Day: April 2, 2013

Well, life unfolds in its own way, and always beyond my imagination. Never once in my life did I imagine for a second that people will pester me for a recipe of mine, I never cooked anything but pasta in a pot for most of my adult life. But here it is, miracles do occur. Maria is out at yoga and I’ve made a multi-grain pizza for her when she returns (she is always wiped after yoga.) In my life now, I shop and cook. My wife is not very domestic and it turns out I am.

For the last six months, I’ve been working very hard on a healthy and nourishing pizza and I’m getting close. I’ve tried a score of different doughs, and experimented with thickness, vegetables and cheeses and other healthy flavorings.  I am oddly secretive about my recipes. Maria is always badgering me to know what I did, but I refuse to tell her. I say she would dump me for a younger, better-looking man if she knew my cooking secrets, and this makes her a little testy, but it’s what I think sometimes. Hey, therapy and spiritual counseling goes only so far.

I promised to be open on this blog and the requests are getting a bit belligerent, so here goes. Tonight’s multi-grain pizza. I’ll try not to forget anything. I’ll call it the Lenore Pizza.

1. First I get a 20 oz dough ball, multi-grain, from the supermarket. Making my own dough seems too much. It says 10 servings, but for a meal, I’d say three or four at most. I rub wheat flour on the dough and spin it around, then roll it with a pin for thinness of crust, which I like. You can use a glass too. I have a stone pizza plate, helps to make a crisp crust and even heating.

2. I chop up four or five cloves of garlic, mix it with extra virgin olive oil, different kinds of pesto (basil, mostly) pumpkin seeds and pine nuts, stir it all up. About half a cup all together.

3. I brush the pesto/oil mix on the pizza. I sprinkle cornmeal over that evenly to give a bit of extra flavor and some texture to the crust. I bake the crust for 8-10 minutes at 475 degrees. This is to make a firm crust before I put the vegetables and other things on.

4. While the pizza is cooking, I saute the vegetables I have chosen in a pan. In this case, tonight, I sliced up a zucchini, chopped up some cauliflower, sliced some small blue potatoes (for body, flavor and color) thinly, and sliced up a bit of squash (not too much, they have to breath on the crust) sauteed all of them together for about 10 minutes on low flame until they are sizzling and slightly browned. Have to watch them and turn them over to keep them from overcooking. You can mix up the vegetables any way you like, vary them. I try and choose them for color as well as health.

5. I sprinkle some ricotta cheese on the pizza over the pesto/oil/nuts sauce. I sprinkle a handful of dried tomato over the crust.

6.  I hand place the sauteed vegetables and potatoes on the pizza, spreading them evenly,  then sprinkle some goat cheese over the top.

7. I bake the pizza for 10 more minutes. You have to watch it closely because dough and vegetables differ and it can overcook.

8. Then I add some chopped kale (sprinkled with oil to keep it from burning) over the top, for flavor and because it is very healthy.

5. I take the crust out of the oven after 10 minutes, let it cool.

We love this meal. It is not too filling (make sure the crusts are thin) and quite healthy and flavorful.

So there, I’ve done it. I’ve shared a recipe really for the first time in my life. Life just opens and opens.

The farm feels like our farm now, the very powerful spirits of Florence and her pony Rocky are fading. The old barn, which drew me to the farm, is gone, now a feeding area for the donkeys. We cleared truckloads of debris out of the barn ruins and the pasture. The pile of tires is gone, but a strong manure pile from the winter – soon to be spread out over the pasture – remains. I see a very different view, a very different vista in this photograph, and things are coming to life for the spring, coming into place. Red in  his position watching the sheep, Zelda keeping a wary eye on him, the donkeys at their feeder, our neighbors beautiful barn in the distance.

We keep at it, one day at a time, one thing at a time. I am opening up. I used to worry about how I will die, a legacy of my long experience with fear, but more and more I am thinking about how I will live. This Spring, we will focus on color and light, gardens surrounding the house, a fenced in pasture in the woods behind the house. If there is any money, a frost free water pump for the winter.

