retirement – Page 3 – Random Ramblings

Belonging

February 2, 2016

Growing up as a child of immigrants, the stories you hear of ‘home’ are usually tinged with nostalgia, seen through the rose-coloured glasses of memory. I can’t say this was true of all my parents’ stories – they had lived through the depression and World War II in Engand- but the ones that stayed with me the most were their stories of long childhood walks through the countryside, roaming footpaths and hedgerows, free and unsupervised.

My own childhood in Canada was as free as most childhoods fifty years ago were, and living at the edge of a village there was freedom to roam the farm lanes close to us, the farmers turning a tolerant eye to our activities, and we certainly bicycled the quiet roads around us. But at the back of my mind, it just wasn’t the same. I had grown up on Enid Blyton and Arthur Ransome, and I wanted footpaths and moorland, quiet hedged lanes, little villages hidden in folds of the hills…and as I grew older, a welcoming pub to stop at.

So here I am, nearly fifty-eight, writing in the sitting room of our holiday cottage that we’ve taken for January and February, back from a walk that ticked just about every box on that list. We set out just after nine this morning, turning right up the lane at our front door. A few hundred meters up the hill a gate opens onto a field and footpath, climbing further up the hill, skirting field margins to bring us out onto a quiet lane. A barn owl is hunting in the field to our west. At the top of the lane, the wide Norfolk views open out; to our west is the broad expanse of the Wash, its flocks of waders and waterfowl visible even from here, the coast of Lincolnshire shimmering in the distance. To our east, fields: field peas and sugar beet, wheat stubble, autumn-ploughed fallow, cut with hedgerows and lanes.

We walk in a northerly direction, following paths and bridleways, along field margins and old drove roads through farms, coming out into villages. The sky is changeable, clouds scudding in the strong westerly winds, patches of blue winking in and out. Hedges, green with ivy, keep the worst of the wind off us except when we the route takes us due west. Grey partridge scatter in front of us, calling their distinctive rasping cry.

After about six kilometers the drove we’re on swings west, past a substantial farm, and then south again for a few kilometers, coming out by a magnificent medieval church perched high on the greensand ridge that runs up the coast here. On a bench outside the church wall we sit for a snack, looking down over the village. It doesn’t do to sit too long, though: we’ve another three or four k to go, and tired muscles ‘set’ all too easily. We walk through the village streets, past the old watermill, and on to the footpath that is the last leg home. In a field to the west about a hundred curlew are feeding, beside jackdaws and wood pigeons, and where the footpath enters a woodland long-tailed tits chatter their high-pitched greeting.

We’re home in time for lunch, just after one o’clock. All this walk was missing was the pub, and that’s just up the road: the well-deserved pint can wait until a bit later this afternoon. I have soup to make for dinner and bread to bake. In all my months of recovery from major surgery and post-surgery treatments in 2014 and 2015, it was the thought of walking under this quiet corner of Norfolk’s skies, along these footpaths and lanes, that kept me going. It was the first place we came when my doctors gave me the green light to travel last spring: in the month here then, I went from being able to walk for less than an hour to managing a couple of hours with sufficient breaks. Now I can walk for four, with a five minute break, and it’s only the arthritis in my hip and foot that keeps me from going further, not a lack of energy.

Spread out on the sitting room floor at my feet is the Ordnance Survey map for this area. In a couple of minutes I’ll sit down with it and start planning another walk. Out to the castle ruins towards the Wash? Due east, to the village with the working windmill? Across the fen to look for short-eared owls and woodlark?

This is not Blyton’s or Ransome’s England, if those ever really existed. It’s not the England of my parents’ childhoods, nearly a hundred years ago. It’s not even the England we started to return to thirty years ago, when my family’s pub still stood where the village’s grocery store does now. But it still offers me footpaths and heathland, quiet hedged lanes, little villages hidden in folds of the hills, skies and birdlife and wind and space, and long walks from my front door. My experiences and memories build on and continue from my childhood stories, the ones my grandparents told, and my father (this was his childhood village), and those of his one surviving cousin, who lives a dozen miles from us here, and whose ninety-fifth birthday we are celebrating later this month. I study and explore these villages and fields as part of my landscape archaeology courses, I write about it in my non-fiction work-in-progress, Reverse Migration, and there is a certain place in the fictional land from Empire’s Daughter that is, simply, here. I belong to this land, this little piece of west Norfolk, and it to me, unlike any other place I know or have lived.

