In his new book Beautiful and Abundant: Building the World We Want, Bryan Welch challenges us to quit moaning and groaning about the environment, economic predation and a host of other uglies and instead take a proactive role in creating a future worth living. Welch's fundamental premise is that humans are smart enough to figure out how to make something happen, but when it comes to the future of the earth, and our species, we can't seem to get past just pointing out the problems and pointing the finger at those perceived to be at fault. Finger pointing and special-interest-agenda grinding will most definitely prevent any future world concept that's fair, beautiful and abundant or worth living.  

Vegetarians blaming beef producers and Prius drivers blaming Hummer afficionados for using up all the natural resources and causing all the pollution, or political pundits pretending there's no end to oil and that global climate change is just some pork-providing hoax, simply skirt and divert attention from the real issues.  Adjusting our consumerism to include guilt-salving environmental bandaid purchases like compact fluorescent lightbulbs doesn't make much of a long-term impact either. As with life in general, there is no environmental magic bullet that will keep our way of life going without us first carefully defining where we want to be and agreeing on a path to getting there.

Nope, a future worth living is not going to be conveniently purchased with a certifying body's stamp of approval, it's not going to wear some political party's slogan, it will challenge cultures, religions and traditional ways of thinking. Building the world we want is going to take honest engagement, cooperation among groups that have not historically cooperated, and untold lifetimes of dedicated work. Building a future that appeals to a common human vision won't likely be televised, but it may well be continuously streamed.

Don't get me wrong, I believe that creating a beautiful and abundant future is entirely within the human realm. As Welch eloquently points out in his book, humans visualized being able to fly for about as long as history has been recorded. The big breakthrough occurred in 1903 and look at us today. If we can visualize it, we can make it happen. So let us start visualizing how a naturally beautiful and economically abundant earth might look because it will likely take a while to get there.

One of the most compelling lessons for me in Beautiful and Abundant: Building the World We Want is that an amazing amount of human effort is being currently squandered in the battle over special-interest slices of the environmental issue. What a waste. Imagine where we'd be if that energy was aimed at a desirable outcome with near universal appeal.

If you are dissatisfied with the contentious and derisive wheel-spinning discussions of the present condition and how it relates to the future, I suggest you read a copy of Welch's Beautiful and Abundant. At the very least, you might be moved to think about the world and your place in it. But more than likely you will experience a paradigm shift in thought -- a ureka moment of sorts. It seems so simple: without a vision, our future is completely lost.

For more information on Beautiful and Abundant: Building the World We Want, click here. To order your copy today, click here. 

There aren’t any real cowboys among my close ancestors, but there are plenty of pioneers and they exhibited true grit of the kind that got it done. Those with the pioneer spirit on my dad’s side showed true grit when they left Germany and Finland with what they could carry – seeking something better. Those with the pioneer spirit on my mom’s side showed true grit when they left Scotland, Ireland and Germany with what they could carry – seeking something better. And those early English colonists among my ancestors showed true grit and a pioneer spirit by taking charge of their lives and telling the Crown to take a hike.

My ancestral milieu includes farmers, nurserymen, steamboat engineers, blacksmiths, railroad engineers, Civil War captains and generals, housekeepers, wood carvers and ministers with names like Will, Gugin, Bird, Coughlin, Logan, Kangas, Myers. They came to this country and exhibited the pluck and stick-to-it/can-do attitudes that define true grit. And yet, before thinking about it today, amidst all the hype surrounding the Coen brothers’ remake of the classic western movie True Grit, I missed the fact that you don’t have to be a cowboy to possess the virtues associated with grit and the pioneer spirit.

As a kid on the prairies in North Dakota, I was blissfully unaware of the true grit and determination that made my little life mostly bearable and even fun at times. I was also unfortunately unaware that my own ancestry offered plenty of heroes – expressing pride about one’s family definitely was not a common practice at that time and place. So I looked for my heroes elsewhere and found them among the gritty men portrayed in western novels and movies.

Characters like Rooster Cogburn, Josie Wales, Jacob McCandles, Ransom Stoddard and so many others were bigger than life to me, and that they somehow managed to find resolution, if not reconciliation, in a topsy-turvy and often quite violent world, was compelling. I rode with all of them across the vast prairies of my mind – chasing cows, living off the land, drinking out of springs, chasing bad guys and taking my lumps.  My heroes have always been cowboys ...

