Applesauce and a Jam

I returned to facilitating Guided Autobiography (GAB) online last week. I have an unconventional approach to these workshops. We’re working our way through the alphabet and for this series of workshops we are choosing prompts beginning with the letter ‘j’. Our first prompt was the word ‘jam’. The sensitizing questions encouraged us to consider jams we’ve made or help make, or jams we’ve experienced. I never made jam – I only ever made applesauce. But I’ve been in a few jams. Here’s a story about making applesauce with my grandmother and getting myself out of a jam.

My grandmother and I never made jam. We always made applesauce. My grandmother, Pauline, lived with her husband, Robert, in a red brick corner row home across the street from McKinley Elementary School on Poplar Street in Allentown, Pennsylvania. The school, red and as imposing to a young child as Uluru, was built in 1880. It was where I attended kindergarten and its playground where I learned to ride a bike. My grandfather hated having the school’s playground a stone’s throw away from the overstuffed chair where he read the Morning Call Chronicle, smoked his Chesterfield cigarettes and chased his whiskey with cans of Schmidt’s beer. In the summer, when his window was open and the kids on the playground were laughing too loud he’d hold himself up at the front door and cuss at them to shut up. That only made the kids laugh louder. 

While I was still in grade school my grandfather would on occasion settle behind the driver’s seat of his massive beige Chevrolet Bel Air and drive my grandmother the thirty minutes from Allentown to our home in Lynnport. This was before my grandfather’s smoking and diabetes caught up with him and doctors took his leg. It was before a tumor took his voice and the cancer took his life. 

But when he still drove, my grandparent’s would visit their only daughter, my mother Barbara. If it was late summer and the start of apple picking season in Pennsylvania my grandmother would bring the tools we needed to turn the apples into sauce – a large, well-worn aluminum cone-shaped strainer, the wire stand that held the strainer upright and the massive wooden pestle with which we forced the peeled and cooked apples through the strainer’s tiny holes. The apples were bought in bushels from local farmers and by the end of my grandparent’s stay my grandmother and I had made enough sweet apple sauce to see us through the winter.

It was always applesauce. I don’t know why we never made jam.

Where I lived in Pennsylvania blackberries and raspberries grew in hedgerows and were free for the taking.

When the berries were ripe the kids in my gang (some names I remember and some names I’ve lost) would walk along the railroad tracks, past the swimming hole under the silver bridge, dodging deer flies and muskrats, to an abandoned house. Along the way we’d pick berries until our fingers were sticky and blue.

I don’t know the house’s story, who owned it and why it was left abandoned. But I remember the outer walls were all but gone filling what remained of the rooms with light dappled by overgrown trees, brambles and poison ivy. I remember, too, the smell of dust and mold and animals. I remember the shattered piano that had fallen through the first floor to the basement. And I remember climbing broken stairs to the attic. I was brave then, and climbed the stairs alone. Half the roof was gone but at the gabled end, resting on a wooden rafter, was an owl. In my memory he is huge and regal and the most majestic thing I’ve ever seen. There’s a moment when we look at one another, startled and in awe. But then my excitement gets the better of me and I shout to my friends. The raptor flies from one side of the attic and then escapes through the shattered roof and disappears into the woods.

It was in the 1970’s when we could leave in the morning, wade through creeks, explore abandoned homes and not come home until dusk.

I guess that’s why my mother never asked where I’d been.

That one day I’m thinking about, I’d been in a jam. 

He was a year older and already smoked cigarettes. He had piercing blue eyes and dark hair and most girls in my grade had a crush on him. So when he called me one afternoon – I didn’t even know he knew my phone number – to ask about an assignment he had for his history class and would I help him my racing heart said ‘yes’ even though it made absolutely no sense that he would ask for my help. When I arrived a friend of his was there, too. They’d just made a great fort in the barn from bales of hay and wanted to show it to me. I followed them into the barn. I was shown where to crawl in and it was only after I was halfway through the tunnel that I realized one boy was behind me and the other had entered through the other side. I was trapped between them.

These two silly boys thought they were going to get away with something but they didn’t. I wasn’t the girl they thought I was. I wasn’t ‘easy’. I didn’t ‘give out’. Even thought here really wasn’t that much else to do in Lynnport, Pennsylvania in 1974.

After twenty minutes we crawled out from the tunnel and I began to walk home with hay in my hair and the feeling that I dodged a bullet. As soon as I walked into the house I filled our clawfoot tub with scalding hot water and scrubbed myself clean.