Quiet

January 20, 2016

For the worst two months of Ontario’s winter we’ve escaped to a small English village in the still mostly rural county of Norfolk; it’s winter here too, but here that means the occasional overnight frost and daytime temperatures anywhere between 4 and 12 degrees C. There are flowers out, snowdrops and winter aconite and primula. It rains a bit, but we also have beautiful sunny days, and it rarely rains hard enough, or long enough, to mean we can’t get a good walk in every day.

This morning, in glorious 7 degree C sunshine, we were standing on a high point on Roydon Common, a large expanse of heathland a few miles from our village. It’s about 2 km square (a bit more than a square mile), inhabited by birds and roe deer, netted with walking paths, grazed by some Dartmoor ponies, and mostly empty of humans except a few dog walkers. We were looking north-east: to the west is the market town of King’s Lynn and the bay of the North Sea called The Wash; in all other directions, it’s farmland.

We have something here we didn’t realize we were missing even in our rural home in Ontario: quiet. The Ontario house is 4 km or so north of the major highway into Toronto (the equivalent of an interstate or a motorway) and it is never quiet: truck and car traffic is heaviest morning and evening but it is constant, all day, every day. Even 4 km away, with the prevailing winds bringing the sound to us, the highway is a background noise to all we do, in or out of the house. A railway runs through our home village: it’s a spur line, with trains two or three times a day, but it’s still noise. We’re on the flight path for take offs and landings at Pearson International Airport. All of this adds up.

But here…our rental cottage is as quiet as can be, even in its village location. During the day, walking the footpaths and lanes, there is farm equipment, the sounds of livestock, a few cars. The major road is a couple of kilometers a away, and has less traffic than my commuter route from when I was working. We sleep deeply here, undisturbed by background noise that we didn’t even realize was affecting our sleep. The first sound I hear most mornings is the call of the pink-footed geese as they fly over the cottage, moving from The Wash to the fields where they feed.

Quiet is a luxury in our world, and one I suspect many people don’t know they don’t have. I didn’t…compared to many places, our Ontario home is quiet…it’s just not this quiet. I’ve experienced quiet before, camping in remote places, travelling through the highlands of Scotland, but I’ve never lived in it for an extended time since childhood. It’s been an added blessing in our winter escape. Along with flowers in January, wide skies, and skylarks singing.

String and Paper

January 12, 2016

Well, we’ve been here almost a week, long enough to know what I miss from the Canadian house; what I should have brought or need to buy here.

This is a very well equipped holiday cottage, and as we’ve lived here many times before I was fairly sure I knew what to bring (an apron, my Aeropress coffee-maker, a thermos for coffee to take on our day trips) and what I would choose to buy here (a slow-cooker, bread pans, a small birdfeeder for the garden.) I was right about all that, except this time there was an apron hanging in the kitchen. The bread pans are heavy-duty disposables: they’ll go into the recycling when we leave at the end of February; the inexpensive slow-cooker will go to a charity shop, as will the bird feeder. Here’s what I didn’t foresee.

Twist-ties or bag clips, for the bags of lentils and peas, pasta and rice. There are a few bag clips here, some of which I bought in the spring, but not enough. String or skewers, for holding together stuffed chicken thighs. Or perhaps I can just buy a ball of food-quality string, and use it for both purposes…that would be the simplest solution. So far, that’s it. Except, perhaps, paper.

At home we both have printers, and printers generate paper that’s usually good on one side. We use it for printing again, anything that doesn’t need to be pristine, or for writing lists and notes. Here there is no printer (that in itself will be an interesting experiment, for someone whose work revolves around the written word) and therefore no paper generated. So paper – for grocery lists, freezer inventories, schedules and menus – is in short supply. I could, of course, go out and buy an inexpensive pad of paper. But we’re going to try to manage with what we have, just to see if we can.

There is no comparison between our two months here and the six-to-eight week camping road trips we made in the past, where everything had to fit in the back of a compact car. But it’s still an opportunity to see what we really use, versus what we use because we have it – or even more importantly, what we have and don’t use.

So what do I miss from the Canadian house? (Other than the cats?) Nothing. So far, nothing at all. My guess is the lack of a printer will eventually be an issue…but we’ll see.

Adjustments

January 9, 2016

We landed at Heathrow about 8:45 on Wednesday morning. Thanks to e-passport readers, we were through immigration in about five minutes, picked up the bags with a two-minute wait, and waited perhaps ten minutes for the bus to the car rental location. Another fifteen minutes and some paperwork, and we were on the road.

