As Riley contemplates Thanksgiving dinner and his potential for scoring extra treats

And as Gus contemplates spending the next six months curled up in a ball by the woodstove, the rest of us look out and contemplate the new fallen snow.

Hope you all have a peaceful, happy and WARM Thanksgiving! Love and Blessings! Molly

Here at kitchen stadium Green Hope Farm, there are culinary triumphs and there are culinary disasters.

As the dust settles on the pre-Thanksgiving November, it is time to share a culinary mishap sure to go down in the history of the neighborhood.

As you may or may not recall, our neighbor Teddy, eternal friend of all things Green Hope Farm lives the good life next door in French Quarter with her three french poodles AND her husband Malcolm. Since Malcolm does not have a single cell in his body that says, “Je suis francais.”, he did NOT feature in our glowing description of french culture at Teddy’s.

Malcolm, an ecumenical minister who marries and buries many folks in the Upper Connecticut River valley, was profiled in one of our green newsletters, so you may have read about Malcolm before. In fact, you may have heard about Malcolm even if you have never heard of us.

Malcolm is a land unto himself. If I need to give the Sears repairman directions to our home I say, ” I live in the house before Malcolm’s” and that is all that is needed. If someone wants to know what Connecticut River valley town I live in, I say, “Same one as Malcolm Grobe.” and everyone knows where to place me.

The fact that Malcolm is well known and also beloved does not mean that Malcolm won’t fire the occasional shot across our bows to keep us down on the farm.

When I wrote the blog about his glamorous wife Teddy, Malcolm wanted to set the record straight about cutlure in the neighborhood.

I received a seething four page diatribe from Malcolm about how he is one of, “the Plain People, original settlers before the “others” arrives with their “goldens,” people who “remember paying taxes by bringing a couple of bales of hay to the Town Barn”, people “longing for the good old days” before we moved to the neighborhood and things went to pot.

But being a forgiving man, Malcolm still invited us riffraff to his seventy seventh birthday party and as a peace offering, I offered to bring the birthday cake.

There are so many questions to be asked about the baking nightmare that followed this offer.

First, what possessed me to try a new recipe from a cookbook I had never used before? What was wrong with tried and true chocolate cake recipes? Why the switch to the big city Magnolia cookbook? In short, why was I trying to keep up with the french quarter?

The chocolate buttermilk cake I made, described in the Magnolia cookbook as having a wonderful flavor and texture, hardly held together as a cake when removed from the cake pan. It had a tinder dry crumb and was an unattractive shade of beige. As I went to frost the first layer, the cake disintegrated into large chunks resembling flecked styrofoam.

Not yet fully alarmed, I pulled a trick out of my baking bag of tricks and went to pop the cake in the freezer for a few minutes to harden up the first coat of frosting so I could apply a clean white second coat. Unfortunately, during this maneuver, I did not keep the cake plate level. Layer number one went flying off the cake plate and smashed into a zillion pieces on the ground.

With layer number one in the dustbin. I returned to examine the remaining layer. It was a sad little thing, hardly an offering fit for Malcolm’s seventy seventh. I clearly needed to bake another cake.

For attempt number two, I went back to a tried and true chocolate cake recipe, one requiring cocoa.

Unfortunately, I had no cocoa and did not have enough time before the party to get to the store to get cocoa and still make the cake….. so I substituted very upscale hot chocolate for cocoa. It seemed like a substitution worthy of gourmet Teddy’s as well as frugal Yankee Malcolm.

The cake baked up looking moist and dark. Unfortunately, when I went to take the cake out of the pan, most of the cake failed to come out of the angel food tin. It was at this point that I began to photograph this culinary nightmare for your edification. Here is the angel food tin after the unsuccessful removal of the cake from the pan. Note strange white lumps from cocoa mix, yet another sign that it was a substitution that had gone south.

The good news was that the cake had the consistency of tar so I could put all the pieces I scraped out of the tin onto the meager little piece of cake that had come out of the tin in the first place and mush everything together into something that looked like it was baked as one piece.

Party time was fast approaching. I t was time to frost the gooey broken mass of cake.

What can I say? Tar baby was too warm to frost AND tar baby was going to need the second layer from the first cake to have the stature needed for a seventy seventh birthday party cake.

I slapped Mutt on frosted Jeff and put the whole thing out on the back porch. It wasn’t as cold out there as in my freezer, but there was less chance of me dropping the cake while getting it onto the back porch.

The timeclock was ticking in Kitchen Stadium Green Hope Farm so after a short period of cake chilling, I had to get to work laying down first one then a second layer of frosting. I can’t say things went well, but there was general euphoria by the time I applied Flowers and candles. The cake actually looked good enough to eat and we had gotten a chance to laugh our heads off for about two hours.

Jim, Will, and I went to put our coats on to go next door with the proud cake. When we came back to pick up the cake, this is what greeted us.

This was a culinary first for me- A cake that literally fell apart after being frosted.