I Eat Meat. I am Not a Bad Person.

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Public domain photograph of various meats. (Be...

This afternoon I had an early dinner with friends. The main course was a perfectly roasted, medium-rare prime rib. It was delicious.

Yes, I’m a yoga teacher who eats meat.

Before you imagine Mimm Flintstone drooling over a giant Brontosaurus burger, allow me to explain. Michael Pollan is right – it is a dilemma being an omnivore. But sometimes it’s who I am. It’s who I need to be.

Over the past year a friend and I carried out a nutritional experiment. Our goal was for each of us to find a balanced meal plan that supported optimal health.

We began with an organic, vegetarian diet that teetered on the precipice of veganism. Eight weeks later, after not seeing the results we hoped for, caution was thrown to the wind and we ate whatever landed on the dinner plate. That was not the best move. We quickly regrouped and tried again by introducing meat back into the diet. At the same time we reduced grains. Our morphed version of the trendy Paleo diet. Three months later and I have to tell you:

I feel great.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to sell my vegan friends on the benefits of eating meat. Because I don’t believe everyone functions at their best on a meat-based diet. Some folks thrive on a plant-based diet. Others need to add a bit of dairy to their greens. Me? I like a side of skinless chicken breast with my arugula salad.

The real reason I’m telling you this story is to inspire. It took work to find the foods that help me thrive. It was frustrating. Sometimes we took two steps forward and three steps back. But we kept at it. My friend and I continued to peel back the layers. Paring our list of foods down to their most basic, simple forms. We now maintain a mostly gluten-free diet that includes meat, eggs, dairy, fruit and vegetables. We keep as organic as possible, which means we are also, as much as possible, GMO free.

This is not a sugar-free, fat-free diet. It’s a good, wholesome, meal plan that lets a potato be a potato instead of a french fry. Besides tinned tomatoes, there’s not much in my kitchen that comes out of a can or a box.

Yes, choosing to eat meat was a struggle. Throughout my life I have spent short periods – sometimes a few months, sometimes a few years – playing and ultimately failing at being vegetarian. The movie Food, Inc. was a turning point, but not in the way you might think. The film taught me that meat eaters had choices. I had choices. My friend and I both decided it was worth the extra money to source our animal protein from farms that reared their livestock humanely. We look for labels that say ‘organic’, ‘grass-fed’, ‘cage-free’, ‘pasture raised’. I’m a big fan of the number system Whole Food’s uses at their meat counter to educate the consumer.

If our meat is organic, then it goes without saying that our produce is organic and, when possible, local. Milk is from grass-fed cows. We also drink goat milk. Warmed goat milk with honey and turmeric is a wonderful bedtime treat.

Mornings begin with freshly juiced organic apples, carrots, ginger and beetroot. I dilute my juice 50/50 with filtered water.

Breakfast might be boiled eggs with wild salmon or porridge made with Rice n’ Shine. Lunch is usually the largest meal of the day – a one-pot meat and vegetable stir-fry. Dinner could be leftovers but sometimes a simple bowl of yogurt and fruit.

While my new food choices are bringing results, the meal plan has its challenges. I wasn’t accustomed to planning three meals each day. It’s been a bit of a learning curve but mastering the Crock Pot has helped. So has preparing and then freezing large batches of home-made soup.

Food shopping, in the beginning, can be a bit like an episode of Portlandia. Changing habits takes patience and requires some knowledge. Remembering to read labels and then knowing how to translate what those labels mean, in the beginning, was frustrating. It left my friend and I agonizing for thirty minutes over which honey to choose on more than one occasion.

Fortunately, we’re fast learners.

Do I feel deprived? Overwhelmed with all the planning and cooking? Do I miss spending my lunch hour circling the hot bar at Whole Foods?

Not one bit.

I’ve gained more than good health from my new food choices. I’ve become more mindful and more thankful. More grateful. I can see the farmers hands in the mud I wash from my orange carrots. I can feel the power of the soil and the sun as I slice through deep crimson orbs of beetroot. This can’t happen when we’re eating pre-formed food from a styrofoam box.

The truth is, good health from good food is a wonderful gift. So much has to happen to bring that food to my plate. Pausing to give thanks for all the work and lives that contributed to the food that nourishes my body makes that gift even better.

ps…and despite spending more to choose organic, cage free, humanely reared food I’ve discovered I’m actually spending less on food because I know longer use Whole Foods as a refrigerator.  I’ve stopped buying one (sometimes TWO) meals per day from the hot bar!