Fresh vegetables quickly turn into good food. The posts below
provide the highlights of my recent adventures in the kitchen.
Check out our recipes
page for some of our old standbys.
Start from the bottom of the page to read about our adventure in order.
I
thought the drying
season had left us
behind, but this week the sun came back out and let me test a few
tomatoes in our automotive dehydrator. It tickles me pink to be
drying vegetables in a totaled
car, even if it is
running fine and useful for ferrying supplies back and forth rather
than being up on blocks in the front yard. My test tray dried
nicely, so today I'll add more tomatoes to the drier.
My
goal is to make Mark stop talking about our movie star neighbor's
sun-dried tomatoes and start talking about mine. Hollywood sun-dried
tomatoes (as I've decided to call the delicious concoction) are so
tasty you can't keep them in the fridge or they'll be gone
overnight.
Part 1 of the recipe is
simple --- slice plum-sized romas or other small, meaty tomatoes in
half, sprinkle the cut side with a hint of salt and pepper, and dry
until slightly moist (like a dried apricot). Stay tuned for the
taste explosion of part 2 once I have enough tomato morsels dried to
show you the steps.
Last
week, I wrote that I
was concerned shelling tiny Urd Beans might be difficult. I needn't have
worried. A few days later, when hot sunlight was streaming in the
front window and across my pan of drying beans, I was startled by a
loud pop. "Huckleberry!" I exclaimed, sure that our spoiled cat
had gotten into something he shouldn't have, but Huckleberry was asleep
on the couch and the popping continued.
I eventually figured out
what every Urd Bean grower out there already knows --- warm, dry
weather will shell your Urd Beans for you. When the pods reach a
certain level of dryness, the two halves curl apart and the seeds
explode out in every direction. Picking another batch of pods this
week, I had to carefully enclose entire fruits in my hand since even
the gentle pressure of my fingers was enough to pop some pods open,
just like pressing on a touch-me-not pod.
Green or damp pods don't
pop on their own, but if you catch them during a dry day, you can
gently roll a handful between your palms and remove the hulls from
several pods at once. Or just wait until the sun comes out and
your kitchen turns into a rice krispies commercial --- snap, crackle,
pop.
Our homemade chicken
waterer is the
perfect fit for a suburban chicken tractor --- clean and easy to use.
When
I was a junior in college, I spent my first summer away from home with
no cafeteria. In preparation, I
picked my father's brain for instructions on making my favorite
vegetable soup, pinning him
down on a specific number of onions, potatoes, tomatoes, and
more. But
it was a struggle to turn Daddy's words into a recipe, because that
wasn't the information he was trying to impart. Over a decade
later, I've finally figured out what my wise father was saying.
Yes,
I am a slow learner.
Daddy
was teaching me the trick of cooking in season with the easiest
in-season recipe --- harvest catch-all soup. He was trying to get
through my thick noggin the notion that meals should begin in the
garden with what's fresh and numerous, rather than with a detailed
shopping list at the grocery store. Clearly, this soup had been
his mother's way of using up odds and ends --- bits of browned carrots,
wilted greens, anything that wasn't rotten but wasn't prime enough for
being served plain. And, in essence, the soup was simple --- make
a stock, then throw in whatever vegetables you have lying around.
The
first step was to make a soup base. Daddy's method involves one
onion, some garlic, and a cup and a half of cabbage all sauteed in a
bit of oil,
then simmered for a couple of hours with two stalks of celery, an 18
ounce can of tomatoes, and enough water to fill up the pot. My
method (at the moment, and ever evolving) starts with three quarters of
a pot of halved tomatoes, enough chicken stock to submerge the fruits,
two onions, six big cloves of garlic (minced), a big
handful of parsley (chopped), and about half a cup of dry beans
(pre-soaked.) This is the part of the soup where you'll want to
follow a vague recipe, but you'll notice that parsley is a great
substitute for the much harder to grow celery, and that if you start
with stock you don't need to bother with the sauteeing step. This
is also where you can tweak the flavor to suit your particular tastes.
After
simmering the soup base for two or more hours until it has halved in
volume, you can pretty
much throw in whatever you want --- preferably whatever's in season
that you're sick and tired of freezing. Vegetables will cook in a
bubbling pot of soup stock at about the same rate as they cook in a pot
of boiling water, so add the veggies a minute before you eat
(for sweet corn), ten minutes before you eat (for beans, okra, summer
squash, etc.), or forty-five minutes before you eat (for
potatoes.) You can make the soup into a stew like Daddy's, chock
full of so many vegetables that it should be eaten on a plate, or you
can keep your soup more Cambell's-like and just add in perhaps a quart
of vegetables in the final step.
Daddy concluded his
lesson with these words of wisdom: "Use a big pot. Your soup
will expand to fill the space provide." Nowadays, I make two pots
of soup at once during harvest time, the better to concentrate summer
goodness for winter delight.
Step
1: Call up Mom.
There's a knack to cutting up wormy fruit, and chances are your
maternal helper will make the work go three times as fast. Bribe
her with less wormy peaches and other garden produce.
Step
2: Prepare the peaches.
Unless you bought your peaches from a commerical orchard, chances are
they need some bad spots cut out. Our peaches are the worst case
scenario since our oriental
fruit moth infestation
means that over half the fruits had rotten,
wormy centers. The quick and easy way to deal with troubled fruit
is to cut them in half and scoop out the rotten centers with a
spoon. Slice off the skin last in this case, or first if your
peaches are pristine.
Step 3: Puree the raw peaches in a
food processor.
Step
4: Add honey to
taste. Honey gives the finished leather pliancy and helps
preserve the peach puree as
it dries. We added almost a cup of honey to about a gallon of
fruit puree --- use your own judgement here.
Step
5: Pour the puree and honey
mixture onto cookie sheets. The official method of
making
fruit leather involves spreading your puree on skins of saran wrap, but
we don't keep that kind of disposable
in the house. Cookie sheets
work fine as long as you don't mind your finished leather
getting bent
out of shape for storage.
Step
6: Spread the puree to about 1/8
inch thick.
At first, we tried spreading the peach mush
with spoons and butter knives, then Mom had the great idea of just
jiggling the pan. The moist peach mixture quickly settled out
across the entire surface.
Step 7: Dry the fruit leather as quickly as
possible.
We haven't built our solar
dehydrator yet, so
last time I dried our fruit leather by moving it between our
east-facing sunny window (in the morning) and our west-facing sunny
window (in the afternoon.) Mom had the great idea of drying the
leather inside Joey's truck, which seems to be working even
better. You need hot temperatures around 100 F or higher to dry
the leather before it ferments and molds. Maximum drying time
should not exceed two and a half days.
Step 8: Scrape the fruit leather off
the trays with a spatula. Depending on how much
moisture is left in your leather, it may peel off, or rumple up as
shown in my
pictures. I prefer the slightly wetter leather even though it's
less pretty.
Step
9: Store your peach leather.
Fruit leather will last at room temperature for about a month, but I'm
planning to use the peaches as a supplement to our winter fruit.
In the freezer, fruit leather should last about a year.
Space in
our freezer is suddenly starting to get tight, something that never
happened last year. Pretty soon, I'm going to have to make a
decision --- stop freezing and start giving produce away, turn on one
of our inefficient freezers, or buy another energy
star model.
Such bounty!
I also harvested about
half of our potatoes Monday because I needed the space for fall
peas. The average yield per bed was about 6.5 pounds (from about
1 pound of seed potatoes per bed.) Yukon Golds aren't the most
productive potatoes, but I'm still a bit blown away at the sheer mass
of tubers I grubbed out of the soil. If we had only a tiny bit of
ground and were desperate to feed a family, potatoes would be the way
to go. At the moment, our
potatoes are cooling it in our refrigerator's crisper drawer.
Even though we downgraded to a much smaller and more efficient
fridge last year, I still run the fridge about half empty most of
the time. I'm a strong believer in keeping close tabs on
leftovers and eating them within two days, so there's plenty of space
for a few dozen pounds of potatoes. Still, we're going to have to
excavate the refrigerator
root cellar soon and
put it back to work --- I've got three more beds of potatoes to
harvest, and the fall carrots are finally starting to germinate in the
garden.
Our
garlic has had a good month plus of drying
time hanging under the eaves, so I decided it was time to clean it
up and move it inside for storage. I took down our strands of
garlic, rubbed the dirt out of the roots, and trimmed both roots and
leaves back. Next step was sorting --- I like to pull out the
very biggest heads for planting, and at the same time I set aside the
tiny or damaged heads for immediate eating. We've saved lots of
mesh bags from buying oranges and onions, so I popped each variety into
its own bag and put the whole mess on our scales.
"How
many pounds of garlic do you think we grew this year?" I asked Mark
minutes later, wanting to brag.
"Six pounds?" was his
less than ambitious reply.
"No!" I hooted.
"25.5, plus whatever we've eaten in the last month." Then, as the
wheels turned in my head, I added "That's half a pound of garlic per
week. Do you think we grew too much?"
Mark got a puzzled look
on his face --- clearly, the idea of too much garlic had never occurred
to him. "Of course not," he answered. "You'd better get
cooking!" Garlic green beans for supper it was.
This
spring, I decided that broccoli
is our most productive cool season crop per unit space, so I decreased our planned
pea plantings and increased our broccoli plantings for the fall.
The broccoli came up quite well, although I did have to transplant a
few seedlings that were too close together, filling in gaps where dry
soil had prevented any broccoli from germinating.
Since we gorged on
broccoli this spring and still managed to put away two gallons of
the florets, it feels a bit decadent to have planted half again as many
broccoli beds for the fall. However, the later in the year we can
eat fresh produce, the healthier and happier we'll be. I also
like to keep the garden full and productive, and I know that my usual
recipients of excess garden produce all love broccoli.
As a side note --- the
freezer is nearly half full, and we're also halfway to our winter
goal. We've put away 9 gallons of vegetables as well as a good
deal of pesto and homegrown chicken. I can tell we won't be
reduced to buying produce from the grocery store in March of 2011.
Although I'm a vegetable
conneisseur, I don't have enough experience to tell the difference
between mediocre meat and awesome meat. This is where Huckleberry
comes in handy.
When I take a piece of
meat out of the supermarket wrapper, Huckleberry naps on the
couch. I can even open a can of tuna, and our spoiled cat will
barely twitch his nose. But when I bring in freshly slaughtered
chickens, he comes running to the kitchen where he meows (in vain) for
a treat.
After its two
day grace period, I
roasted up one of Tuesday's chickens yesterday and Huckleberry was
suddenly ready to help out with anything, no, really, anything. Meow! (Yes, this time I did
give him a tidbit of meat to nibble on.)
To my untrained taste
buds, the 16 week old Dark Cornish roosters are less flavorful
than the 12 week old roosters, falling on the taste gradient somewhere
between a storebought, organic, uncooked chicken and a storebought
rotisserie chicken. But to Huckleberry's nose (and mouth), our
homegrown chickens are ten times better than either. I suspect
Huckleberry is sniffing out the superior nutrition, which makes me even
more inclined to keep experimenting with a good way to raise our own
meat.
Even
though I'm the primary cook around here, Mark does nearly all the
grocery shopping. I just hate shopping, so every two weeks, I
hand Mark a list and send him to the big city. He always comes
home with everything on the list...plus this and that. When I
first started converting him to Walden Effect eating, the "this and
that" were things like biscuits-in-a-can and lemon cookies.
Nowadays, I roll my eyes when he brings home...an out of season
butternut.
Yes, we've become such
fans of butternuts (especially butternut pie) that Mark's hard pressed
to live without them over the summer. I didn't know they would be
such a hit, so I only put in two small beds last year, and we ran out
of the delicious fruits in the middle of the winter. This year, I
expanded the planting to encompass three beds, and I fed the soil
well. Cucurbits love a good meal of manure, and before I knew it,
the butternuts had zipped off their own beds, across the aisle, and
were partying with the tomatoes. Bad butternuts!
As every parent knows, proper limits are essential in raising a healthy
child...I mean, butternut. And parents definitely have to work
together to set those boundaries. So Mark and I went out as a
team to train our recalcitrant butternuts to toe the line. Mark
hammered in fence posts and I strung up pea trellis material to cage our butternuts
in. Now they can play as hard as they want and we won't have to
worry about them skipping curfew.
After
the internet, what I missed most during our power outage was the
ability to pack food away for the winter. With the freezer closed
and halfway full, 30 hours without power wasn't a big deal, but there
was no way I could introduce warm food without negatively impacting the
old. So I watched the summer
squash achieve, then surpass, their optimal size, and as soon as the
power came back on I was ready to freeze.
Roasted
squash, cabbage for winter potstickers, and a few meals worth of
green beans left the garden for cold storage. I also dug into our
fresh
garlic to make nine
cups of pesto for quick winter
lunches. While I was at it, I picked the second to last meal of broccoli --- these plants are buggy
and ugly since they took so long to grow, but they still tasted great
in cheese sauce for supper.
While poking around, I
discovered that we are overflowing with cucumbers for the first time
ever. Our farm is hard on cucurbits, and cucumbers are the worst,
coming down with some kind of wilt disease every year just as they
start to bear. This year, I sprang for a wilt-resistant hybrid
--- Diamant --- that is vigorous enough to (mostly) withstand our
annual bane. Since we don't like pickles, I'm suddenly serving
fresh cucumbers with every lunch and dinner (and am seriously
considering making the prolific vegetables part of a complete
breakfast.)
Last year, the weather
was against us and we only managed to pack away 13 gallons of food for
the winter. As a result, we bought grocery store produce for a
couple of months this spring, and I vowed to do better. With 6
gallons of vegetables, 7 cups of pesto, and 7 whole chickens already in
the freezer before the end of June, we're starting to ponder what we'll
do with the excess.
The last couple of times
we've killed and eaten our own chickens, we thought we'd get the best
flavor by eating the meat as fresh as possible. Since then, I've
read that it's best to let the chicken sit in the refrigerator for a
couple of days so that rigor mortis can relax, tenderizing the
meat. I suspect the two day wait was part of the reason our
latest home grown chicken was the best I've ever tasted.
This
week's lunchtime series has barely scratched the surface of learning to
start a small garden and eat the fruits of your labor. If you
catch the bug, you're sure to want to learn more. Of course,
you'll keep reading our blog, but where else should you turn?
Barbara Kingsolver's Animal,
Vegetable, Miracle
may help to get you inspired, and also includes some in-season
recipes. For more solid information about
growing your food, many beginners report getting a lot out of Square Foot
Gardening,
despite its flaws. The basic spacing, planting, and harvesting
information about all vegetables can be found on extension service
websites using a quick google search. (I've found keyword
combinations like "tomato cultivation" get good results.)
Year one is a good time
to start learning about the soil food web, and Teaming
With Microbes
is a quick, fun way to open your eyes to what's going on beneath the
surface. I don't have specific books to recommend, but other
important topics to consider include composting and
beneficial insects.
Finally, why not take a
master gardener class? Most state
extension services now offer these semester-long classes for a small
fee. You'll meet other gardeners in your area and will come away
with a great grounding in basic concepts.
Whatever you do, don't
put the process off until next year. If all you have the time and
energy for is throwing one tomato plant in the ground, do it!
Right this instant! Turn off your computer, pick up your trowel,
and plant!
If
the beginner
recipes in my last
post look boring to you, you're
probably ready to become an experimental, in-season chef. Most
cookbooks are chock full of fascinating recipes...which call for
ingredients from three different seasons per dish. Here are my
intermediate tips for learning to cook in season.
First, start with the
ingredients. Rather than saying, "I feel
like lasagna tonight," take a look in the garden and see what's
ripe. Our recipes at the moment revolve around snow and sugar
snap peas, new potatoes, eggs, broccoli, greens, basil, and parsley,
which is why we've been making meals like pesto pasta with balsamic
vinegared greens and a fried egg on the side.
Once
you know what you're cooking with, head to one of the recipe
websites like epicurious and type your
ingredients into the search
box. The website will spit out a whole string of recipes for you
to choose between.