We’ve done this so many times. Forty minutes or so north-and-and east on the M25, the London Orbital, and off the motorway at South Mimms for coffee and breakfast at the services there. Back to the motorway for a short time, and then swing north on the M11, then the A11, then the A1065 and the B1112 to Lakenheath RSPB Reserve by late morning.

Here we’ll walk for a couple of hours, shoving North American birds to the back of our brains and retrieving the British ones. So many adjustments these first few days: the birds, the money, the side of the road to drive on (BD is expert at this, whereas it takes me a few days); names of things, behaviours. We finish our walk, eat our lunch, and make the last leg of the journey, an hour or so into the village and our little rented bungalow, home for the next two months. We retrieve the keys from the lockbox, open the front door, say hello to the house. Back out for quick shop for enough food for dinner and breakfast; tomorrow we’ll do a proper shop. Jet lag is kicking in, but the house is familiar; there are no surprises here. We know where everything is in the kitchen and how the stove works.

Am I home? Or am I home in Canada? We’ve lived with this duality all our lives: two citizenships, two passports, two countries to call home. I’ve stopped trying to answer that question, because both places feel like home, in different ways. Our families’ roots are deep here, shallow in Canada; our personal roots are deeper in Canada, shallower but getting deeper every year here. Unlike for some people with dual citizenship, there isn’t a deep moral choice to be made: both countries are democracies, both have universal human rights, universal health care and reasonable social support. Canada has better state-funded schools, probably. Britain has better public access to land for walking. Small differences, those last two, but huge for us. We preferred our teaching careers to be in Canadian schools; we prefer the access to the countryside here. And that no-one thinks birders are odd. And the weather: it was -18 C the morning of the day we left Canada. It’s 8 degrees C here.

Our life is smaller here. The bungalow is much smaller than our house. We have only one car. We shop more often, because the fridge is half the size of the one in Canada. All of this is ok. There’s a good library, a good butcher with local meats and game, a good little grocery store. The market town ten minutes away has everything else we need.

So, yes, I’m home. (Except I miss the cats, but they are being well taken care of by our long-term house/cat sitter.) I can love two countries: I loved both my parents, after all. It’s pretty much the same thing.

New Year Thoughts

January 2, 2016

Our New Year’s Day lunch is over, and we’re switching gears to preparing for our imminent departure for two months in the UK. I’m not a resolution-maker (at least, not just because it’s January 1^st), but a couple of things together have made me think.

First was the meal planning for these last few days. Inevitably we had food left over from our lunch. Some of it went home with guests, with me doing quick calculations about what we needed to feed ourselves until Tuesday afternoon. Once everyone had gone, I did some planning.

A handful of raw veggies and some roasted red peppers, plus the half-box of chicken broth in the fridge? Those became roasted red pepper soup, which, along with the last of the baguette, became Friday’s light supper.

Lunch today and tomorrow will be the rest of the cheese, crackers and fruit for me, and the left-over hummus for BD. Tonight’s dinner will be the rest of the mini-quiches, with some frozen veggies. Sunday I’ll use the chicken pieces and jar of broth in the freezer, both the last remnants of a roast chicken from a few weeks ago. Monday we’re out with friends, and Tuesday brunch will be the last of the eggs, scrambled, with a small package of smoked salmon brought as a hostess gift. I have enough milk for cereal and coffee to last to Tuesday. The apple cider will be drunk. Nothing opened will be wasted; the unopened- beer, wine, a box of crackers, a box of chocolates – will wait for our return.

At the same time, I’m doing the last loads of laundry and planning the packing. We’re simply moving houses, to our little rental cottage in Norfolk, our second home by virtue of us returning to the same cottage time after time. But we don’t own it, which means we can’t leave clothes behind. (It comes with everything else you could possibly need, except for personal electronics and toiletries.) How many clothes do I need, for two months? How many can I take (along with my binoculars and scope, my laptop, my art supplies, my maps for my course…) without paying for more luggage?

What do I need? We’ll be spending our time walking and birding, and I’ll be continuing to work with my writing, reviewing and editorial work. So. Half-a-dozen pairs of socks and underwear, two bras. Four t-shirts, four long-sleeved t-shirts, to cover the possible range of temperatures – which will be roughly 0 C to 12 C over the two months. Two sweatshirts, two corduroy shirts. Two pairs of jeans. My hiking boots, my canvas Tom’s that double as slippers. A nightdress, and a pair or two of yoga pants to lounge around in. One set of decent clothes for dinner out. A quilted vest, a rain jacket and rain pants, gloves, hat, scarf. That’s it. (So, nags the little voice at the back of my mind….why do I need more than this at home?)

