There are no signs of spring here except for a vague stirring in our hearts. Always in spring, Brent’s heart turns to puppies (and rabbits and chickens and shaggy miniature donkeys). That’s why it is dangerous to send him off to the Northeast Organic Farmer’s Association Massachusetts conference where he took some classes in rabbit and bee-keeping and only narrowly avoided coming home with a very-affordably-priced angora rabbit. Of course, Brent has good company in his longings. Now Ella, our 3-year-old, has begun praying a faith-filled prayer every night: “Thank you for my puppy and my bunny and my nice little kitten and my turtle and my farm.” Her favorite toys of late are a tiny rubber pet mouse and a hockey puck she pretends is a turtle. Even Mabel has begun wandering around the house saying, “Dog. Dog.” So far we have settled on the not-terribly satisfying compromise of a betta fish instead.

After some discussion of Brent’s trip to the NOFA conference on Facebook, my uncle recommended we read a memoir called 40 Acres and No Mule written fifty years ago by Janice Holt Giles, who moved back to her husband’s homeplace on an isolated ridge in the western Kentucky hills. One of my favorite parts of the book is when, soon after moving, an older neighbor lady comes to visit and asks her what she plans to tend: chickens, a cow, a hog? Giles explained that between writing and farming, she would have little time for tending, but it wasn’t long before her neighbor showed up with a dozen chicks, and said, “As I told ’em, Janice ain’t never had nothing to tend in all her life an’ she just don’t know how a flock of leetle chickens’ll pleasure her.”

As Brent pointed out, we can’t even lay claim to 40 acres and no mule here. We are more like 0.126 acres, two crazy cats, and a small herd of worms on a cold-induced hunger strike. But despite our lack of land, we have been thinking a lot about tending. Lately we have begun to wonder if there’s not something in our soul that is made to tend. After all, it is the first job God gave people – to tend a garden. Since I quit my job to stay at home and tend our children, I have been surprised at the pleasure I get from simple things like baking bread, growing a garden, sewing, and learning to make the things we need from scratch. It seems tied to the root of the word tend: attend. To attend: to show up, to pay attention, to listen, to serve, to minister to. In our fast-paced, technology-driven world, maybe we need more tending to help us to slow down, pay attention, connect with nature and with God, and to get over our self-absorption and do things for other people. Maybe that is why we get such pleasure out of our pets (the nice ones at least) and our gardens and our baking.

So to all you tenders of gardens and chickens and children and dogs, may your spring be blessed. May we come by and pet your puppies sometimes?

If I had to choose one taste to remind me of childhood, it would be homemade biscuits (my maternal grandmother’s recipe) spread with homemade apple butter made by my paternal  grandmother. I inherited my grandma’s apple butter kettle, which is a large traditional copper kettle blackened with use, which stands on four cast-iron legs to be used over an outdoor fire. It looks a lot like this one they use at my parents’ church. That’s my dad stirring the apple butter.

I dream of getting my grandma’s kettle cleaned up someday and using it again, but for now we are forced to make our apple butter indoors. This year we bought a bushel of low-spray Ginger Gold apples from our friend’s farm.  A whole lot of them were eaten straight off, but we did manage to save some for canning.

We used an old-fashioned peeler to prep the apples, which worked great. Ella in particular loved cranking the handle.  (The worms loved the peelings.)

After we peeled all the apples, we gave them a coarse chop so they’d cook down faster.   We finally found a way to keep our preschooler busy while we were work: We gave her a butter knife and some apple slices and set her to work.  She took her work very seriously and ultimately declared, “I love helping you cook, Daddy!”

All those chopped up apples went into a stock pot along with a bit of fresh apple cider to start them steaming.

When they were very soft, after an hour or so, Brent mashed them up with a potato masher, all the while regretting having given away his immersion blender years ago.  Once we had a fairly smooth apple sauce, we added lots of cinnamon and some sugar.   This lovely, fall-ish concotion simmered for another hour or so until it had cooked down by about a third and, most importantly, it looked and tasted like apple butter. We packed the hot apple butter into sterilized jam jars. While lots of old-timers will just let the jars seal themselves, we processed ours for 10 minutes in a boiling water canner.  Here’s our finished product all set for winter eating and for giving as Christmas gifts.

After we made this, Brent found an amazing sounding recipe for Pear Caramel Butter, and we decided to try that too.  We made some changes to the recipe that we’re quite pleased with.  We left out the lemon juice, cut the nutmeg down to just a pinch or so, and added a couple teaspoons of vanilla extract.  It made a fantastic spread and is definitely worth your trying!  We enjoy it spread on all kinds of things – pancakes, biscuits, and of course, a spoon.

How’s your fall canning going?