Chances are, you still
won't have all of the ingredients required by a
recipe, so you should be willing to substitute for a more appropriate,
in-season vegetable or herb. Some of my favorite replacement
plants are Egyptian onions for leeks and parsley for celery since I can
harvest Egyptian onions and parsley for at least 11 months out of the
year.
Finally, some vegetables
are such good keepers that they can be
considered to almost always be in season. Bulb onions, potatoes,
garlic, and carrots are a few examples. You can add them to your
recipes with impunity.
If
you take my advice and plant a few of the easy vegetables
mentioned in
my last post, you will quickly be overrun with fresh produce. Now
what do you do with it?
First of all, it's
essential that you get over the grocery store
mentality that a slight blemish means a vegetable gets tossed in the
trash. Your vegetables may have a bug nibble here and there, or
even a crack in the side. Don't worry about it. I can't for
the life of me find a link, but I was recently told about a sect of
monks who were quite healthy vegans until they began to buy commercial
produce and came down with nutritional deficiencies. It turned
out that the insects they were accidentally ingesting in their previous
diet of non-commercial vegetables had been keeping them healthy.
I don't wash our homegrown produce, and we find it delicious, bugs,
dirt, blemishes, and all.
Chances
are, once you discover how good your homegrown vegetables
taste, a good amount of the bounty won't even make it out of the
garden. Eventually, you'll probably want to present the
vegetables as part of the meal, which is the purpose of this
post. Tomorrow I'll
give you pointers on becoming a bit fancier.
Lettuce - By the time fresh
tomatoes and cucumbers reach my plate, lettuce is long gone, which
blows my traditional salad out the window. Here are some in-season salad ideas.
Swiss
chard - The
easiest way
to prepare stellar greens is to cut them into bite-size pieces and
steam them for a few minutes until the stems are soft. Drizzle
them with balsamic vinegar and eat. Once you get bored with that,
try sauteing the greens in a large pot in a bit of oil, adding minced
garlic for the last minute of cooking.
Tomatoes - Once you get sick of just
eating tomato slices (if ever), try our cucumber and tomato salad. Some people add goat
cheese and/or mozarella to the mix for a heartier salad.
Basil - Pesto is the obvious
solution to an overdose of basil. I've posted my recipe for chestnut pesto, but we usually use walnuts
in our daily lives. Pine nuts are the classic pesto component,
but are extremely pricey.
Sweet
corn - In my
opinion, the
only way to eat sweet corn is to very lightly cook it. Bring a
big pot of water to a boil while you shuck the corn, then drop the ears
in for less than a minute, just until they change color.
Carefully pull them out with a pair of tongs and eat immediately (with
salt and/or butter if you prefer.)
Okra - I already mentioned that I
prefer steaming okra, and that most people fry it. What's your
favorite way to eat okra?
Whatever you do,
remember that freshness is key. As soon as you
pick an ear of corn, the sugars begin to turn to starches and the
flavor declines. Although the difference isn't quite as
pronounced with other vegetables, the trend is the same. For
maximum flavor and nutrition, pick produce right before eating it.
The
easiest way to lose the gardening bug permanently is to start a huge
garden with a bunch of vegetable varieties suited only to an expert,
then see everything disappear down insect gullets in a few
months. I recommend that beginning gardeners instead start small,
with just a few vegetables that are nearly impossible to kill.
Here are my top contenders:
Leaf
lettuce - The
time has
already passed for this cool season crop, but fall will be here before
you know it. Lettuce is great for beginners because you can't do
anything wrong and you get to harvest a month after planting. One
of the easiest to grow in our area is Black-seeded Simpson, but I like
to mix in a red variety for eye candy. Read all of my tips
on growing lettuce here.
Swiss chard - Most greens are
extremely easy, but Swiss chard takes the cake. Unlike other
greens, swiss chard doesn't get bitter, nor does it bolt the first
year. The greens are mild in flavor and can be substituted in
recipes which call for spinach (a vegetable that does bolt quite
quickly.) Although they taste the same as the white-stalked
variety, urban gardeners will love Swiss chard varieties with leaf
stalks ranging in color from white to yellow to red since they're
pretty enough to mix into your flower border. This warm season
crop should be planted after your frost-free date ---
for nearly all of you, that means you can go ahead and plant now.
Once
the leaves are four inches tall, I start cutting them just like leaf
lettuce once or twice a week, making sure I don't cut the growing bud,
but taking most other leaves.
Tomatoes - In my opinion,
tomatoes are really a year two crop, but the flavor difference between
a homegrown tomato and a storebought one is so great that few people
can resist planting them. For the raw beginner, you should go
ahead and buy a transplant or two from the feed store and put them out
after the frost-free date. Choose a slicer or a tommy-toe (or
both). Be sure to cage or stake your tomato, and if you're
starting this year, I
highly recommend pruning since the blight is still in the air. In
later
years, I think you'll be happier starting your own tomatoes from seed
and growing primarily romas for ease of storage, but in year one you
should stick to simple vegetables that go straight on your plate.
Basil - I see people buy basil
transplants, and I can't figure out why. Basil is the easiest
herb you can grow --- throw the seeds on the ground around your
frost-free date and you'll be picking off leaves a couple of weeks
later. The trick to a summer-long harvest is to cut your basil
back regularly (at least once a week) and never let it bloom.
With lettuce and swiss chard, I told you to be careful not to harvest
the central growing bud, but with basil I advocate the reverse.
Cut the whole top off the plant, leaving one or two pairs of older
leaves at the base, and it will branch out into a bush. Keep
cutting the youngest, tastiest leaves, and your plant will just get
bigger and bushier. When the basil does start trying to bloom,
pick off the flower buds. I recommend a simple Sweet Italian or
Genovese basil for your first year, but later you can branch out into
the varieties that taste great in other ethnic foods.
Sweet Corn - The only major
thing that can go wrong with corn is lack of pollination if you plant
too small of an area. I try to plant at least two short rows
together, and three or four are better. Your corn will mature
nearly all at once, so for a full summer harvest, I plant a bed on our
frost-free date, and continue planting another bed every two weeks
until the end of June. Like tomatoes, there's no comparison
between homegrown and storebought sweet corn. But this is the one
vegetable where I like to stick with fancy hybrids --- heirloom
varieties are starchy instead of sweet.
Okra - Okra may seem like an
odd choice for the beginner, but in the South few crops beat its ease
of growth. In fact, the plant has such huge, beautiful flowers
that okra can easily pass for an ornamental. Plant the seeds at
the frost-free date, and in a couple of months you'll see blooms and
little, furry fruits. Cut the whole fruit off at the stem when it
is less than three inches long and steam it --- the trick to defeating
okra slime is to never let water touch the interior of the fruit.
We eat our steamed okra with our fingers, holding it by the stem and
eating the fruit portion off, but you could cut the tops off after
steaming them if you like. The traditional method of eating okra
is to slice, batter, and fry it, but I can't really recommend that
approach. Our favorite variety is Clemson Spineless.
The beginner should pick
two to four of these varieties to try out their first year,
steering clear of okra if you live in the north and of tomatoes if you
live in a very hot area like Texas. Plant a very small garden, no
more than perhaps 100 feet square, and mulch the whole thing if
possible to cut down on weeding. If you have anther choice, steer
clear of pots, which are harder than they look, and keep good records
of when and where you planted and what happened. Most of you
still have time to start something this year, so go do it!
I
picked my beekeeping mentor's brains this weekend, and decided to go
ahead and harvest
a lot more honey out
of the overflowing hive. My mentor told me that when he harvests
honey, he takes the super off the hive, closes the hive back up, turns
the super on its side on top of the hive, and blasts the bees out with
a leaf blower. Wow!
I was a bit too scared
to do that (and don't have a leaf blower), so I tried the same method I
used last week, carrying the frames around to the other side of the
trailer to confuse the guard bees, then brushing off the frames one at
a time. Since I took two whole supers off the hive this time,
though, rather than just a couple of frames, the method didn't work so
well. There were gobs of bees present, and when I brushed them
loose, they flew around the front door in a writhing (and not very
amused) mass.
No major stings
resulted, but I had once again riled up the hive. They began to
harass Mark in the garden so much that he had to come inside, and when
my cousin-in-law stumbled in from the yurt, he was a bit surprised to
be divebombed on his way through the door. Apparently I'm still
making basic beginner mistakes. Next time, I'll try brushing the
bees off near the hive so that they can head home quickly. It
also turned out that only five of the frames were fully capped, so I
probably would have been better off picking frames out of the hive
rather than disrupting so many workers' lives. Still, no harm
done, and we've now harvested about five and a half quarts of honey.
I still haven't even
opened up the most productive hive, though. Maybe in a few days
once my poor cousin-in-law flees the farm.
Several
friends of mine have neither the inclination, time, nor space to grow
their own vegetables, so they join a CSA
to be part of the local food
system. Inevitably, a few weeks in, they regret the
decision. "What do I do with a huge basket of mixed greens?" they
moan. Or, "Five butternut squash? I
don't know how to cook squash!"
The truth is that the
beginning gardener often feels the same
way. We're used to buying whatever vegetables suit our fancy or
are mandated by our favorite recipes, and we don't know how to make a
salad when we realize that lettuce and tomatoes are never in season at
the same time. On a similar note, we might want to start a
garden, but we don't know which vegetables are within our reach and
which ones are the domain of experienced green thumbs. How can we
even start when the whole endeavor looks so daunting? It's much
easier to pick up some organic produce at the grocery store and figure
we're doing our part to save the world.
Although I know that
many of our readers are long time gardeners and
cooks who use in-season produce without thinking about it, I also
suspect that others of
you are afraid to put the first plants in the ground because you just
don't know how to go from seed to gourmet feast. This week's
lunchtime series launches a new facet of this blog geared toward giving
beginners the information they need to start a quick and easy garden
and then to enjoy the bounty. I hope that you experienced
gardeners and
foodies will read along and add your own advice on which plants are
easy to grow in your neck of the woods, and on simple recipes you use
to produce delicious, in-season meals.
Don't have time to put in
even the smallest garden? Our microbusiness ebook will show you how to make a
living in just a few hours a week so you can spend time doing what
really matters.
This post is part of our Beginner's Guide to Gardening and Eating in
Season lunchtime series.
Read all of the entries:
Although
I was running toward the trailer at top speed and swatting at my
breasts, I still had
the presence of mind to grab those two full frames
of honey. My beekeeping mentor (aka movie star neighbor)
had admonished me that, at this time of year, the frames need to go
back on
the hive ASAP. Within a couple of hours, he warned, bees will
start building comb willie nillie to fill that empty space. So,
even though I mostly felt like crawling into bed, I needed to extract
our honey and open the mean hive back up.
I iced my wounds, but my
head wasn't quite on
straight when I got to work on the honey. In fact, this post
really should be called "how to do everything wrong while extracting
honey." I hope you'll learn by seeing
the error of my ways.
Step
1: Remove the bees from the honey.
I actually managed to do this step well, moving the frames a good
distance from the hives (which calmed the bees down),
then gently brushing one frame at a time free of bees.
Step
2: Uncap the honey.
Here's where I failed miserably. For future reference, a plain
kitchen knife will mangle your comb so that it falls apart in the
extractor. A bread knife works great.
Step
3: Extract the comb honey. Place the cappings in a
collander on top of a bowl and mash the wax with a spoon to let the
honey begin to drain out.
Step 4: Place a bowl under the spout at the
bottom of the extractor. With the state my head
was in, I'm surprised I remembered this step.
Step
5: Extract.
Place
the frames in the extractor opposite each other so that they are
balanced. With new comb like ours, it's best to gently spin the
extractor a few times, then flip the frames around and fully empty out
the other side of each frame, before flipping the frames a second time
and giving the handle a few hard spins. My beekeeping mentor
explained
this to me in great detail, but when I tried the gentle spin, I
couldn't see honey coming out (even though it was), so I spun
harder. As a result, the comb on my mangled frame from step 2
fell apart, and even the other frame got a bit distorted.
Step 6: Cut out the mangled frame to join the
cappings.
Oops.
Step
7: Put the frames back on the
angry, angry hive, along with an extra super since the bees are clearly
making honey faster than we can extract it. Your hive won't be
angry. Mine was because I made a mistake.
Step
8: Pour the honey from under the collander and from under the extractor
into canning jars for storage. No need to can ---
honey will keep indefinitely if harvested when fully capped and stored
in an air-tight container.
Some people strain the honey first to remove the little bits of wax,
but I didn't bother.
Step
9: Taste a bit of honey. It was all worth it!
I'm actually glad I
tried a couple of frames before embarking on a larger extracting
expedition. Now I'll know what I'm doing this week when we remove
a gallon (!!!) from the hive.
Internet
sources tell me to harvest new potatoes when:
The potatoes begin to bloom.
The calendar changes to June.
The peas are ripe.
I noticed the first
flowers on our potato plants this weekend, so I decided to dig around
and see what's there. The result? The potatoes are past the
tiny new potato stage I love, and are already swelling into the
half-fist-size zone. I guess option 3 is the best indicator for
my garden since the peas have been ripe for a week or two, which is
just about when I should have harvested new potatoes.
Most
people harvest new potatoes by grubbing them out from around the bases
of plants, leaving some tubers in place to finish growing. I
opted to just yank out two plants since they were encroaching on my
biggest tomato's growing zone. This gave me a great opportunity
to explore the benefits of my modified
Ruth Stout method,
and I'm totally sold on the heavy mulch. The potatoes required
just a little digging with the trake, but they came out clean and
beautiful, with nary a spot of green. The area is also nearly
weed-free despite never being weeded (though I did toss a few more
handfuls of grass clippings on insipient weeds a few weeks ago.)
I picked a bowlful of
our stunning sugar snap and snow peas, cut up the first basil leaves of
the year, and added the rest of the ingredients for a modified Green Bean and
Potato Salad.
The taste of summer!
We've been eating broccoli for a week, but the crop
finally reached critical mass Monday. Perhaps a third of the
plants had heads at full maturity --- if I left them any later, they'd
start to degrade. So I picked a basketful...
...stripped off the leaves to
feed the chickens... ...and
put over a gallon away for the winter.
Part of the reason for
this different management is pests. As we reach June, the few,
easily-picked cabbage worms are joined by the southern
cabbageworm, which burrows up under the florets and is very difficult
to pry out. I figure it's not worthwhile to fight the bugs for a
few sideshoots.
I also planted the
broccoli a bit too close together this spring, so it's good to thin the
crop and give the smaller plants room to grow. Once the little
guys mature, I want to hurry and put in a different summer crop in the broccoli beds while it still
has time to grow. Finally, I just really love the taste of
broccoli stalks!
While I was at it, I
froze 5 pints of spinach, collards, and swiss chard. I've
resolved that we will not have to resort to buying vegetables next
March and April!
Yes, this is another gratuitous
strawberry photo.
I may have to rename this The Strawberry Blog if I don't pull my
attention elsewhere soon. But aren't three quarts of strawberries
at one picking pretty awesome?
In the interest of at
least pretending like this post imparts useful information, here's your
strawberry tip of the day. For maximum sweetness, pick fruits
before you water and wait at least 24 hours to pick again. Try to
time your harvest to the sun --- bright, hot days churn out sensational
berries.
Since I wanted to water
the front garden Friday, I picked every berry that was ripe or nearly
ripe. One quart went into our bellies whole for lunch (along with
the sugar snap peas shown here); one quart was sliced, lightly
sprinkled with sugar, then topped with whipped cream for supper; and
the final quart is going to my mother today. Only mothers are
high enough up in our esteem to merit gifts of strawberries --- I don't
want you to think we're giving them away because we're sick of them!
I
started to write that this is the year of the broccoli, then stopped
myself. After all, it's only May. Who knows what bounty
the garden year will bring?
Plenty of broccoli,
that's for sure. We've eaten three medium
heads, and I'm eying this huge one as it continues to swell larger and
larger every day. Six and a half beds are devoted purely to
broccoli this spring, and I also slipped in a few plants amid the peas
and
garlic.