And it is a good question. OK, I need grubbies to paint the attic in, and to garden in. I need another, warmer coat because it isn’t going to be -20 C in Norfolk, and it is here; same with winter boots. But even given that, and the need for a summer wardrobe as well, why do I own so many more clothes than this?

I’m satisfied with my approach to food: I plan meals, including potential left overs, and very little gets thrown away. I can find ways to incorporate almost any left-over into a soup or a casserole or a curry, or as a scheduled lunch. But even after my major clothing purge in the spring, it will be time, when we get home, to do another. I’ll keep my favourites, figure out what I might have actually missed having while I’m away, and take the rest of the fall and winter clothes to the charity shop. Because I no longer live a life that needs a closet full of clothes. My work lives in electronic form in the cloud and is completely and totally portable: I talk to all but one of my clients only by email or by editing notes in the manuscript, and I talk to those who edit or review my writing, or interview me, in the same way. They don’t know what I’m wearing, nor do they care. Other than the odd dinner out to celebrate something significant, and the rites of passage of weddings and funerals, there is nothing in my life that needs more than comfortable jeans and shirts.

I’m going to watch myself, in these next two months. The cottage, as I said, is fully, even extensively, equipped. What do I use? What toiletries do I really need? What do I buy? I have a local library card. The cottage has excellent WiFi: that’s a must, now, for me. My goal is to buy nothing except food, toiletries if I run out, and the occasional cup of coffee to warm up after cold hours birding on the North Sea coast. Oh, and a movie or two…because there is immense value to me in seeing a film at the Majestic Cinema in King’s Lynn: after the first time we went there, several years ago, and I was telling my father about it, back in Canada, he said “Oh, yes, I remember that cinema: I saw Ben Hur there in 1929.” Some things are, truly, priceless.

The Monthly Menu

November 27, 2015

In the first months of retirement, it felt good to be able to shop every day or so, especially with the farmer’s markets in full swing. It was a luxury I hadn’t had in my working days.

But over this autumn, as my days of leisure become fuller with the work of my third, chosen, career, it’s becoming a nuisance. The markets are closed, except for the Saturday ones, and the roads are becoming icy, so last month we went back to the monthly menu.

Once a month, we sit down and plan meals. I create a four-column chart: Date, Meal, Prep on Day, Need to Buy. This goes on the fridge, and can be modified as needed – if I only use half a tin of chopped tomatoes in the curry, then a note is made on the next meal that needs them that they’re in the freezer. I use this chart to determine monthly and weekly shopping lists; I tend to buy meat monthly and freeze it, and everything else weekly, with a quick top-up shop half-way to buy milk or yoghurt or eggs, as our fridge isn’t big enough to keep large supplies of these on hand. It also reminds me what to thaw and what other prep is needed on the day.

This works because there are only two of us, and our lives are fairly predictable. If we decide to go out to a movie and dinner with friends, that’s ok -that meal either doesn’t get made, or, it gets moved to the next day, and that meal cancelled, whichever is easier. Meals can be moved around without too much difficulty, and left-overs always have a meal to be included in.

The other advantage is that in six weeks, when we leave for an extended vacation, we’re not leaving behind a freezer and fridge half-full of food. We left once for a two-week holiday over Christmas, only to have our area hit by a vicious ice-storm that meant our house was without power for eight days. All the freezer foods, all the fridge perishables, had to be discarded (luckily our cat sitter is very flexible on what tasks she’ll take on – oh, and the cats went to live with a friend for that time) as we kept in touch by text from England. I’d like not to put her in that situation again, so both fridge and freezer will be empty of anything that could go bad.

Will I keep this up in the summer, when the markets are open again and fresh local food abounds? Probably not….or I’ll modify it a bit…but for the winter months, it works for us.

The Quiet Joy of Enough

November 24, 2015

Walking today on the snowy trails at our local conservation area, BD expressed once again his sense of disbelief that we are actually retired. Like many – if not most – of our generation, he’d expected to work to 65. ‘But,’ I gently pointed out, ‘many people just wouldn’t be prepared to take the pay cut we did, to retire early.’

