We have a pear tree in our yard and each year we watch the pears growing and ripening for most of the summer. Even though this is a long, drawn-out process, somehow we are always a bit surprised to find that the pears are already falling to the ground (many times, over-ripe). Usually we do some combination of apple-pear sauce, pear tarts, and eating the pears raw. This weekend, we tidied up the yard and ended up with a rather large bucket of fallen pears, many with blemishes, bug holes, and bruises. We decided to make pear sauce. Usually, we buy some apples at the vegetable stand or farmers market to supplement the pears, since there usually are not that many. This year, however, we’ve got such a bumper crop, there was no need for apples. There are still a ton of pears out on the tree, and more falling each day. Somehow, we’re just not quick enough to get to pick them before they fall!
The pear sauce turned out so well, I wanted to share the recipe here. The best thing about it was that it contained no added sweetener at all–just pears, a little water, and the juice of a lemon. Note: if you do not have an inexpensive or free source of pears, you may want to use whatever fruit (e.g., apples) is readily available. In Seattle, there’s an awesome group called City Fruit where, if you have a fruit tree whose fruit you do not/cannot use, you can post on the site and offer the harvest to other people in the city. It’s a great way to share/trade/find free produce. For those in other cities, do you have a similar program?
The Recipe:
a lot of pears
1 lemon
1/2 cup- 1 cup water
Wash and cut up all of the pears (in 1-2 inch chunks), cutting out any parts you wouldn’t want to eat. If you have a food mill, you don’t have to worry about removing the skin or bits of core. If you do not use a food mill, you may consider peeling the fruit, and you would definitely want to make sure you remove any seeds or core. Put the fruit in a pot. For an idea of how many pears we used, we filled an 8-quart pot.
chop pears and put in pot
Add a splash of water (~1/2 – 1 cup) and the juice of 1 lemon. Cook on medium heat, stirring occasionally.
cook down the pears, stirring occasionally
The pears will reduce drastically. Cook until the pears are very soft. If you’re going to use a food mill, now is the time. Food mills are great because they are inexpensive, easy to use, and they strain out any unwanted bits from what you’re making. Process pears through the food mill, until you’ve got a smooth sauce (we left a few chunks of pear in the sauce because we like it that way).
process fruit through food mill
If you don’t use a food mill, leave the pears in the pot and mash them with some kind of mashing device/ hand tool.
sauce after processing
If the sauce, at this point, is at your desired consistency, you can now eat it. If it’s thinner than you’d like, simply cook it down some more. If it’s thicker, add a little water.
pear sauce: so sweet!
This is so sweet and delicious. We put this batch in jars in the fridge, but normally we can it in jars so we have it all winter long. Enjoy!
On another note, I spent the day yesterday cooking dried kidney beans and yam treats, and then, in the afternoon, set about making Okra Gumbo (from Post Punk Kitchen’s blog) with some okra that was calling to me at the co-op this weekend.
Okra Gumbo
I had never had gumbo before, and certainly never made it, so I really had no idea what to expect. But this was SO GOOD. Seriously. I made two changes to Isa’s recipe: (1) I added twice the number of kidney beans and cut out the garbanzo beans, and (2) I added some of the roasted green chilies we had in the fridge for some spice (I think this really helped)! I would highly recommend this recipe–hearty, filling, and it tastes so good! I served it with brown rice and twist of lemon.
I’ve struggled ethically, for quite some time, with the choice of what to feed the animals with whom we share a home. I’ve known that many people feed both dogs and cats a vegan diet and the animals are doing great. And now, especially, there are plenty of vegetarian/vegan dog and cat food options out there. But I still continued to feel conflicted about making that choice for these individual animals. I asked myself, “what would they choose to eat, given a choice?” “would they choose to kill an animal to eat?” “what exactly is in these dog and cat foods, even the organic ones from the boutique-y food stores?” I knew from research that the contents of many commercial dog and cat foods are a fright, with horror stories of foods made from euthanized stray dogs and cats, the worst of the worst remains from factory farmed animal bodies, and lots of unnecessary filler. This troubles me, as we have tried to cut out as many animal products as possible from our lives, and this remains our most pervasive use of animals.