The varied planting
dates this spring due to frost
damage
mean that our
broccoli will ripen over a few weeks rather than all at once, which is
all to the good. But already I'm considering packing some away in
the freezer, along with the greens that have finally outgrown our
appetites. We're eating sugar snap and snow peas too, and I spent
the whole week working in the upper garden so that I could lean down
and nab a juicy strawberry whenever the fancy struck. On the other hand, the
last of the lettuce is turning bitter, slated to be torn out and
replaced with summer crops shortly. The first set of beans is
nearly ready to bloom, a few tomato plants sport flower buds, and
cucurbits seem to double in size every day. The garden wheel has
turned from spring to summer and our stomachs are full.
Share the bounty with your
chickens. Our homemade chicken
waterer keeps
chickens healthy and happy.
Left-o-ver
straw-ber-ry [left-oh-ver straw-ber-ee]
--- noun, plural -ries.
1. Fruit that makes it into the house to be shared with the
long-suffering husband after the primary gardener has glutted herself
for two weeks on sun-warmed strawberries.
Origin: Previously considered an erroneous combination of "leftover"
and "strawberry". Added to the dictionary in 2009 when excess
rain caused a decline in flavor. Despite full flavor in 2010,
the phrase has been retained.
I
hope you'll bear with a second lunchtime
series of experimentation. If you're bored, say so and I'll try
to cut back
on future lunchtime series about experiments. Meanwhile, I've got
a book-related series on comfrey coming up, so stay tuned.
Last summer when
the blight hit, I
was faced with several empty beds in
August. Even though it was a bit late for planting most fall
crops, I decided to seed carrots and parsnips, and the umbellifers did
grow beautiful ferny leaves to replace the blighted tomatoes.
However, when cold weather approached, I had to face the fact that my
crops hadn't been in the ground long enough to thicken their
roots, so I decided to cover them up with mulch and see what would
happen
in the spring.
I uncovered the carrots
and parsnips at the same time I uncovered the
strawberries, and the plants took off, once again turning their beds
into a jungle of leaves. I was so hopeful...until I pulled a few
up. The parsnip roots had gone woody inside while the carrots had
paled in color and turned bitter.
They were just barely edible enough to use in soup, but I would have
been
better off eating the small roots last fall when they were sweet and
crunchy.
I haven't gotten around
to pulling all of the parsnips out yet, and
they're starting to send up flower stalks --- the one positive result
of overwintering a biennial. I don't know if I have
enough plants to prevent inbreeding, but I'll at least let them bloom
since umbellifer
flowers are beloved by beneficial insects. And if I need
something to fill garden gaps in August, I'll stick to a late planting
of summer squash.
Want to know how we can
afford to spend so much time gardening and blogging? Our Microbusiness Independence
ebook shows you how
to follow in our footsteps.
This post is part of our Farm Experiments lunchtime series.
Read all of the entries:
Despite being a
vegeholic, I have to admit that the prettiest part of the
garden right now is the flowers. Our chamomile and columbine are
in
full bloom, and the first brilliant red poppy unfurled its petals
Wednesday morning. It's hard to walk through the yard without
having my eyes drawn to that splash of red.
But the most exciting
flower is white and relatively small, sitting atop a pea vine.
Juicy pods are now only days away, and they promise to spice up our
current garden diet of lettuce, greens, pea
tendrils, kale
flowers, mushrooms, Egyptian onions, parsley, fresh eggs, and
slightly woody overwintered carrots and parsnips. The best thing
about eating in season is that when you're starting to get sick of
collards every day, something new pops up to tempt your palate.
Eliza's
suggestion to eat
young pea shoots as a salad green inspired me to make better use of
other sub-prime crops in the garden. About a third of last year's
kale successfully made it through the winter, but after a couple of
weeks of leaf harvests, hot weather prompted the plants to bolt.
I was tempted to let the kale go and save the seeds, but instead
decided to clip the flower buds off and eat them like broccoli (or,
really, broccoli raab.)
Meanwhile, the first
shiitakes are coming out on our mushroom
logs, and here the
warm, dry weather has been a boon. The mushrooms actually started
breaking free of the wood a few weeks ago, but lack of humidity
retarded their growth and caused a cracked cap. The result is not
only beautiful, but is considered by gourmet chefs to be the highest
grade shiitake out there. Mixed with our kale buds, copious Egyptian
onion leaves, and
eggs from our chicken
tractors, the
shiitakes were absolutely delicious!
The world's best omelet
starts with chickens raised on pasture drinking copious, clean water
from our automatic chicken waterer.
One of my mother's
favorite expressions is "all ye of little faith" --- it's in reference
to me, mostly. Every year, I plant an early bed
of peas around Valentine's day.
And every year, I give up on the bed less than a month later and
replant
it. As a result, I'm never quite sure whether the Valentine's
peas came up, or whether what I'm seeing is the later peas. This
year, I got smart (though no more faithful) and marked my early row of
peas, planting the replacement row a couple inches to the side.
So I could tell that both rows of peas came up, and
that the Valentine's row came up a week earlier than the March row.
Now what do I do with
two rows of peas where one is supposed to be? Just as I was
pondering this problem, I dropped by Eliza's awesome blog and learned
that young
pea shoots taste similar to snow peas.
Just what I needed to round out the first completely-from-the-farm
salad of the year! Lettuce, pea shoots, baby kale (wintered
over), and the last of the fall carrots melded into a delectable side
dish. Last year we
lived on salads for the entire month of March, but I say better late than
never!
As
part of my continued obsession with lower-energy cooking, I
decided to try to make a haybox to cook my chicken carcass down into
stock Sunday. Someone (Heather?) had emailed me in response to my
Dutch
oven post,
telling me that you can bring a pot of incipient soup to a boil, wrap
it in towels, and leave it alone for the afternoon. The cast iron
and towels will hold in the heat, and the soup will cook itself.
While researching rocket
stoves,
I stumbled across a mention of hayboxes, which seem to work on a very
similar principle to Heather's idea. You fill up a box with hay
(or other insulation), put in your boiling pot, and leave it alone for
several hours. I've seen figures suggesting that using a haybox
with long-cooking recipes like chicken stock will save 80% of the
energy you would use to simmer the stock on the stove. You should
leave the pot in the haybox somewhere between once and twice as long as
you would have left it on the stove. If you're worried about
bacteria, bring the whole thing back to a boil for a few minutes on the
stove before serving.
So how did my experiment
go? I brought my carcass and water to a boil and tucked it into
an old comforter in a cardboard box. (The image on the left shows
the pot before I bundled the rest of the comforter over the top.)
Our house temperature was low on Sunday --- 50 degrees Fahrenheit ---
but when I peeked in six hours later, the pot was still steaming and
the stock was a lovely yellow. Success!
A
few of you were as intrigued by the rocket stove
concept as I was, and Roland's comments sent me searching the web for
more information. Basically, I wanted to know if I could design a
slightly modified rocket stove made out of found/bought materials to
simplify construction. I was also interested in any updates to
the design that might maximize efficiency.
Preheating
the combustion air
The drawing shown here
is Roland's suggestion for preheating the combustion air to increase
efficiency, in much the way that efficient
space-heating wood stoves
work. A search of the web turns up contradictory pages --- folks
who have tried similar methods are split on whether it increases
efficiency or not. Many sites suggest that the conventional
design already preheats the combustion air by passing the air intake
underneath the burning fire, so I think I'll stick with that.
Insulation
Insulating the burning
chamber is another important factor in rocket
stove efficiency. The official Aprovecho design calls for making
your own fire bricks, which are rated at about R10 when fully
assembled. Roland's suggestion --- perlite --- has an R-value of
2.7 per inch, so four inches of loose-filled perlite placed between an
inner and an outer wall could be a much easier option than making our
own fire brick. (For future reference, other folks mention using
materials such as vermiculite (R2.08 per inch) and pumice (R2 per
inch).)
Body
materials
I've seen various DIY
rocket stove options using found or bought
materials, and the ones that caught my eye used nested stove
pipe. The image shown here is my revised version of the official
design made out of one big stove pipe, two pieces of smaller stovepipe,
and an elbow to connect the smaller stovepipe pieces together. As
Roland mentioned, the bigger stovepipe might be replaced by a metal
bucket --- otherwise, I'd have to add some kind of cap to keep the
perlite from coming out the bottom. I'm envisioning the pot
sitting on pieces of rebar stuck through the exterior walls rather than
welding anything together.
There's a bit of math
involved in deciding how high the interior
chamber should be and how much air space should be left between the pot
and the skirt -- more on that later!
Rocket stoves are currently
being
introduced to several third world countries to help lower the pressure
of firewood harvesting on native forests. The stoves are designed
to need very little wood in order to heat up your
cook pot, so trees get left in place. I love the concept, but
can't help wondering --- why don't we promote rocket stoves in the U.S.
too? I'd never tell someone in a third world country to institute
environmentally friendly measures I wasn't willing to put into practice
in my own life.
Before I knew it, I'd penciled a rocket stove onto our ten year plan
and started researching. First, I discovered that you can't use
rocket stoves inside because they're basically an efficient
hearth. So, in practice, they'll probably be part
of a summer kitchen in our long term plan --- something I want anyway
because I always dread turning on the stove on a sweltering summer day.
The video I've embedded above is well worth watching if you'd like to
build your own rocket stove. It looks like we could probably make
one quite cheaply, though it would take quite a bit of trial and error
to figure out certain parts. The sheet metal looks an awful lot
like a stovepipe to me, suggesting that we might not need welding
skills (the part that scared us off building our own initially.)
Alternatively, we could buy one pre-made for around $125.
Have any of you built or used a rocket stove? What did you think
of it?
Baking
a cake on the farm is always an adventure. As the culmination of
Mark appreciation week, I decided on a rich chocolate cake that called
for seven eggs...only to look in the fridge and see a mere four
eggs! So I put on my boots and coat and headed outside in search
of three more.
Usually, our nine hens
give us more eggs than we can eat, but this abnormal cold spell has
frozen the chicken
tractors in place and put our hens in a bad mood. Some days
this month, we've only gotten one egg between them. Would we get
lucky today?
I opened the nest box
door in the Plymouth Rock's tractor --- one egg. The young Golden
Comets are always good for at least an egg, so I wasn't concerned there
--- sure enough, one egg. But the last tractor has Golden Comets
who are finishing up their fourth year of life and are starting to slow
down in their laying. I opened the dryer
door and peeked in the last nest box...and breathed a sigh of
relief. One last egg!
Back
inside, I melted and beat and mixed. It was the first day this
year that had reached above freezing (even if only by a degree) and the
cats were feeling their oats. Every time the sun came out from
behind a cloud, both cats begged to be let out. Five minutes
later, the clouds closed and two chilly cats wanted in. My
routine was a bit like this --- turn on the microwave, let in a cat,
stir in the butter, let out a cat, measure the flour, let in a
cat. I think I didn't miss any ingredients (or cats.)
Finally, the cake was
ready to hit the oven...except that I couldn't find the second round
cake pan. After a few minutes of looking around the kitchen with
a furrowed brow, I realized that I hadn't baked a double layer cake
since we stopped watering
the bees in a marble-filled cake pan. Out came the marbles,
in went the batter. Finally, the cake was in the oven and I could
relax. Happy birthday week, Mark!
Some people are gluten
intolerant, which means that their bodies can't break down
gluten. If these folks eat foods containing gluten, they end up
with all kinds of health problems. On the other hand, gluten
isn't like trans-fat or any of the other components of food that cause
problems in everyone. If you don't have a gluten sensitivity, you
can dive right in with no problems!
Gluten is found
naturally in most grains, and is currently added to a long list of
other foods (including things like chocolate, soup, and potato
chips.) Basically, if you're not making an effort to be
gluten-free, you're almost certainly eating gluten on a regular
basis. As long as you aren't showing any gluten intolerance
symptoms, you might as well get in the habit of adding gluten to your
whole wheat bread for a tastier texture (and extra protein.)
My
big brother arrived on Sunday bearing gifts! He looked just like
Santa, walking up the trail with his sack of goodies over his
back...except for the way his legs were bare from where he'd stripped
down to his underwear to wade through the creek.
Mom and Maggie sent
delicious pies and treats and Joey brought a real, live Dutch
oven!!! Then he pulled out yet another package --- Agricola, a
great homesteading board game. The board looks just like the
dream farm I drew six years ago, where I allowed myself to pencil in
another square of orchard or pasture or creek every time I saved up a
thousand bucks for an acre. We played Agricola twice, then heated
up supper in the Dutch oven --- what a luxury!
As a certified
non-Christmas-gifter, I feel a bit hypocritical enthusing about my
gifts, but they sure made me happy. Thank you, everybody, for the
Christmas treats!
Someday, we'd like to be off the grid by
choice, so we've considered this extended (and still ongoing) power
outage as a useful dry run. It's been very helpful in giving us
an idea of infrastructure we need to be adding to the farm, and
reminding us which aspects of our electrified lives are really just
optional.
Here are the top
electricity-free items we've added to our wish list for next
year. Some are to buy, but a lot can probably be made from the
parts at hand.
DC fan to keep the wood stove blowing hot air while the
generator's off. (Daddy suggested that we look into the fans that
cool off car engines --- we might be able to get one cheap at a
junkyard.)
Alternator setup to get juice out of the golf cart so that we can
run low electricity items (like the fan and maybe a router!) for much
longer periods.
Rocket stove (which we might be able to build) and a real Dutch
oven for easy cooking.
A second sub-zero sleeping bag so that we can both stay toasty
during short-term emergencies.
Solar LED lighting. You'd be amazed at what a difference it
makes to have enough light to read by on long, dark, electricity-free
nights. Flashlights have served us well, but we'd really like to
take some of those solar yard lights you can get so cheaply in the big
box stores nowadays and turn them into indoors lighting with the solar
panel outdoors for charging. Even though our current bulbs are
CFLs, I suspect that this would lower our electric bill during our
on-the-grid times too.
I also need to remember
to keep more library books on hand --- I'm starting to run a bit low,
which is a pain since the creek has flooded as the snow starts to melt
so I can't get to the library. We would have had a much easier
time with water, too, if we'd had the water line completely buried and
the big tank all the way full. Still, all told, I think we've
done pretty well so far.
When Mark mailed our
week's chicken waterers (made without the benefit of
electricity) this week, he overheard a lady in the post office
complaining about how difficult the power outage was since she couldn't
do her dishes. I feel so lucky that Mark's ingenuity has enabled
us to want for very little during this power outage!
This post is part of our Two Weeks Without Electricity series.
Read all of the entries:
When we learned that
electricity was a long way off, I decided it was high time to start
really cooking rather than hastily heating up leftovers and hot dogs in
the wood stove. Our exterior wood stove is singularly ill-suited
for cooking, with a sleeve around the stove providing hot air to be
blown indoors and also preventing the surface from reaching cooking
temperatures. The inside is generally far too hot to cook in
without charring.
But I had nothing else
to keep me busy, so I decided to create my own Dutch oven. I dug
up an old roasting pan out of the barn, set it up on a cinderblock, and
filled it with hot coals shoveled out of the wood stove. A pizza
pan fit well on top, and a big lid enclosed the heated surface. I
had moderate luck "baking" chocolate chip cookies but great luck frying
up bacon. Maybe the latter tasted so good because of the bit of
leftover chocolate melding with the bacon juices?
Meanwhile,
I was starting to get worried about our water situation. We still
had seven jugs of drinking water, but I could easily see us running out
and the dirty dishes were stacking up. I was pleased to discover
that packing a pot full to the brim and then half again as high with
clean snow melted down to a nearly full pot of warm dish water in three
hours on the wood stove. I added a bit of bleach for safety and
revelled in the feel of warm water on my hands as I cleaned up the
dishes.
In a pinch, we probably
could have gotten away with drinking the melted snow, but our generator
made that unnecessary. We've allotted ourselves an hour and a
half of generator time every evening, plenty of time to turn on our
drinking water pump and UV light to fill up another dozen or so milk
jugs. And time to feed my blogging bug!
This is the last installment on the Monday CD. Stay tuned for more details soon (I hope.) Meanwhile, check out our microbusiness ebook.
