Perlieu in June

We went to our beloved spot in Dunn County again last month. It had been over a year since we'd last been there. I'd say that it was one of the most relaxing cabin trips yet. We even had some friends visit us.

Here's a set of pictures from the trip, including digital and film photos.

Menomonie Weekend

We just spent a wonderful weekend both in my home town of Menomonie and at the Perlieu land. We got to see both of my parents, go to my 10 year high school reunion, and relax at the cabin. Probably the highlight was a stretch of about nine hours on Saturday that Libby and I got to be around Menomonie without the boys. It turs out that, given the chance, we still really enjoy hanging out together!

Here's a small album of photos from the trip. They're not regular family vacation photos, since some are things we found interesting (signs, Menomonie's green algae-rich water, graphitti) as well as the normal cute kid shots. As always, I recommend the slide show option for viewing them.

Name That Plant

At Purlieu, I went back and forth between the forest and my stack of guide books. We made a last minute stop at the big library on our way out of town, which cost us a parking ticket. It was worth it. I got a stack of field guides. They were invaluable in helping me learn more about our land and its inhabitants. I was amazed how many times I had to recheck my theory on a plant I'd found before I could correctly identify it.
None of these are uncommon plants at all, and I think of myself as pretty well-versed in the local forest for a city girl. This just shows how out of touch I am with the world around me; I've been coming to this land since I was a kid, and never noticed these plants, which are abundant on our land, until this trip. I had no idea what they were.
Looking them up was a fun little puzzle to solve, counting petals and looking in different sections of the books, smelling and tasting parts of the plant until I had found out who it was.
It's fascinating, learning not only the name, but how each little one works, how it spreads, what people have used and enjoyed them for.
Gibbie got so used to me dropping to the ground in amazement that he would spontaneously do it too--"look at this!" he would say, "it's a cerota." Nodding seriously, "It makes water in it's leaves." I love that he does this. He's thinking about how we interpret nature, and joining right in. Soon enough knowledge and experiences with the plants will catch up with desire to participate. I'll bet to him a lot of what I say sounds just crazy, and often he can't see a thing that's being pointed out to him, like the wild turkeys out the car window, or the skunk he just missed when walking with Papa in the garden.
What I really love is that this little person of but three years has already learned so much. Many different plants he can identify in various seasons, though they look quite different, and he has a lot of favorite little flowers and leaves he can find to nibble on.
Or, pointing out into the forest, "Did you see that? It's a deercat. Right there, in that tree." He also spotted the rare leafcat. "It eats leaves."
Notes on the plants: the two photos of the pink and white ones are not of the same flowers. The flower in the first photo, seems to grow just one flower each, and the stems and low leaves are remarkably soft, covered in downy fur. The second photo features similar flowers, but as you can see, there is a small cluster of them, and a pair of leaves with parallel veins.
The top flowers, the white and purple ones, do very well if transplanted into a garden, where in the loose, fertile soil they grow to giant versions of their forest selves.
The fourth photo, with the white-veined leaves, the leaves are rather thick, almost leathery. The last picture the drying up berries, are growing on a short, pretty tree. These also grow in the city. I guess the birds don't like them much, since they still have lots of berries now in the spring. I have so much to learn!

Pudgy Pies

Some people call it a tonka-toaster. We always called them pudgy pies, presumably because eating them in great quantities makes us pudgy, hobbits that we are. There! The secret's out! They can be savory or sweet, but the classic pudgy pie is filled with marshmallows and pie filling.
A good pudgy pie can only be made in a cast iron clam-shell cooker. Aluminum or steel will not work just as well. We've tried. We only have one pudgy pie maker, and don't know where to get another one. Maybe I shouldn't advertise!