Furthermore, Maizy came to us with some chronic health issues. At her former home, she had developed chronic ear infections from neglect and living outside all the time. These will continue to be a problem, the vet says, for the course of her life. She has early onset arthritis in her hips from being chained on the cement for 4+ years with very little exercise. She has severe skin reactions/ allergies to food. And she has a very sensitive stomach, with frequent digestive problems. The skin and stomach issues can be managed easily with diet, and so when she came to live with us three years ago, we immediately tried to find the right diet for her, to minimize the flaring up of these issues. We tried limited ingredient dog foods, strictly organic, vegetarian dog foods, wet and dry dog foods, and after many failed trials, finally settled on the vet’s recommendation, a prescription kibble that is hypoallergenic and designed specifically for dogs with skin and stomach issues. She seemed to be OK on this diet in terms of stomach and skin issues, but we struggled to keep her weight in check, she wasn’t thrilled about eating, and I continued to read horror stories of the contents of (even the prescription) companion animal foods. At the same time, I heard from several people of dogs they knew on vegan home-cooked diets who were living extraordinarily long and healthy lives (a lab who lived to be 26 years old, for instance!).
Last summer, she went to Maizy’s annual check-up at the vet and she weighed in at 68 lbs (8 pounds overweight!). I couldn’t imagine how this had happened. We’d been walking every day, I was rationing her food to control her weight, and she wasn’t getting an excessive number of treats. We started exercising more, which was (at times) hard on her because of the arthritis (which we manage with glucosamine/chondroitin supplements), and I started seriously contemplating her diet. I read and read about vegan dog foods, raw diets for dogs, and home-cooked meals. We decided to try her out on a home-cooked (mostly) vegan diet. I took notes on nutritional needs for dogs and created clear guidelines for what she was allowed to eat, what foods were toxic for dogs, and which supplements were necessary to augment a home-cooked vegan diet. I called the vet and ran my idea by them to switch her to the diet and they said it sounded OK, but that we should check her after she’d been on it for a while to see how she was doing. Armed with the research I had done, many lists of food, a Vegedog supplement I had ordered online, and a little apprehension, I started cooking breakfast and dinner for Maizy.
Her meals change regularly, in order to get a variety of vitamins and other nutrients, but the ingredients for a fairly typical meal look like this:
meal ingredients
A sampling of her everyday eats:
cooked quinoa
beans or lentils or tofu
kale or broccoli
carrots or zucchini
pureed pumpkin or butternut squash
sea vegetable (wakame or nori, usually)
nutritional yeast (a generous sprinkle)
flax oil (~1 Tbls)
1 tsp of VegeDog powder (according to her weight requirements)
I fill her bowl (which is about 2 cups) with a mixture of these ingredients. Dogs need at least 30% protein in their meals, so I shoot for that ratio with the protein ingredients and fill the rest with vegetables. The VegeDog formula provides extra essential trace minerals, the flax oil–essential fatty acids, and the nutritional yeast–a boost of vitamins. I cook the quinoa and beans or lentils ahead of time (they have the bulk bags of organic quinoa at Costco, which is very economical) and keep them in containers in the fridge for easy meal assembly.
We make her yam treats once a week or every other week, as needed. Other treats she gets regularly are whole raw carrots, kale stems (with leaves removed-for some reason she doesn’t like raw kale leaves on their own), zucchini, or broccoli stalks. And the occasional fruit–she likes watermelon, apples, pears, and berries best. She gets an occasional cooked egg (from our chicken backyard friends), which is why I say she’s “mostly vegan”.
Her food experience has really changed. She gets excited about her meals. She knows when I’m cooking her breakfast or dinner and she’ll sit there and watch me make it. She eats enthusiastically now, and it seems like she enjoys the fact that she gets to snack all day long on fruits and vegetables. In volume, at least, she’s eating far more than she ever got to before.