This post is part of our Two Weeks Without Electricity series.
Read all of the entries:
Our
first full day without power brought us back to basics: animals, water,
food, and shelter. The animals, luckily, weren't too hard.
Huckleberry and Strider came bounding up to the trailer through snow
over their heads (nearly a foot deep now, but finally slacking off) and
Lucy pranced and played in the drifts.
The chicken tractors
were completely covered, and one had half-collapsed under the weight of
the snow. I brushed the tops clear and saw hungry hens eager for
their breakfast...once I'd shoveled out the tractor so they wouldn't
get their feet wet.
Without electricity, the
fan on our exterior wood furnace doesn't run, which means that most of
that heat dissipates into the great outdoors. Mark first rigged
an ingenious setup using a DC fan and the golf cart's battery banks,
but the plastic fan quickly melted out of whack and stopped running.
At this point, I gave up and curled myself under a sleeping bag on the
sofa with Huckleberry and a book. But Mark wasn't deterred.
He dusted off the generator, and soon we were back in business!
Lights, power, action! Heat! Even electricity to top off
the cold level in our fridge and freezer and keep our food safe.
Luckily, we had drinking water stored up, but food was going to be
difficult since we cook on an electric stove. It took most of the
next day for me to figure out how to cook in and on the wood stove,
ending up with food that wasn't charred at one end and cold at the
other. But at least we had the basics we need to keep the farm
rolling along.
My
post yesterday about care
of your Meyer lemon tree got long, so I didn't have
room to fit in what I've learned about cooking with the fruits.
Since Meyer lemons are actually a hybrid between a true lemon and an
orange, their flesh is a bit sweeter than the lemons you'd buy in the
store --- just sweet enough that sour-lovers like me can eat them
raw. When cooking with Meyer lemons, I tend to lower the amount
of sugar in the recipe a bit so that we're not overwhelmed with
sweetness.
I've also noticed that
the zest (grated rind) isn't as tangy as that on a true lemon.
Here I tend to cheat and throw in a bit of extra zest from a
storebought lemon. On the other hand, Martha Stewart will
tell you that the white part of a Meyer lemon isn't bitter, so you can
just cut up the whole lemon and put it in various dishes --- I'll have
to give that a try!
If you want to learn
more about the Meyer lemon, I recommend this
NPR article.
Did you know they've been grown as container plants in China for over a
century?
Is
that a lemon tree in the background?
I've been babying a Meyer lemon for 10 years now. No flowering, no
fruit, just a beautiful tree that gets bigger and frustrates me more
and more each year.
--- Fostermamas
We
love our dwarf Meyer lemon. We got it as a tiny tree two years
ago and ate
our first four lemons last February. We just got three
more lemons that turned into the most delicious lemon meringue pie, and
the tree still has four half-grown lemons and an explosion of flowers
on its branches.
We've now met four other
people who have dwarf Meyer lemons, and the reports are varied.
Our neighbor has a several year old tree that had 91 lemons on it last
year:
On the other hand, my
father's lemon tree is a year old with no sign of blooms or
fruits. Another friend's lemon tree looks even more puny.
What's going on?
I'm far from an expert
on dwarf Meyer lemons, but I'm starting to think that the trees require
heavy feeding and big pots. Our lemon tree is in a five gallon
pot that I filled with stump dirt, topped off later with worm castings,
and now fertilize regularly with compost tea from the worm bin.
My neighbor's amazing lemon tree is in an even bigger pot and he feeds
it Miracle Grow. On the other hand, the less happy trees I've
seen have all been in smaller pots. Remember, creating lemons
takes a lot of energy, so your tree needs plenty of nitrogen.
My advice, for what it's
worth --- transplant your lemon into a big pot and feed it, feed it,
feed it! Under the right conditions, dwarf Meyer lemons are a
great source of citrus for those in cold climates who want to grow
their own as a houseplant.
A couple of weeks after my
big kill, we've had time to try out a few venison recipes.
I've learned a lot, and find myself enamored of the taste, which seems
closer to high quality beef than anything else.
Our first and best
experiment was grilling
the tenderloin (on either side of the backbone) and upper ham (the top
of the "thigh" of the back legs). We let the meat marinate in oil
first since venison tends to be very lean, then rubbed it with some
salt and pepper before tossing it on the grill. That was so
delicious, we all ended up in rapture. Hard to beat.
For my second attempt, I
wanted to try some of the stew quality meat --- the front legs, the
lower parts of the ham, and other random spots around the deer. I
tried roasting the
venison up with some root vegetables, but I was disappointed ---
the taste was good, but I hadn't taken out all of the white stuff
(tendons?) that is so ubiquitous in the lower quality cuts of the
deer. The white stuff cooks up to be very chewy and hard to
eat. I considered this a failure, though Mark gamely munched his
way through and proclaimed it a success.
My third attempt went
much better. Again, I used some of the stew quality meat, but
this time I threw it in the food processor first to be chopped to
little bits. The white stuff stayed unchopped and was easy to
pull out, then I mixed up potsticker
filling with the remaining meat. Those were some of the best
potstickers we've ever eaten! More rapture.
For my next experiment
with the stew meat, I want to try to make Italian sausage. Stay
tuned....
I
probably could have left them in the ground a little longer, but the
day before Thanksgiving just felt like the right time to dig the
parsnips. I ended up with a big bowlful, and the roots slipped
quite nicely between layers of damp creek sand/gravel in a large flower
pot. They have now become the first inhabitants of our fridge
root cellar!
Meanwhile, inside, I
checked on the carrots I've
been storing in the fridge. After about a week,
the top layer started to lose a bit of its crispness, so I wet a dish
towel and laid it on top. It seems like I need to re-soak the
dish towel once a week, but the carrots are now staying nice and
crisp. The only problem is that we've eaten half of them
already! I guess next year we'll have to grow twice as many.
I still have a bed of
younger parsnips and a couple of beds of young carrots in the
garden.
I planted these too late to get large roots this fall, so I'm hoping
that they'll overwinter in the ground under a heavy leaf mulch and grow
for me in the spring.
It's
a bit heartbreaking when you wake up in the morning and see an email
from your mother with the subject line "Gooseberry Fool." Turns
out she was just passing on a recipe that my grandmother got from one
of her older relatives. We don't have gooseberries yet, but I thought I'd
record the recipe for posterity. That way, we can give it a shot
once we're swimming in gooseberry fruits.
"This
is a recipe Ruth
made for us June 20, 1980 with her berries. I guess you can
do the same with raspberries.
1qt. green gooseberries. Put in sauce pan
with cold water to cover and
bring
to boiling, but remove from heat before fruit cracks and juice
escapes.
Strain off water, let cool and press thru
colander with a wooden spoon,
adding sugar and a little milk at same time.
Sweeten again to proper
taste and add more milk if necessary to bring to proper consistency.
Serve when cool with whipped cream or
regular cream. Strained juice may be
used in drink.
"Perhaps with raspberries you will
need a little lemon juice to make milk
thicken, and not so much water, but more berries."
Shooting
the deer, of course, is the easy part of getting free meat out of
the
woods. The next steps left me floundering and wishing I had a pro
with me. At least I had the internet!
Everyone you talk to
says that it's essential that you disembowel the deer
immediately. I was surprised at how thick the hide was on the
belly --- I hacked and hacked and didn't even make it through the hair
before turning the knife over to Mark. He did a better job and
then I
had no problem pulling out the steaming entrails --- a lot like gutting
a chicken but with the addition of what seemed like a gallon of blood
sloshing over my hands.
After carrying the deer
back to the barn, we hung it up and went inside to figure out whether
we should age the meat. Some people seem to age their deer for up
to two weeks, leaving them hanging out in the open. A few minutes
of research, though, suggested that you shouldn't age your meat outside
if the temperature is above 40 or 50, and the day was beautiful.
So we moved on to plan B --- cut the deer up and age the meat for a day
or two in the fridge.
Between
the two of us, with the help of a sharp knife and hacksaw, skinning was
fun and relatively painless. Then we whacked off the head (to be
composted), the
legs, and the tenderloin before cutting up the rest of the meat for
Lucy's dinners. I've been reading Sharon Astyk's
thought-provoking blog and was especially struck by her entry that calls
us to task for buying mainstream pet food.
Although I would consider it wasteful to throw away all of the meat I
plan to give to Lucy, it'll help lower our dogfood footprint (and will
save me a lot of time cutting little bits of meat off the bone.)
I spent the next two
hours chopping meat off the carcass and bagging it in meal-size
portions. I'm a terrible butcher, and I suspect this part could
be done much better by someone with a bit of knowledge. Still,
it's hard to complain when a third of our fridge is now full of free
range meat bought for the cost of a single bullet!
We ended up with 24 pounds of meat for us humans, which includes the
kidney (but not the heart, since I seem to have missed that.)
Nearly half of the meat is from the front legs and lower parts of the
back legs and will be turned into roasts or sausage. The rest is
steak-quality meat, I hope.
All told, from my
pre-dawn wake-up call to the last wiping down of the counters, it took
six hours to kill and process my first deer. If our chicken
killing experiments are any indication, this time could be halved with
practice. Still, I think I'll wait a while before trying my hand
at
another deer!
Even though hunting
season only started today, I've been hunting in my mind for two
weeks. After a serious bout of target practice at the beginning
of the month, the
gun has sat in front of the living room window. At intervals,
I would turn off the deer
deterrents and let the deer into the yard, but every time I cracked
a window, the deer were gone.
I learned that we have two sets of deer that visit our garden --- a doe
with a relatively young fawn and a pair of adults. I learned
their paths, too, and the time of day they like to come to call.
Half a dozen times, I thought I might get a shot at them. Three
times, I
took the safety off the gun and pumped a shell into the chamber.
But I wasn't going to shoot until I was sure I would kill the deer, not
just wound it.
I turned off the deer deterrents last night, then woke at 5:51,
dreaming of deer hunting. At dawn, I opened the door --- and two
deer fled up the hillside out of the yard. Was that my one
chance, gone?
Still, it was the perfect dusky morning, just the time when deer like
to travel. I leashed Lucy, made sure the safety was on the gun,
and headed off for our morning walk. In the powerline cut, I
startled our other set of deer, but these two only ran a few feet and
stopped. I crept forward and the deer watched me but stayed
put. My second chance!
I silently ordered Lucy to sit, then crouched down myself and took the
safety off the gun. Lucy is a good dog, but she's not used to
hunting --- she tried to crawl into my lap with the gun, and the
ensuing scuffle sent the deer running again. But again they
stopped and waited. Again I crept forward. This time, Lucy
sat, I crouched, the deer watched.
I'd been practicing to hit the
heart, just behind the front leg. But the deer in my sights
was only visible from the neck up. I could try for a head shot
and risk missing entirely, or guess where its heart might be and
fire blindly into the weeds. I chose the latter, checked one last
time to make sure my aim was accurate, then pulled the trigger.
I can't even remember the gun going off. Suddenly, the second
deer was fleeing in huge bounds, her white tail a brilliant flag
against the brown woods. The deer I'd shot at was
invisible. Did I hit it? Wound it? Kill it?
I beat a path through the brambles to the spot where the deer had
stood. Nothing. But I faintly smelled a hint of gunpowder
and blood so I let Lucy off the leash, hoping she'd track down the wounded deer.
She set off like a shot and I raced behind her until she crossed the
creek to the neighbor's hay field. Was my deer really gone?
I circled back around
toward home and nearly stumbled upon my deer. It had fled about
twenty feet, then died just outside the powerline cut. Upon
further inspection, I saw that my shot had been about five inches off,
hitting the lungs instead of the heart --- still a pretty good hit.
I have to admit that at this
point, my adrenaline was pumping so hard that I couldn't think what to
do next. So I made sure the safety was on the gun and ran home to
my husband, waking him out of a sound sleep to come help me gut the
deer, tie it to a board, and carry it home.
My very first deer! I guess I shouldn't feel so special since the
newspaper is always full of photos of six year olds and their first
kill at this time of year. But I'm oddly exhilarated, floating on
air. A deerslayer wannabe no longer, Mark has taken to calling me
"Killer."
Come October, all of the main heads were eaten up, but the plants
started putting out small florets where the leaves attach to the main
stem. Since then, we've been eating one meal of broccoli per week
from these small side heads --- they're perfect in an omelet with
Egyptian onion tops and fresh mushrooms.
I've tried a lot of broccoli varieties and I think this one --- Packman
Hybrid --- will definitely be our mainstay from now on. Calabrese
and Bonanza and Broccoli Raab never really grew for us, probably
because of some microclimate condition on our farm. It's worth
noting that there are two kinds of broccoli --- ones like Packman that
are bred to form a big single head and ones like Calabrese that are
bred to sprout lots of small side florets. In practice, though,
Packman seems to manage both strategies quite well!
As we dug and ate the last of our blighted
potatoes, peeled our last onions, and ate all five of our turnips this
week, I figured it was time to take a good hard look at the food we'd
managed to stock up for the winter. Clearly, if we run short it's
not the end of the world, with the grocery store fifteen minutes
away. Still, I feel much more nourished eating our own
vegetables, and I'd hate to run out halfway through the winter.
On the surface, our haul of 17 gallons of frozen produce this year
looks measly compared to last year when we froze about 44
gallons. On the other hand, about a third of last year's produce
was excess, so I doled it out to my family over the spring and early
summer months.
Last year I froze things like carrots and winter squash that do quite
well storing on the shelf. I figure our carrots add up to another
4 gallons, our sweet potatoes to maybe 8 gallons, our (undug as yet)
parsnips to another gallon or two, and our butternuts the same.
We still have an inspiring four pounds of garlic and we're eating
greens, oyster mushrooms, broccoli, and lettuce out of the garden every
week.
Clearly, we'll be eating many more roots this winter. That was
actually my goal --- to grow more food that could be stored unfrozen so
that we keep getting fresh food throughout the winter. We'll see
if I'm heartily sick of orange things by spring....
As I wrote
yesterday, I was
raised on found fruit so I hardly notice things like spots and bruises
and gritty pears. Mark, on the other hand, was raised on Red
Delicious --- he doesn't seem to mind insipid fruit as long as it looks
and feels pretty. I chopped up one of my stolen pears for lunch
yesterday and he turned up his nose at the texture, which sent me to
the internet, wondering about pear grit.
It turns out that the
grit in pears is caused by stone cells (also known as sclereids)
--- the same material that makes walnut shells and cherry pits
hard. All pears produce stone cells, but there are a few ways to
get around them. The pears you buy in the grocery store have been
bred to produce far fewer schlereids, but even old fashioned pears are
more edible if raised properly. To reduce grit, pick your pears before they are ripe, when stone
cells are at a minimum.
Some of the best fruit I've ever eaten has
been stolen. One fall, I housesat for a friend whose land butted
up against an abandoned apple orchard currently being turned into
subdivisions. Those apples were some of the sweetest, tangiest
fruits I've ever tasted --- I don't even know what variety they were,
but I gathered huge bags full to turn into applesauce.
After we moved into town from our farm when I was in fourth grade, my
mother used to take us out hunting abandoned fruit on quiet side
streets and alleys. She scouted carefully and found several trees
whose fruit was left to rot on the ground, yellow jackets buzzing
ominously between. Sometimes she rang the door bell and asked for
permission. Sometimes we scurried around and filled plastic
grocery bags surreptitiously when no one was home. This is how we
got our June Apples (Early Transparents) --- the type of apple you
might envision the gods eating on Mt. Olympus.
Yesterday, I collected some pears --- not quite stealing since the
property owner's niece had said I could. I didn't plan it ---
just went walking on the private park to enjoy the autumn colors, then
stumbled upon fruit rotting on the ground. Luckily, my backpack
was full of old grocery bags, so I filled them to the brim, stopping
only when my backpack refused to zip closed. Now what will I do
with a couple of gallons of delicious, but a bit gritty, country pears?