Pudgy Pies
-butter two slices of soft bread. Whole wheat will work great, so long as it's soft.
-Lay a slice, butter side down on one half of the pudgy pie maker.
-Spoon on fillings.
Sweet:
Fruit is great. Depending on how gooey you want it, add sugar or brown sugar if it's fresh fruit rather than pie filling. Chunky jam will work if it's on hand. Maybe a dollop of butter or a marshmallow, one big or several mini mallows.
Other combos: Chocolate and marshmallows
or Chocolate and peanut butter
Peanut Butter and Bananas.
Chocolate and dried cherries, Dried fruits, nuts, cream cheeses, etc...
The fillings are quite personal.

Savory Pudgy Pies:
Eggs: it may be best to cook the eggs and meats or anything that really needs cooking, not just heating up, before assembling the pudgy pie, especially for pudgy pie newbies. Eggs of course like bacon, ham, cheese, sausage, broccolli, peppers, mushrooms, onions, though I doubt all the above would fit in a single pie!
Potatoes, gravies, meats, you get the picture.
So, we've put in the fillings; enough to fill the pie but hopefully not so much it oozes out all over the place, unless you're into blackened food.
-Now we put the other slice of bread on top of the pile, butter side up like a grilled cheese sandwich.
-Close the clam-shell cooker, clamp it shut
-and set it right on top of a nice bed of coals.
-Flip over every 15 seconds several times and check for doneness. We like our pudgy pies dark golden brown.
The art of the pudgy pie is in getting the insides melted and gooey while the crust is golden brown. The common failing is the filling being cool while the crust is blackened. This especially happens if the pudgy pie is cooked over hot flames instead of hot coals. Coals, I think, cook much better, but the inclination is to put it in the dancing flames. We wait to cook them until the fire has a nice bed of coals, and rearrange things a bit so there's a good place for roasting.
The most difficult part of pudgy pies is waiting until they cool off a bit before devouring them. We eat these at the cabin, where we're ravenous from hiking around all day, so it helps if they come as a dessert course, which also makes time for a nice fire full of glowing coals, but we like them so much they are often the main attraction. I usually burn my tongue on the first one. Watch out!

Perlieu in Spring

We recently got back from the most wonderful trip to the woods of Western Wisconsin. We love this place. It's the landscape I grew up in and Libby grew up visiting. Now our boys can enjoy it too. We may have more to say about specific adventures from this trip, but for now enjoy a slide show.
(Click here if you're Flash disabled.)

Knowing the plants

It was a great moment for me when Gibbie, seeing staghorn sumac with it's drying flower clusters pointing up all over, said, "hey, that looks like fruit!" What kind of fruit, we asked? And he said, "Sumac!" I was particularly proud because the sumac flowers we have gathered looked very different from these, because these had all lost their leaves. Yup, we've been making a tasty juice from the flower clusters, and he's even developed an appreciation for licking the sour fuzzy flowers.
I do hope the kids grow up knowing how to read the land and plants. In the above photo, you can see dozens of different plants. I don't so much care if he knows all their names (I sure don't!) but I'd like to teach him, and learn together, and I'm sure eventually learn from him, all about them. Know how to make baskets from the bark of the white trees, as he calls them. Know how to eat the different parts of the milkweed plant during different seasons. We can dig the wild parsnip, and look forward to the raspberry and blackberry seasons in their turns. We will look around for the jewelweed when we get a nettle's sting and pop the seeds out at each other in the late summer when the pods are spring-loaded.
Here Gibbie is enjoying the tactile beauty of the ready milkweed seeds. Soon he will scatter them in the breeze, as any happy person will.

Fall is a great time for gathering basket supplies; we collected willow and cattail. They are drying on the porch, if one can call it drying with all this rain! I look forward to weaving them up into beautiful and useful things when we are stuck inside later in the year. That's the great beauty of this world; In the plants, seemingly dying back in the fall, are the stores for new life, promises of fresh vigor and growth next year, and abundant material for wild and artisinal beauty. This world is so made that in a deeper sense than I can grasp, dead things are always and everywhere coming to life, greater and better than before they fell. I am thinking of the food we eat, the seeds we sow, the troubled lives we live, and Christ himself.

