Standing at the kitchen sink I silently watched a natural drama unfold. A fox caught a black squirrel in the next door neighbour’s back yard. The chase, then the kill, it was all over in only a few minutes. Then the fox took his treasure into the cover of the forest. That is the way of things. It leaves me feeling a bit sad, and aware of the nature of things on planet earth.
We are canning two batches of Cowboy Candy this morning. Attila estimates we harvested over 16 pounds of jalapeno peppers in the last month, all were used to can Cowboy Candy. The scraps were used to make hot sauce.
After canning two batches of Cowboy Candy I will mill two gallon jars of whole grain flour. After that, if there is time, I will bake bread. I don’t like to bake it too late in the day, because I like it to be completely cooled before putting it in the bag.
Yesterday was the busiest kitchen day of the 2025 preservation season. I started on the pizza sauce at 6:00 a.m., and didn’t sit down for more than a few minutes to eat my meals until after 8:00 p.m. So much to accomplish! Besides the canning, there was baking, making gummies, and a lot of other small but necessary tasks, such as filling the Berkey, grinding flax seed, etc.
Tomorrow we can salsa verde with the harvested tomatillos, and will process a batch of pickled peppers as well.
We are eating fresh produce out of the garden daily. This morning I enjoyed a small helping of fresh raw strawberries, also green pepper slices, and carrot slices, all from the garden. For dinner we will be enjoying cooked garden beets, and a casserole that in includes our home grown rutabagas that were frozen when harvested last month. When the garden stops producing, we will rely on our preserved vegetables for most of our needs. We buy eggs, meat, and dairy, as none of these do we produce ourselves, the rest of our grocery cart is filled with items we buy in bulk when they are on sale.
We will continue eating fresh produce for a few more weeks, beets, carrots, cabbage, lettuce, strawberries, sweet peppers,
Almost everything we eat is either grown here, preserved here, or cooked and prepared here. This lifestyle is a result of three major factors.
The first factor inspired all that was to come. My anaphylaxis. Being allergic to preservatives started this journey, long before I met Attila. As preservatives were more and more widely used, food that was safe to eat became harder and harder to find, and more and more expensive because it was not popular enough to inspire large scale production. Slowly I gave up trying to find foods I could eat at the grocery store, even a loaf of bread became dangerous. Home cooking from known ingredients was the only safe approach. Cooking from scratch is time consuming, it was difficult at first when I was raising children and busy with either work or my education. It got easier when I met Attila, as we are like minded about food, and he has cooking skills… and Attila loved me enough to share the isolation that comes with anaphylaxis, he is one of a kind.
The second factor is Attila’s appetite. He truly eats more than any other human I have ever met. He does not gain weight, nor does he lose it. He eats about four times as much as I do, so we are, for all practical purposes, feeding a family of five. Attila pays a lot of attention to food, and pulls his weight in the kitchen, as I would suffer from exhaustion otherwise.
The third factor is financial. We have always lived within our means, and our means have always been modest, but for two years when we both earned a living wage. Now that we are retired with only the government pensions, our attention to growing, preserving, and cooking food allows us to enjoy a highly nutritious and delicious diet within our budget. The skills we developed for other reasons are paying off for us now.
From June until November we enjoy produce fresh from the garden. From December until May we rely heavily on our preserved produce to maintain a healthy diet. We do indulge in a daily green salad, year round, we buy those vegetables, and inexpensive vegetables such as cabbage and carrots during the winter months.
We also focus heavily on homemade condiments, such as Pepper Relish and Cowboy Candy, because these healthy low sodium, low sugar, preservative free condiments make rice, beans, legumes, pasta, grains, affordable bland foods, taste fantastic. For instance, I will enjoy tonight’s cooked beets with Pepper Relish, rather than butter or salt or other types of toppings that aren’t good for me.
So here we are, Attila and I, busy every single day providing for ourselves what we can. It keeps us very busy, there is no lack of agency in our retirement years. We eat well, walk daily, and are always busy with enjoyable something or others.
We are dull as dishwater, and happy as clams.
Worldly
Weather
19°C
Date: 1:00 PM EDT Tuesday 7 October 2025
Condition: Light Rainshower
Pressure: 101.5 kPa
Tendency: Falling
Temperature: 18.6°C
Dew point: 18.6°C
Humidity: 100%
Wind: SSW 30 gusts 39 km/h
Visibility: 8 km
Quote
“Anyone can revolt. It is more difficult silently to obey our own inner promptings, and to spend our lives finding sincere and fitting means of expression for our temperament and our gifts.”