The frost kindly waited until our return to
threaten --- frost by the end of the weekend. Most major frost
preparations are long since complete, but I picked the last of the
everbearing red raspberries and Mexican sour gherkins, took in a
bowlful of green tommy-toe tomatoes, and picked the last big bowl of
shiitakes.
Meanwhile, our first day home glowered coldly at us, so I decided to
make some roast roots to warm up the house and our dispositions.
The parsnip I dug clearly wasn't
quite ready yet, so I filled up our roasting pan with masses of
carrots, tiny sweet potatoes that need to be eaten ASAP, and white
potatoes, shiitakes, onions, garlic, thyme, and parsley, all from the
garden. Toss on a storebought chicken, and our dinner was nearly
as good as the ones on our cruise.
The second photo is a closeup of a carrot cell, showing the
chromoplasts that give the root its color. More on the fancy,
digital microscope the photo was taken with later.
There's nothing more
depressing than picking one of the two watermelons
in your garden, cutting it open, and discovering that it's not yet
ripe. That's what happened in our garden last year, so this year
we grew more watermelons and started learning the secrets to
ensure we only pick the watermelons when they are fully ripe.
Some folks say they can tell when their watermelons are ripe by
thumping the side and listening for a hollow sound. Good
luck. Others count the days since they planted their seeds and
look at the days to maturity on the seed packet --- this is a good
start, but doesn't factor in chilly weather droughts, and other
features that set your ripening back by a day, a week, or a month.
I've found two signs that seem to be much more fail-safe. A ripe
watermelon will turn yellow, tan, or white on the portion touching the
ground --- the Sugar Baby in the photo on the left is a great
example. This pale spot can be harder to see on lighter green
watermelons, like the Dixie Queen on the right. Here, I focus on
the tendrils directly opposite the stem running to the
watermelon. Once these tendrils start to dry up and turn brown,
your watermelon should be juicy and sweet.
As a final note, we grew four varieties of watermelons this year ---
Sugar Baby, Dixie Queen, Early Moonbeam, and Sweet Favorite
Hybrid. Sugar Baby won the prolific fruit prize and Dixie Queen
won the taste test (but had very few fruits.) Early Moonbeam was
more of a novelty melon, with its yellow flesh, while we never actually
got a fruit from the Sweet Favorite Hybrid. It's always worth
planting several varieties if you have a fruit or vegetable that
doesn't seem to be working for you --- chances are that one of the
varieties will become your garden's new star!
I figure chances are pretty good that we'll
return from our honeymoon to a frosted farm, so we're doing frost
preparations before we leave. I've gathered up our curing
sweet potatoes, garlic, and butternut squash to be hung in mesh
bags in the kitchen. In the garden, I picked the last of the
basil (already nipped by a 35 degree night on Saturday) and what may be
the last of the summer squash, peppers, and green beans. One more
gallon of summer bounty hit the freezer and we ate our last batch of
pesto pasta with basil fresh from the sun.
I'm torn about whether to pick all of the green peppers and bring them
inside to eat when we return, or whether to gamble by draping the
plants in row covers and hoping that we'll have some orange peppers
when we get back instead. I vastly prefer the latter, but think I
might do the former --- I'm not big on gambling and even green peppers
taste pretty good after the frost.
We started to have some trouble back in the
summer with one of the Plymouth Rock hens laying her egg on the ground, which
made it easy to miss and pull the tractor over it, creating a
scrambled egg in the yard.
It seems like a golf ball is close enough to an egg to fool even our
smart Plymouth Rocks. No broken eggs since we installed the fake at a
price well under a buck depending on where you get your sporting
supplies from.
The
trick to keeping your storage vegetables fresh all winter is
understanding the type of conditions they prefer. Storage
conditions can be measured by temperature, humidity, ventilation, and
darkness. Nearly all crops like it dark and airy, but each
vegetable has a favorite range of temperature and humidity conditions.
In practice, I divide
our storers up into two main categories --- cool, wet storers and warm,
dry storers. Cool, wet storers thrive in root cellars and can
also be kept well in simpler storage operations like mulched garden
rows, storage mounds ("clamps"), trenches, a basement, or the crisper
drawer in your fridge. Warm, dry storers will do much better in
your attic, an unheated room, or under your kitchen sink.
I'm vastly
oversimplifying by dividing crops into these two categories, but it's
far too easy to get carried away trying to provide a half dozen
different storage conditions to keep all of your crops happy. The
table below gives some storage data on common vegetables:
Vegetable
Optimal
storage conditions
My storage
conditions
My storage
location
Beet
32 - 40 F, 90 - 95% humidity
cool, moist
haven't done it yet
Cabbage
32 - 40 F, 80 - 90% humidity
cool, moist
haven't done it yet
Carrot
32 - 40 F, 90 - 95% humidity
cool, moist
haven't done it yet
Garlic
32 - 50 F, 60 - 70% humidity
warm, dry
kitchen shelf
Onion
32 - 50 F, 60 - 70% humidity
warm, dry
kitchen shelf
Parsnip
32 - 40 F, 90 - 95% humidity
cool, moist
haven't done it yet
Potato
32 - 40 F, 80 - 90% humidity
cool, moist
storage mound
Sweet Potato
50 - 60 F, 60 - 70% humidity
warm, dry
under the kitchen sink
Turnip
32 - 40 F, 90 - 95% humidity
cool, moist
haven't done it yet
Winter Squash (including Pumpkin)
50 - 60 F, 60 - 70% humidity
warm, dry
under the kitchen sink
Despite ignoring some of
the optimal conditions, I've had great luck keeping onions, winter
squash, and sweet potatoes fresh until they're all eaten up. (In
fact, we still have some of last year's sweet potatoes to finish up as
this year's are curing!) Don't get too caught up in thinking you
have to build a fancy root cellar before you can enter the world of
storage vegetables.
This post is part of our Storage Vegetables lunchtime series.
Read all of the entries:
Nights have started dropping into the low 40s
this week --- time to get serious about freezing the last of the summer
crops.
Now that we suddenly have enough summer squash to preserve, I decided
to try to find a mush-free way to freeze them. Last year, I
steam-blanched the squash then froze them, and the thawed squash turned
out watery --- okay in a spaghetti sauce, but not so great
otherwise. A friend of mind grills her summer squash before
freezing them with great results. I decided to slice the squash
lengthwise and broil them in the oven rather than firing up the
grill. The result was certainly tasty in the short term --- we'll
have to wait and see how they thaw out once winter hits.
Our deer
deterrents are still working like a charm, but one got hung up this
weekend and a deer came through the gap in the sound barrier.
After looking at my munched strawberries, I resolved to kill a deer
before the fall season is over.
I spent a while Monday afternoon poring over the Virginia hunting laws. Turns out that if we
were good enough,
Mark and I would be allowed to kill 5 deer apiece on our own property
without a license. The rules are complex and confusing ---
no hunting on Sunday (even on your own land?! What happened to
separation of church and state?), no more than two bucks per person
(great --- I want to kill does!), and no more than one deer per day per
person.
We were thinking about hunting last year, but never found the time to
practice amid the rush of winter preparations. But this year we
freed up some time by buying
firewood, and are even prepared with a 40 caliber rifle. I'm
hoping that in the next six weeks before hunting season begins, we'll
have time to become proficient marksmen.
The
gardener lives for fresh produce straight out of the garden, but the
homesteader wants more. She wants to be eating her own vegetables
straight through the winter and into the spring. But how?
Last year, I got
obsessed with freezing,
and we did eat our own vegetables all winter long. With some
judicious use of cold
frames,
we even had fresh lettuce and greens for most of the winter to keep us
healthy. But by late winter, I was still craving more fresh
produce.
The solution to the
fresh-produce-in-winter problem is growing more vegetables that can be
kept fresh straight through the winter. Why freeze those carrots
and cabbage (like I did last year) when you could crunch into them
fresh and crisp in February? This week's lunchtime series
explores storage vegetables --- what to plant, how to harvest, and how
to keep them fresh through the winter. I drew my information from
personal experience and from Root
Cellaring: Natural Cold Storage of Fruits and Vegetables by Mike and Nancy
Bubel. I highly recommend the latter if you want more information.
This post is part of our Storage Vegetables lunchtime series.
Read all of the entries:
After two years of failed garlic harvests,
last year I spent $45 on a sampler pack of four types of garlic from Southern Exposure
Seed Exchange.
I'd read that garlic needs to acclimate to local conditions, and they
were the closest company I could find with garlic for sale. I
also figured that by trying four varieties, we could find one well
suited to our farm and our palates.
I planted about two thirds of the two pound sampler (giving away the
other third), and was stunned by our harvest in June.
Both the Silverwhite Silverskin and the Inchelium Red grew like
gangbusters, while the Music and Italian Softneck made a pretty good
showing. I figured the garlic we harvested would last us all year
with some to give away.
But then two things happened. First, we went out of town
immediately after the harvest and didn't cure the bulbs properly, so
about a quarter of them went wormy and rotted. And our tastes
seem to have changed. Not many years ago, I wouldn't even eat
garlic, but lately the bulbs have been taking a more and more prominent
place in our diet. Suddenly, our June harvest looked...small.
So this year we're planting twice as many beds as we did last year ---
18 instead of nine. (Each bed is approximately 18 square
feet.) I put the first half in the ground on Friday and plan to
plant the rest early next week.
It's always a good sign when I stumble across two snakes in the course
of a planting day --- the garter snake below was hiding in the moldy
straw I used as mulch while a worm snake
(and a toad) slipped out of the soil as I dug in manure. Here's
hoping that the snakes are telling me that next year we'll have garlic
to give away!
We bought a bunch of
cheap, plastic bowls at the Dollar Store in preparation for last week's
party, and they're already coming in handy. It sure is nice to be
able to carry a week's worth of green beans into the house without
having the veggies drip away over the sides of our formerly largest
bowl....
It's been quite a harvest week, with gallons of vegetables making their
way into our freezer. I'm most excited by the scads of summer
squash from our late planting. We've been spraying them with
Bt just in case, but this week I decided to leave a few plants
unprotected. If those guys get bored, we'll know we have to keep
spraying until the frost. If not, we might be able to leave our
fall planting of summer squash completely unprotected next year.
Reports of first frosts
trickle down to me from friends in New England. We're supposed to
be safe in southwest Virginia until October 10, but I can feel the
change of season pushing against our garden. Tuesday, I scurried
around freezing the year's last batch of corn along with some okra and
broccoli. Cross-striped cabbage worms had crept in amid the
broccoli florets while I ignored the garden last week, so I tried to
soak the heads in salt water with little success, instead ending up
just picking off the caterpillars.
Still to be harvested this week are peas,
swiss chard, green beans, basil, and summer squash (ate our first
squash from the fall bed Monday!). We might even dig up
our sweet potatoes since they need a warm
curing period just like winter squash.
Suddenly, other projects
are also asserting their importance. That water line we nearly
buried in the spring needs to be finished, our bathing and chicken waterer construction
shed looks awfully important all of a sudden, and even the worm bin
will require some care to bring it through the winter. Since we do our
laundry in a wringer washer outdoors and dry the clothes on the
line, now's a good time to hurry up and wash all of our bedding before
cold weather makes drying comforters impossible. We'd also
like to turn our broken fridge into a cheap root cellar, but that
project may not make it onto this year's agenda. Fall sure is a
busy season!
You
may have noticed that our website has received a face lift.
Hopefully now it will show up properly for all of you Internet Explorer
users. Stay tuned for other upgrades as we celebrate our first
year on the internet!
Meanwhile, Mark and I splurged and got a brand new, Energy Star
freezer. We'd filled our small freezer to the gills over the last
few weeks, but I didn't want to plug in the big freezer because of its
leaky gasket.
The new freezer has handy sliding baskets and lots
of room to put away more produce, and its annual energy usage is on a
par with our little fridge. Can you believe that Mark
attached it to the golf cart and hauled it back to our trailer all by
himself?
Finally, the bad news. I've waited to post about this until now,
because I didn't want to think about it. Remember how I said that
our broody hen
was poking
around under her belly when I heard the peeping Friday
evening? It seems that she was killing the chick, not helping it
out of its shell. She continued to pummel the dead chick with her
bill Saturday morning until I scooped it out of the nest, and now the
hen is happily sitting on top of what may be more dead chicks for all I
know. No more peeping. I have no idea what we're going to
do with this hen who is so obsessed with brooding that she kills her
offspring when they get in the way. (Well, the stew pot
beckons....)
There's so much going on here on the farm that I can't for the life of
me choose a single thing to post about. We're still eating all
garden meals
whenever possible, and I've discovered that I suddenly like omelets
with Egyptian Onion greens in them. Our ever-bearing raspberries
are starting to fruit again, which turns the meal into a feast.
I'm also getting a bit more serious about seed-saving.
We've never had a good crop of watermelons before, so this year we
tried out four varieties. The most successful and prolific was
Sugar Baby, which is billed as being both disease and drought
resistant. I'm hoping it didn't cross with its less prolific
neighbors and that these seeds will give us an equally exciting crop
next year.
Meanwhile,
the abnormally cool and rainy July has tempted my broccoli to start
heading up in August. The bug damage has been minimal and I
staggered my plantings so I expect to be eating broccoli for several
weeks once this one is ready. Finally, a success big enough
to outweigh our potato and tomato failures!
Our broody hen
has settled in for the duration. She did hop off the nest for a
couple of minutes on Monday to eat her breakfast, but otherwise has
barely moved. It seems like she has the entire farm's biological
clock energy. We'll enjoy eating the fruits of that energy
this fall and winter.
I was raised on the old USDA food pyramid, and
even though I know it's not quite healthy, I still tend to plan my
meals based on its teachings. I try to make sure every meal has
plenty of vegetables, a bit of protein, a bit of starch. And, of
course, I eat fruit like it's candy.
But mushrooms mystify me. They have so many vitamins and minerals
in them that they are clearly in the vegetable group. On the
other hand, they are relatively high in protein, which means that I
might lump them in with meats (where I put eggs and legumes.)
Given this week's massive harvest, I'm tempted to say that shiitakes
fill both niches. After all, we have enough mushrooms this week
to cover the entire food pyramid!
Everett sent us a Redi-Set Go Indoor
Grill to test out last week. While the recipes included were
aimed at the culinary illiterate, the grill itself worked like a
charm. I tested it out on fish patties and banana muffins and was
very impressed by the quick and easy cooking. Both came out
pleasantly browned with a crusty exterior and a moist interior. I
did have to use some oil despite the pans being non-stick. (This
may be par for the course --- I know very little about non-stick
surfaces.)
I think the grill may fill a nice niche in our cooking lives, fixing
small dishes which only Mark likes (such as the fish patties) or which
I want to whip together quickly in the morning (like the banana
muffins.) What I like the best is that the grill stores on its
end, so it only takes up about three or four inches of counter space.
My biggest warning --- don't open the enclosed recipe book and get
excited by the picture of lava cake muffins. That recipe is not
included. I guess I'll be looking for a good lava cake recipe now
--- anyone?
Mark
has been quashing his carnivorous urges and we've been eating a lot of
all vegetable dinners this week. Last night I made a Green Bean and
Potato Salad which
was remarkably delicious!
We used Mark's mom's
Roma Beans, which we rate 7/10 for taste (compared
to Masai which we rate 10/10) and our poor, blighted potatoes. I
can't wait to see how much better the salad will be with our beloved
Masai Beans!
One of the best pieces of gardening advice
I've heard this year is: your very first gardening priority should be
the harvest. It's easy to get caught up in the gardening
locomotive at this time of year and put weeding, mowing, watering, and
planting at the top of your list. But the whole point of the
garden is the food, right?
Tuesday, we had an all garden dinner --- corn cooked for thirty seconds
in boiling water so that it just turns yellow but there's no time for
the sugars to convert to starch, Masai green beans
sauteed in a little oil with six cloves of garlic, a cucumber and
tomato salad dressed lightly with balsamic vinegar, and fried eggs for
protein. The only parts of our meal which came from elsewhere
were the tomatoes (homegrown by Mark's buddy), and the oil, salt,
pepper, and balsamic vinegar. This is what gardening is all about!