When novels turned into movies, John Wayne became a favorite western hero. He taught me to swagger with my double rig cap guns and taught me a few smart aleck lines. He made me into the lever-action rifle fan that I am today. Through his characters, Wayne showed me what the pioneer spirit and justice was about – in a naïve and grossly idealized kind of way. Sergio Leone’s Man With No Name (aka Joe, Manco, Blondie) offered an almost believable glimpse of surviving life’s harsh realities at the periphery – a place I sometimes inhabited.  

I now wish I might have known my grandparents and great grandparents – every one of them. I might not have learned to swagger or to shoot the bad guys with a two-handed quick draw, but I’d have understood much earlier that true grit and genuine pioneer spirit have nothing to do with silver screen cowboys.

Rarely do I find so high quality a tool that I get gooseflesh using it, but last night when I converted about five pounds of the Bloody Butcher corn we grew last summer into homemade cornmeal with our GrainMaker hand-powered mill, gooseflesh crawled all over me. Homemade cornmeal is easy to make if you can source some nice and hopefully open-pollinated corn and have access to a home-sized mill. I’ve used the C.S. Bell No. 2 mill to grind meal – and it is possible to make fine cornmeal with that mill using multiple passes, but the GrainMaker is truly a work of art that delivers finished cornmeal (from coarse to fine) in a single pass. I can’t wait to try it with some other grains and may even use it to whip up some homemade nut butters next year.

Proudly made in Montana, U.S.A. at a precision machine shop, the GrainMaker reeks of American pride and a master craftsman level of quality that is not attainable in any but a handful of shops in the world. With the GrainMaker you won’t find poorly finished castings or stab yourself on stray metal slivers that were somehow missed by quality control. Instead you will find a perfectly functional and absolutely gorgeous piece of metal craft that is simple to use, intuitive to assemble and that actually works exactly as intended. Top that off with a lifetime warranty and the mill is nothing short of phenomenal. My GrainMaker grain mill came with a beautifully crafted, optional clamp that reminds me of some of the German-built machinists vices I’ve had the privilege to use over the years.

The GrainMaker hand-powered grain mill comes with a pair of feed screws. One is essentially a spring-steel spiral that is suited to feeding smaller grains to the grinding burrs, while the other, called the GrainBreaker augur, is machined from stainless steel. The GrainBreaker’s cracking action makes it easy to mill larger and harder grains such as corn and dry beans in one pass. The GrainBreaker cracks the grain as it is fed to the grinding burrs – my experience with making cornmeal with the GrainBreaker installed was entirely pleasant. So that you don’t have to lose the different feed screws in a cluttered kitchen drawer, the GrainMaker comes equipped with a post to store the unused feed screw on and a pin to lock it into place.

Photo Courtesy Karen Keb 

Although I chose human power for the making homemade cornmeal with my GrainMaker, the mill’s flywheel doubles as a V-belt pulley and the machine is sufficiently robust that it can be set up with motor power easily – without voiding the warranty. For the more ingenious the GrainMaker would be simple enough to drive with a bicycle or even a geared down windmill. The GrainMaker has a red powder coated finish that makes cleaning it as easy as brushing and wiping the surfaces. If you made something like peanut butter with the device or ground coffee beans, you’d likely want to disassemble the unit and give it a good cleaning before switching over to wheat. Wondering about the kind of bearings used to locate the GrainMaker’s main shaft? The company installs only sealed roller bearings, which will give you plenty of years of hard use before needing to replace them.

Finally, the good folks at GrainMaker are friendly, incredibly knowledgeable, helpful and justifiably proud of their product. These are the folks we need to be doing business with – especially in these economic times. If you are interested in learning more about the GrainMaker hand-powered grain mill, I know Bonnie Jones will take good care of you.

A little more than a year ago, we obtained a few purebred Midget White turkey poults for a homegrown turkey project that came to fruition last Thanksgiving Day. We sourced the Midget White turkey poults for our homegrown turkey project from the Sand Hill Preservation Center in Calamus, Iowa and wound up with two adult toms and one hen smack in the middle of winter. Undeterred by the cold, the Midget White hen started to lay eggs in February of 2010 and we collected a batch to incubate and let her set the rest. The upshot of the entire homegrown turkey project is that we wound up with a few extra toms around Thanksgiving – we traded one to a friend for his loner Midget White hen and we processed the other for our own Thanksgiving table. About a month before Thanksgiving, the hens began laying again – our first batch of poults is nearly finished hatching.