Georges Rouault
1871 – 1958
With the fox and the squirrel, I fall back on the idea that this is how plants and animals were made. They depend on each other for sustenance. Plants depend on the organics provided by plants and animals dying, and animals depend on plants and/or animals that produce the necessary nutrients that their bodies need. We are indeed a circle of life.
DH and I are back from DH’s second check up for his first cataract operation. He did great! We dropped Skye off at the vet on the way. Her surgery to have her cancerous leg removed was supposed to start around 4 or 4:30.
Tomorrow, DH goes in to have his second cataract done. He’s excited, thinking both his eyes will be as good as the first one. It would be wonderful if it works out that way.
We stopped at Wally to get him some cheater glasses for reading, as he is a voracious reader. He got a pair for both computer and reading, and is thrilled with using them for computer right now. He also did a quick check with reading and found he could do fine print, even though we have a cloudy day with low light.
We’re just waiting to hear about Skye’s surgery now. I find I’m actually grateful for having such a full two days, as it’s kept me from worrying about any one thing that we have going on.
Teri, I agree with what you say about the circle of life. It isn’t always easy to deal with the harsher realities of it, but then I feel that the living have only a limited understanding of reality, and perhaps what I find harsh is something else entirely.
So glad DH’s first surgery was such a great success! Wishing him all the very best with his second surgery!! Eyesight is such a wonderful sense, one that I have taken for granted, as many of us do.
Good wishes for Skye, I hope the operation goes well, and the recovery is as painless as possible. Also wishing Skye a successful adjustment period, getting used to missing that leg. Skye will be glad to be home with you and DH!
I was thinking about what you said about life being harsh. I think maybe to me harsh sounds like a value judgment, which can work when applying it to humans but doesn’t work for animals relating to other animals or plants. Animals that eat other animals, there’s no other choice for them. Plus they don’t have the ability to weigh the right or wrong of having to eat another living thing. It’s closer to just instinct for them. I’m hungry. It moves. It’s something I can eat. I hunt. I eat.
Now that’s a generalization. Some animals have a higher intelligence level, some have lower intelligence levels. Some are very smart but are simply limited by the sounds they can utter due to the shapes of their tongues and limited in manipulating their environment due to not having opposable thumbs.
I’m fascinated by a very intelligent cat that I watch on YouTube. His name is Todd and he has a vocabulary of currently about 65 words, and he has 65 buttons his owner has purchased for him so he can use those words. My university psych professors would have been fascinated by this. I can remember debates of whether dogs knew the meaning of up and down. (I believe they do understand the named concepts – once you teach it to them and give them examples.)
Here is a link to a Todd video. I’ve actually subscribed to his channel and get notifications when his owner posts. https://youtu.be/PZb0W4jTvkA?si=dk8Z8KWOwyuABdCs
Teri, carnivorous animals eat each other, no room for sentiment. Humans do it too, most eat meat without having to hunt, kill, or process the other living being they are going to eat. Growing up on a farm, harvesting and eating our animals, some of them loved, was always a source of some sadness for me. Providing them with the best quality life, and humane kills, was always important to me. I accept that humans eating meat is animals doing what animals do, and that sadness is a part of the human experience of life.
The fox felt nothing untoward about obtaining a meal. The squirrel on the other hand experienced great distress, which I witnessed, it was not a particularly humane kill. I guess I will always regard distress in living entities with sadness, or in some cases even stronger feelings, be it people or wildlife of any kind.
Thanks for the link to the Todd the cat videos, fascinating! Our Ginger tries to talk to us, but we have not learned his speech. His body language is quite expressive, there are moments when we are on the same page and understanding one another. When there is a distressing noise Ginger will look to me, my quiet response will calm him instantly. When he wants something he will come to get me, and take me to the scene of desire… usually the food or water bowl, lol.
I believe animals know a lot of things we don’t know, and cannot be bothered with the tiresome task of building that bridge of communication with us, they are too busy just being alive. it is always amazing to find animals that seek communication with humans. Bex and Paul and their dogs were amazing together.
It’s fascinating to watch the Todd videos, watch the family of 3 cats grow and change. Just recently, Todd has started asking for things for the other 2 cats that don’t use the buttons. But you can see that the other 2 cats are starting to respond to the button words the same way they do a human voice. Todd has also let his owner know what the other cats aren’t feeling well.
The female cat, Glamour, is quite “spicy”. She makes her wishes known without the use of buttons. LOL!