Staying hydrated is good for you, and the
more water you drink the better you'll feel. However, your wallet
will feel much better if you break any dependence you currently have on
bottled water. Sure, it's easy to pick up a bottle from the
vending machine at work, but did you know that if you traded tap water
for a single purchased bottle of water per day, you'd save nearly $550
per year? (Figure out the exact financial and
environmental costs of bottled water here.) Just buy two
reusable water bottles (we've moved to metal for health reasons and
because the water inside tastes much better) and you're all set for a
1,500% return on your investment in the first year.
But maybe you're not a water drinker. Perhaps you imbibe soda at
the national average of 557 cans per year, which can cost you anywhere
from $200 if you buy it at the grocery store to $600 if you buy it out
of a vending machine. Instead, why not make your own sweet
tea? (That's southern-speak for sweetened iced tea.) Mark
likes his drinks sweet and copious, and I like to keep him off
caffeine, so we pay top dollar for decaffeinated tea bags in the
grocery store --- about $150 per year for his half gallon a day.
If you don't mind caffeinated tea bags, you will probably be paying
half that, all while saving your body from the evils of high fructose
corn syrup and scary additives.
This post is part of our Frugal Living Tips lunchtime series.
Read all of the entries:
Before Mark came along, I
was nearly a vegetarian. But Mark is a carnivore --- if he
doesn't get his red meat at least once a week, he goes stir
crazy. In fact, I've found that farm work goes a lot faster if I
feed him meat at least every other day.
So, how do you put a chicken in every pot during a recession?
Head to your grocery store and check out the reduced meat
section. If you get there soon after a batch of meat has been
marked down, you can bring home quite a haul for as low as a dollar a
pound. Toss it all in the freezer immediately and you can thaw it
out at your leisure for the rest of the week. It is perfectly
safe to eat reduced meat as long as you don't let it sit around in your
fridge for another few days first.
Finding reduced meat can turn your grocery store schlep into a fun
adventure. We've discovered that reduced meat is most copious
around holidays like the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving, but you can
also talk to the guy behind the meat counter and find out when he's
likely to mark meat down. I estimate that we save about $200 to
$300 on meat every year by catching bargains.
This post is part of our Frugal Living Tips lunchtime series.
Read all of the entries:
This week, Mark called our illicit butter
source to see if they had any drugs...er...butter to part with.
"Sure, I've got three pounds," the neighbor said. "But don't come
over until after 5. I've got to go to the doctor."
When Mark arrived on his doorstep that afternoon, the farmer handed
over the foil-wrapped packages. Mark thanked him and asked how
his appointment had gone.
"Alright, I guess," our neighbor said.
I wasn't there, but I envision a lengthy pause at this point in the
conversation. After all, Mark explained to me that our
butter-source is the salt of the earth and unlikely to complain.
Still, a doctor's appointment can wring a nasty sentence out of the
worst of us.
At last, the farmer gave in. "Yep, the appointment was
alright. But it was cold enough to slaughter a hog in that
waiting room."
Our
bees have been in a bit of a honey
flow lull, so I was
surprised to see serious activity around the hives Sunday despite
drippy weather. A quick jaunt through the woods, though, turned
up the culprit --- Sourwood. Tiny white bells scattered on the
forest floor were the only indicator that the trees were in bloom.
We don't plan to harvest
any honey this year, but if we did it might be worth trying to taste
some sourwood honey. Slow
Food USA has an
entire page about the honey, including this tantilizing quote:
Most honey is made
by bees. But sourwood is made by bees and angels.
---
Carson Brewer
The page also
answers a question I've always wondered about --- how can beekeepers
sell you "clover honey" or "sourwood honey" when bees are constantly
checking out alternative food sources? Honestly, I can't see
myself ever jumping through the hoops necessary to get pure sourwood
honey, but you never know....
Mark and I were both raised on Appalachian
green beans --- pole beans, picked when they're so big they have half
inch seeds inside, then boiled into submission (sometimes for hours)
with bacon. Then we met Masai beans and fell in love.
These heirloom, French-style green beans are all we'll eat now, first
and foremost for their exquisite flavor. The tiny beans are sweet
and stringless, so I usually just break them in half and steam them for three minutes,
or toss them in a
skillet with garlic for a few minutes. Either way, they are
phenomenal. Masai beans also freeze extremely well --- we froze
four and a half gallons last year and wished we'd had twice that many.
Of course, Masai beans are also a pleasure to grow. First,
they're heirlooms, so you never have to pay for seeds again.
They're bush beans, too, which means the plants produce big crops all
at once without a trellis. But unlike most bush beans, they just
keep producing big crops all summer, so there's no need to succession
plant. (I do succession plant, but only because I like to have
lots of beds and it's easier to start them scattered throughout the
summer.) The clincher is that they seem to be relatively immune
to bean beetles. Try them out and I suspect you'll write your own
ode to Masai Beans next summer.
It's been such a bountiful week on the
farm. We're
smack dab in the middle of the spring/summer overlap, when peas are
ending but beans are taking their place. Yesterday alone, we ate
summer squash, green beans, snow peas, carrots, red raspberries,
garlic, basil, and eggs. With vegetables this good, it almost
doesn't matter how I cook them --- they're always delicious.
Half
a basket of swiss chard, spinach, and shelling peas swung into the
kitchen. A pint of blanched greens and a cup of blanched peas
trotted out of the kitchen.
Like everything in the garden, freezing for the winter begins slowly,
but I expect it to pick up speed soon. Time to get those last few
gallons of 2008 produce out of the freezer to make space for 2009.
I
adore fresh, raw milk, and once I believed that I'd some day own a milk
goat. But the infrastructure demands are just too high ---
pasture, high security fences, neighbors willing to milk morning and
evening when we're away. I'm not ruling out dairy animals
forever, just for the foreseeable future.
But, as Mark likes to say, "Anna gets what she wants." He's been
networking, trying to hunt down someone who'd sell us raw milk.
Given the legal
situation, I understand it's a lot like trying to find a drug
dealer.
Last week, we got a little nibble --- someone willing to sell us fresh,
homemade butter. I hope the butter will be like a foot in the
door toward milk.
Meanwhile, I just read in Mother Earth News that butter
from pastured cows is highest in vitamins at this time of year.
Just like the yolks from pastured poultry eggs, butter from summer
pastured cows is yellower and considered a premium product. So we
plan to stock up and sock summer butter away in the freezer to feed us
through the long, hard winter.
I'm starting to realize that jam has a
definite place in farm life. Last year, I froze our few excess
berries as-is, and while they were tasty once thawed, they weren't
phenomenal.
Then Mark's mom gave us some homemade strawberry freezer jam.
Wow-whee! We thinned that jam down and mixed it into salad as
dressing, ate it in gobs on pancakes, and even spread it on cakes as
frosting.
It looks like I missed out on a delicacy this
spring --- garlic scapes! We planted
four kinds of garlic last fall to test which one is the tastiest
and grows best in our soil. One kind was a hardneck garlic, which
sends up reproductive stalks (scapes) and eventually produces little
bulblets.
Now that the scapes are a couple of weeks old, I finally got around to
hitting the internet. It turns out that good gardeners pluck the
young scapes and eat them in stir fries, pesto, and other delicacies
when they're still young and tender. Mediocre gardeners (us,
apparently), finally remember to pluck off the scapes when they're a
little older, then discard them. Bad gardeners leave the scapes
on and end up
with garlic bulbs which are 33% smaller, on average. Next
year, we'll be good gardeners!
To energy star or not to energy star?
That was the question when our fridge started to die over a month
ago. Refrigerators are the single largest drain of electricity in
most households, sucking up about 14% of your energy usage.
That's money going down the drain and pollutants going into the
air. But could we afford to go green?
You can download
a very useful spreadsheet of energy star appliances' features and
energy ratings here.
I was curious about whether the label was a marketing gimmick, but
perusal of the spreadsheet made it clear that energy star fridges do
save electricity, often 100 KWH per year or more. The problem with energy star
is that new models are out of our price range, with
the cheapest ones going for over $500. No one seems to be willing
to sell used ones at all. Read more....
We're very lucky to own
both a huge freezer and a medium freezer, which makes our food
operations much more efficient. In the summer as we become
overwhelmed by vegetables, we start to fill up the small freezer.
By late summer, the small freezer is chock full, so we unplug it, plug
in the big freezer, and transfer our wealth over. And we keep
freezing more produce, of course, until the big one is mostly full.
As the big freezer begins to empty out in the spring, we transfer
everything back to the small freezer. This year and last, by
freezer transfer time, I've realized that I froze too much of certain
types of food, so I gave them away. It's a good feeling to be
able to fill your mother and brother's freezers, then give them some
extra to pass on to their fixed income friends. Read my last
few hints --- last chance meat and the Berry Syndrome....
This post is part of our Introduction to Farm Freezing lunchtime
series. Read all of the entries:
Careful notes are the
key to freezer success. I keep each type of food segregated in
the freezer and draw a map so that I can find things easily.
Since I clean out the freezer entirely every spring and freeze in clear
plastic containers, I don't even need to label my produce.
I do keep a very careful list of how much of each vegetable I've
frozen, though. Using a piece of graph paper, I list the name of
each vegetable at the top, then hash off a square for each cup, pint,
quart, or gallon (depending on the food) as I throw the day's produce
in the freezer. Once winter comes and I start pulling food out, I
cross off the squares for food I've used. That way I have a quick
visual estimate of what I'm getting low on and don't end up eating all
of the green beans in December and ignoring the summer squash until
February. Read more
about how much to freeze....
This post is part of our Introduction to Farm Freezing lunchtime
series. Read all of the entries:
My next newbie freezing
question was "How do I freeze food?" With pesto, tomatoes,
applesauce, and a few other things, freezing is as simple as throwing
the food in a bag and putting it in the freezer. But you'll want
to blanch most vegetables prior to freezing.
Blanching consists of cooking the food for a couple of minutes, long
enough to denature the enzymes so that the vegetables will stop aging
and will be preserved in the instant of summer freshness. I
prefer to blanch in a steamer, although you can put your veggies
directly in boiling water if you'd rather (though you'll lose flavor
and
nutrients!) Read more
about how to blanch....
This post is part of our Introduction to Farm Freezing lunchtime
series. Read all of the entries:
As a newbie to freezing,
my first question was "What can I freeze?" I soon discovered that
just about anything can go in the freezer. With our unlimited
freezer space, we even freeze things which taste just as good canned
---- like tomatoes. On a 90 degree September day, when you've got
a bushel or two of fresh tomatoes on your hands, you'll probably prefer
cutting off the tops and throwing them whole into freezer bags rather
than standing over a huge pot of boiling water at the stove for an
hour. I know I do.
I've run across only a few things which I wish I hadn't put in the
freezer. The biggest one is peaches. Last summer, I bought
a couple of bushel baskets of peaches and cut them all up, dreaming of
tasting summer peaches on a cold winter day. But when I
thawed them back out, I discovered that the fruit chunks had turned
flabby and brown
and lost a lot of their delicious flavor. This year, I plan to
can or dry my peaches.
Two years ago, I made a similar mistake with freezing basil and parsley
by themselves. The thawed out herbs were woody and flavorless,
but
luckily I froze lots of pesto which preserved the fresh basil
taste much better. If you're going to freeze herbs, try freezing
them in
oil, or just make up some spaghetti and pizza sauces in advance and
freeze those.
This post is part of our Introduction to Farm Freezing lunchtime
series. Read all of the entries:
I spent all day Saturday
alternating between defrosting the big freezer and reading a book about
Alaska. It was a bit surreal --- as I hacked through the
rainwater-turned-ice which a leaky gasket had allowed to engulf my
food, I felt like I was single-handedly enacting a spring thaw.
The problem of our leaky gasket aside, the two free freezers we
acquired a couple of years ago have been some of our best farm
tools. I was raised on canned farm produce, and I'm here to tell
you that frozen farm produce tastes about ten times as good as canned
farm produce. It's better for you too.
So, in honor of the spring thaw, this week's lunchtime series is an
introduction to farm freezing. Stay tuned!
This post is part of our Introduction to Farm Freezing lunchtime
series. Read all of the entries:
Ever since I discovered the world's
fluffiest 100% whole wheat bread, white flour has seen little use
in our house. Every week or two, I'd put in an hour or so of
effort and then serve up bread which was nutritious and
delicious. Until the inevitable day of reckoning came --- the day
we ran out of gluten.
Gluten was discovered by 7th century Buddhist monks, who mixed flour
with water and kneaded until they extracted the protein (gluten) from
the starch. Their goal was to use the gluten as a meat
substitute, but other folks discovered that if you add the gluten back
into some other flour when making bread, you increase the protein
content of the bread and also increase the fluff by an order of
magnitude.
We had just enough lettuce and spinach to have
our first salad of the year on Sunday! I thawed out some of our
last home grown strawberries to celebrate and we each scarfed down our
half bowl in short order.
The weather continued to stun me, though I wasn't quite so thrilled to
get my first mosquito bite....
Here are some foods with a high
glycemic index. They should be avoided, reduced in our diets, or
at least balanced by lower glycemic index foods (such as combining
wheat flour with other whole grains):
sugar, honey, syrups
potatoes, mashed
potatoes
corn flakes, rice
krispies, all other bleached
or sweetened cereals
james and jellies
fruit cooked in
sugar, fruit in syrup
sweetened drinks,
sodas
industrial fruit
juices
alcohol (except
during meals)
This post is part of our Food and Health lunchtime series.
Read all of the entries:
Foods with high glycemic
indexes, such as sugars and white flour, trigger in our bodies a
complex reaction which results in the release of insulin growth factor
(IGF) which stimulates cell growth. Both increased insulin and
IGF from these foods trigger inflammation, making us fatter, more
pimply, and more able to grow tumors into cancer. And diabetic,
by the way. Diabetics have an increased risk factor for cancer.
I was diagnosed as diabetic over ten years ago. I began
medication and at the same time the hard work of changing how I
eat. My last a-1-c hemoglobin test scored below 6. My
doctor said, if I hadn't been diagnosed, he would say, based on this
test, I wasn't diabetic.
We are experiencing a cancer epidemic in America. Between 1940
and 2000, cancer has increased from less than 60 to 140 cases per
100,000, taking in account the aging of the population. Prostrate
cancer raised by 258 percent in the United States between 1978 and
2000. Breast cancer rates have tripled since WW II.
The good news is, we have eaten our way into this mess, and we can eat
our way out of it!
This post is part of our Food and Health lunchtime series.
Read all of the entries:
In David Servan-Schreiber's book Anticancer,
we learn that cancer tricks the body to feed it by using the body's
response to inflammation, and that without this inflammation cancer
cannot thrive. What do sugar and refined flour have to do with
inflammation?
Plenty, it turns out. Studies of cultures without juveline acne
discovered that diet played an important role in acne
inflammation. By feeding Western adolescents a diet without these
two foods, their acne miraculously disappeared in three months.
The human body developed over many eons eating in a certain way.
Our ancestors' diets were made up of a lot of vegetables and fruit,
with the occasional eggs and meat from wild animals. This diet
began changing with the advent of agriculture around ten thousand years
ago. Up until recently, humans consumed around four pounds of
sugar a year, mostly in the form of honey. Our ancestors
occasionally had some wild grains, but they'd never heard of flour.
In less than two hundred years, the Western diet went from under ten
pounds of sugar eaten per year to over one hundred and fifty pounds.
Editor's
Note from Anna: If you missed the first week of the food and health
series, you can find it in our archives. Daddy
introduced the Anticancer book in part
two.
This post is part of our Food and Health lunchtime series.
Read all of the entries:
The Nutrional Problem Eggs used to be called "nature's most
perfect food." Today, eggs
are out of balance, like most of our diets, containing little omega 3
fatty acids and an overabundance of omega 6 ones, for the simple reason
that chickens' main food now is corn. There are many ways to
correct this imbalance, such as substituting worms for corn. But
free ranging them or pasturing them is not enough.
Studies have found that the omega 3 can be brought back in balance most
simply by adding 5% (five percent) flaxseed to their food ration.