She seemed happy with the transition and has plenty of energy and loves exercising with me, she has clearly lost weight (she has a waist again, thank goodness!), and her coat is shiny and soft. But the real moment of truth was the vet check-up. I was a little nervous heading into the vet as I tried to disregard all those voices that have always said that dogs need meat to be healthy (‘it’s what’s natural afterall’). I explained to the vet in detail what I had been feeding her, including the supplements and treats. I brought in the VegeDog container so he could assess the ingredients (he was impressed!). He is a strong advocate that the dog’s body and health will tell you whether or not a diet is right for the dog. For some dogs, they may do better on a meat-centric diet, according to the vet, and so it’s really about watching closely and making sure that whatever your dog is eating is giving him/her what she needs.
The vet set about assessing Maizy’s well being. He weighed her, checked her over, took her temperature, and did a full blood panel. We talked about her arthritis, which seems to be quite improved (very little stiffness during and after exercise)–he says this is probably a result of the combination of the flax oil and glucosamine creating more fluid/padding in her joints. He said her coat looked great, her figure was quite improved (she has a nice ‘tuck’ in her waist now), her teeth looked fine. Her weight was 57.5 lbs, which is smack dab in the middle of ideal (so the vet says). He says ideally, she shouldn’t go below 55 or above 60. A successful report, followed the next day by a phone call saying her blood work results were all “quite good”!
Eric and I were both delighted by this news, and I wanted to share this whole saga with you in case it was of some interest. Maizy is 8 yrs old now. We’re shooting for many many more good years together!
Many of you might have already seen the film Forks Over Knives,but if not, you should! I sometimes waffle back and forth about pressuring people to watch films or read books about veganism because I don’t want to be pushy. However, this one should be pushed on people, assuming they have an interest in living a long life with fewer instances of disease! The film follows The China Study and is a very digestible way to get information about the effects of a plant-based lifestyle.
What prompted this post is the fact that I saw that Forks Over Knives is available for streaming (and dvd rental) on Netflix. Also, last time we were at Costco, they had a huge display of them, which shocked me (in a good way). I’m not sure you can get much more mainstream consumer than Costco, and there it was for the American public to toss into their gigantic shopping carts and be educated about veganism!
This film is empowering, eye-opening, and potentially life-saving. So, run–don’t walk–to see it. [Note: if you’re in Seattle, and would like to borrow a copy, I’ll lend you mine.]
This past week has been partly about the bounty of late-summer harvest, and partly about animal love.
Monday September 5th: A post on the glorious Pigs Peace Sanctuary, where 190 rescued pigs reside in a peaceful and happy setting.
Tuesday September 6th: I joined Farm Sanctuary’s Walk for Farm Animals and am now in the process of fundraising for Team Blitzen, if you’re interested in sponsoring me!
Wednesday September 7th: A review of the delicious birthday dinner we cooked using a purple cabbage from our garden: black-bean burgers, kale salad, quinoa salad, and vegan carrot cake cupcakes. Yum!
Friday September 9th: An awesome and nostalgic experience of summer harvest in the Roasted Green Chilies post. Green chilies from New Mexico. H.E.A.V.E.N.
Happy Sunday everyone! Catch you next week (i.e. tomorrow)!
My godparents live in Albuquerque, New Mexico and, when I was little, they used to send us 40-lb burlap sacks filled with green chiles around this time of year. When I think of it, I can smell the aroma of fresh chiles (pre-roasting) and burlap–a magical combination of smells. When the chiles arrived, the whole house would turn into a flurry of excitement. Photographs would be taken, the oven would be fired up, the roasting pans pulled out, and the whole house would smell like chiles. My mom would spend the day (or two) in the kitchen, roasting chiles under the broiler–turning them and poking them, switching out pans, cooling them, peeling them, deseeding them, and bagging them up for the freezer. This annual ritual would keep us in green chiles all year long. There was always the exciting moment when the first batch was finished roasting when my mom would determine just how hot they were. Sometimes they were ‘hot as hell’ (as my mom would say), and other times they were more mild, which meant we could eat them in much bigger quantities. When Eric and I took a 5 week road trip around the U.S. in 2006, we stopped off to visit my godparents in Albuquerque and it just happened to be late summer/early fall–chile harvest time! We bought two 40lb sacks of chiles and tossed them in the back of the pick-up truck and headed east, delivering them to Pittsburgh for a chile-roasting extravaganza, only to discover that these were ‘hotter than hell’ and could only be eaten in teaspoon-size quantities.