Further salvage was deemed impossible, our time was up and we had to give the birthday boy his cake just like that.

It tasted surprisingly good. More people got to laugh at the futility of keeping up with the french quarter.

And Curly, one of the three french poodles, gave us another moment of high humor when he put up his little head and howled all through our rendition of “Happy Birthday”

I guess he wanted us to be singing ” Bonne fete a toi.”

In the early years of Green Hope Farm, we sent out an annual newsletter to one and all. It was sort of a hard copy blog, a booklet summing up the garden season, sharing new Flower Essences, the kids’ drawings of their world and my musing on the events of the year here. A stranger to desktop publishing, I cut and pasted the whole thing together and then gave it to a friend to print in her little print shop, “The Graphic Magician.” We always wrapped the newsletters in green paper covers, and consequently we came to call these annual missives our “greenies.”

The artwork in the greenies was a particular joy. Over the years, we learned about Emily’s love of frogs.

We learned about elves.

They liked Flower Essences and had familiar names.

Their teeth were good and they thought a lot about ice cream.

Sometimes they were prepared to hold the labels in place on the greenie covers.

And they loved Flowers just like us.
We also learned a lot about Angels.

Angels liked high fashion especially when they had a cover shot.

Inside the newsletters, they sometimes were less flashy.

Sometimes, a few lines told us all we needed to know about the sweetness of Angels.

This styling Angel marked one of our goofs. One newsletter went out with stamped postcards addressed to us so that everyone on the mailing list could let us know if they wanted to stay on the mailing list.

We got hundreds and hundreds of postcards back with the “Please keep me on your mailing list” checked but no address written in to tell us who had sent the card!

Our artists also taught us a lot about the animals in our midst.

They liked a good party.

Sometimes it was necessary to fill in the details about an animal’s good looks.

Sometimes not.

When left alone at home, the animals also had their favorite web sites.

And they seemed to think about ice cream as much as the elves.

Sometimes, I would give the artists the themes for a story. Here’s Will’s take on the theme of holes.

Here’s Emily’s drawing for a piece of Ireland.

On the covers, the artists strut their stuff.

And got credit for all their efforts.
During all these years, the artists were needed for more than just their brilliant illustrations.

In our first years sending out the newsletters, the mailing list was quite small. I didn’t know how to sort our mailing list in zip code order, so addresses got printed out in random order. The kids were enthusiastic and nimble, happy to spend a weekend making piles of newsletters all over the playroom. One of us put a label on the newsletter, then it was sorted by the first three digits of the zip code. Every child would then fly around the room adding to the 034 pile, then to the 902 pile, then to the 021 pile. One side of the room was east coast, the other west coast and somewhere on the couch the mighty Mississippi flowed.
Any time we had a bundle of more than ten with the same first three numbers, we would put a 3 digit sticker on the bundle and earn ourselves a few pennies off the cost of mailing the newsletters in the bundle. Any time there was a cluster of more than ten with all five digits the same, we would celebrate the amazing fact that we had ten Green Hope friends in the same town. We reverently placed a D sticker on the group, wondering how we got such a gathering of friends in far flung places like Fort Bragg, Colorado, Santa Fe, New Mexico and North Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. These collections of friends were mysteries to enjoy and sometimes we fantasized about getting a map to stick pins in, marking Green Hope Farm outposts across the world.

As our mailing list grew, our postmaster encouraged me to go to postal workshops to learn all the ways I could use my postal permit number 5 with more finesse skill. She would give me new publications on sorting systems and labels that often failed to have enough glue to stick to the newsletters. The language of the hefty postal regulation books was predictably obscure and every year the post office seemed to reshuffle its regional post office groupings into new apparently random groupings.

Eventually, I learned how to sort and print the mailing list in zip code order. It was no longer quite the chaotic process it had been, but it wasn’t straight forward either. This was because we had to sort the newsletters into regional post office groups as well as into 3 digit and 5 digit bundles and this regional post office category was the stuff of legends.

Zip code clusters from regional post office groups would read like this ADC 300 includes 300- 317 320-322 327-331 339, 341-350, 352, 356-363. 385, 392-394. As my skills only ran to printing the labels in zip code order, we would have to pull newsletters with zips like 326 or 340 out of such a regional post office pile and hope to find their regional post office homes elsewhere.
As we grew, the greenies, fresh from the printer, filled a truck. Soon, we needed a whole week’s time with all the staff labeling the newsletters to get the job done. Often the children would be recruited for the second shift of night time labeling. Their enthusiasm for the newsletters began to wane. Adolescence does that to people.

As we labeled and sorted, we would fill postal trays with the sorted and bundled newsletters. Each tray had to be counted and counted again before it could be sleeved and marked with the appropriate postal regional post office ADC code. My number tally for the whole mailing had to match exactly with the post offices number and weight tally. My fingertips would grow callused from counting the newsletters in each tray over and over again. The finished trays would grow to a sea of ceiling high piles before making their way to the Meriden Post Office to be mailed. We would enjoy the sight of all these newsletters about to head into the world.