‘Enough’ played its role in determining it was time to retire. Both in it’s negative sense: ‘I’ve had enough of this job.’ and in its positive: ‘We have enough money to retire.’ The latter statement was true only if we kept the positive concept of ‘enough’ in our minds. ‘What isn’t need is greed’: I don’t know who said that, and I’m not sure I entirely agree with it – but that depends on how you define need. If you acknowledge that the soul has needs as well as the body, then it’s not a bad quote.

‘Enough’ sometimes is difficult. My health issues have meant I have had to learn what ‘enough’ is with regard to certain foods; that one glass of wine is plenty; that I have physical limitations that must be considered. BD has had similar lessons to learn. But ‘enough’ is also marvelous: there is enough time now for me to write, to read and review books, to edit for others, to walk every day: all the things that the demands of the salaried job took away from me. And even better, there is enough money that I can do these things as a true amateur, for the love of them, and not for profit, and so I have only myself to answer to. But this is true because I can say this of so many things: clothes, furnishings, possessions of all sorts – ‘I have enough’.

I will honestly admit to greed in the past. I had too many clothes; I liked food and wine all too well, and no-one needs the travel experiences we have had, although how can you regret the sight of a tiger hunting along an Indian river, or an Adele penguin standing at your feet, peering up at you? I can’t. But I can also say, even about that, ‘enough’. We have the memories.

Our world is smaller now, but our time is…ours. I wake every morning with quiet joy, knowing I have enough.

Good Fences

November 3, 2015

Good fences make good neighbors, Robert Frost wrote, in Mending Wall. Between our property and the neighbours on both sides, a split-rail fence delineates the property lines. We built the fence ourselves, getting on for twenty years ago, pulling the cedar rails out of the brush of an old farm at the edge of the village, gladly given to us by the elderly farmer. When the fence was done, he walked down one day to see them in their new incarnation. “Good to see them used again,” he said, of the old swamp cedar rails, probably even then well over a hundred years old.

But in a massive thunderstorm earlier this year, with drenching rain and high winds from the east, unusual for here, the young butternut that grows just at the edge of our eastern neighbour’s property shifted just a little, leaning into the fence, and took down three rails. Oddly enough, it didn’t break them: the steady pressure on the fence snapped the wire that held them to the posts. But they couldn’t go back up – the trunk of the butternut was in the way now.

We debated taking the tree down, but I really didn’t want to. Another young butternut, at the edge of the maple swamp behind us, also listed in the storm, but it straightened itself up within a couple of weeks. I decided to wait. Yesterday, mulching leaves, I took a good look at the tree, and realized it had grown straight again, but from about five feet off the ground, meaning its lower trunk still was an impediment to replacing the rails.

BD and I brainstormed, and decided the simplest thing to do was to add a post directly beside the one north of the tree. This would allow us to run the rails from the new post to the existing one south of the tree, creating a slight zig-zag (or, really, only a zig). We throw almost nothing out in term of wood, so hiding down with the compost bins was a huge old post that had once supported the far end of the washing line. Cut down and wired securely to the existing post, it was the perfect size.

It took us about half an hour to fix the fence, on a glorious November day, sunny, very warm, no wind. Overhead ravens swore at and chased migrating red-tail hawks. The chickadees went back and forth to the feeders, ignoring us, joined by two species of nuthatch and two of woodpeckers. The squirrels – black and red – are happy to have their highway contiguous again, and neighbouring dogs and grandchildren have their limits back. Good fences do, indeed, make good neighbours.

Raking Leaves

November 1, 2015

The winds that brought in a cold front a couple of days ago also brought down almost all the leaves hanging on to our two Norway maples. Norway maples – Acer platanoides – have, as their scientific name indicates – huge, plate-like leaves, and they don’t decompose easily. I have a couple of choices – I can rake them onto a tarp, and move them to the edge of the maple swamp behind us, in a (useless) attempt to smother the goutweed that someone planted there, long before our tenure in this house. Or I can mulch them into small fragments, and leave them to enrich the lawn. Burning isn’t an option – that requires a burn permit (if you’re at all law-abiding, anyhow) – and on our small property there is nowhere that meets the criteria.

I choose to mulch them into the lawn with the electric lawnmower. But first I have to rake them away from the porch, and the shrubs, and the garage doors where the wind has pushed them. It’s a cool last day of October, and this is just the right thing to be doing. Last year I was still on post-surgery restrictions, and the years before that I was working, gone from the house from dark to dark, and it seemed to rain every weekend. So for some years a landscape service has taken care of our leaves. But this year, it’s all mine, and I’m reveling in it.