Maria and I are coming to life, too, emerging, creating, coming into the world. We have a lot of exciting plans for our new Bedlam Farm, stay tuned. April is here, but months don’t mean much to me, one way or the other. As birthdays are just dates, April and May are just names. I am ready to be warm. I am coming to life.

So many of you have shared my life with dogs, my ups and downs, mistakes and triumphs, lessons and sorrows. I am very proud to give you the first look and  share the tentative (no sub-title yet and the type will change) cover of my second e-book original (the first is “The Story Of Rose,” a New York Times Besteller published last summer). This book will be published next month, and will be available where digital books are sold. It will not be available in paper for or sold in bookstores.

Listening To Dogs is an important book for me, my dog training manifesto, my philosophy of living with dogs and training them. It is not a training book, per se, I do not tell you how to have a perfect dog, whatever that is and I don’t want one. I have never had a perfect dog, but a bunch of great ones, rescues and purebreds. I do not read dog training books, they have never been useful to me, although I certainly recognize they can be very useful to others at certain times. I have learned so much in recent years from Orson, Pearl, Clementine, Homer, Rose, Izzy, Lenore, Frieda and Red. I want to share what I have learned, good and bad.

I see this as an empowerment book. I have learned to train my dogs by choosing them carefully, by listening to them, understanding myself and my environment and being my own guru. By understanding them as animals, not as pathetic creatures or furbabies.  I have a lot of confidence now in what I am doing, I have paid attention, experimented, been tested,  learned my lessons in the real world of humans and animals.

I have wonderful dogs, as many of you can see from following the blog every day. In a way, this is because I have learned to follow my own instincts. They come when called, eat well together, do not harm humans or animals. They even pose for photos. I believe dog training in America is something of a catastrophe, a de-empowering shell game in which a few people make a lot of money telling people to do things most of them cannot do, no fault of their own.  There is no one class, no one theory of dog training – I don’t have one –  that will work for you and your dog all of the time. Training is a highly personal, individualistic experience, a spiritual experience based on who your dog is, who you are, where you live, who else is in the house. It starts before you get your dog and never ends.It is woven into your life, as is your dog.

Training is not about obedience but communication and trust. No one person can tell everyone else how to do it.  Many people buy expensive books and struggle with their complex lessons, and give up on training their dog.

In this book, I will be urging you not to do that, to empower yourself to have the kind of relationship you want. To really think about the kind of dog you want and are willing to work with. I think I have figured out how to do this, and I am on fire to share it with you. There are many great dog trainers and they have a lot of good things to say. But nobody knows you and your dog better than you do and there is much at stake at your believing you can figure it out yourself, free of charge. One of the many reasons I want to publish this particular idea as an e-book is that it will not be expensive, and thus especially accessible to anyone who loves their dogs and wants to do well by them. That is all of you. I’ll keep you posted on the cover and the pub date. Thanks for following my life with dogs, and I hope this book is helpful to you.

My next paper book, The Second Change Dog: A Love Story will be published in November by Ballantine/Random House.

Hey, Wake Up. Love Yourself. Look Around You.

Who Gets Recognition In Our World?

The one who makes peace.

Or the one who makes war.

The one who wants to solve a problem,

Or the one who doesn’t.

The one who wouldn’t hurt a fly,

Or the one who kills people.

Love yourself. Who Gets Recognition?

The hen who lays her egg,

or the dog that bites?

The one who heals. Or the one who wounds.

Love yourself. And the man who goes to work,

every day of his life, to care for his family,

and struggles every to make his ends meet.

Love yourself. And the woman who works all day

and rushes home to love her children, and feed them.

Who gets recognition? The man who steals,

or the man who never says he can’t afford to buy the car

he needs for his family.

Love yourself. Love them.

Who Gets Recognition In Our World?

What is happier than a border collie going to work in the morning? What is more focused and energetic. In a world of distractions, border collies do not check their e-mail, text, tell people where they are driving on Facebook. Every morning, Red shows me how to get to work. Thinking about it, there is one thing happier than a border collie going to work. A Lab at mealtime.