Our Fall Vacation

Here's a look at our fall vacation. I took last week off from work and we went to the Perlieu cabin, and then Libby's grandparent's place near Battle Lake, MN. We'll write more about the trip itself when we can, but for now just enjoy the photos!


(If the slideshow doesn't work for you, here's a link to the photo album.)

Purlieu Weekend

It's been a busy couple of weeks and we've got a lot of back-blogging to do! Two weeks ago we took a long weekend in Wisconsin. It started around a close family friend's graduation party and turned into a good excuse to spend a couple of days at a cabin in the woods. If I've got the history of the place right, it goes like this: Libby's dad and some friends decided to form a sort of farming co-op back in the '70's and bought some land in Dunn County Wisconsin. The whole farming aspect didn't much take off, but they built a couple of cabins and have had various projects going on the land. We've been spending time there on and off for years and love the rustic (no electricity, pluming, etc.) accommodations. Libby would come here in her childhood and thus learned to love the same landscape that I enjoyed growing up just a few miles south of here.

This was our first time bringing the boys to Purlieu (as it's called). We thought Gibbie would love it, since he so much enjoys the large wooded parks we frequent in St. Paul. Some aspects he took to right away, like the large field with a hill to run or roll down.

There was one unexpected obstacle to his nature enjoyment, however. Bugs. I guess we just have a lot fewer bugs in the city. For the first day Gibbie went around with his hands over his ears trying to block out their buzzing.
Eventually, after talking with him about it for a while, I figured out why he was so scared. He's really good at taking a concept and generalizing it. He knows that bees buzz, therefore he figured that anything that was buzzing around his head must be a bee and could hurt him. No wonder he was freaking out. He didn't completely get over the bug thing until our last day out there.

On Sunday morning we decided not to drive back into town for Church. Instead, we went down the highway just a mile or two to the Hay River Lutheran Church. I had expected this little country church to contain a handful of old people singing feebly and slowly after listening to an old pastor preach feebly and slowly. I was wrong. It was a small church, but it was full, and full of people of every age. The pastor had a wonderful conversational style of delivering a message true to Jesus' character. He also had quite an accent. Someone said he was from Colfax (another small WI town). We later learned that came from Australia before serving in Colfax! When we went downstairs after the service for coffee we met people who lived all around the Purlieu land. They knew about the land, and a little about the people who owned it. They were impressed that we knew the old farming couple who used to live next to Purlieu, in fact one of them was their niece. It was a joy to see some life in that little place, and to meet many of the friendly folks who live around the cabin.

On our way back to St. Paul we stopped for lunch at that very farm once owned by the old people I mentioned. After they moved into town for health reasons one of the Purlieu members bought their land. It's a beautiful little valley with a creek running through it.
Looks idyllic, doesn't it? What you can't see in this picture are the wood ticks. Hundreds of them. All over us. They weren't bad at the cabin, but here there was a steady crawling stream of them. When we sat down for lunch here Libby said, "Oh Paul, you've got a tick on your pants... and one on your shoulder... another on your shirt... here's one on Ezra's head..." and so on. She didn't mind it so much (that's the ex-wilderness guide in her.) It really bugged me, though, and I was already in a bad mood because the Mercedes was running funny and I was worried about making it back home. So Libby pulled out one of her tricks from camp counseling: the Tick Stick.
See that brown mass on the diaper pin? That's a stack of impaled wood ticks. They still wiggle a little like that. It's great for grossing out Junior High campers.

We did make it home in the Mercedes. It was a good trip, but I think the next one will be even better because the boys will have already gotten used to the accommodations. I forgot to mention how much Gibbie liked the "potty house"!
This last picture has no significance except that I think it's a good photo. (Check the texture on the wood and old chair.) Gibbie is being a bird in his nest on the porch of the cabin.