[ Another great piece by Wendy at Home Is... ]

Some time ago, I went on a quest for convenience, but I didn’t want the kind of convenience that comes in a box from the store.

Actually, that’s exactly what I wanted, but what I didn’t want is modified food starch, disodium phosphate, mono- and diglycerides (to prevent foaming … seriously, is foamy pudding a bad thing?), Yellow 5, Yellow 6, or BHA (preservative).

I’m not a purist or anything, but in learning to eat locally, we had to unlearn our dependence on commercial food products. So, when I went looking for “convenience”, initially, it was just because I couldn’t verify where the stuff in the boxes had come from, but I could find local flour and salt for the mix, and milk and butter when I mixed the pudding, and using raw vanilla beans and local vodka, I can make my own vanilla extract. So, at first, it was all about keeping our diet as local as possible, which means we had to learn to eat a lot of “whole” foods.

But sometimes, it’s nice to have the convenience. You know?

Then, I started looking at what’s in those boxes …

… and, well, as Neo discovered, once you’ve eaten the red pill, there’s just no going back.

So, I went on a quest for “mixes” I could make myself, and I found a lot of them. Currently, I have in my cabinet, pancake mix and vanilla pudding mix. I have recipe for corn muffin mix, but I haven’t mixed it, yet .

I found the Vanilla Pudding Mix recipe on Cooks.com.

It is:

1 1/2 c sugar
1 c instant nonfat dry milk
1 1/4 c flour
1 tsp salt

Stir ingredients together and store in a tightly covered container in a cool place.

For different flavors you can add:

Caramel: 1 1/2 c brown sugar in place of the granulated sugar.
Chocolate: add 3/4 c unsweetened cocoa.

Recipe yields about 5 c of mix.

To make the pudding:

2/3 c pudding mix
1 3/4 c warm milk
1 tbsp butter
1 tsp vanilla

Stir pudding mix into the milk in a saucepan, stirring constantly until mixture bubbles throughout. Reduce heat and cook over low heat for one minute. Add butter. Remove from heat and stir in vanilla. Chill before serving.

There are no preservatives – except what’s in the dry milk (Added later: I looked at the ingredient list, and the dry milk doesn’t have any preservatives, only the addition of vitamins A and D, but there is a concern as to how the dry milk is *made*). We used real butter and raw milk when we made the pudding, and added green food coloring (because it was St. Patrick’s Day .

It’s really rich! One could probably reduce the amount of sugar by a quarter and not miss it too much.

When we first started our quest to localize our diet, I assumed it would mean giving up things like pudding, which is crazy, when I really think about it, because pudding wasn’t “invented” by Jell-O, but I don’t think my assumptions were too far removed from the average American’s. I never thought *I* could can tomato soup, or that *I* could make cinnamon rolls that are at least as good as anything I can buy.

But I have, to both, and the more I learn about cooking with whole ingredients, the more I realize that food production isn’t some magic created in the bowels of the Campbell Soup factory.

I’m a little embarrased that it’s taken me so long to get where I am with regard to my food preparation skills, but, as they say, “better late than never ….”

And even better than my learning these skills, is that my three youngest are learning right along side me.

They actually know that cinnamon rolls don’t come shrink wrapped from the grocery store, that milk comes from a cow’s udder (which they’ve seen), that “chicken” is an animal that lays eggs and not just a KFC product, that yogurt and cheese can be made in our kitchen using milk and heat and bacteria, that maple syrup started out as maple sap, that potatoes and carrots grow underground, and while money doesn’t, apples do grow on trees.

They may not be able to recite the Preamble to the Constitution (thanks, Schoolhouse Rock!), but they have a great deal more knowledge than I had at their ages.

And better, it’s knowledge that has value.

Of course, if you’ll give me a dollar, I’ll sing the Preamble for you .

This is a Guest Post by Rob from One Straw: Be the Change.  Rob has many part time jobs, as you will learn if you start reading his blog, but one of them is as a market farmer.  This is a story about how the meaning of Autumn has changed for him over the years, and how Autumn is the time to build the soil for the future.

We had our first real frost this weekend which did in the squash and solancea.  Much of our lettuce survived and we are still pulling potatoes (1400+ lbs!) out of the ground so the harvest continues for the 3rd month at 100#’s a week.  The air is now crisp and fresh and the chores varied and more relaxed -pick a little, clear a bed, mulch one here, plant cover crop there-this is my favorite time of year.  Autumn is a fantastic time, cherished by the ancients for its abundance – a season absoutely riddled with holidays and festivals to celebrate the vitality of the earth before the Long Sleep.

The service this morning at our Unitarian Church focused on the Jewish High Holidays.  I was deeply moved by the correlations between the passing of the Jewish New Year and my own mindset with the passing of the agricultural one.  I too am thinking of things that went well in the past season – the potatoes were a raging success as was the Hoop House -seeds I hope to plant in the Great Book.  I also reminisced about things to leave in the past – the onion rows swallowed beneath a Sea of Sedges, the fence rows intertwined with 6′ lambs quarter, and others -things that I hope to leave out of the future.  But most of all I was struck by just how my thinking of this season has changed with my growing ecological awareness.

Autumn was often seen as the passing of the year -a winding down, even a death, to the vibrancy of summer.  Outdoor activity had often escalated -this is my preferred camping season -the nights are crisp & bug free for glorious sleeping, the understory is open, dry, and full of aroma, and the wildlife is on the move.  It is still all of these things, but the more naturally I have learned to view the world, the more I think of the seasons as they are meant to -cyclical.

Now the falling leaves that blanket the soil are also a call to me to mulch my gardens and spread the season’s compost for a final mellowing over winter on the soil.  Where before there was death and decay, now there is abundance and the “putting by” of root crops, and even the rekindling of life as vetch and rye shoots forth before the end of the warm sun.  It is now a time of new beginnings as the beds and fields are stripped bare with the harvest to the sweet melodies of flitting finches in the cupplants and raucous chippies under the oaks sharing my labors.

Stretching to a longer harvest as my plantings have diversified has greatly increased my enjoyment of the seasons – Summer’s peppers and sauces and now wonderfully augmented by early Spring’s crisp, sweet, frost-kissed Spinach to late Spring’s romaines and now I am awed by the bounty of October’s butternuts, acorns, carrots, and kale.  It is a bountiful harvest, with more to be planted as the Hoop House enters full circle with spinach and mache for another winters run.  Stretching the harvest spreads the labors and greatly enriches the enjoyment of the tasks.  No energy is so full as that which courses through my arms when I first put spade to soil in those early warm days of Spring, no air so warm and moist as walking through the Hoop House’s 75 degrees in January only to rejoice in the frigid cold as I leave with arms full of greens, and no air so crisp and alive as the fields of October as the flocks gather.  Spreading the Harvest is to take part in the Glory of Nature varied seasons and what they have always meant.  Turn…turn…turn; always and forever.

While Spring and Summer are the seasons of food building, Autumn is now the Season of the Soil.  The bounties of the harvest are coming in full, but time is now taken to Give Back.  As Nature drops Her leaves and folds Her stems to blanket and feed the soil, so too must we give back to that which we have taken of so freely so that the cycle may begin again, enriched, for seasons to come.

This is our task.

This must be our promise.