I've
experimented with different ways of doing this other than paying double
for special formula chicken feed. Flax seeds sprout in about a
week,
so sprouts are one way. My chickens love a tray of ground flax
seed
and gobble it up in no time, but they waste a lot picking and flinging
it. What works best for me is to grind the seed (30 seconds in a
food
or coffee mill), add enough water to make a paste, and feed it in a
flat pan. It is gone in a couple of minutes with no waste.
Editor's Note from Anna: My hens
each eat three
quarters of a cup of laying pellets per day, so using Daddy's
math I should be giving each one about two teaspoons of flaxseed mash
per day. Dosages for your hens may vary slightly, but are
probably in the same ballpark. For those of you with a lot of chickens, there are 48 teaspoons in a cup.
This post is part of our Egg Advice lunchtime series.
Read all of the entries:
I knew this sad day would finally come, when I
hit the bottom of the bag of homegrown onions. After these three
beauties are eaten, it's back to storebought for the next four to six
months.
On a more positive note, the Copra Hybrid onions stored on a dark shelf
in the kitchen for six months with only one onion rotting.
Although about a third of them did
start to sprout a few weeks ago.
We're not producing much of our fruit yet, and our garlic harvest last
year was a bust. I gave away all of our potatoes because I grew
the wrong variety. But beyond those few types, we haven't bought
any vegetables from the store in almost a year. And the freezer
is still about half full!
If you have chickens or get
really fresh eggs, you will be familiar
with the first problem. THEY WON'T PEEL! If you want to
make deviled eggs and boil them, removing the shell takes away big
chunks
of the egg white. Not very pretty on the potluck table.
Simple solution.
Chill the eggs before peeling, either in ice water or by leaving them
in
the refrigerator at least three hours after bringing them to room
temperature in cold water. There is a bubble of air on the wide
end of the egg. Crack it there and remove the peel and the
membrane under the peel. It will now peel like a store-bought egg.
This post is part of our Egg Advice lunchtime series.
Read all of the entries:
When Daddy sent me his
essay on eating eggs for this week's lunchtime series, I sent him back
the question I've been wondering about for months --- how many eggs can
we safely eat in a week? Like many other people, I had heard that
eating too many eggs caused high cholesterol.
Daddy --- and numerous websites
like this one --- debunked that myth. Eating cholesterol
doesn't raise your cholesterol. Government health agencies are
now putting no limit on the
number of eggs you should eat in a week. Good timing since those
girls are laying up a storm! Guess we can poach some eggs in our
tomato sauce for lunch today.
But there are still some problems with eggs. Stay tuned this week
for an analysis of the problems and solutions.
This post is part of our Egg Advice lunchtime series.
Read all of the entries:
Wednesday was a busy
day. First of all, there was the tornado warning ---
even deep in our cove, we experienced strong winds and pounding rain,
then the front passed us on by.
More importantly, though, there was the lemon. Thirteen months
ago, Mark's mom gave me a dwarf Meyer lemon --- a cute little sprig of
a tree about 18 inches tall. Soon, the tree bloomed, and those
lemons grew and grew and grew. I've been watching one turn yellow
for the last week and a half, but wasn't sure when it'd be ripe enough
to eat. Finally, the tree decided to force my hand --- as I moved
a nearby plant, the ripe lemon dropped right off.
One lemon was just enough to make two thirds of the recipe of these Luscious
Lemon Bars. They were indeed luscious. Lemons two,
three, and four are also nearly ripe, so I'm eying other recipes on
this comprehensive Meyers
Lemon recipe page. Decisions, decisions!
Did you know that studies showed, in
thirty-six market basket samples, potato chips had 207 residues of
toxic pesticides and industrial chemicals? But organic chips
didn't. Now I know why organic costs more--and why it's worth it!
Unfortunately, many of us
can't afford organic foods or we live in areas where they are not
available. Diet for a Poisoned Planet looks at non-organic
commercial foods and lists them in three categories. Green light
foods are the safest. Eat plenty of them. Yellow light
foods have higher levels of pesticides, but should still be eaten if
organics are not available. Red light listed foods should be
replaced by organics. Still, the worst vegetable foods are better
for us than the worst animal foods. Read more....
This post is part of our Food and Health lunchtime series.
Read all of the entries:
By lunchtime yesterday, I had a grant proposal
in the mail and a client's website updated. Time to go out and
play with Mark and the golf cart!
After the cut, I've included a bunch of photos about the process since
I figure it might be useful to other folks who need to get a large
piece of machinery up onto a trailer. The trick is to back your
trailer up to a steep enough hill so that the rear end of the trailer
ends up level with the ground.
Here you see the only party injured by the afternoon's activity.
I forgot about my bread dough and let it rise for four hours instead of
one. Oops. Luckily, the yeast still had plenty of gumption
left to rise again in the pan.
The photos....
Diet
for a Poisoned Planet
has a different approach, identifying high-energy low-toxin foods which
not only fight cancer but also help prevent a host of other diseases,
from heart disease to Parkinsons to attention deficit disorder.
Eating plenty of plant
food is a key to eating healthy. Plants are low on the food
chain, and, the higher up that chain you eat, the more concentrated are
pollutants. "Cows, pigs, and other animals raised for slaughter
have concentrations in their flesh of chemical residues and biological
toxins from all the food they eat--thousands of plants laced with
chemical pesticides or fungal contaminants and microorganisms in their
feed. And the pesticides that accumulate in animal flesh are the
same ones that can accumulate in human flesh. The higher up the
food web you eat, the greater concentration of toxins you are likely to
consume. Humans, not surprisingly, are among the most poisoned
creatures on earth." Read more....
This post is part of our Food and Health lunchtime series.
Read all of the entries:
Inflammation is key to
cancer formation. Cancer cells utilize our body's response to
inflammation to feed themselves. There are many anti-inflammatory drugs
available. However, each has bad side effects. Because drug companies
cannot make money off them, medical science has ignored the many
anti-inflammatory foods which are available. A diet rich in these foods
can help prevent cancers from developing or recurring.
Foods which aggravate
inflammation include: refined sugars, white flour, red meats from
industrially raised animals (see the documentary King Korn), oils rich
in omega-6 (such as corn, sunflower, safflower, soy), dairy products
from industrially raised livestock (especially if full fat), eggs from
industrially raised hens fed corn and soybeans, persistent anger or
despair, less than twenty minutes of physical activity a day, cigarette
smoke, atmospheric pollution, domestic pollutants.Read more....
This post is part of our Food and Health lunchtime series.
Read all of the entries:
David Servan-Schreiber was a medical
researcher in his early thirties when he learned he had brain cancer.
After surgery, he searched for a way of life which would reduce his
chances of his cancer recurring. His book, Anticancer: A New Way of Life,
tells what he learned, scientifically, about how diet affects cancer.
Dr. Servan-Schreiber's
experience with cancer changed him from a research career-driven
scientist to one interested in the practical application of science,
particularly the drawing together of divergent knowledge to find out
what prevents cancer and, once it has been treated, what prevents it
from recurring. He learned that healthy immune cells fight cancer in
its beginning, so it doesn't take over a body. Read more....
This post is part of our Food and Health lunchtime series.
Read all of the entries:
David Steinman grew up eating fish he and his
family caught in Santa Monica Bay, California. Much later, as a
journalist, he learned that all fish in that bay were polluted with
industrial chemicals, and portions of the bay became federal superfund
sites. In 1990, using information he gained from federal agencies,
Steinman wrote Diet
for a Poisoned Planet,
the result of years of research studying the food America buys in our
supermarkets. He updated the book in 2007.
Steinman tells us how to
avoid consuming the poisons which fill many of our foods. Those which
are highest on dangerous chemicals contain animal fats. Read more....
This post is part of our Food and Health lunchtime series.
Read all of the entries:
I'm going to take a break from our
lunchtime Lisbeth Longfrock series --- I've noticed that not many of
you got into the story, and the tale is starting to veer into
summertime. You can read
the ending over on the Project Gutenberg site.
Meanwhile, Daddy has pulled together some fascinating information about
the connection between food and life. David Steinman, author of Diet
for a Poisoned Planet, has kindly given us permission to reprint
excerpts from his book here. Tomorrow through Friday, tune in for
a daily dose of food wisdom, peppered with specific information about
which conventionally grown vegetables are the safest to put in your
belly.
In other completely unrelated news, Joey is working on a spam filter
for the comments section of the website. He says that the only
downside is that there may be some false-positives. So, if you
try to leave a comment and it won't work, drop me an email!
Carrots
Carrots are relatively low in
pesticide saturation. Sixty-three pesticide residues were
detected in thirty six samples.... The pesticides DDE, iprodione and
linuron were frequently detected. Organic carrots are widely
available.... They are reasonably priced.
--Diet for a Poisoned Planet, David Steinman, Thunder's Mouth
Press, 2007
We came home from a day in the big city
Wednesday dragging our feet, worn out from shuttling between web
clients and my family. All I wanted was an easy, fast supper,
which generally equates to pesto pasta with veggies and a fried egg on
the side.
Imagine my dismay to open up the freezer and discover it
was...frozen. The gasket on our secondhand freezer has never been
the best, and water does slip in now and then, but somehow in the most
recent deluge gallons of water made its way into the body of the
freezer. A solid third of the produce was suspended in a block of
ice. All of the tomatoes, corn, and --- yup, you got it ---
pesto, was locked away out of reach. Read more....
I know I wax eloquent about Egyptian onions
far too much, but if you haven't grown any before, you must give them a
shot! Right now, they're the only thing (beyond thyme) which is
actually green and growing in the garden.
I have three beds of Egyptian onions, each one about three feet
by six feet and full of about a hundred plants. One bed is at the
furthest north edge of our garden where the winter sun is able to peek
up over the hill and warm the ground for nearly the full day --- this
bed feeds us green onion tops all winter long. The two beds on
the south end of the garden sit in ground which stays frozen for weeks
at a time due to shade from the hill --- these are onions I've been
saving for when I'm desperate for a hint of freshness.
Today I decided I was desperate. Out I went, trowel in hand,
expecting only to get a crisp white bulb. But once I peeled back
the speckled brown nubbins poking up out of the ground, I found the
most tender green shoots imaginable. Winter delicacy --- new
Egyptian onion shoots! Good thing I planted two extra beds so
that we can eat them whole and still have enough left to propagate come
spring.
John
Wells has an interesting website where he blogs about being off the
grid completely somewhere in Texas.
He has a good sense of humor and I have enjoyed hearing his take on how
off the grid living is working for him.
I would like to someday build a solar
oven like the one he finished last year in this picture. It would
be nice on really hot days not to add any more heat to the trailer and
save a bit of electricity at the same time.
The holidays are winding
down, and I'm ready to get back to my daily routine. But for
those of you who might like a bit more celebration, I've posted my
recipe for Sugar Free
Cranberry Raisin Pie.
In our family, no Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner is complete without
this pie, made with honey for the sugar free folks. Nearly
equally good is a variation which uses apples instead of raisins.
Both recipes, plus homemade cranberry sauce, explain why I want to
plant cranberries in my garden some day. Meanwhile, I buy several
bags of cranberries in the store every winter and pop them straight in
the freezer where they last for a year or longer.
People either love this pie or hate it. It's not your run of the
mill pie, but I can't live without it!
Finally --- the holy grail has been
attained! I discovered a whole wheat bread recipe which Mark will
eat. 100% whole wheat, and he still cut off sliver after sliver
to gobble up.
This webpage
gives the recipe in great depth. I don't know what made it work
so well, but figure it was probably some combination of the extra rise
in the sponge stage, the long kneading, the special Mennonite flour we
used, and the half cup of gluten. Ignore the fact that both the
photos on that site and my photos here are subpar --- in actuality, the
loaves are tall and beautiful.
Now that we've found a recipe Mark and I will both eat, it's time to
figure out how to fit such an elaborate recipe into our weekly
routine. But Mark liked it so much that he told me that he'd
knead it himself if the thirty minute knead flares up my carpal tunnel,
so it might just make the cut!
When Sheila sent me Full
Moon Feast by Jessica Prentice a week ago, I flipped it open to
peruse the recipes then got sucked in and stayed up until after
midnight reading it. First, let me be up front about the book's
downside --- I don't think I would ever try a recipe out of the book
since every single one calls for exotic ingredients I am unlikely to
own. (Orange blossom water, anyone?)
But the text, which makes up about three quarters of the book, covers a
fascinating range of history, myth, and psychology about our
relationship with food. I particularly liked one of the winter
chapters which asserted that electricity has changed our winter sleep
patterns which in turn has changed our winter eating habits. The
author says that without electricity, we would sleep for fourteen hours
on these long winter nights, half waking in the middle for a few hours
of near meditation. (In passing, she also notes that in nature
most women give birth between midnight and 4 am for this very reason
--- that at that point in the night, you are in a slightly altered
state of consciousness and don't feel pain in the same way.)
I know that as the nights get longer and longer, my body wants to sleep
more and more, and I have to poke it to get up right at dawn to match
my usual summer wake-up schedule. The book makes me wonder if
perhaps I should be sleeping
more in the winter. I'm such a creature of habit and efficiency,
I find myself pondering how I would get all of my winter chores done if
I slept more in the winter. And how sound is her science ---
after all, didn't humans evolve in the tropics where the nights would
have always been the same length? Needs more thought....
Still, I recommend the book to anyone interested in how food affects
our lives.
I prepare the turkey breast and throw it in
the oven. Chop up potatoes and sweet potatoes and onions and
garlic and spread them around the base. Baste the turkey and
prepare the stuffing. Baste the turkey and throw the stuffing in
the oven. Baste the turkey....
...and Mark comes in next to frantic. Half an inch of rain last
night and the creek has risen to mid calf. The golf cart is
mysteriously ill, the footbridge treacherous. How will my family
make it in to enjoy our feast?
I look at him with soapy hands, three different side dishes yet to be
begun running through my head. I don't know. Can they wear boots and
wade through the water? Read more....
Thirteen months ago, I cooked my first
Thanksgiving dinner. I was daunted by the task, so I made
extensive lists with start times for each dish.
It's funny how far I've come since then. Tomorrow, I'm having
Mom, Maggie, and Joey over for Christmas lunch, and though I've made
lists they're far less extensive. This morning, I whipped up a
cranberry raisin pie, two little pumpkin pies, peach turnovers, and
cranberry sauce (all sugar free for Joey.)
I dried out some bread crumbs for stuffing and am slowly thawing out
the free range turkey breast in some water in the sink. In the
fridge, I'm thawing green beans, corn, summer squash, apple cider, and
chicken broth (for the stuffing), all homemade.
Of course, the hardest part is yet to come --- making the trailer and
yard presentable for visitors!
Part
of my solution to the Christmas gift problem this year is going to be
baked goods. Everyone gives sweets for Christmas, and I did bake
a lemon merangue pie with a cookie crumb crust for Mark's mom, but I've
decided to go for the salty side of snacking for most of my presents.
The photo doesn't really do my Cheddar-Parmesan
Cheese Crackers justice. I've been working on this recipe for
the
past month, trying to come up with something to replace Mark's
dependence on storebought snack crackers. I finally succeeded a
bit too well --- when I make a batch of these crackers, they're gone
before the day's out. Luckily, they're extremely easy to
make. Blend the ingredients in the food processor, roll out the
dough into a cylinder, cut off slices, and bake. You can probably
make a batch in half an hour or less, including baking time.
Enjoy!
Mark and I tried out a new
bread recipe yesterday. As the picture here shows, it hit the
spot. I had no time to get the camera before every slice was gone.
We don't eat storebought bread because the choices there are either
insipid or way too expensive. Instead, I usually make bread in the bread machine,
which is definitely better than storebought bread, but could use some
work in the crust department.
Unfortunately, I never seem to set aside the time to make real bread,
so I was thrilled to see an article
in the most recent Mother Earth News touting real bread which you
can make in five minutes a day. The recipe is enough for four
loaves --- you mix the dough up in about ten minutes (no kneading
required) and then cut off a quarter to bake. The rest goes into
the fridge where it can sit for up to two weeks.