It’s been several years since we had any green chiles and my godfather was kind enough to ship me a box of them this week (all hail the Godfather!). They arrived yesterday, which meant ‘drop everything and roast!’
You can roast any kind of peppers–poblanos, anaheim, bell peppers, jalapenos, etc. Anaheim’s are probably the most commonly available in grocery stores/farmers’ markets around the country and are pretty freakin similar to the New Mexico chiles we get.
The Recipe
You will need:
Chiles (any quantity)
Turn on the broiler on the oven, or at least fire it up as high as it will go. Use a baking sheet/roasting pan. IMPORTANT: You DO NOT want to use any pan that you use for sweet baking. We have two large baking sheets–one dedicated solely for sweet baking projects; the other for savory roasting projects. Lay out the peppers on the pan; they can be touching and crowded on the pan, but should only be in a single layer:
lay peppers out on pan
Put it in the oven, under the broiler. Now, this part is kind of intuitive, and you have to check them regularly (about every 5 or 10 minutes, you want to peek at them), You’re looking for them to look like this:
the tops get brown and a little scorchy
Turn them over and return them to the oven. Keep checking them regularly and turning them until all sides get roasted and the skins are papery and pulling away from the flesh of the peppers, like this:
look for papery skins, and roasted all around
When they are finished roasting, remove them from the oven, and you can either (1) put them in a reused paper bag, if you need to do a second batch on the pan, or (2) cover the pan of chiles with a clean dish towel, tucking the corners of the towel under the pan. The idea here is that you steam them slightly with their own heat to help the peeling process. I used a paper bag since I was doing multiple batches with the same pan:
close the top of the paper bag and let cool
When the chiles are cool, you can peel them. Peel off all of the papery skin and squish out the seeds and the stems of the chiles. Make a plate of the chiles:
peel and de-seed the chiles
Now, you can either package these up (in your preferred method) and freeze them. Or you can chop them up for immediate consumption (they’ll keep in the fridge for about a week like this):
chopped chiles, ready for eating!
Wash your hands well after handling them; the spice could be painful! Also, if the air in the kitchen gets spicy while you’re roasting, just open a window and/or turn on the oven vent.
These are fantastic pretty much any way you eat them. In burritoes, no-cheese quesadillas, on toast with avocado (yum!), in stew, on black bean burgers, etc. Can you think of other ways to enjoy these wonderful chiles?
This kale salad is one of my favorite foods right now. It’s easy to make, packed with vitamins and nutrients, and totally delicious. Also, it holds up well as left-overs. If I make it for dinner and toss it with the dressing, it’s one of the few salads that can survive (dressed) in a container in the fridge for a day or two. The kale is just that awesome–so sturdy! You can use whatever type of kale you like. Lots of times I do a mix of the curly-leafed kale and dinosaur kale since I tend to buy one bunch of each each week to have around for making green juice.
The Recipe
Serves 2 (large helpings)
3-4 cups raw kale, torn into bite-size pieces
1 apple
1 cup purple cabbage, chopped
1/4 cup chopped pecans
1/8 cup onion (or more, to taste) chopped
1.5 T flax oil
1.5 T apple cider vinegar
salt and pepper to taste
The quantities in this recipe are fairly arbitrary and should be adjusted to your taste. I don’t measure anything when I make the salad, but this is generally the ratio of ingredients I enjoy.