I would give our post master weeks of warning about which day I would bring the mailing to our tiny post office. The arrival of the newsletter always gave whomever was at their post office box more than a moment’s pause. People were astonished by the size of the mailing, given that the consensus in the town seemed to be we were a bunch of funky ladies singing and dancing around in a garden while growing some kind of herbal type stuff.

As neighbors gawked, Postmaster Pam would weigh each tray before sending the mailing on to White River Junction, Vermont (ADC 050 if you must know), to be launched. Having heaved every tray onto our pick up truck for loads to town and then having carried each tray into the post office, I knew why she needed her Wheaties on mailing day.

The greenies usually went out in November. I could probably call out in the office right now about what November used to mean and there would be hoots and hollers and laughter as each person remembered some labeling mishap. We just didn’t do the sorting often enough for us to get it down cold. We were annually relearning the process with a lot of trial and error.

Like so many things, I didn’t know it when I was mailing the last of the greenies. It was two or three truck loads of trays that year. William had become the primary artist after earlier years in which first Ben and Lizzy and then later Emily had showcased her art. During that last greenie year, Ben had yet to whisper the word “blog” in my ear, but that was what was around the bend.

It’s been a happy “round the bend” for me. I love the blog. But I do look forward to someday handing the next generation of Green Hope children a black felt tip pen and asking them to draw their world.

Sophie, seen here restocking our Flower Essence boxes, is no longer the newest person on our staff.

Our newest staff member, Masaki Schuette joined us in September to help us with shipping. When not at the farm, she lives in the village of Meriden with her husband Lee and three year old twins Yuki and Koa.

We have Former staff goddess Vicki Ramos-Glew to thank for introducing us to Masaki. Vicki told us we would love Masaki and we do!

Masaki is from Omagari City near Akita in northern Japan. She met her husband Lee in the Seattle airport. When Masaki and Lee met, she was working in a hotel in Banff, British Columbia but was on vacation with friends from Japan in transit from Alaska to Boston.

She met Lee because he was traveling with his beautiful golden retriever, Banjo. Masaki went over to say hello to Banjo and then met Lee. They all got on the same flight east and met up again during a layover in Chicago’s O’Hare Airport.

And so the world turns on the charm of a golden retriever, as well it should. And we are glad! Welcome Masaki!

I hear America singing. I hear a toilet running.

Our water is hard, full of lovely calcium that makes it taste good.

This calcium also means that white stuff precipitates just about everywhere. Places like teapots and toilets and sometimes Flower Essence droppers.

The calcium in the toilets means that factotum Jim has been fiddling around with our toilets ever since he built our house, working hard to keep them flushing well, with as little water as possible.

The latest toilet, which arrived six months ago to much ecological fanfare, was installed in the bathroom used by all the staff. It was described by the manufacturer as a wonder of modern toilet engineering, poised to singlehandedly halt global warming. So little water would do so much work. And with six or so women using the toilet every day, it needed to be a workhorse of an ecological marvel.

We were as excited as six or so women can get about a toilet. We thought our new toilet was part of the solution.

Oh well, who can blame us for dreaming?

And it was a dream, because frankly, this ecological wonder of a toilet is a lemon.

Right after installation, we had to fiddle with a little pole in the back of the toilet in order to get the toilet to flush. This was an off and on dodgy problem for a couple of months despite Jim’s repairs, replacement of parts, and in-services to us about our pole pushing technique.

In October, the toilet went off the tracks a bit more dramatically and gave us a month of pauses that refresh.

During October, whenever the toilet was flushed, each of us had to stand facing the exposed water tank at the back of the toilet and watch it fill. This was meant to be the pause that refreshes part, each of daydreaming for a peaceful moment while we waited for the toilet to begin its malfunction. After the pause, when the filled toilet began to have water continue to pour in, we had to push down on some thingamajig to get it to shut off manually.

The only thing that I can say for this activity is that it has given us all a lot of time to look at the bathroom as a man would and to enjoy the art I hung on the back walls for the men at the farm to enjoy. Manyly art like a rooster crowing at dawn and a cow preparing to head butt another animal.

As we faced the back of the toilet and got a new view on things, what did we learn?

Precious little, I fear
Meanwhile plumber Jim is now on a first name basis with Brandi back at toilet headquarters.

He calls her on such a regular basis that she knows his address off the top of her head. Even yesterday, new toilet innards came from Brandi. The replacement part this time was the third flush valve Brandi has sent us. The note inside said that this one REALLY was going to fix the problem and yet…..

I hear a toilet running.

Won’t Jim be pleased when he gets home from his first shift as a sixth grade teacher to find out he needs to drain the toilet AGAIN and take that back tank apart AGAIN during his second shift.

And he thought he might get to work one shift today?

Somedays, I am sure a return to outhouses seem like a very good idea to Jim.

I think today is going to be one of those days.