Home, Home, Soup

I was a good 30-something daughter and went Upstate to visit my mother this weekend, therefore, there’s not much food in this post. But don’t despair! From what I can gather, you guys seem to like my pictures of pretty things and there’s lots of that in this post! So, without further ado, may I present some beautiful scenery from a blustery, wet, Upstate weekend.

My mom met me at the train station and we immediately went over to the place where she works, the Watervliet Shaker Heritage Society, as it was the first day of their annual Christmas Craft fair.

This is the meeting house.

There’s three doors on the front when there should be only two. The city of Albany owns this site and they originally removed the two wooden doors, which were the entrances for the Brothers and Sisters, and stuck the one in the middle there. They also clad the exterior in brick, which has thankfully been removed in a recent restoration which also put the original doors back.

An interior staircase. Aren’t the colors beautiful?

The creamery.

The barns. There’s turkeys and chickens and quail over there. They make a lot of noise.

This is the herb garden that my mom is in charge of. The Shakers used herbs to flavor their foods, but also as medicine. They were also the first people in America to sell packaged seeds. Prior to the Shakers, seeds were sold in bulk and often got moldy over the winter. There are many Shaker cookbooks available out there, grab one if you see one. Their recipes were wonderfully simple and soul satisfyingly good.

And here’s what you were really waiting for, right? Oxen!

The brown ones are Swiss browns, and the little black one, Kerry, is a heritage breed from Ireland that I’ve forgotten the name of.

And in case you didn’t know, oxen are always castrated males.

I can’t remember which of the brown oxen is which, but their names are Freighter and Liner, and for good reason, they are HUGE.

While both sects are Anabaptists, the Shakers differed from the Amish in their use of technology. The entire idea behind the Shaker religion was to become closer to God through perfection, good works and simplicity.

Thus, if an invention came around that made their lives simpler and more perfect the Shakers would adopt that.

I bring this up because over time these gorgeous guys were replaced with Studebakers and tractors.

Okay, let’s drag ourselves away from the oxen.

We had a lovely dinner with my step-sister and her family; lambchops, sautéed escarole and puréed butternut squash. The mixture of garlicky greens and sweet delicious squash is one I hope to recreate here this week.

Here’s my nephew. Doesn’t he look like he’s about to do something evil?

After some shopping and general carousing, it was time to head back downstate to my other home. It’s hard to decide which home is home anymore, so I guess it’s just best to think of them both as well, home!

The sky was amazing, so I took some pictures of my favorite river in the whole world through the train’s windows.

Those are the mountains where Rip Van Winkle took his famous nap off in the distance there.

Because of the end of Daylight Savings and the massive storm we’d had, the sunset was brearthtakingly gorgeous.

The colors got even more intense than this if you can believe it, but there wasn’t enough light for me to continue taking pictures, so I turned back to my book.

And what did I find when I finally got home? The boy had made soup. One of the most wonderful, tasty, most deliciously simple, healthy and perfectly amazing soups I’ve ever tasted.

It was a cauliflower and mustard greens soup flavored with ginger, tarragon and harissa. Doesn’t sound like it could possibly work does it? But oh by did it! It tasted simultaneously healthy and hearty, it’s the kind of soup the Shakers probably would have made, and it was exactly what I had been craving.

What a great weekend. It’s so good to go/be home.