Chop the onion and the apple. You can use any kind of onion (red, white, sweet, etc.). Just be careful with the quantity if it’s not a relatively mild onion-you don’t want it to be too overpowering. Any kind of apple will do (or pear, for that matter); I tend to get gala apples because I like their level of sweetness and crunch:
gala apple
Put the onion and apple in the bottom of your salad bowl. Add the vinegar and the oil (Note: if you don’t have flax oil, use olive oil. I just like to try to get some extra Omega-3s). Add a pinch of salt and a few grinds of black pepper (you may want to add more later, once you’ve tasted the final product). Stir the apple, onion, and dressing ingredients together. Set aside.
marinate apple and onion
Wash the kale well and tear into bite-sized pieces. I find that soaking it in cold water for a short while helps to get any dirt or little bugs off of it:
wash the kale
Dry kale (either by spinning it in a salad spinner, or by patting it with a clean kitchen towel). Add kale to the salad bowl:
Chop purple cabbage (I actually got to use a purple cabbage from our garden recently!) and pecans. Add to the top of the salad:
Toss before serving and add extra salt & pepper, if desired. Voila! So easy- a delicious and nutritious kale salad. Do you have an all-time favorite salad recipe?
vegan chocolate chip cookies with Doctor Who cookie jar
Eric just surprised me with a Doctor Who TARDIS cookie jar (excuse me, biscuit jar, if you’re British) and a Doctor Who mug. A friend and colleague of mine in my department has been walking around showing off her Doctor Who mug for at least the past year or so, and every time I see it I’m completely in awe of its greatness (and her good fortune in having one) and I’m also practically green with envy! So you can imagine my delight when a package arrived on Tuesday containing both the cookie jar and the mug.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with Doctor Who, I would highly recommend it–fun for the whole family! It’s a British sci-fi television show dating back to the 1960s, but with a renewed series starting in 2005. Even if sci-fi’s not your thing (I, for one, have turned into quite the sci-fi nerd under Eric’s influence), it’s got a little something for everyone… humour, drama, adventure, action, romance, fantasy… It’s definitely in my top 5, if not top 2 television shows of all time. Doctor Who is a time-lord–the last of his kind–travelling through time and space in his TARDIS (Time And Relative Dimension In Space) with companions (usually from Earth).
The TARDIS cookie jar is an exact replica of the TARDIS and if you press down on the lantern on top, it lights up and makes the unmistakable noise that the TARDIS makes when it takes off and lands:
TARDIS cookie jar in action
The mug is pretty magical. It starts out looking like this on one side:
And like this on the other:
When you pour hot water for tea, or coffee into the mug the TARDIS disappears from the one side. Awesome:
Then it reappears on the other:
When I got the cookie jar, I immediately wanted to make cookies and so I was excited when Emily at Daily Garnish posted a recipe for vegan chocolate chip cookies yesterday. I followed her recipe exactly, except I added 1/2 cup of applesauce instead of the banana (we were out of bananas). They were delicious and I would highly recommend trying out the recipe. Easy to make and they don’t require unusual ingredients. Thanks, Emily!
With our cookies and some peppermint tea in my new mug, we settled into the couch last night to watch the latest episode of Doctor Who. Perfection!
I’ve gotten a few email inquiries about what delectable treats I ate for my birthday. On Saturday, we had brunch at cafe flora with all the usual suspects (cinnamon roll, strawberry creme scone, caesar salad and roasted potatoes) and we also tried the vegan version of their reuben, which was quite delicious and unpictured because I was taking the morning off. We shared everything and were quite satiated for our trip to Pigs Peace Sanctuary . It was late by the time we got back from Pigs Peace and we were tired, so we just grabbed some burritoes from the local taco bus and brought them home. On Sunday, we had Eric’s mother and step-father over for a celebratory dinner.
