Suburban Valkyrie

When my daughter was in kindergarten at Sellersville Elementary School, I had a flexible enough work schedule that I was able to spend an hour a week volunteering in her classroom to help the gaggle of squirming 5- and 6-year-olds with free writing.

The weeks got colder as we moved into another Northeast winter, and most of the kids' clothing evolved accordingly. Shorts lengthened into pants. Short sleeve shirts into long-sleeve shirts and sweatshirts. Sandals into sneakers and socks.

Except for one little boy.

"Can you tie my shoe?" he asked, sticking out a sneakered foot.

As I scooched up his pant leg to rearrange the snarled laces, I realized that he didn't have any socks on. It was December in Pennsylvania. Not a good month to go about without socks.

"Where are your socks?" I asked him, with a mock scolding tone of voice.

"I don't have any," he said matter-of-factly, and sat back down to continue painstakingly penciling block letters into his free writing journal.

Now - I have two kids myself, and I know that not everything that comes out of kids' mouths is true. That's not to say they're lies - kids just don't always have full knowledge or grasp of a situation. It was perfectly possible that this little boy had socks and just didn't feel like putting them on - and that his parents chose to let him take ownership of that decision and feel the consequences of not wearing socks in winter.

Somehow, though, I knew that wasn't the case. This little boy, who lived within a two- to three-mile radius of my comfortable suburban home, did not have socks to wear to school in winter.

That was 2012, and the situation for many of my children's schoolmates has not only not improved, it has grown markedly more desperate.


Since 2012, the number of children in the Pennridge School District who are eligible for the free or reduced-price lunch program has surged from 14.2 percent to 23.3 percent. That means that nearly 1 out of every 4 students in this Bucks County school district lives in a family struggling to get by on 130 percent to 185 percent of the federal poverty threshold. With the poverty threshold for 2015 set at $24,250 for a family of four, that means an annual family income of about $32,250 to $44,860.

At my children's elementary school alone, the number of eligible kids nearly tripled between 2000 and 2014, from 6.6 percent in 2000 to 18.5 percent in 2013.

So much for the economic recovery.

Given that backdrop, it was with real sadness that I saw our local food pantry posting on Facebook today:





We will be heading to the grocery store to pick up some staples to donate to our local organization, Pennridge Fish, which concentrates its efforts exclusively on our local school district. We will drop them off on the way to my daughter's soccer game, feeling ever so thankful that such an organization exists.

If you want to know how families in your own school district are faring, check out Kids Count Data Center. And for a real eyeopener, this article from The Atlantic, on families who survive - barely - on about $2 per day is illuminating.

Vendors vary week to week, but have included:

• 14 Carrot Farm - Quakertown, PA
• Brumbaugh's Farm - Telford, PA
• Freeland Market - Pottstown, PA
• Hershberger Heritage Farm - Sellersville, PA
• Living Hope Farm, Harleysville, PA
• Small Batch Kitchen, Harleysville, PA
• Stone & Key Cellars - Montgomeryville, PA
• World O'Honey - Silverdale, PA

With the addition of live music and family-friendly activities such as chalk drawing or painting with vegetables, the Perkasie Farmers' Market is a fun, laid-back weekend destination. It's one more way people are discovering - or rediscovering - warm and welcoming small towns like Perkasie, and one more way that community leaders are working to make those towns' downtown areas vibrant, attractive places to live, work, and visit.

To see what's coming up at the market each week, check out their Facebook page.

If you go:

What: Perkasie Farmer's Market
Where: Corner of 7th Street and Market, Perkasie, PA
When: 9 a.m. to noon
Why: Fresh food and supporting local farmers and crafts people

New pursuits fall into my life and consume all of my attention. And so it was that I fell into canning.

My mother had always canned. Each summer would yield dozens of pints of tomatoes and beans and cut crystal jars of ruby red strawberry jam.

I had never expressed an interest in canning - probably not least of which is because I envisioned hours bending over steaming pots in my tiny kitchen, and trying to find different things to do with the dozens of jars of finished products.

Last summer, my colleague Rose introduced me to Food in Jars, the book penned by food blogger Marisa McClellan - who also happens to live in the Philadelphia area. I was immediately smitten.

McClellan, who lives in an apartment in the city, focuses on canning in small batches. Many of her recipes yield only a couple pints of this or four half-pints of that. The smaller amounts somehow made the whole idea seem less intimidating.

She demystified the whole process of canning, especially the equipment needed. In the end, it turned out that I had much of what I needed already on hand and I only needed to buy a couple items to launch the Great Canning Experiment of 2014 in my own kitchen.

Into my Amazon cart went a granitewear canning pot. A trip to Target yielded small, 4 oz canning jars (OH SO CUTE) and various implements. The utensil set - a jar lifter, lid lifter, headspace tool and wide-mouth funnel - was a particularly good buy at something like $6. I also picked up a copy of the tried and true Ball Blue Book guide to preserving.

For my first attempt, I chose one of McClellan's recipes that looked simple enough but offered the promise of tantalizing flavors - Blueberry Ginger Jam.

Ingredients include blueberries, sugar, fresh ginger and crystallized ginger. My mouth watered just reading the ingredients list. I could just taste that flavor explosion.

Key to the success of this project was going to be the freshness of the blueberries. As with most dishes, the simpler the recipe, the more important it is to use the best, freshest, most flavorful ingredients. Since I don't grow blueberries, I had to find an alternate source.

Living in Bucks County, Pa., offers no end to the options for fresh, local food. We buy our milk in glass bottles produced at the dairy (Penn View Farm) in the same township where we live. Within a 7-minute drive from my front door, we can get pulled pork and maple-glazed, spiral-sliced ham from Blooming Glen Pork, grass-fed Angus beef from Tussock Sedge Farm. And whenever I want fresh, in-season, local produce, I stop by Bolton's Farm Market, literally 4 minutes from my house. A quick trip to Bolton's on this particular day yielded two dry pints of fresh-picked blueberries.


McClellan's recipe - Blueberry Jam with Crystallized Ginger - was simple. If you're interested in checking it out, it's in her Preserving by the Pint book. You may be able to find it in a local bookstore. There's a link on McClellan's blog.

As for my experiment with it, everything went as planned. I was pretty focused on the process and didn't stop to take enough photos. But you get the idea.



The result: 4 tiny jars of amazing flavor.