So we made it to the deadline. The building was closed in and warm . We had a table , benches and a sink and even lights. Even though power was only run in with an extension cord.The oil lamps were lit.
Plus our ambitious goal to feed the masses from Tuesday through Saturday only from our garden or locally produced meat. Tuesday was bread preparation for Wednesdays early morning bake. Naturally fermented bread has many steps it goes through from the starter coming out of the frig. on Sunday, then added to and revitalized until Tuesday morning when it becomes the preferment, then dough, then loaves with many hours and folds in between. We ate Fish Chowder, rock fish traded for bread, our potatoes, parsley, garlic, and onions.Served with baby greens salad, purple onion and chopped parsley. Some of our sourdough bread from last week reheated.
Wednesday the oven was too hot. It was 800 degrees at 6am. I needed to get it down to 580 by 8am It keeps fooling us when it’s been fired for a few days, and it is already hot, it’s easy to overheat it. So we had time constraints, trying to deliver our orders so there were some dark sourdough loaves. Still everyone who came by or who arrived gorged themselves on fresh, warm bread. The blue cheese from Point Reyes with walnuts is always a favorite.
My idea was every family would take a loaf of bread, a dozen eggs from our chickens and jam for breakfasts. I think I got those to most everyone. Then Wednesday local cheese and warm bread with snacks for lunch. Dinner was lasagna from our homemade putanesca tomato sauce full of many garden vegetables and put up over the summer. The area we couldn’t keep up the local production was in the dairy. We bought in milk and cheese. Although a local dairy, commercially produced. Oh I would love it if you could again buy milk from small dairymen, but legislation trying to make us “safe” makes that near impossible. With the casserole we had salad with local beets and romanesco broccoli. Fresh bread and a tart made from redhaven peach and crabapple jam I made over the summer poured into a crust filled with frangipani, baked in the brick oven. 
The Thanksgiving pies I made that day I was disappointed with because I baked them in a too hot oven, easy to do when the oven is wood fired. I made a butternut squash pie, from squash that I grew, and locally made mincemeat, from Lisa’a Luscious in Point Arena.
Thanksgiving arrived with the Turkeys my brother and his family picked up, I’d ordered them in August from Mendocino Organics, in Redwood Valley, pasture raised . They were the most beautiful turkeys I’d ever seen, so plump and firm, fresh. As Joel Salatin say’s “well exercised”, verses birds stuck in small cages, eating round-up sprayed feed laced with antibiotics . Roasting heritage breeds is different than the huge commercial turkeys, they have more muscle and less fat, so quickly roasting them at a high heat for fewer hours was recommended. We turned then three times and they baked for about two hours in the 450 brick oven. The had been brined the night before and were filled with oranges my neighbors brought up from their tree in LA and our onions. I made the croutons for the stuffing, then local celery traded for some backhoe time, onions and parsley. Bacon or sausage were the two types we made. The turkey was the best I’ve ever eaten. Support local pasture raised meat !
I had really planned the vegetable timing and the romanesqo broccoli and the lettuces, were perfect. The potatoes had looked great from above and I dreamed of letting the kids dig the potatoes for Thanksgiving dinner. I dug some up a week before to see the size of all the red potatoes I’d planted.They were covered with a scaly scab. Oh, bummer forty feet of bum potatoes, usable but ugly. But as I dug I found the fingerlings were fine . So I had to BUY some potatoes for the mashed potatoes so wonderfully made by my nephew Casey. The fingerlings were roasted with butternut squash, acorn squash, garlic and rosemary all grown here.
It was a wonderful meal. Followed by what I realized my family “does” when it has many hours together, SING . Then some impromptu acting, charades, and even some fabulous opera sung by my niece . When we were young my Dad, a self professed history buff, decided to try to remember the sea shanty’s he had heard as a child and also mixed with a large dose of Woody Guthrie. He taught himself these on the guitar and we all learned them as kids. We had an old fishing boat and would often show up at Catalina Island on the weekends. As we put down the anchor, my Dad would get out the guitar start singing, with all of us joining in, and the fancy yachts would pull up anchor and move away, leaving us with a perfect spot !
The next day Turkey sandwiches and homemade beer my brother had brewed and brought with him from Portland.
Then I made myself go on a walk, which led to a great mushroom walk all over our property, leading to a continued walk down under Hwy 1 in a tunnel and out to the ocean on the other side.
My brother in law dragged around David Aurora’s huge manual on mushrooms for the next day, looking like a preacher.
We made it to the lighthouse to see the most beautiful fall skies and ocean in turmoil. Another home grown salad and chili (our onions, home canned tomatoes, herbs and belted galloway beef from our local friend) and more bread ! for dinner.
I can’t remember when but everyone rode the horses around, led and instructed expertly by my sister the true equestrian. We had a great time. Everyone helped so much. It was fun to see what we all might do with one another when you have no TV, power, cell reception, internet access or phone. We had great fun and a wonderful visit all based around the hearth .
All the cousins cleaning up ! Thanks to my sister Heather for spending much of her Thanksgiving taking these wonderful photos.