My birthday is at the end of summer, and so when I was little, we always celebrated with a cookout and a homemade birthday cake. My mom used to ask us what kind of cake we wanted and she would decorate it with flowers, mint leaves and berries from our garden. One of the most memorable ones was a chocolate cake covered in lavender and mint colored icing in the design of a yin-yang symbol (my special request!). Anyway, I guess I was feeling a little nostalgic and wanted to do a vegan version of this kind of meal for my birthday. My mom and Eric and I spent Sunday around the house, doing little cooking projects for dinner and doing some yardwork and cleaning as well. We made black bean burgers from scratch (I’ll post the recipe when I perfect it-it still needs tweaking…the flavor is there, just not the consistency) on whole-wheat buns with some delicious fixin’s (roasted green chile, avocado, onions, lettuce, and tomato):
homemade black bean burger
Eric’s mom made a quinoa salad with red peppers, onions, basil, mint, kalamata olives, etc., which is always great:
quinoa salad
I made a kale salad (I will post this recipe shortly), which is one of my favorite salads. And as a special touch, we used a cabbage from the garden! This is the first year we’ve actually planted cabbage AND had them produce cabbages AND harvested one in time to eat it before the bugs and other critters got to it. Here it is growing in the garden–so pretty:
cabbage in the garden
I peeled off all of the outer leaves and gave them to the chickens:
cabbage feast!
And all cleaned up:
ready to eat
Check out the inside. The color is amazing!
purple garden-y goodness
Back to the meal.
kale salad and quinoa salad
The outcome was a delicious and well-balanced plate of food with plenty of protein, plenty of vegetables, vitamins and nutrients and, of course, plenty of ‘yum’ factor.
my plate of food-yum!
Of course, I wouldn’t dare forget dessert. For dessert, we made the Carrot Cake Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Frosting from Isa Chandra Moskowitz’s and Terry Hope Romero’s Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World. Usually I triple their recipe and make a 2-layer cake, but in this case I felt like making a single-batch of cupcakes (though I think we could have eaten more!). This cupcake recipe is outrageously good–if you haven’t tried it, you should. Their series of dessert books, including Cupcakes and Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar (and coming out soon with Vegan Pie in the Sky), make the transition to veganism SO much easier.
vegan carrot cake cupcakes
A perfect end to a perfect meal with some wonderful family!
In the vein of posts about animal sanctuaries, Farm Sanctuary is hosting a national “Walk for Farm Animals” this fall to raise money for animal advocacy and for the care of formerly farmed animals who are in need of rehabilitation and a safe place to live out their days. Farm Sanctuary has done a tremendous amount of work, both directly for individual animals, as well as widespread educational iniatives to improve the lives of farmed animals every where.
I’ve joined a local walk team in Seattle and will be walking for ‘Blitzen,’ one of many calves who are the thrown-away ‘by-products’ of the dairy industry. Blitzen’s story is below, and is representative of the experience of too many calves in the dairy and meat industries:
Blitzen and his two friends, Lawrence and Alexander, were rescued as calves from brutal conditions at a stockyard. One of the calves was “a downer” – too sick to even stand – and his suffering was ignored by the stockyard staff for hours. The other two were tormented by workers for their tiny size and mocked for their obvious distress. When they failed to sell, the calves were callously thrown away. Blitzen, the smallest baby, came to Farm Sanctuary with low protein levels, pneumonia, and in need of a plasma transfusion. Luckily, Blitzen is on the mend and will never again know such cruelty. He and his pals now spend their days with our New York shelter’s older, special-needs herd, where they are mothered by dairy cows who were never permitted to keep their own babies. ~Farm Sanctuary Website
If you’d like to make a donation to support my fundraising goal of $1000 when I walk for Farm Sanctuary on Oct. 23rd, you can click here (and Thank you, Thank you! in advance). Or if you’d like to join a team locally, or see if there is a walk in your city, click here.
Saturday was my birthday, and I couldn’t imagine a better way to celebrate than to go to Pigs Peace Sanctuary in Stanwood, WA. I had never been to Pigs Peace and had been wanting to go for quite some time. So about a month ago, I made the appointment to go on Saturday with my mom and Eric. It took us exactly an hour to get there and was an easy drive–just a straight shot up I-5.
