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.

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.

I didn't want you all to think we had a bad taste in our mouth about Dark Cornish chickens.  Sure, they're inefficient at converting feed to meat and can't forage to save their lives, but the flavor is phenomenal!  We roasted up one of our cockerels, and it turned out as juicy and tender as those rotisserie chickens in the grocery store.

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.

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:

1. The potatoes begin to bloom.
2. The calendar changes to June.
3. 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.

Last fall, I cut the tops off our broccoli and let the plants send out side florets for a couple of months, but I manage spring broccoli quite differently.  With my spring crop, I cut down the whole plant when I harvest the top, peeling the stems to be added to the steamer pot.

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!

Our homemade chicken waterer is perfect for chicken tractors.

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.

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.

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!

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!

You know when you're a homesteading geek when...

• you go to a party and one of the big attractions is heading down into the basement to check out your host's stored produce...
• ...and all of your friends want to go too so you have to wait your turn.

Check out these homemade shelves spaced apart with log sections.  Very classy!

Last year, I posted about the most delightful, fluffy, completely whole wheat bread recipe that counts on wheat gluten to increase the fluff factor.  Ever since then, folks have been asking me, "Isn't gluten bad for you?"

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.
• Solar charger for the golf cart so that we can fill the golf cart batteries back up.
• 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!

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.

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.

Stay tuned for part III soon.  Meanwhile, feel free to check out our ebook about starting your own business and quitting your job.

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?

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.

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.

"Perhaps with raspberries you will need a little lemon juice to make milk thicken, and not so much water, but more berries."

--- Frances Tirrell Eckberg

 

The word delicious doesn't even begin to describe how wonderful it was to grill up part of Anna's first deer last night.

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."

Fall broccoli has been one of my favorite crops this year.  I tossed the seeds into garden gaps in June and July, and all through August and September we ate the main heads that ripened at different times on different plants. 

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:

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.

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.

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.

Shame-faced plug: Our DIY kits include information on how to make a chicken waterer for as low as $1 per bird.

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.

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 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. 

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.

So this year, I hunted down the remarkably easy Strawberry Freezer Jam recipe and used it on my excess strawberries from the less tasty beds.  The recipe is on the inside of the package of Sure-Jell pectin (less or no sugar type), but I'll reproduce it after the cut because it's surprisingly hard to find on the internet....

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!

Ye olde charcoal grill saw the light of day yesterday as we cooked up some asparagus and shitake mushrooms with a few hot dogs on the side.

My mom introduced me to the charcoal chimney starter years ago and grilling has never been the same since.

Your coals get heated up faster while using less lighter fluid. If you have a large crowd to feed you might want to have two going at the same time.

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....

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....

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....

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.

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!

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.

Of course, you can't just pour gluten into your bread dough and expect to get the world's fluffiest bread....

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....

From Diet for a Poisoned Planet:

Red Light Foods (all non-organic in this list):

• non organic apples (342 pesticide residues in 36 samples)
• raw apricots (157 residues)
• raw celery (240 residues)
• raw sweet cherries (215 pesticide residues in 36 samples)
• collard greens (260 residues in 36 samples)
• raw cucumbers (189 residues)
• grapes
• green peppers (256 residues)
• mixed nuts (246 residues)
• raw peaches (266 residues)
• peanuts (282 residues in 36 samples)
• raw pears (176 residues in 36 samples)
• raw plums (171 residues)
• potatoes (205 residues)
• raisins (200 residues)
• spinach (279 residues in 36 samples)
• raw strawberries (237 residues)
• summer squash (185 residues)
• raw tomatoes (214 residues in 36 samples)

Editor's note from Anna: Daddy introduced the concept of red and green light foods in part 5 of his food and health series.

Low Glycemic index foods (eat all you want):

• natural sweeteners, agave nectar, stevia, xylitol
• dark chocolate (70%)
• mixed whole grain cereals
• multi-grain bread
• basmati or tai rice
• multigrain pasta and noodles
• quinoa, oats, millet, buckwheat
• nicola potatoes
• lentils, peas, beans
• sweet potatoes, yams
• oatmeal, muesli, All-bran, Special-K
• fruit in its natural state, especially blueberries, cherries, raspberries
• water flavored with lemon, thyme, or sage
• unsweetened green tea
• one glass of red wine a day with a meal
• garlic, onions, shallots

Avoiding candy and snacks between meals is important because without balancing food they raise insulin levels, triggering inflammation.

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)
  

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!

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.

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.

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!

Here's an easy deviled egg recipe:

4 hard cooked eggs
2 teaspoons vinegar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon mayonnaise
1/8 teaspoon pepper
1/4 teaspoon dry mustard (or 1 teaspoon prepared mustard)
1 tablespoon cream if using dry mustard
Optional: chopped olives, pickle relish, chopped jalepinos, etc.

Slice eggs lengthwise, remove yolks and hash them till smooth.  Mix well other ingredients.  Garnish with paprika or parsley.

Two Problems With Fresh Eggs

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.

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.

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....

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....

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....

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....

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....

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!

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".

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!

Jim from Michigan wrote in to ask "Do you hunt?"

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.

Before....

And after....

Our first home-made chicken dinner on the farm.  We feel self-sufficient!

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! 

So, time for a poll!