For the most recent Midget White incubation experiment, we collected eggs daily from the hens until we had a clutch of 7 and placed them in our Brinsea Octagon incubator. A couple of days later, I noticed a few more eggs in the nest box and tossed them into the incubator for 12 eggs total. Like clockwork, five of the first seven eggs hatched as expected, 28 days after setting them. Another egg had pipped but the chick died before breaking free. And since then, we’ve hatched another three chicks (one died in the brooder) with two more eggs pipped this morning! Considering that I wasn’t diligent with managing the incubator’s humidity levels, the chance that we will wind up with 9 live poults out of 12 eggs is pretty exciting. It’s a bit of a relief actually because we should now have plenty of breeding stock to carry us beyond the next few years. And with a little luck, we will be able to harvest several turkeys for the table in 2011.

The Midget White turkey is an American Livestock Breeds Association (ALBC) listed heritage breed that was developed in the 1960s and 1970s using a line of commercialBroad Breasted White turkeys crossed with Royal Palms. Several generations later (with careful selection of small birds with good breast meat characteristics), the Midget White was born. The toms dressed out around 13 pounds and the hens around 8 pounds – just perfect for a family of two or four with plenty of leftovers to share.

We enjoy raising the Midget White turkeys because they are rare and unusual, and because they are efficient, largely self sufficient and produce delicious and juicy meat. They also look great on pasture accompanying the sheep and devouring grasshoppers. As far as dressing the birds goes, they are almost as easy to process as broiler chickens. You need a larger killing cone or other means of restraint when bleeding them than for broilers, but we found that the Featherman scalder and Featherman Pro plucker were completely up to the task. Evisceration is easier for me than the smaller chickens simply because my hands fit into the larger body cavity more easily.

Cooking the Midget White turkeys requires a little care, but our birds had plenty of subcutaneous fat on their breasts so they turned out juicy and delicious. And since these turkeys haven’t been bred to produce white meat where white meat wasn’t meant to be, their legs and thighs are delightfully dark with a texture and flavor reminiscent of nicely braised pot roast. The Midget White is a perfect homestead turkey that’s capable of providing your family with a sustainable supply of healthful and succulent meat. I expect that they’ll have a presence on our farm for many Thanksgiving Days to come.

Photos Courtesy Karen Keb

I'm pleased to report that I managed to remember to add the clarifier and carry out the few intermediate steps in the Artful Winemaker's foolproof wine making kit and finally got around to bottling the brew the day before Thanksgiving. I think that's a little over 28 days total, which means that the wine making kit better be foolproof since I didn't follow the instructions to the T and I neglected to install the seal on one of the funnels. How I missed that instruction is beyond me, but the wine was clear, smelled like wine and so I went ahead and followed the directions for bottling.

The first step in this process was to install one more component (a funnel) into the Artful Winemaker's fermentation vessel, which was designed to seal the substantial sediment away from the spigot's inlet. In spite of my somewhat clumsy nature, I managed to get the seal  installed on that funnel and get it inserted into the wine without stirring up that sediment -- whew.

Next, I dissolved the sulfite packet in water and rinsed the artificial corks and the wine bottles, taking care to slosh the solution all around to be sure that no stray yeast cell or bacterial spore could escape certain death. After that, it was simply a matter of filling the bottles with the spigot, and inserting the bottle closures. I was ready to call it a day, but my Partner in Culinary Crime noticed that the box of supplies included lovely bottle labels and foils to cover the corks.

So she carefully applied labels to the bottles and I installed the foils before setting the entire case of foolproof homemade red wine in the corner of our yet-to-be-completely-completed-mudroom-addition turned temporary wine cellar.

We cracked a bottle of the stuff on Sunday, just three days after bottling and wow, were we pleasantly surprised. Our homemade Cabernet was entirely drinkable (and looked great in PICC's crystal wineglass) and accompanied our supper of turkey tetrazzini quite delightfully. I was really amazed at the outcome of this experiment and found the foolproof wine to be much more enjoyable than the Franzia boxed Cabernet sitting on the kitchen counter and the bottle of Bogle in the wine rack. I enjoyed the entire process so much that I ordered a couple of kits to send as gifts.

Photos Courtesy Karen Keb