I’m interested in sanctuaries for a number of reasons; in particular for their role in rescuing and rehabilitating abused and neglected animals. I like to see sanctuaries because our plan, eventually, is to start one ourselves. But more immediately, I’m interested in sanctuaries because my dissertation research is focused on them. My dissertation is about understanding both the life-courses of dairy cows in a small-scale family farm setting, as well as those living in sanctuary. Farmed animals are commodified in even the most alternative, ‘humane’ farm settings. The dairy cow, in particular, labors to produce milk until her productivity wanes and she is sent to slaughter, a process by which her body is commodified and commodified again, in life and in death. And so, sanctuaries are important both for educating the public about the realities of farmed animal life and for caring for individual animals. But I’m interested also in exploring how the sanctuary operates as an alternative to the farm and how cows’ lives may differ considerably in a setting where their worth is not dictated by their productive capacity. And so, while Pigs Peace is a sanctuary for pigs (and not cows), the sanctuary model is one that I’m committed to exploring. Plus, visiting sanctuaries is generally wonderful and lots of fun!
We arrived at Pigs Peace at 5pm with our 100 lbs of carrots in the back of the car (thanks, MacPhersons!). The sanctuary itself is picturesque, particularly in the late afternoon light, with a white farm house with wrap around porch, and a red barn. Everything was immaculate and well-kept when we visited; I was completely impressed by how clean the grounds were and how everything seemed to have, and be in, its place. Judy runs Pigs Peace on her own, with help from volunteers and donors and was a warm and friendly host as she showed us around the sanctuary. And the pigs… Oh, the pigs! They were free to roam around the sanctuary as they wanted to, with no pens or gates isolating them from one another.
The sanctuary is all run on donations and Judy cares for about 190 pigs there (both potbellied pigs and commercial hogs). She said it was unique for both types of pigs to be allowed to live together, and that pigs need the community of other pigs. They are very social creatures and will mourn when they lose one of their friends. For other facts about pigs from Pigs Peace, click here. And for information about the experience of pigs in factory farms, click here or check out the very interesting book, An American Trilogy-Death, Slavery and Dominion on the Cape Fear River, by Steven Wise.
Judy has set up several different areas for the pigs–one is the “Special Needs” area where she has a blind pig living, along with a few others. There is also the “TLC” area, where pigs with spinal injuries, etc are living and she is working on helping them to rehabilitate and/or live out their days as peacefully as possible.
Ziggy was one of the greeters for the sanctuary, a very sweet pig born with only three legs who loved to have her belly scratched: Judy told us the stories of a number of the pigs at the sanctuary and they were filled with both heartbreak and hope. Betsy came from one of the worst cases of neglect and abuse that Judy had ever seen. Betsy was found lying in mud and feces surrounded by the dead bodies of all of the other pigs living with her. She was so weak that the only way she could avoid drowning in the mud was to rest her head on the corpse of another pig and when they rescued her, they found body parts of other animals in the mud. It was so amazing to see her at the sanctuary, hopefully working on forgetting what she had to endure before she came to Pigs Peace.
After Judy showed us around the sanctuary, she let us help feed treats to the pigs. This was quite a production, with two of the visitors running out with a cart filled with carrots and apples. Judy rang a large bell and the pigs came running. We all threw carrots and apples as fast and as far as we could:
This was totally magical, with the bell ringing, carrots flying through the air, and the pigs (big and small) running and munching down on carrots and apples. Pure bliss.
Thanks to Judy and the pigs for inspiration, and for providing hope and peace for animals in a world where animals are often treated in the worst ways imaginable.
We have a pear tree in our yard and each year we watch the pears growing and ripening for most of the summer. Even though this is a long, drawn-out process, somehow we are always a bit surprised to find that the pears are already falling to the ground (many times, over-ripe). Usually we do some combination of apple-pear sauce, pear tarts, and eating the pears raw. This weekend, we tidied up the yard and ended up with a rather large bucket of fallen pears, many with blemishes, bug holes, and bruises. We decided to make pear sauce. Usually, we buy some apples at the vegetable stand or farmers market to supplement the pears, since there usually are not that many. This year, however, we’ve got such a bumper crop, there was no need for apples. There are still a ton of pears out on the tree, and more falling each day. Somehow, we’re just not quick enough to get to pick them before they fall!
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