I rake the leaves onto the front and side lawns into more-or-less even drifts, and plug in the mower. I start with the mower set at 3 1/2 inches, and go over the leaves, dropping the mower height down as the leaves are chopped. Across the road, a neighbour with a much larger property is burning hers: the smell takes me back to childhood, when we all burned leaves: the scent of fall.

It takes me about an hour and half to do the front and side lawns, clean the mower, sweep bits off the driveway and the walks. The leaves have been reduced to tiny fragments that will decompose easily, returning their nutrients to the soil, feeding earthworms and micro-flora, strengthening the grass and clover that make up our lawn.

There is something that just feels right about taking care of what we own ourselves, instead of paying a service to do it. I draw the line at the highly specialized or dangerous (BD and I are having a debate about our very tall chimney, which needs repointing. I think it’s too tall for him to do; he thinks otherwise. I point out we only re-shingled the one-storey additions and the garage ourselves, summer jobs, and left the high roof of our three-storey house to the professionals. And the chimney is higher than that roof. He’s ‘thinking about it’.) But raking leaves, cutting the grass, pruning…and inside, cleaning, painting, repairing….I like doing these, and they connect me to my house and my garden. I prefer to be a steward, with all the responsibility that implies, than a occupant, leaving the responsibility to others. Too often, in our working days, we felt more like occupants, renting services to keep the place going.

It rained heavily last night, so I can’t mulch more leaves today. I’ve still got twice as much to do – the other side lawn and the back, the the leaves from one Norway maple and a host of other, smaller-leaved trees – but that’s ok. The weather is promising to be warm all this coming week (unseasonably so, actually) and I have the time now. I’ll wave at neighbours, chat over the fence, watch the chickadees completely ignore me as they go back and forth to the feeders. What better way to spend a sunny, early November day?

Slow-Cooker Cassoulet: A Portable Feast

October 22, 2015

I do love my slow cooker.

A new cinema opened in our general area a few months ago. It plays first-run and art-house movies, and it does matinées every weekday afternoon. It has become our primary place to go to a movie with friends, also retired, who, like us, prefer the matinées. But here’s the rub: our friends live 22 km (13 miles) south of us, and the theatre is another 20 km (12 miles) south of their house. Realistically, this means that the post-movie dinner is always at our friends’ house, which means they are always doing the cooking. We could go out, but its difficult and frustrating for BD with his allergies.

This week (the movie was Bridge of Spies, by the way, which was excellent), I said ‘enough – I’ll cook.’ Then, of course, I had to come up with something that was easily portable and could be left over the afternoon. And as I know my friends’ fridge is always full to overflowing, that really only left me with the option of a slow cooker meal. So I wandered around on the internet for a while, found a few similar recipes, modified them for BD’s allergies – and here is what we had. It was really good and very easy. You may need to adjust the spicing to suit yourself; this is fairly mild to suit our friends’ palates. It cooked on a low setting from about nine in the morning to about seven at night, except for the half-hour we were driving.

Slow Cooker Cajun Chicken and Sausage Cassoulet

(Serves 6)

Ingredients

3 spicy turkey sausages cut into 1/2-inch slices

6 skinned and boned chicken thighs (about 2 1/4 lb.), sliced into 2-inch pieces

1 teaspoon salt

1 /2 medium onion, chopped

1 medium-size bell pepper, chopped

4 garlic cloves, chopped

1 c frozen lima beans

1 14 1/2-oz.) can diced tomatoes

1 1/2 cups chicken broth

1 8oz package frozen chopped spinach

1 Tbsp celery seed

1 1/2 teaspoons Cajun seasoning

1/2 c safflower oil

2 Tbsp flour

Preparation

Cook sausage in a large cast-iron frying pan over medium heat, stirring occasionally, 4 to 5 minutes or until browned. Remove sausage with a slotted spoon, and drain on paper towels, reserving drippngs.

Sprinkle chicken with celery seed. Cook chicken in hot drippings over medium-high heat 2 to 3 minutes on each side or until browned. Remove chicken. Add onion, pepper and garlic to pan, and cook, stirring often, 5 minutes or until onion is tender.

Add tomatoes, lima beans, spinach, salt and cooked ingredients to slow cooker. Using the oil and flour, make a roux to thicken the chicken broth. Add the thickened chicken broth to the other ingredients; add the Cajun seasoning. Cook in a slow cooker on low all day. Serve with good crusty bread and a salad.

Cajun Spice Mix