I may tweak the recipe when I try it next time --- I like my bread a
little eggier, a little sweeter, and a little less white. Still,
it was hard to argue with the loaf's crunchy crust and moist
interior. And the fact that I still have three more loaves to
bake over the next few days!
The seemingless endless line of unrecyclable
empty cocoa tins in the barn pushed me over the edge into buying in
bulk. The concept of bulk food makes ecological sense (cut down
on packaging), emergency preparedness sense, and financial sense.
Still, it took me a month after considering bulk food before I actually
made the leap --- here's why:
First I had to figure out what to buy,
and how much.I've summarized how long
various foods can be expected to last in the table to the left. I
decided to start out with a "small" amount of a few items for our first
experiment, skipping the sugar and pasta which seem to cost the same in
the grocery store as in bulk, any items which last less than six
months, and items we don't use enough of to merit a bulk purchase.
We live at least an hour and a half's drive from the nearest bulk food
store, so I initially considered
buying online. Most folks recommend Walton Feed for online bulk
food, and their prices did indeed seem to be perfect. However,
once you load up your shopping cart and proceed to checkout you'll find
out that shipping costs are as high
as food costs. Not my cup of tea! Read more....
For future reference, the best way to feed
chicken or turkey feet to your dogs is whole and raw.
Unfortunately, the turkey feet I got a week and a half ago came with
instructions to cook them for a long time until the meat fell off the
bones. So I did, using up all of the propane in our outdoor
cooker's tank then finishing the feet on our kitchen stove where they
stunk up the entire house.
Once cooked, turkey feet turn into a gelatinous mass which will stay on
your hands until scrubbed extensively with scads of soap and hot
water. I gave up on trying to pick the meat off the bones after
about five minutes and threw it all back in the pot to cook some
more. Eventually, I strained off the liquid to add to Lucy's dog
food, wasting all of the meat, skin, and bones. Next time I'll
know better!
Still, Lucy adored her dog food, and I was thrilled to have finally
taken the time to make a week's worth so that I won't have to feed her
dry when I'm too busy to make up a batch. It would have made two
weeks' worth, though, if I'd stuck to raw! So be forewarned!
Sunday, I chopped up the two massive turkeys
Mark and I had been given for our labors the day before. Each
turkey will make four big meals --- one meal of the drumsticks, two
more from the two halves of the breast, and a fourth meal from making
soup out of the back.
I have a lot of poultry recipes to choose from, but with nice young
birds I tend to fall back on my roast chicken recipe.
I roasted the drumsticks, then on Monday turned some of the copious
leftovers into Curry
Chicken Pot Pie. Until I tasted this recipe, I didn't think I
liked curry, but the curry is a perfect match for lightly steamed
vegetables and fresh chicken or turkey --- and it makes the dish a
beautiful brilliant yellow! I highly recommend you check it out
as a post-Thanksgiving use for leftover turkey.
Remember Mark's
bean sprout experiment? I was intrigued by the idea of
feeding beans to Lucy too, but wanted to get a bit more information
before I headed straight into the world of dog cookery. So I
ordered Earl
Mindell's Nutrition & Health for Dogs through interlibrary loan
--- yesterday it arrived and I tried out Lucy's first home made meal.
The result? Lucy was head over heels in love with her dinner of
overcooked oatmeal, raw ground turkey, blended sweet potatoes and
mustard greens, and raw egg. She continued licking the bowl long
after it was bare.
Here is the basic formula for home made dog food: (Note that some
sources say that the meat component should add up to 25% rather than
50%. There's also debate about raw vs. cooked.) Read more....
With colder weather comes the
craving for soups and hot meals of every type. One of my favorite quick, hot
meals is pizza and I've spent the last two years in a quest for the
perfect recipe. I tried out half a dozen
sauce and crust variations before settling on recipes I like.
I've put up a pizza
recipe on the recipes
page which includes all of the tips I've been learning --- like
cooking the pizza in a hot oven, using cornmeal on the pan instead of
oil, and tossing the crust instead of patting it out. I'm always
learning, though, and would love to hear any tips you've developed to
make the world's best pizza!
Until we moved to the
farm, I never considered cooking in season. Sure, I'd pick some
lettuce out of the garden to make some salad, but then I'd toss on a
hodgepodge of vegetables from different times of the year which
travelled to my grocery store from Florida, California, and South
America.
Since then, I've been learning to cook in season. It's a fun
process as long as you have these required ingredients: Read
more....
Cooking old chickens seems to
be a nearly lost art --- or at least, the people who know how to cook
old chickens don't use the internet. We roasted the
young chicken we killed last month, with great success, but old
chickens are too tough to roast.
Last time we had an old
chicken, we
stewed it, which was tasty but stringy. (I also didn't take
out the carcass before the connective tissue deteriorated, so we had to
pick out tiny bits of spine, which didn't seem very safe.)
This time, I vowed to do better --- and I did! I remembered that
sausages are the old-fashioned way to use up old meat and scraps, so I
decided to turn our mean old rooster into potstickers (which are
basically sausage inside pasta.)
First, I cut the meat off the bones (which were destined to be turned
into stock), then whirred the meat in the food processor until it had
the consistency of hamburger meat. I had to pick out a few bits
of connective tissue, but then moved on to my usual potsticker
recipe.
The result? Mark and I deemed it delicious! The meat had a
few chewy bits, unlike the store-bought ground chicken and more like
bratwurst, but none was tough and all was delicious. Turning old
chickens into sausage seems to be a winning proposition!
Last night's unprovoked attack on our innocent garden greens will
directly affect the amount of venison that goes into the freezer this year.
This is not a threat, but a statement of my increased motivation.
I realize that our succulent plants must make a tasty treat when you
and your buddies have eaten most of the good stuff out of the forest,
but enough is enough.
I am prepared to stop at just one dead deer this year if you can agree
as a herd to cease all future hostilities. If we notice any more
nibbles past this day then all I can say is "I warned you".
We finally solved the deer in
the garden problem, and the solution was so elegant we gave it a new
website. Check out our deer
deterrent website for free plans!
First, before I forget --- congratulations to
Jill from Knoxville, the winner of our easy flower
giveaway! And thanks to everyone who entered too --- I always
love to hear from you! Now back to your regularly scheduled
navel-gazing....
Lucy and I walked up the holler this morning to check out an old
homestead just across the property line. I'm terribly nosy and
couldn't help myself from investigating the results of my neighbor's
clearing operation up there --- he told me he was going to be opening
up a bit of land to attract deer for his son (who hunts.)
True to his word, he'd rooted up a bunch of blackberries and sown grass
over perhaps a half acre or acre. As Lucy and I headed home, our
curiosity satisfied, we nearly tripped over a big pear at our
feet. My memory --- dubious at the best of times --- finally
kicked into gear and reminded me that I'd seen a fruit tree blooming up
here by the homestead this spring and had meant to come back and check
on it. Then I'd forgotten, of course.
Most of the pears had already fallen, but shaking the tree dislodged
five more which thudded to the ground around us. (I remembered,
almost too late, that it's not such a bright idea to look up while
shaking a fruit tree.) The pears were sweet and gritty --- the
old-fashioned kind you find growing around old homsteads in our area,
pears which will mellow in the root cellar over the course of a few
months into true ripeness. I like them hard, though, so chomped
my way through one, giving Lucy the core.
I love the idea of wildcrafting, but I like the taste of most
cultivated fruits better. Hunting down abandoned fruit trees by
old homsteads is the best of both worlds!
Unlike most of you, I wasn't raised on peanut
butter. I can remember when I first tasted peanut butter as a
child --- freshly ground in the machines at the GNC in the mall.
The gunky paste quickly became one of my favorite foods and I was
thrilled to eat peanut butter sandwiches in my lunch box for years.
Here in rural Virginia, though, real peanut butter is hard to come
by. Instead, the shelves in the grocery store are full of jars of
hydrogenated vegetable oil, high fructose corn syrup, masses of salt
--- oh, and a few peanuts.
Today was the first time I tasted real peanut butter in years.
Yum! It was worth every minute of shelling those wiley
nuts. Check out my guide on how to make
peanut butter (from raised bed to bread) on the resources page.
Also, if any of you have any bright ideas on how to shell peanuts fast,
I'd love to hear them!
I have recently come to the conclusion that hunting around here makes
good economic sense if you're a meat eater in this region and you have a
freezer. We are in the process of shopping for a more suitable gun and
have come to a bit of a fork in the road. 40 caliber or 9 mm? Any
feedback from our readers would be appreciated.
The main factor in choosing to hunt is wanting to take an active part
in the deer management problem in these parts. Another big reason is the self
sufficient element of not relying on the grocery store for all your
protein needs and having a desire for a more pure meat experience. I
guess one more reason would be to someday enjoy a wild turkey dinner
since all the hunters I talk to keep going on and on about how juicy and
tasty a wild turkey is compared to the farm raised ones you get at the
store.
I know everybody has heard this before, but I'm going to say it again.
Keep all firearms well out of reach from any cats you may have hanging
around your place. A cat cannot be trusted with a gun of any type.
It's a well known fact that a dog would never even think of shooting
its master...but a cat...well let's just say that a cat's loyalty is
sometimes shaky at best.
A week of heavy frosts later, our garden is
pretty much barren. We've got plenty of greens and lettuce, a few
carrots, and not much else.
Luckily we spent the summer filling the freezer up with gallons of
produce --- we hope enough to feed us until next year's garden
overflows again. All summer as I frantically harvested goodies, I
looked forward to the ease of freezer cooking. Thaw out a package
of beans, nuke it, and eat five minutes later. So restful....
What I'd forgotten in my dreams is that winter cooking has its own
challenges. Even though frozen produce is tastier than canned
produce, it still loses that aura of garden which allows me to steam it
and serve it plain. Instead, my first batch of thawed green beans
was a bit bland and disappointing.
Time to pull out the winter recipe book! The next batch of thawed
green beans, --- sauteed with garlic --- was heavenly. No
leftovers from that meal!
To get you all started on delicious winter eating, I've posted several
new recipes,
including the beans pictured above, parsley and egyptian onion egg
salad, and baked sweet and white potato fries. Enjoy!
While starting on supper this evening, I
realized that I could only barely read the recipe for Butternut Squash
and Egyptian Onion Soup in my recipe book because of an oil
spill. As I pondered recopying the recipe, I realized that others
might like to try some of our favorite meals.
So I put together a page with some of our favorite recipes.
It's lacking photos right now, but I'll add them in (along with more
recipes) as we cycle through the meals. For now, wave hello to
Huckleberry the cat who finally wiggled his way into a picture --- he's
been miffed ever since he noticed that he didn't make it into the
banner at the top of the page.
Take a look at Mark's
post below and then tell me what you think. So far, I agree with
Mark that we should eat the aggressive rooster --- when he tore the
inch in diameter gash out of the back of our lone hen's head a few
months ago, I just about whacked him then and there. But then
we'd be roosterless!
After giving away, saucing, and drying two
thirds of our traded apples, I've been pondering making cider out of
the rest. Mark suggested seeing what the juicer would do with
them, but I creased my brow and denied its utility for all I was
worth. "We'll have to cut them up and it'll take hours!" I moaned, thinking of the
cider press a friend has offered to lend us.
But, in the end, Mark's reasoning prevailed. He reminded me that
another friend had tried out a similar press recently and found it to
be more trouble than it was worth. Add to that the fact that the
presses weigh a ton (not quite literally), and it suddenly looked more
interesting to try home juicing.
Despite what other folks will tell you, there's no need to cut out bad
spots, cores, or stems before making cider. Just cut your apples
up enough that they'll fit in the juicer (quarters in our case), mash
them in, and cider will come pouring out the other end. Wait a
little bit and skim off the foam and your cider is ready to
drink. (Don't fall for the government's line that you risk dying
a horrible death if you drink unpasteurized cider --- cooking the cider
makes it taste like apple juice and my stomach at least can handle a
few germs in the pursuit of good flavor.)
The end result --- both of us were right. It took me about 45
minutes to turn a fourth of a bushel of apples into a little less than
half a gallon of juice, but that's probably about the same amount of
time (or less) than it would have taken to use the press. I still
had time to crack out a bunch of raw Chinese chestnuts to make pesto
for supper (a pesto that Mark and I agreed tasted much better than
pesto made with walnuts!) Even though the garden has slowed down,
it looks like we'll be busy squirreling away apples and chestnuts from
friends for another few weeks yet.
I've been wanting to write a post about what
we've learned from a summer experimenting with CSAs, but the taboo
against speaking honestly about money has held me back. Every
time I start the post, I realize I need to go check on the chickens, or
sweep the floor, or wash my hair. :-)
What
is a CSA?
CSA stands for community
supported agriculture. Basically, customers pay a certain fee for
a weekly basket of produce with the understanding that they will share
the eccentricities of the harvest --- if the cucumbers all die of
bacterial wilt (they did), then there won't be any cucumbers; and if
the winter squash produce enough fruits to feed an army (they did too),
then the customers will eat a lot of winter squash. Customers get
the benefit of fresh (organic in many cases) produce from a farmer they
know and trust and farmers get the benefit of cutting out the middleman
and being able to depend on a definite income in a risk-prone industry.
Check out Local Harvest
to find a CSA near you. Or, as a first step toward learning to
eat local, visit our What's
in Season? page to learn what's farm fresh right now.
So let's get the money out of the way --- we've made $533 this year on
our CSA and eggs, which is vastly less than the $3,260 we've spent on
the farm this year. (Though, that last number is not really a
valid comparison since it includes everything from chicken feed and
seeds to fence materials and the generator we just bought. Gotta
keep more detailed records next year.) We would have made more,
but two of our three customers spent several months out of town.
What have we learned?
CSAs are
cost-efficient when you have one nearby customer, become a pain in the
butt when you have 2-5 CSA customers scattered across the region, and
presumably become cost effective again at a certain number above that
(though we never tried to get that high.)
Our rural
customers are not interested in paying a lump sum up front to be a
member of a CSA. But they are willing to pay $25 a week to get a
basket of whatever goodies are in season. They understand that
the basket will be bigger some weeks than others.
It's a waste of
time and energy to ask your customers what they like and dislike.
Chances are, the things they "dislike" will actually be eaten quite
readily if you give them some useful cooking hints and minutes-old
produce. That said, on our very small scale it's good to ask them
the next week what they liked
the most from last week's basket.
What will we do next
year? We'll stick to our one nearby customer --- having an extra
$100 every month makes everything nicer and is really no more work than
gardening for ourselves. Mark wants to try out a cash crop next
year (maybe pumpkins or sweet potatoes) to bring in a bit more "egg
money" instead.
Today's experiment in simplicity was cooking
an old rooster. The neighbor of our chicken-slaughtering buddies
asked them if they'd be willing to kill and dress two of his old
roosters for him, but when the neighbor came back and saw what the
dressed chickens looked like --- all legs and no breast --- he said no
thanks and left the roosters behind. Mark and I are always up for
a challenge, so we took one home to cook.
I did some extensive web searching last night, looking for some advice
on how to cook old roosters. Besides "Coq au vin", which looked
like it'd take me hours of hard work to prepare, there didn't seem to
be many choices except hints to cook it slow and long. So I
decided to make up my own chicken stew, basically pretending I was
making chicken stock and then throwing in some extra veggies at the
end.
At 8:30 am, I put the whole rooster in a pot
of water with a few chopped onions and garlic and some parsley and
thyme out of the garden. (I've found that parsley can be
substitued for celery to good effect in nearly all recipes and is much
easier to grow!) Then I slowly simmered the budding stew for
about eight hours.
By then, the meat was falling off the bones and I was able to strain
out the solids and then remove the hard bits easily. I threw all
of the meat back into the juices, added carrots, potatoes, and sweet
potatoes and simmered about half an hour until they were soft.
Then I turned off the heat and threw in some frozen corn and peas from
this summer. A bit of salt and pepper and the stew was
done! A delicious meal for eight out of free ingredients --- our
girls wish we weren't quite so empowered.
Read other posts about killing and eating your own chickens: