The Thanksgiving contribution…

We always celebrate Thanksgiving at my aunt and uncle’s house. It is usually a pretty big crowd and everyone pitches in by bringing a dish or two. This year was no different, except I decided to branch out a bit with one of the dishes.  This year our compost volunteered many things, but most prolific of the volunteers was a large and rambling winter squash vine. It produced two large squashes which looked to be some cross of delicata and butternut (but significantly larger than either of those varieties). While most impressive looking in the garden, and tipping the scales at well over 10 pounds each - we were unsure if they would actually be edible. Cross pollination mysteries can be a lot of fun, but they can also result in nasty, bitter flavors occasionally.

The night before Thanksgiving we decided to sacrifice one of these beauties and take it for a test run. It was great, sweet and dense without a bunch of excess water. I surfed about in search of a recipe and found one that fit the bill on Epicurious. I grabbed a bunch of leeks and sage from the garden and was ready to go. The one non-local ingredient used was walnuts. The epicurious recipe actually called for hazelnuts - a local and delicious option and had I had any in the house I would have used them instead.

While cleaning the leeks I came across this one. Apparently at some point during the summer this one got a little backed up in its growth.

Local: Squash, Leeks, Sage, Cream, Goat Cheese

Non-Local: Olive oil, Walnuts, Salt, Pepper

*This post is late and may not make it into the summary roundup. I managed to catch a post-holiday cold and have not been up for much of anything until today.

Despite my best intentions of increasing my posting frequency this summer, it seems the year got away from me. However, I resolve to do better over the dark days of winter and part of that entailed signing up once gain for (not so) Urban Hennery’s Dark Days challenge. For those unfamiliar - a quick synopsis is here.

So - to kick off the brand new winter season and first in a long line of Dark Days posts, I bring you…..leftovers. A bit anti-climactic, I know. But somehow when you think about it, a meal comprised of leftovers that meets the Dark Days requirements is exactly what the goal is, right? Local, wholesome, ethically raised and sustainably grown food should be the norm and not the exception in our roster of weekly meals.

We just purchased a new (to us) freezer in anticipation of our 1/4 beef coming from Prairie Springs in December. As part of the transfer and clean out I’ve been preoccupied with using up all of the various odds and ends that were stashed in the freezer over the past year. A brief perusal of the ready made and frozen shelf a couple days ago yielded a few containers of bolognese, a half tub of bechamel, a container of roasted garlic ricotta and some additional marinara sauce.

The bolognese I made a big pot of earlier this year, from our own canned tomatoes, beef from Prairie Springs and pork from Whistling Train. The bechamel was comprised of Golden Glen milk and Wheat Montana flour (purchased from the cooperatives store in MT while on vacation). The marinara was our own tomatoes and the ricotta was homemade with a head of roasted farmers market garlic thrown in for flavor.

With almost all of the makings for lasagna staring back at me from the freezer, all that really remained to be done was the noodle element. I used some of our new bag of Shepherds Grain* flour and a few eggs to make lasagna noodles and also pulled out a bag of frozen lambs quarter that I harvested from the backyard earlier this summer. Layers of marinara, noodles, lambs quarter, ricotta, bechamel and bolognese found their way into the casserole dish and an hour later we had dinner.

Last nights dinner did constitute a bit of assembly, but I do love it when a meal just comes together with a minimal amount of effort. And what the meal lacks in photogenic appeal it more than made up for in taste.

Local Food: Beef, Pork, Flour, Milk, Garlic, Lambsquarter, Tomatoes.

Not Local: Olive Oil, Eggs**, Salt, Nutmeg.

*I cannot rave enough about this product (and company). I had been searching for quite a while for a more local source for flour - and found that and even more in Shepherds Grain. Their whole wheat flour is delicious and a fantastic product for baking 100% whole wheat goods that don’t weigh half a ton. In addition to the quality, this is a cooperative of farmers committed to sustainable agriculture. They practice direct seeding (no-till) and are Food Alliance certified. For those in the Seattle area, their products can be purchased in 50 lb sacks at Merlino Foods (you have to call ahead to order). Try it, you’ll like it and support folks on the other side of the mountains trying to do the right thing.

**Questionable, they were organic - but derivation was unknown. Our girls have been on strike for months now and this was a carton picked up from Costco in a moment of weakness.

Words will follow at some point….

At long last I finally got around to uploading some of the pictures from our visit to the Bullock Brothers homestead on Orcas Island at the end of August.  It was a veritable wonderland of food laden forests, millions of projects and experiments in process. The majority of thier land occupies a southfacing slope that leads down to a recovered wetland (before the Bullocks moved in, the valley bottom had been drained for crops). This picture is facing the lowest point of the property on the gentle curve of where the land slopes down to the water.

Fruit trees, little annual plots and berries abound. Old Sears and Roebuck homestead pumps powered on solar panels pump the water stored in the wetland back up the crops and trees planted on the hillside. The excess eventually makes its way back down again.

I was secretly happy to see that the majority of the annual beds were in a rather traditional rectangular arrangement. Permaculture manuals are all filled with these mandala-style beds, which are great if you have a lot of space (and a small army of labor and materials to construct them) but are pretty intensive for someone working with a very limited amount of space - City lots are square you know. The rectangular shape of the beds makes it easy to move a chicken tractor along the bed at the end of the season to turn up the soil.

Chinese Mountain Yam and Burdock(both perennials) growing in 50 gallon barrels. This is a brilliant idea that I am going to work towards putting in action on our patio next year. Right, this just looks like an oversized container garden of vines. But the brilliance lies hidden behind the burlap bags covering the barrels. Each barrel has actually been cut fully in half vertically and then put back together with makeshift hinges. This allows you at harvest time to just turn the barrel on its side and open it up clamshell style for harvesting the tubers. You can then leave enough for next years crop, put the top portion back on and turn right side up again. No dumping and sorting through the entire mess.

Ahh, the grafting! This is an apple grafted to a native Hawthorne tree. Perhaps one of the most exciting things I learned in the class that Doug Bullock taught a couple months ago was the endless possibilities that grafting presents for using already established rootstock to produce food. Imagine taking all of the ornamental non-fruiting plum trees and grafting on other stone fruit branches. Within a few years you could have plums, nectarines and peaches all off of the same tree which presented no food value just a short time ago.  Also, taking advantage of already present, native varieties of trees in the same family allows you to cheat strict soil and climactic requirements of some of our more tasty, but domesticated cultivars.

This is a picture of a tree that was quite obviously recently grafted with a large number of different scions. If you look closely you can see the silver tags hanging off each branch identifying the variety. The sun was out that day and not very cooperative with my goal of getting good pictures, everything is a bit overexposed.

This is a series of two ‘greywater’ pools that are fed from the excess water coming off of nursery tables just up the hill. This eventually drains down into the wetland again, but provides a bit of habitat along the way.

Part of the intern kitchen. Note the Cobb oven on the left and the gorgeous braids of garlic in the background.

A recently completed Cobb Rocket Stove - so cool.

Picnic and rest stop. This was a rather large arbor constructed mainly of whole logs. It supported grapes, arctic and hardy kiwi and was a cool spot to relax. It was also being used as a semi-shade location for some seedlings.

The homemade solar dryer, courtesy of Frigidaire. The inside was remodeled to hold a stacked series of drying screens and on the backside a solar collector (once again on the south slope) funneled hot air into the box.

Waters edge. On the right you can see reed and other water grasses marking where the water begins. On the left is a blueberry, medlar and large cherry tree surrounded by the ever-present Bullock signature comfrey rings. They plant comfrey around each orchard tree. Comfrey has a deep taproot that brings nutrients up to an accessible soil level for fruit trees. The comfrey can be cut back and mulched in place 2 to 3 times each year, returning even more to the root zone of the trees.

In all it was a fabulous trip and I am a bit sad we didn’t get to camp as originally planned (so we could explore a bit more on our own). There were many other inspired ideas that I didn’t manage to take pictures of that are still jumbling around in my head. I was also glad that Gary came along for the tour as he seemed to catch a bit of the bug after seeing all that could be achieved. It is a bit strange being the lunatic that comes home after each class scheming with grand ideas. Not that he doesn’t share (at least some of) my vision, but not being immersed possibilities for 16 hours at a time does allow one to take a bit of a less immediate view of things. This, contrasted with me, so overwhelmed with all that we could be doing that I want to get at least a few things rolling right away.

And this brings me to my final impression - both of the Bullocks place and what I have gathered from the class and presenters. One needs brothers. I noticed that out of the three presenters we’ve had so far - two (coincidentally the two that own their own homestead) started out their presentation with something along the lines of “10-26 years ago I bought this place with my brother(s) and we’ve been working on it ever since”. In addition to the brother factor - large scale operations like the Bullocks place benefits greatly from a small army of 10-12 interns each year. A young, eager, twenty-something brute labor force brimming with inventiveness, renewed each spring and at their disposal in exchange for some hands on learning.

It all points toward a greater need for the rethinking and re-figuring of community. I’ve spoken of this before in more simple terms of having local friends to sit down and talk seeds, cooking and gardening with. But it extends much past that when we start to think about creating networks that even faintly approach a closed system. We’ve got to get a lot closer to our neighbors than our current culture promotes, and our friends have to be more than someone you grab a beer with on a Friday night. In reality, this is a separate post entirely (one that I’ve started twice and not yet managed to wrap into a concise enough package for blog-friendly reading). I struggle with my own desires to create a small, simple and self-sufficient(ish) life, knowing that for it to be truly effective it needs to be a joint effort bigger than my little home and family. But I also struggle with the idea of intentional communities.  I am uncomfortable with the two extremes they usually take - either uber-creepy survivalists or woo-woo hippy enclaves. I don’t know the answer, but I certainly am thinking about it.

]]> http://www.eighthacrebounty.com/2009/09/11/the-bullock-homestead/feed/ http://www.eighthacrebounty.com/2009/08/29/off-to-see-the-wiz/ http://www.eighthacrebounty.com/2009/08/29/off-to-see-the-wiz/#comments Sat, 29 Aug 2009 14:29:38 +0000 maya http://www.eighthacrebounty.com/?p=989

er… Bullocks I mean - as in the Bullock Brothers permaculture homestead on Orcas Island.

26 pounds of fresh hot Hatch green chile from New Mexico. I was born in New Mexico and although it has been almost 24 years now since we moved away, there is little that can compete with a big bowl of green chile as the ultimate grounding and centering meal.  No - this is most definitely not a local meal, but I don’t care. I’ve tried to make green chile with peppers closer to home (usually from the eastern side of the state). But Washington’s anemic Anaheim peppers don’t even get close to the level of flavor or heat a Hatch chile packs in it slender green package.

My dad gave me a call the other week when he heard an advertisement on the radio that one of our local supermarkets was selling fresh chiles for a limited time. By definition, fresh Hatch chiles are only available for about a month since they are only grown in one region of NM, thereafter they ripen into the red chiles tied into ubiquitous ristras  or pulverized into powder for other, truly delicious applications). The Pacific Northwest-New Mexico phone tree fired up and everyone we know was notified.

The only other way to get green chile is to either know somebody who regularly travels down there or pay an insane amount of money to have frozen packages shipped up here (at last check it was somewhere around $150 for 10 pounds). Prices like that are not within my budget, and while I do still have some family down there that brings us beautiful chile care packages when they visit - fresh chiles are a little hard to get on a plane in any substantial bulk and they are only available in August/September (timing doesn’t always work out).

So - after waiting over a week for my special ordered box, I spent the large part of yesterday afternoon and evening roasting and peeling the peppers. Despite wearing gloves the entire time, my hands were absolutely on fire for several hours after I had finished. I froze the bulk of the peeled and diced chile in quart bags and also for the first time canned seven jars of the chile to see how that worked. The jury is still out as I haven’t tried it yet, but if it is palatable it will be a nice way to preserve in the future. Gary-of-the-tender-mouth knows nothing of the pure joy and deliciousness that is green chile so being able to package it in ready to go single servings will be great.

So, I’m feeling mighty rich right now and well prepared for winter! And, although the elevation and weather is all wrong - I still saved a big handful of seeds to experiment with next year to see if I could at lease get a plant to grow.

The opportunity presented itself the other week when I was faced with having to take out a massive number of parsley plants from one of the main beds. I had a plant go to seed late last year and this resulted in a bumper crop of parsley (almost to the detriment of anything else planted nearby). Parsley has a long taproots, much like dandelions and carrots. I decided to go ahead and take the a different approach in clearing the bed and took a small paring knife out with me to cut off the green plant material just below where the root began. This allowed me to preserve the parsley in bunches that held themselves together by the top of their root, until I could dedicate time to cleaning and bundling the harvest and it also ensured that there would be no regrowth in the areas I wanted to reseed for fall.

So far it has worked like a charm. We amended the entire bed with a thick layer of compost and seeded into that. The parsley roots are busy rotting 6 inches or so underneath the current soil level and hopefully creating nice channels of organic material in what was becoming a very sandy bed . This is a bed we had to import soil from offsite to fill after construction 3 years ago. At first it was a dreamy bed full of compost, but as the organic matter burned away we were left with an ever increasing ratio of sand. The mix was advertised to be loam, compost and sand - but I have yet to see anything remotely resembling clay. Funny after so much complaining about Skyway Clay, that what we really need is clay now. Despite my vows to not till our garden, I may end up rototilling the whole bed at some point just to get a bit of water retaining clay added to the mix.

After we pull our fall greens from this bed I plan to cover the entire bed in a deep mulch for the winter and let it rest and rot. Hopefully the focused organic material will improve the bed significantly for next year’s garden.

Canning season is upon us. In this house it actually never really ends since I find myself canning up big batches of chicken stock every couple months from the trimmings and bone I hide away in the freezer after we roast a chicken. But the preservation of summer’s gifts has officially begun. It all started in drips and drabs with the strawberry jam making sessions and assorted fruity booze experiments. But last Friday made it official with pickle time. I made a large batch (mixed whole and spears) of Laura’s dill pickle recipe (I’ve had the chance to taste test these myself and they are fabulous). I also made a batch of Bread n Butter pickles and dilly beans.  With the smallest of the cucumbers I made a few jars of french style cornichons (no dill) to accompany the remainder of the pate’s still stashed in the freezer. If I can fit it in, tomorrow I hope to head out once again to Duris Cucumber Farm to pick up another bag or two of freshly picked cukes to make a batch of lacto-fermented pickles.

Saturday morning I’ve got grand plans for Blueberry and Blackberry preserves canning session with a friend. There is a blueberry lime jam calling to me from the ball blue book, I’d like to make another batch of KitchenMage’s Blueberry Habanero Chutney and I am going to experiment a bit in using the food mill to remove some of the (excessive) seeds present in our wild blackberries for jam. Hmmm, perhaps a blackberry vanilla variation? I am hoping to get a bit of blackberry picking in this evening for a sideline trial of Blackberry Pickle and a batch of Blackberry Vinegar. I managed to injure the tendons in my right hand peeling a kohlrabi earlier this week, so it should be interesting to fully realize the dexterity needed to pick berries in a wrist brace. (Isn’t it just like me to suffer injury by kohlrabi of all things?).

Ahh the list of experiments is long this time of year. I still hope to make another harvest of the rhubarb, which has bounced back from the earlier pie extravaganza. One of my cousins procured a tried and true rhubarb wine recipe that I’d really like to get going (perhaps make a blackberry-rhubarb variation on that…). I also came across a mention of Bread n Butter Jalapenos while researching recipes that is calling out to me, so I picked up an extra bag of peppers at the Renton Farmers Market on Tuesday.

The last two nights have been dedicated to dealing with a massive parsley harvest (detailed in an upcoming garden status post). I had a plant go to seed last fall and was positively overflowing in flat leaf parsley. I bundled up a bunch of it and set them in a tub of water on the side of our street with a free sign when I first harvested. They were all taken eventually, and I hope it was enjoyed. The remaining huge bag was broken down into a parsley pesto with walnuts, lemon juice and garlic. I made several batches of this for freezing and found that the batches in which I subbed vegetable oil (canola) for olive oil I actually liked better. Somehow the canola oil came off a bit smoother and enhanced the flavor of the parsley rather than competing. Most of this was frozen immediately - but several large dollops were reserved for the first (pseudo) BLT’s of the season.  Bacon from our Whistling Train pig was placed on an open faced slice of homemade bread, layered with huge, thick slices of red and yellow tomato and topped with generous spoonfuls of the parsley pesto. I don’t know if there is much in the world that tops that flavor…

I’ve met some pretty fantastic people and hope to develop, maintain and continue relationships afterward as well. It is actually a bit strange meeting so many people with similar interests when you have become somewhat used to being the food and garden obsessed lone wolf. in the crowd…

Other news on the home front includes a heatwave topping 105 degrees on our fair hill, temperatures unheard of and weather breaking for the area. The hot snap resulted (methinks) in the catastrophic failure of the first scarlet runner crop. A week after the super hot weather, all plants dropped all of their blossoms and all of their growing (still tiny) beans. Since cooler weather has rolled in, blooms are beginning to develop again so there may be a fall harvest (water and weather willing).

I at my first backyard ripened tomato in July that I believe I have ever eaten here in the PNW. I feel as if our tomatoes should be going gangbusters with all of the hot weather, but the truth is that they have struggled a bit this year. Most likely this is due in part to their location (the bed they are in was due for some serious amendment that never happened this spring) and the lack of spring and early summer rain. We are currently having to water from the city’s water supply and as a result are rather stingy.

We have eaten scads of broccoli and have several heads of cabbage. I am behind in making sauerkraut again as well as getting fall seeds started (what else is new?). Gary’s 3 sisters garden is producing well with tassels on the corn and patty pan squash going gangbusters. I am experimenting a bit with the dehydrator that a friend lent me. I have a baggie of dehydrated squash I plan on using Hank’s approach on this week. We gapped a bit in our lettuce planting, but have a whole new crop coming up in the shade of the Rhody in the backyard. Multicolored beets are waiting for me in the fridge and the peppers are blossoming and growing. The carrots have done well too, despite the meager water allowance.

On the downside of things; We suffered a complete massacre of our trees courtesy of the Seattle City Light hired tree service. I have never in my life seen such a hack job as they performed on the Crimson Maple and Douglas Fir in our front yard (and the other trees on the block). The turf war/pissing match between City Light and the other utilities is very evident in our front yard. Imaging a full tree outline, now take the uppermost left quarter completely away. That is what our 50+ year old Crimson maple now looks like. All limbs even looking sideways at the power lines were cut back to the trunk - but all limbs entangled in the phone, cable and other lower utility lines remain.  We are now left with decisions to make on what to do with 1 and possibly 2 irreplaceable trees that have been incredibly compromised. The “free” service that the utility trimmers provided will likely end up costing us a thousand in tree removal when the time comes (at least for the Fir).

Really and truly there has been a lot going on and I sense even more burgeoning in the next two months. There are additionally some home improvement tasks that need to occur before the end of September. Namely the replacement of the two old windows in my office. Ahh the fun never ends!

This post turned into a bit of a laundry list, but so goes life I guess. So how are your summers treating you (Do I have any readers left…)?

I hope you all have a relaxing weekend.

Pardon the poor picture quality, but I was hungry and there wasn’t much light left so the camera flash left everything a bit overexposed. It occurred to me that I have all but stopped cataloging  some of our meals. With canning and growing season well upon us, the daily food preparation takes a backseat. Add to that the fact that during the summer we don’t usually eat dinner until the sun starts to fade (8 or 8:30) means when dinner is finally cooked there is little time to snap pictures before we wolf it down.

Last night’s meal was in many ways the epitome of all that is good in the summertime. Two pork chops from Whistling Train were rubbed with fresh minced sage, garlic powder, salt and pepper and seared on the cast iron griddle. A pseudo-succotash comprised of peas, purslane, squash, squash blossoms, garlic and young (still green) coriander went alongside a few griddled grit sticks (don’t quite know how else to describe them - leftover grits that I had chilled in a bread pan in the fridge overnight) that had been mixed with fresh herbs and cheddar cheese.

The night before we had chicken heart stew.  We had several bags of chicken hearts left over from when we went out to Laura’s to process chickens earlier in June. I ended up with the majority of the hearts, feet and liver from the 79 chickens we butchered that day. The subsequent days were dedicated largely to making an amazing stock from all those feet and making a bourbon pate from the livers (both were canned to save freezer space). All of that took some significant time so I bagged the hearts in smaller portions and stuck them in the freezer until I could figure out what to do with them.

I doodled about on the internet looking for inspiration and came across a forum thread that mentioned a Puerto Rican stew. It had been a rather cool day and stew sounded good so I took inspiration from there and went rummaging around to see what I could put together. I pulled  a half bag of dried hominy out of the cupboard and set it to soak a few hours before. I diced up the remainder of a red onion that had been lanquishing in the fridge, grabbed a quart jar of the green tomato enchilada sauce I canned last year (pic here) and a two quarts of chicken stock. While all of the above ingredients simmered with the chicken hearts and a bit of additional cumin, I picked and washed a large bunch of purslane to be thrown in at the last minute. The result was hearty, delicious and perfect for that evening. The purslane added a great lemony accent to what was a very savory stew.

We’re eating good around here now with the garden in full swing. Pole beans are climbing up thier poles, the peas are slowly finishing and broccoli and cabbage heads make themselves ready. I’ll have to harass Gary to make a post on his 3 sisters garden out front - we ate the first squash from there this morning.

The Friday before last, we went to a local u-pick strawberry field and walked away an hour later with 28 pounds of strawberries. I froze several bags for use later in the winter and I also immediately baked up some shortcake for dessert that evening (real shortcake, not that angels food sponge-like substance you get at the market). I reserved some fresh and some frozen berries for my parents and had the remainder to play around with.

I ended up making a strawberry-black pepper jam and a strawberry-lemon marmalade. Both turned out quite well for my first foray into jam making. I’ve been canning food for years, but somehow never got around to making jellies or jams. We aren’t really breakfast eaters around here and jam or jelly has never been on the shopping list so I suppose it just didn’t occur to me. But - there is more than one use for jam, and Gary does go on PB&J kicks every once in a while.

The first two tries were made using powdered pectin, quite successfully, but I started getting curious about naturally made jams (without added pectin). I was flipping through the Ball Blue Book when I saw a recipe for grapefruit marmalade and I realized that I still had a good number of pink grapefruit in the closet from a bulk purchase earlier this year. The grapefruit marmalade was a two day process, but I am happy to report that it was successful as well! It set up perfectly and is a nice balance of sweet and hints of bitter. I’m thinking it will be great incorporated as a glaze for one of our ham roasts from the half pig we got earlier this year.

By far the easiest little experiment is in the half gallon jar in the picture above. After years of talking about it, this year I am actually experimenting with making fruity booze. The strawberry liqueur is my first attempt. If it turns out allright, by the end of the year I hope to have a little variety of strawberry, raspberry and blackberry liqueuers to bottle up and gife as gifts for the holidays. The assembly was quite simple. I looked up a number of recipes and ended up with a baseline idea of how to approach this. After washing and stemming the strawberries I filled the half gallon jars full of berries. I then poured sugar over the berries (I eyed this, perhaps 3/4 to 1 cup?) and filled to the top with vodka. After a few days the berries had given up most of thier color to the liquid. I plan on keeping teh berries in the vodka for 1-3 months and then I will strain and rebottle the liqueur. I also did the same on a smaller scale with gin. I like gin quite a lot, but know that others are not as fond of it - so I may just reserve those jars for myself and other gin lovers (that is assuming any of it is palateable).

Sunflowers full of promise

Borage

Boy in the garden, planting lettuce in the shade.

A bee with deformed wings. The result of mites, or simply worn out?

A theme apparently developed here, this concludes the furry section of our picture show

A garden intruder, looks like your standard cabbage looper - but check out that red racing stripe along its side. Any body know what this is?

I am letting several bright lights chard plants go to seed this year. These particular plants survived our insanely cold and snowy winter without any protection, so in my book they are survivors and it would be well worth keeping thier progeny around. We save some other seeds around here each year. Obviously the simple stuff like tomatoes and arugula, and Gary saved some cabbage seed last year as well. But here is the issue with the whole ‘urban’ self sufficiency thing. I need more room!

While the chard plants above are beautiful in thier own right - they are taking up a LOT of summertime growing space. I have to constantly do a cost/benefit analysis of the items in our limited garden space. Letting this chard go to seed means we will have plenty of seed for successive years. That seed will feed us well and ideally for a longer period of time since we have selected for plants that showed the most resilience in the cold. But for now, that chard is taking up the space that my tomatoes would be occupying. It is a constant assessment and reassessment game. Delicious fresh greens in the fall and winter means that many fewer quarts of ruby tomatoes for this year.

For the most part I think I am reconciled to mostly just saving seed for annual plants. Those plants that take 2 years to produce seed simply don’t pay back enough for the space they occupy on our little eighth of an acre.  All of this garden economic theory aside, I do get a simple joy out of watching the full life cycle of these plants. So many of our crops we harvest and consume without a thought to what they may look like at the peak of thier maturity. Sometimes it becomes an entirely different animal alltogether…

Despite my promise to post more frequently I’ve failed. You see, I’ve been busy making pie. In fact, the whole household got wrapped up in the pie making for a day or two. You can see Gary’s documentation and newly developed (soon to be patented) pie holder for all this pie here. These pies above are all rhubarb-blackberry pies, made for my cousin’s graduation party from our own backyard rhubarb and blackberries that we picked last fall. Gary was charged with delivery of the pies (since I was going to be at my permaculture class and arriving late to the party) and took his job very seriously.

Eleven pies in total were made, in addition to an asparagus, provolone and egg tart for the permaculture class. (God, the food we eat every class! It has evolved into a full blown potluck each day and I can’t even fully convey the deliciousness that is laid out on the table each morning. There is something to having a potluck with a bunch of gardeners I tell ya). I spent most of Friday cooking, and Gary spent the day making pie racks - what a team, eh?

Gary made this sweet little birdhouse a few years ago from our old fence boards. The first year we set it close to the patio and a pair of chicadees moved in and set up house. We watched thier comings and goings all spring until one day we woke up to a massacre. Nin had decimated the chicks as they tried out thier wings for the first time. (No need to lecture me about the impact of domestic cats on wild bird populations, I struggle with it already. She is the only real hunter of the three cats, and even then she is pretty half-assed about it).

After the slaughter we moved the birdhouse up along the fence and further out of her ‘goatpath’. Bad news travels fast and no birds have set up a home since that summer. Just the other day, I noticed a bunch of winged activity around the entrance, but it was not of the feathered variety. It appears that bumblebees have taken over the birdhouse and now have a nest going. Perfect!

The warmth has pushed my Oregon Trail Shelling Peas into an abundance of blooms within a matter of days. Likely a good thing as I didn’t set up an appropriate trellising system for them this year, and last year’s cold spring had them growing to heights of almost 6 feet before setting a single flower. This year’s heat promises to keep them at a more manageable height while still promising a harvest.

The Mr. Big peas have already set pods (a 60 day vs. 100 day variety) and boy are they tasty (and short!). Dahl the chicken has gone broody again. This is the second time this year. I am contemplating either finding some fertilized eggs for her this time, or perhaps picking up a chick from the feed store for her to mother. She might as well make herself useful if she is just going to sit on her butt (belly?) all day. Mother Earth had an article this month in which the author had (successfully) experimented with setting a bunch of cornish cross (meat) chicks under a broody laying hen, and let the hen raise the meat birds instead of fussing with a brood box and separating the birds. It’s got me thinking with the red hen just sitting there….

We are scheduled to head up to Laura’s this weekend to help in the processing of the 79 meat chickens she has been raising for our household, her own freezer and several other local families.   Thankfully the forecast has adjusted down to the 70’s for Saturday.

Gary and my father weren’t so lucky with the weather earlier this week. My dad came over to go through the bee box with us and do the weekly check. I was more than happy to pass off the responsibility to him and Gary, letting them crawl into the hot monkey suits on an 88 degree day. The bees continue to be incredibly docile, further making me wish I had just bought a veil instead of the full getup. They are thriving in this heat and put on a daily show for us.

I think I am off my little mini-vacation from blogging now, and have more stories to tell at some point. The next few months have incredibly filled up with various engagements, celebrations and appointments so I suspect I won’t be nearly as regular in posting as when nothing is going on. It feels good though, I love this time of year and things are happening!

“Hey, Class of 2009: you are going to have to figure out what it means to be a human being on earth at a time when every living system is declining, and the rate of decline is accelerating…”

Go here to read the entire text of Paul Hawkens address to the University of Portland.

A good deal of Washington’s cherry harvest comes from that area and I know there is a significant snow pack in the winter so I am holding out a little bit of hope! I am also hoping that we can get in on the asparagus harvest in Eastern Washington as we make our way to Montana, and with any luck there may be some Morels hiding in the woods. It has been years since we’ve gone camping so I am actually pretty excited to get out there.

It is still hard to leave home at the height of planting/chores season. We have so many unfinished projects right now. I never got the beans planted, we still have to construct trellises, winter squash needs to be planted, potatoes need to be hilled again, etc, etc and ugh. That, and leaving all of the fresh greens that are pumping out of the garden right now after we waited all winter for them is a bit disconcerting. I’d probably be laughed right out of camp if I brought one of my lettuce flats, right? Picture me rocketing across Washington, Idaho and Montana with my safety lettuce in the back of the truck? (Don’t worry, I won’t really do it - but the thought did occur to me!). Hopefully my wild edibles identification skills are sufficient enough that I’ll be able to cobble together some green stuff for dinner without taking the garden with me. Mark that as one of my goal this year, to become much more proficient at wild edible plant identification.

This winter I purchased a one pound package of “chicken lettuce” from Wild Garden Seeds. This mix is made up of seed that was passed over for inclusion in regular seed packets due to rain stains, excessive chaff or lower germination rates. But it is cheap - a one pound package was $19 (do you know how many lettuce seeds fit in a one pound package)? Imagine one and a half quart size ziplock bags filled up tight. On a whim, while starting seeds for other things this spring I took two nursery trays with drain holes, filled them with soil and broadcast seeded the lettuce mix over the top.

Fast forward to about 3 weeks ago when I started harvesting. As I’ve mentioned before, space is at a premium around here. While I did pull off several seedlings from the trays to transplant into wider spaced rows in the garden (for full head lettuce), I left the grand majority of the lettuce starts in the trays and just placed them on the patio table which is functioning as my potting shed at the moment. Round dinnertime when I am wandering the yard in search of green things to put in a salad I take a pair of shears and snip off handfuls of the baby lettuce about an inch above the soil level.

The picture above gives a good idea of the cycles of regrowth. The center area had just been snipped for a salad, the area to left has already been harvested once and is regrowing, and the area to the right of the tray is lined up for tonights dinner. This has been a fantastically easy (and space saving) way to get a greater variety of lettuce greens. The only thing you really have to keep an eye on is to make sure you are watering. Having so many plants so densely spaced means that water is at a premium, but the seedlings usually give you a heads up by looking a bit wilty when they need water.

In other news, I completed my first permaculture class session last weekend and am positively amped about it. I will have to dedicate a separate post to the topic to treat it fully, but suffice to say it is everything I had hoped it would be and I have the feeling I will walk out with a much improved skill set and framework through which to filter all of my endeavors. I also just finished a welding class and arrived home late last night with a brand new garden gate. We still need to set the posts to hang it, and I am debating whether to powder coat/paint it or let the rust set in.

The rain has been coming down in sheets for days now. I am hoping it lets up enough to allow me to construct the bean trellises. The full weekend of class time last week made me realize how much I depend on weekends to get major projects done around here. I feel a bit behind the ball now and hope to catch up this weekend with numerous additional seeds to put in. The knotweed and blackberry over at the land still awaits me as well, although I did manage to clear a 14×10 area the week before last. TIme to get some seeds in over there too!

The Seattle Urban Farm Co-op is a community-based project to start a co-op to purchase supplies for urban farmers in the Seattle area.

Our focus will be on obtaining supplies such as animal feed, fertilizers, mulch, seeds, etc., from local & organic sources. We are also promoting the ideas & values of sustainable living. We hope to collaborate with organizations such as “Urban Grange” & “Seattle Tilth” by providing a place for tool & resource sharing, educational classes, community information, etc.

The Co-op is having a meeting at 6pm this evening at the Columbia City Library. We plan on attending and hope to see you there!

The Co-op also has a Yahoo Group and can be found as a group on Facebook.

The first of this month was my birthday. Our dogwood in the backyard always tends to bloom within a week or two of my birthday every year and puts on a chorus of color with the emerging lilacs, tulips and iris. Although May tends to be a generally soggy month in this part of the world, the flowers are all emerging and it is a gorgeous time to be alive.

This birthday in particular marked a half-way point in my life. This year I turned the same age that my mother was when she had me. I am reminded regularly of how fortunate I am with the family that surrounds me and the friends and partners I’ve encountered and kept. I was a bit of a blubbering mess at my birthday dinner with Gary and my parents, but it was all borne of love and gratitude and there were (are) no better people to fall apart around.

Gary colluded with my parents on a present which was very fitting and far too much. The result is that I am putting just a fraction of the total cost toward the Permaculture class I mentioned a few posts ago. I was (and am) overwhelmed by the gift and will be studiously dreaming up ways in which to return the magnitude of their generousity.

This month also marks a year from when I made some major changes and moved toward working less, commuting less, eating out less, buying less, wasting less and earning less money. I gained so much more of my life back in this process and I honestly wouldn’t trade the time I’ve regained for the world.

I’m really not a very sappy-sweet, nor chipper person. My sense of humor runs more to sardonic than slapstick and I tend to identify with those that see the clouds rather than the rainbows. Although I still am gravely concerned with the trajectory of the world in general (and our country in particular), I can’t help but feel incredibly grateful, thankful and even a little bit hopeful when I witness the people I am lucky enough to call friends and family and the folks I have met through this blog.

Meet my new love, the Weed Wrench. No, this little hottie hasn’t replaced Gary - in fact I am pretty sure that Gary is ok with my new relationship.  At the end of last week I drove downtown to visit the fine folks at King County’s Noxious Weed Division and they kindly loaded me up with the aforementioned tool for a weeks use, absolutely free of charge. You’ll recognize my joy if you have ever found yourself hacking away at a project with the wrong tool and then that moment occurs when you are handed the right tool and your entire life suddenly seems a gazillion times easier.

Don’t get me wrong, pulling out the forest of scotch broom on the land is still a lot of work (I was a pretty stinky and dirty mess when I got home). But compared to hand digging these giant shrubs (several are around 12-14 feet) this was a cakewalk. I spent the better part of Thursday afternoon over there and was amazed by the excellent sunlight it got, even after 6pm.

In this picture you can see the meadow area I am working on clearing between all of the fruit trees. If you look close you can still see a few stubs of the scotch broom that had filled this entire clearing (all gone now!). The tree to the left is an apple, with another apple to the right, a plum directly ahead and what I believe to be a cherry to the left in the back (hiding behind tons of overgrown blackberry at the moment).

This is the same general area, but from the opposite vantage point. Where the grass ends and the bramble/unidentified invasive plant begins on the right is where I plan on putting in the first garden beds.

This is the next battle. I have no idea what this plant is that has taken over (in coordination with the rampant and ever present Himalayan Blackberry). I already cleared the dead stalks of it from last year (over 12 feet high) and at that point it was still barely above ground, three weeks later it is around 3 feet tall. But it will need to come out and the blackberry crowns chased down and dug up before they get much more spring growth on them.This area definitely has the best soil and of course presents the most challenging clearing job but if I can get at least a portion of it under control I think it will be a great spot.

The pictures above are just a fraction of the available land, but I am just one person and the remaining land has a ton more blackberry, scotch broom and overgrowth. I had hoped to get some of the fruit trees trimmed a bit before they flowered, but the apples beat me to it. I can’t really complain about beauty like this keeping me company while I sweat though…

The spinach I planted in the cold frame way back in February has turned into a bumper crop. In addition the girls have had numerous 3 egg days recently so this household has been rolling in the greens and eggs. What better way to celebrate the emergence of true spring than Spinach pasta?

Tuesday night we had our beekeeping meeting and had to eat quick before we were out the door. I prepped the pasta dough a little earlier in the day and used leftover chopped up green onion, red pepper and mushrooms from a pizza making session over the previous weekend. Threw in some garlic and fennel sausage and we were ready to eat. This was my first attempt at making a pasta dough with anything added in, and it turned out quite well. So well that I believe we will be having spinach noodle lasagne on Saturday night with guests!

We have done a lot with what we have. This year we have finally eradicated the last of the lawn and completed what is likely the last major planting bed in the backyard (if there is to be another, I have no idea where we will fit it). We’ve planted several perennial crops - Walking onions, Rhubarb, Raspberries, Blueberries, Chives, Plum and Apple trees, numerous herbs. And regularly cram as many annual crops into our small yard and short growing season as possible. My ideal would be to get us to the point where we produced for ourselves somewhere around 90% of our vegetable diet. We get a good protein supply from the hens eggs and I am fine with purchasing our meat from small local producers trying to make a go at sustainable and humane production.

I’ve been on the hunt for a bit of extra land in the neighborhood to use for gardening. Some of you might recall that I made an arrangement with a friend that has acreage 2 hours south of here to use some of her land to grow longer season crops like winter squash. But the more I thought about it, it seemed an difficult arrangement.  I would either be putting the onus on her to keep an eye on my crops, watering and weeding them etc or I’d be driving two hours each way numerous times over the course of the summer to raise my “locally grown(?)” food.

Back in March I started sending out letters to owners of bare lots I had identified up here on the hill. And earlier this month I received a response from one . My original letter had inquired about use of the land for gardening ideally in exchange for a box of fresh produce during the growing season, but alternately that I was willing to discuss a rental arrangement as well. The owner that responded to me lives up north, she indicated that she would be happy just to have somebody taking care of the land like her father did when she was a child (no rent or produce necessary). She did ask that I sign a release of liability in the case that I injure myself while working on the land (perfectly reasonable in my mind). Oh! And that I not grow any illicit substances!  (I assured her that the closest we would get to illicit would likely be some vaguely pornographic tomatoes).

We had actually gone to look at this piece of land a few years ago when it was on the market (it never sold). It is undeveloped and just over an acre. It was obviously at one point a well developed garden and orchard, attached to the property of a house it has since been subdivided from. When we went to look originally there was a golden plum tree loaded with fruit and several apple trees and a cherry as well. All of the orchard trees were unkempt (and still are, even more so). The windstorms of the past few years have not been kind to many of the trees on the property and the blackberry and scotch broom are slowly swallowing everything.

I spent this past Saturday battling blackberry vines and topping scotch broom in the upper (flattest) portion of the land. The majority of the land is on a south facing slope and is covered diagonally by the immense electrical lines that grace our fair hill, bringing power to the richer masses (with higher property values and underground power lines). The scotch broom is VERY hard to dig out and after some research I came across the Weed Wrench, a (I am hoping) miracle tool designed specifically for the woody-stemmed invasives like tamarisk and scotch broom. I also found out that the King County Noxious Weed Division owns several weed wrenches that they loan out at no cost. So - I now have a date with the weed wrench on April 30th!

As I was clearing it was fascinating to uncover the vestiges of a garden past. I saw a few struggling vines of what look to be some sort of raspberry cane, surprise patches of daffodils blooming bright yellow under the blackberry brambles, 4 gorgeous cedar trees, a pacific yew, all sorts of ornamental bushes and shrubs, and clumps of day lily peeking out. There are numerous other things coming up that I have yet to identify as well, no doubt I will once again call on the skills of you readers!

There remains a lot of work to be done before I can begin to plant anything. The blackberry fight has only just begun. I also am in the process of trying to devise some sort of quick-setup, impermanent rainwater catchment on the land as there is no plumbed water. If I can get a few rain barrels full during the still-wet month of May I should be in good shape (with judicious mulching). I also hope to get a trim in on the long-neglected orchard trees before they start budding in the hopes that they rebound a bit. Though from the looks of the still-rotting fruit underneath them, they are still productive and we should see at least a small harvest.

I will try to take a few pictures the next time I am over there. I should have done a full set of “before” shots before I went in with the clippers last weekend. My current agreement with the owner only extends to November of this year, but I am hoping we can renew again next year (and that nobody buys the land to build condo’s or a $500k house on it!).

The bees have been enjoying the nice weather as much as we have lately. We checked them last Thursday (1 full week after installing the package) to both confirm that the queen was still there, and ideally to confirm that she was laying. Well, we found the queen but could not find any eggs (this more likely due to our novice status than her lack of work). If a queen isn’t laying you have a pretty short amount of time to replace her before your hive dies out, so I’ve been stressing about it a bit.

Today we decided to break into the box once more to see if we could find anything, and also to check on thier progress. Our girls have been busy! The picture up above is of brand new comb that must have been built within the past 5 days. They have added on to the existing comb in 5 of the frames and are guzzling and storing sugar syrup like mad in between thier rapid foraging trips. And….we have eggs! Or more appropriately we have larvae! The eggs that we didn’t see last Thursday have matured into coiled little white larvae at the bottom of the comb. The picture below shows a frame with a good bit of capped larvae. Toward the outer ring of the capped larvae are uncapped cells containing larvae as well. Who knew I’d ever find the sight of slimy little wormy things so relieving and darling at the same time?

There appears to be a good brood pattern here, all in the center and radiating outward (one of the things we are instructed to look for). So all in all this little adventure is going swimmingly. Todays pictures are courtesy of Gary - who is also completely captivated by these golden winged creatures.

$900 isn’t chump change. A lot could be done with that money, that is a whole months mortgage payment for me*. But as I sat there spinning on the possibility, I realized that I haven’t really taken any intensive classes since I got out of school. In addition this is something I am really interested in, and aside from one real-world friend who shares my interest in gardening- I mainly rely on all of you out in the blogosphere to function as my plant growing, chicken raising, beekeeping buddies.

And then I did the actual math. 12 full days of instruction breaks down to $75 per day, or less than $10 per hour. I paid more than that for a two day intro to welding class that totaled 4 hours a few years ago. There is no doubt that Toby Hemenway is the go-to guy in the area of permaculture and I might very well meet some people in the class with similar interests while learning a bunch and having the experts at my side to question.

Excuse all of the rationalizing above. I’m a bit of a tightwad when it comes to money I have traded my limited time on earth for - so I think I just had to lay it all out there. But this post also has an ulterior motive to see if any of you PNW bloggers may be interested in the class as well.

*My half of the mortgage payment, that is. Oh how I wish our whole mortgage was just $900!

Late Wednesday night we got the call that the bees would be in early and available on Thursday after 11. The two day early arrival of the package was actually a case of very good timing as Thursday was apparently the last somewhat sunny day we are scheduled to have for a while. We drove out to pick up the package and despite a run-in with a russian speaking proslyetizer who pressed upon us a dvd that expounds upon the “Dangers of Evolution” we made it back safe and sound, bees in tow.

After suiting up and starting the smoker we installed the package. No pictures of that part as it was all hands on deck. The bees were very courteous and gentle. No stings or angry swarms. We never even used the smoker on them (to tell the truth, I couldn’t see the rationale on using it when they didn’t have honeycomb to flee to). They took a good part of the afternoon to make it into the hive, and several little clusters attempted to overnight on the fence. With our nighttime temperatures still in the low 40s, those that didn’t go in the super didn’t really make it. A bit of natural selection going on I suppose.

Yesterday it was rainy most of the day, but the minute the temperature popped up above 53 and the rain stopped, there was a flurry of activity. They currently seem to be very preoccupied with a few areas on the boxes. We can’t yet tell if they are trying to proplyze and seal up the cracks or if there is something else going on.

I have to say I am fabulously entertained by them. I could stand out there watching them for hours. We may need to rethink our current location but are going to wait a bit to see how they settle in. Right now the total number of bees just hanging about the vicinity of the box is likely to put a bit of fear into any guests of ours who aren’t as smitten as we are with the little critters, but I suspect when the pollen and nectar really start flowing they will be spending much less time worrying about the outside of thier house. We will see - here goes another experiment!

We got a lot done this past week and it eased the wet weather malaise that often hits me this time of year. I picked up a yard of hogfuel last Tuesday and managed to get it unloaded on Thursday mostly in between rainstorms. I believe everybody that is a part of this little household was happy about that. The slip-n-slide that once was the pathway and chicken pen has been abated and we are high and dry again on this hill. Hux was simply thrilled that he didn’t have to get his paws muddy while on patrol.

We also completed the new bed under the Rhododendron this weekend. It took close to 4 yards of compost/soil all hauled and unloaded on Saturday. May I just say once again how thankful I am to have Cedar Grove nearby? Three trips out there in the truck, innumerable trips from the truck to the backyard with the wheelbarrow and sooo much money saved. Gary completed the surrounding wall on the bed as well. It looks great and I am excited to start filling it up. Late last evening I put in the potatoes as a baptismal planting.

On Sunday morning, after hitting the West Seattle Farmers Market we headed just down the street to Mintners Earlington Greenhouse. I had noticed that they were having a 72nd year anniversary sale in which everything on stock was 30% off. We walked out with an espaliered apple tree grafted with three different varieties from Raintree (Chehalis, Jonagold and Spartan) and a Meyer Lemon Tree. I’d been mulling over both of these purchases for a while and with the discount offered - it made sense to get them in. After a brief delay and heroic rescue from our friend J. we were back at home digging holes for the apple tree. I’ll let Gary decide if he wants to elucidate the reasons for our extended stay at the nursery.

I direct seeded carrots, parsnips and beets into thier rows, transplanted broccoli and leeks also. I started seed for Aunt Mollys Ground Cherry, tomatillos and two varieties of squash as well. It doesn’t look like much right now but give it a month or two and we’ll be cookin! I rotated out compost from one of our in-ground compost bins and am hoping to get it spread and worked in to the worst bit of soil left in the main bed before the rain hits again.

It has been so warm (65 degrees) the past few days I’ve had to vent the coldframes to avoid killing or bolting the spinach and arugula. But they are coming along swimmingly now and I steal a leaf or two to snack on everytime I go out. They will both be due a thinning here soon and we may even get a salad out of our own backyard!

We finally had a bit of a sunny day yesterday, allowing me to tromp around and get pictures of all the promise out there. The ground is still completely soggy, so not a lot of cultivating I can do until we get a few sunny days in a row to dry things out a bit.

I’ve been meaning to post an update on how the gutter pea experiment is going. I briefly mentioned it in this earlier post, and transplanted them outside the other week along with the pac choi and cabbage. The picture above is of the peas sown in plastic gutter and started in the coldframe. The picture below is of peas sown directly outside in the ground at the same time (February 21st). The gutter peas did get quite a jump comparatively, and it was a cinch to put them in the ground.

The daffodils have opened up, giving a spot of color to the generally gray color motif we have lately.

The raspberry canes are moving past the bud stage and starting to put out a few leaves. I pruned and tied them in early March so now all we have to do is wait for the little red rubies to arrive.

Even the lilacs are getting in the mix. We have three lilacs total, but one of them has got to be of a much different variety than the other two. It has differently shaped leaves and puts out it’s flower buds at the same time as the leaf buds. Below you can see the tiny purple lilac bloom to be.

The other lilacs put out leaf buds like normal. Any promise of a flower is still wrapped tightly inside.

The pac choi took transplant quite well. I have both it and the cabbage covered in remay for the time being out in the bed. I had quite a time with cabbage butterfly last year and wanted to try and prevent as much as I could this year, but something is still munching on the cabbage seedlings pretty heavily. It apparently prefers cabbage to pac choi as these are in rows right next to each other and the pac choi shows minimal damage.

Rhubarb is peeking out too, the knarled leaves in thier tight covering always remind me of brains when they first start to pop out of the ground. A sickly little medical experiment in the backyard.

And the blueberries are showing signs of life too. We have 4 plants now in the bed out front. I am hoping to get more than a 5 berry harvest this year, but between the crows, squirrels and marauding middleschoolers that frequent our front walkway each day - I am keeping my anticipation in check. I’ll just be happy that the kids are eating something edible instead of daring each other to eat the berries off the ornamental bush we previously had out front (true story).

So this is the post where I expose my ignorance. My plant identification skills suck for the most part. This little green thing above showed up last year in what was originally to be our strawberry bed (poor siting and the strawberries, erm… failed to thrive?). I have no idea what this is and am reluctant to make a command decision on whether it stays or goes until I do know. So the question goes to you, dear readers. Anybody have a clue here? It is a low growing plant that dies back in the winter, puts out these tiny little purple flowers through spring and summer, and generally taunts me for my ignorance every time I look at it. Help!

Novella, over at Ghost Town Farm, posted the other week offering up seeds she had saved from her largest Triamble winter squash. I excitedly took her up on her offer and received an envelope in the mail not too long after with several beautiful seeds. I’m thrilled to have a new variety to try this summer and it got me thinking about the seeds I’ve saved. I posted at the end of last week that we had finally done in the last Sugar Hubbard from our garden. It was a 26 pound squash which is a miracle in itself given the short and cold growing season of 2008 (scroll down to the Dark Days post for a picture).

This kept incredibly well, with no signs of rot and has a great flavor. The Sugar Hubbard is a bonafide Pacific Northwest heirloom. A cross between the Sweet Meat and Hubbard squashes developed by the Gill Brothers in Portland, OR. I saved seed from this last and largest one and would like to pass on the good juju that Novella extended me (in other words pay it forward) by offering some of this seed to any of you who may want it. Drop me an email with your address and I will send some along (maya at gonesouth dot com).

Note the georgous little bowl those seeds are sitting in is courtesy of Annie over at Edifice Rex, making beautiful pottery is but one of her multitudinous skills.

Happy first day of spring! I sit here this morning silently hoping that the rain doesn’t start up again so I can celebrate by putting my Pac Choi, leek and Cabbage seedlings in the ground. I can already feel the warmth converging a bit. We haven’t had a 30 some degree day in over a week! It will be shorts weather in no time, eh?

It appears the White House is getting in the mood too! It has been 66 years since the White House last had a food producing garden*. That changes today…

*Jimmy Carter had an herb garden, but Eleanor Roosevelt was the last to grow her own substantial food.

In the interim, consider this

Turn off the television, radio, lights, ipod, microwave and even our much loved computers. Light a candle or hurricane lamp and have a finger puppet contest with those you love. Play hide and seek. If you are lucky enough to see stars, stare at them for a while. Talk to each other for a whole hour, uninterrupted.

Our final featured meals for this week are essentially a continuation of the Pig Parts post below. I detailed the grand experiments with the pork liver, but had yet to address the heart and kidneys. This past week we consumed both with surprising results. The hearts I cleaned, sliced thin and pounded. I dredged them in a bit of seasoned flour and fried them in the cast iron skillet.

They were served with a Hubbard squash gratin (we finally broke open our 26 lb Sugar Hubbard from the summer garden). I never had eaten heart before, and I was very pleasantly surprised at the full flavor and tenderness.

And the last meal from our soon to be delivered pig was the kidneys. I prepared these two ways (having never eaten kidneys before either). On the advice of Hank, I soaked two kidneys overnight in milk. One of the kidneys I chopped up and deviled with the addition of a Pasco Onion and some sliced shitake mushrooms. The other I seasoned simply with salt and pepper and threw on my cast iron grill. Both were good! Neither lived up to the horror stories or tales of extreme distaste I’ve heard many people express and I’d definitely eat either again rather than see it go to waste.

Despite the snow/rain/snow/hail/freezing temperature merry-go-round we’ve been on lateley there are still signs of life in the garden. The cold frames I built last month are serving the little seedlings well, protecting them from the below freezing temperatures we’ve had. The pic above is one of the cold frames that I planted first. This box contains radish, spinach, mache, green onions and arugula. All of which are peeking thier little green heads above the earth at this point.

I’m looking forward to some fresh spinach…

And been doing some more reading of my “Preserving Food Without Canning or Freezing” book, which offers several ways of preserving radishes. I think I may try all of them as our radish crops tend to be excessive.

The lone broccoli plant made it through this last deep freeze as well and it looks like we will be having some very early spring broccoli here in about a month, it already has a small head on it.

And there are other, more general signs that the sun is indeed coming - if still a few months off.

As I’ve mentioned before, we ordered half a pig from a local farm a mere 15 minutes from our house this year. In the course of making the cut arrangements with the farm I inquired about the offal. You see, I am a bit preoccupied with using everything. Especially when an animal is being killed to feed me. I was alternately vegetarian or vegan for approximately 14 years. Now that I have started eating meat again I’ve focused on procuring as much as possible from local sources who treat their animals and their land with the respect they both deserve.

Our half pig is scheduled to be processed within the next week or two. We are behind the regular boat since I wanted to get a pig that had been scalded and scraped, preserving all of that pig skin on the cuts of meat for various curing and food preservation projects I have planned.  However, the butcher date for the remaining batch of pigs (which were being skinned on-farm instead of scraped at the butcher) was scheduled for this past Thursday out at the farm. Shelley at Whistling Train said I was welcome to come out when they butchered and take whatever we would like of the offal and other items that don’t make it to the butchers table.

So Thursday around noon we headed out in the rainstorm to the farm nestled between the railroad tracks in Kent. We were the only customers there for the actual slaughter and apparently the only ones who had requested any of the offal. We got there before the slaughter truck and waited a while before they arrived and set to work. The mastery of these guys and the speed with which they worked was pretty incredible. The pigs were dispatched quickly with a single shot and rapidly were broken down into sides of pork that were packed into the refrigerated truck for transport to the butcher for further processing.

We walked away with 3 whole livers, 3 hearts and several kidneys. There was more for the taking, a total of 6 pigs were slaughtered. But a pig liver is a very large thing, and I need several more kitchen hands to accomplish the translation of raw organs to edible and storable food products. Next year I will be much more on my game (hopefully with kitchen recruits) now that I know of the volume available for the taking (that would otherwise go to waste). I drove home slowly, taking corners at 5 miles per hour with a large pot of organs in the back seat.

I’d never had pig liver before. Truth be told I wasn’t exposed to much in the way of offal growing up. We had liver and onions, and aside from the occasional bowl of menudo or tacos de lengua when eating out, that about sums my experience. I had researched quite a bit in anticipation and decided upon 3 recipes to use the pig liver. I came upon the thought of making pate in half-pint jars and was curious whether I’d be able to can it. I decided to use the jars, but freeze the pate after cooking. Several sources stated that the pate survived freezing quite well. I was concerned about the high heat of the pressure cooker breaking the pate emulsion and turning it into a chunky greasy mess. I know there must be a way to do this as most commercially produced pate is offered in shelf stable glass jars or cans - but I will need to do some small scale experimenting before subjecting such a large amount of food to an untested process. I decided upon two different pate recipes, the first was Pate Campagne from Bourdain’s ‘Les Halles’ cookbook, and the second was Pate Grandmere from ‘Charcuterie’ (Polcyn and Ruhlman). The last recipe I used was for an italian liver sausage called Mazzafegati, found on Hunter Angler Gardner Cook ( I omitted the pine nuts).

After soaking the organs in cold water for several hours on Thursday it was too late in the day to get started so I packed the them into the fridge for the night. Friday morning I prepped the marinades for the pates and set them to rest overnight in the fridge. Then I started on the sausage  and by Friday evening we had a large pile of links chilling in the fridge as well. Our friend J. stopped by just as we were starting to stuff the ground mixture into the sausage casings and his extra set of hands were most welcome. It is a messy job, but the results are well worth it. You can be assured that there was no shortage of crude jokes as these two gents helped to stuff the sausage.

After sectioning off the sausage into links I let them sit overnight in the fridge to tighten up. We sent J home with a string as well for all of his able-bodied assistance. The next morning I packed up the pan of sausages and put most in the freezer - saving one to cook (gotta test your product, ya know).

The pates were finally finished late Saturday night, when I pulled the last batch out of the makeshift bain-marie. Most of them I put in the freezer, reserving a small jar of each type for the fridge and snacking/taste testing. Overall, we are both very pleased with the way they all turned out. The sausages will provide numerous meals, and the pate’s are excellent to have around for our snacking purposes, for dinner parties and guests.

I have to admit I was a bit anxious about going out to the farm for the slaughter. I’m really a big softy at heart. I had the opportunity when I was much younger to help some family friends on slaughter day. We killed and processed the chickens they had raised and watched while the mobile slaughter guys killed and broke down the cows. I think I was maybe 10 at the time. I handled the chickens fine, but the cows for some reason really shook me. I think it is important to have a full understanding of where our food comes from, so I wanted to be there for the slaughter. The preceding week was full of all kinds of mental preparation. I was kind of surprised at my reaction this time. For me I think there will always be some emotion involved in seeing an animal killed. But knowing where it came from, how it was treated and processed from beginning to end of life and doing what I could to not waste any of it brings some sort of solace. All in all I feel ok about it, I feel ok eating it, and I feel closer to the understanding of how food arrives on my table. Somehow there is something therapeutic in witnessing and doing the processing work yourself. In many ways, for those of us that eat meat- this is the logical extension of gardening. Gaining a greater understanding of what goes into the dinner put in front of you every night makes you appreciate every morsel and think twice before you blithely pick something up at the supermarket.

And now I need to focus on the heart and kidneys, which are still in the fridge. If any of you have recipe suggestions or advice, I’d welcome it! Also - if there are any local like-minded readers out there who might be interested in a kitchen work-party next year, please drop me a line. This is a case where there can’t be too many cooks in the kitchen!

This past week has been pretty busy. So busy that I never got to read the book I was supposed to by this afternoon, I haven’t kept up at all with posting this week and here we are staring down a rapidly approaching Monday. Saturday was another busy day, full of meat grinding and mixing in the morning then straight off to our first 5 hour beginners beekeeping class in the afternoon. After class we headed back home to grind meat again and do a bit more cooking (all of the meat grinding will be detailed in the next post, I promise). So dinner had to be something quick that didn’t take any oven space and was relatively simple.

It is precisely times like these that I realize the value of canning our summer harvests and having jars of goodies readily available. After a quick look at the state of the kitchen and the stores in my office I arrived at Tomato Soup. I diced up several large cloves of garlic along with some shallot and sauteed in olive oil. I added a jar of home-canned tomato sauce and a quart of canned chicken stock as well. Seasoned with salt, pepper, and a bit of smoked paprika. I finished the soup with a bit of cream and stirred in some pesto I made last year and had frozen precisely for a time like this. It could have only been made better by a couple of grilled cheese sandwiches to accompany alongside, but we had not the space or the attention to dedicate to that.

Next up: The great offal experiment of 2009….

The one potential downside to a nice rustic soup - is that the finished product likely will not have many redeeming visual qualities. This was definitely a meal where the sum of the parts did not at all equal the individual parts on an aesthetic scale. The beans soaking above are Peregion Beans. Once again purchased from Full Circle Farm at the West Seattle Farmers Market. From what I read, these are an heirloom bean originally from Oregon. I found them really striking with their black swirls and color variation.

After soaking the beans I set them to simmering with a bay leaf (snipped from the Bay Laurel in the backyard) and a couple of cloves of crushed garlic. The last quarter of an onion soon joined the beans and I prepped some previously frozen chinese broccoli, yellow carrots, butternut squash and sunchokes for adding when the beans were almost done.

I toasted a bit of cumin and coriander, ground them in my mortar and added them to the broth of chicken stock along with a bit of chinese 5 spice, tumeric, salt and pepper. The sunchokes lent an overall sweetness to the soup that I hadn’t quite expected, but it went well with the butternut squash and the spices balanced it nicely.

Local Ingredients - Homemade chicken stock, yellow carrots, chinese broccoli, peregion beans, onion, garlic, bay leaf, butternut squash, sunchokes.

Non-Local Ingredients - Salt, Pepper, Chinese 5 spice powder, tumeric, cumin, coriander.

Yep - this is what I woke up to today. All of the seed planting and gardening glory of last week buried under a couple inches of snow. I know for those readers in the Northeast you are probably tired of listening to me whine about the miniscule amounts of snow that drop upon us here. But this is Seattle! We don’t get snow at the end of February. I’ve got peas in the ground under that white fluffy cover, dammit! I’m hoping that the insulating properties of the snow combined with the cold frames are protecting my beautiful little arugula and spinach seedlings inside.

I don’t know if the broccoli will fare so well without any of the protection afforded by the cold frames. This is my lone broccoli plant (out of an original eight) that survived the earlier winter snowstorms and freezing temps. it was shaping up quite nicely and I was anticipating a tasty head of broccoli sometime in March.

The sun is peeking out though so I can’t complain too loudly. Forecast calls for another potential two inches of snow today and then a bit of warming. Looks like the mud bowl will be in our backyard this weekend!

No - this isn’t one of ours. This is a picture from last May when our rhody bloomed. For living on a small city lot we actually get our fair share of wildlife. The herons seem to have established their migratory pattern right over our house so during the summer we see them cruising by and when they first show in Spring it is a welcome sign. We have all sorts of other birds too, most of which I (embarrassingly) can’t identify, but of those I do recognize we have stellar jays, chickadees, hummingbirds, robins, some sort of wood pecker and the ubiquitous crow. Huxley has a war currently on with the crows - something about his airspace being violated. This year also brought us a bald eagle. I’ve caught him gliding around several times on our Skyway winds and sometimes he alights in a nearby tree to survey the area.

I’d like to think that all of our efforts in planting out the back and front yards have made a nice little habitat for all of the fauna. We also have bees, lots and lots of bees. This past spring and summer I had great fun stalking bees in the yard with my camera. They are fascinating and I am thrilled to have them doing thier business in my backyard. So all of this lengthy introduction is intended to reveal the fact that we are going to try our hand at beekeeping this year!

I am beyond excited about the prospect and have been consuming beekeeping books and articles for a while now. About 3 weeks ago I drove out to Belfair to pick up two deep brood boxes and 4 honey boxes from a beekeeper who had posted on CraigsList. He had a bad shoulder and was slimming down his operation as it was becoming more and more difficult to lift boxes that can get up to 100 pounds when full of bees and honey.

Gary and I took a short intro to beekeeping class at the Snohomish County Extension Small Farms expo last month, and last night we attended the Puget Sound Beekeepers Association meeting. We will be taking a 2 day intro to beekeeping class offered by the PSBA in March and our package of bees will arrive in late April. I just have to say that ever since I started researching and talking to people about keeping bees, I have never met a more friendly group of people who are thrilled to offer you advice and help you get started. I also had the good fortune of hooking up with one of my mothers co-workers who has kept bees for years now. He invited us out to his place and offered to be a sounding board for advice and questions.

It is king of astonishing after so many years of being interested in ‘off-the-wall’ things and having to learn everything by book-reading and trial/error, to find such a willing group of mentors and excellent resources. We still have several supplies to buy - a smoker, hive tools, queen excluder, feeder, the list goes on. But come late April we should be buzzing around here. And talk about a symbiotic hobby - beekeeping and gardening! I am interested to see if there is an effect on my ultimate fruit set this year.

This weeks Dark Days featured meal brings back fond memories for me. When I was younger, my brother and I spent a summer traveling around Alaska with my Dad. We camped, canoed, berry picked and even spent a few nights in an Inuit whaling camp. One of the meals we frequently had at night after we set up the tents and my dad fired up the Coleman stove was Shepherd’s Pie. I suppose a true shepherds pie would usually be made with lamb - but to tell the truth, I don’t believe I’ve ever had it with lamb. Ground beef is much more prevalent in this house at the moment. We didn’t order a lamb this year and our quarter beef included over 60 pounds of ground.

I constructed the meal in a cast iron skillet (only fitting as that is the way we ate it in AK). I sauteed an onion and some garlic with the remains of a log of seasoned butter I had stashed away in the fridge. I honestly can’t remember what all I put in the butter when I made it. But there was a definite coriander and cumin element. I added a pound of ground beef to the pan to brown and also threw in the remains of a jar of tomato paste canned from our garden. The last bit to go into the mix was a bunch of diced chinese broccoli, frozen from last summer.

While the beef mixture was cooking I boiled up several russet potatoes then drained and mashed them with a bit of milk (always with the skin left on). I topped the beef and veggies with a fluffy layer of mashed potato and covered the top with some sharp cheddar cheese. The skillet went into the oven for around 45 minutes to meld and melt the cheese. It was a easy, two pot meal and there were no leftovers.

Local Ingredients - Milk, Beef, Tomato Paste, Garlic, Onion, Potato, Butter, Chinese Broccoli.

Non-Local Ingredients - Coriander, Cumin, Salt, Pepper, Cheese (Tillamook, OR. Not so far away - but could be closer)

We’ve had a spate of sunny days this week and they are beginning to show their effect in the garden. I’ve got several volunteer and overwintered violas popping up in the main bed, flashing their colors underneath the straw mulch we left on the bed for the winter.

Out front, the first primrose peeked out this week too. Something out there really likes to munch the leaves and flowers, but the plants always survive and give the first bit of spring.

I direct seeded a portion of the other cold frame this week with Beets and Cilantro. I ran a full surround of peas along the outer border of the same bed (picture at the bottom of this post). I hope to utilize the existing hoop house structure that sits over the top of it to string up the peas for a spring harvest. Gotta figure out a plan for that.

I also started several lines of peas in gutter cut-offs. I can’t recall where I first heard of the idea, but last year I read something about starting peas/beans early by taking a cut section of gutter (the aluminum or plastic variety) filling it with soil and seeding. You can then place the movable sections of gutter in a cold frame/greenhouse and get a bit of a jump on the season. For peas, I see the benefit being a more rapid germination - they are pretty cold hardy, so once they sprout and get their first few true leaves they will be fine. It also works for us as we have not yet completed the addition of the other garden bed, so we are starting the peas and buying ourselves a bit of time to boot.

My experience with pole beans is that they will germinate and grow to about an inch or two, but then will not do anything until the daytime temperatures are close to 75 or 80 degrees. Using the gutter to start the beans will be especially useful for us since we try to pack as much growing as possible into the small garden space. This way I can plant a spring crop of cold hardy greens or radish in the location where the beans will ultimately go this summer, and not worry about the beans being planted too late for a good harvest. When the time comes you just dig a shallow trench the depth of the gutter and pushing from one side, slide the whole column out to it’s final resting place. I will post an update on how it works.

The seeds I started in newspaper pots are taking off. I only have one garden window that I use for seed starting. No heat mats or artificial lights. It has worked out pretty well so far. I started all of our tomatoes in this way last year and didn’t have any issues. The picture above I took a few weeks ago. Below is the current state of growth as of this morning.

This flat includes starts of Leek, Cabbabe (red and green), Pac Choi, Jalepeno pepper, Kohlrabi and Buttercrunch Lettuce. I recieved my final seed order yesterday from seed savers exchange and hope to get two other types of pepper, some mixed lettuce and poppies going within the next day or two. I’ll start tomatoes in March sometime. No sprouting yet from the cold frame, but I think I need to water with all the sun we’ve had lately. The soil inside the frames is actually looking pretty dried out now.

Thats the update from the garden. I am going to head out and soak up some of this sun before the rain comes tomorrow. We are going to pick up some wood this morning for incorporation into the wall of the new garden bed. This is Gary’s baby so I will defer to him to post on it (I’ll give him a week, then I get to blab about it).

This is a bag of shiitake plug spawn. 1000 plugs to be exact. When I last visited my friend down in Mossyrock in January we stayed up late talking seeds, gardening, critters and grand agricultural experiments. We hatched a plan to go in on the spawn and other assorted supplies for growing shiitake musrooms. The snowstorms of December and early January had left her with massive numbers of downed trees, a good portion of which were alder (one of the preferred hardwoods for growing mushrooms).

I trundled back to the city and ordered the plug spawn and she set about choosing the choicest fresh logs for our experiment. Knowledgeable sources say that a log should be inoculated with mycelium within 4-6 weeks of being cut, while the moisture content is still high in the wood. So we scheduled this past weekend as our day of labor. In the interim, she wire brushed each log to remove moss and other detritus. Saturday morning we hauled the logs onto a table (pickup truck bed) and got to work after cranking up the generator for the power drills - cordless drills just don’t cut it when you have to drill one thousand holes.

Not just a goat/goose/chicken/duck/cat/dog wrangler and grower of things, but also an artist- she freehand marked each log with drill spots in a diamond pattern for those of us less spatially/artistically gifted as we drilled out each marked hole.

The holes should be in a diamond pattern, 6-8 inches away from one another.

Once a log was fully drilled we inserted a plug into each hole, and tapped it down until it was flush with the bark.

Liam supervised Gary to make sure he was doing it right.

Molly couldn’t figure out why were were so interested in the big sticks and wouldn’t throw hers. (If that isn’t the saddest face in the whole world…)

Once the a log was fully plugged, the plugs were sealed off with melted cheese wax - applied with a foam brush.

And that was it! We hauled the 17 logs down to a pallet set up under the some fir. They will be occasionally doused with water to maintain the moisture and now we wait and see. It could be 6 months to a year for the first flush of mushrooms. Each log should give a minimum of 4 flushes before it is exhausted. We took two logs home with us and set them in a shady, moist spot on the side of the house. It will be interesting to see what effect the different climates have on the maturation of the logs.

The whole thing cost somewhere around $99 in supplies, $81 for the plug spawn and cheese wax and another $18 for the foam brushes and extra drill bits.

Our featured dinner this week was a relatively simple affair (comfort food really). Roasted Chicken, mashed potatoes, roasted carrots and braised red cabbage. The chicken was prepared very simply with a light rub of olive oil and sprinkle of salt before going in the oven. I sliced the last of the carrots from our most recent farmers market trip and combined them with a bit of olive oil, rosemary and salt before throwing them in the oven as well. Mashed russet potatoes from Pasco,WA (a 70 mile over violation of my 150 mile rule) enriched with a bit of canned chicken stock and Golden Glen Cream. The braised cabbage was sliced with a red onion and some butter, sauteed until wilting and then combined with a bit of red wine and apple cider vinegar. Once the chicken was out and resting I made up a quick gravy from the pan drippings, adding in just a bit of thyme and more chicken stock, salt and pepper.

It was all consumed on our laps as we watched the first dvd of the Battlestar Galactica series from netflix. All in all a very good meal and entertaining evening. Everyone else had seen the original Battlestar Galactica. I however, was raised in a cave apparently and had never seen it before- so they were all kind enough to periodically pause the show and fill me in on all the things I was missing.

Local Ingredients - Chicken, Potato, Carrot, Rosemary, Cream, Chicken Stock, Flour, Butter.

Not-so Local - Red Cabbage, Wine, Brown Sugar, Salt, Pepper, Olive Oil, Caraway Seed, Mustard Seed.

Dahl has been sitting for over a week now. At first (once again for those loyal readers who have followed the saga of Dahl since last spring) we thought she might be eggbound. She hadn’t laid for several days and was wandering around being even more bullyish than she usually is. Letting out these godawful screeches whenever she went into a nesting box…but no egg. Then, I finally found an egg under her and decided to let her have it if she wanted to set. But apparently the fact that I had seen/touched it made it unworthy - so she destroyed her own egg that same day.

That was Tuesday or Wednesday of last week. For several more days she sat, day and night in the nesting box with no egg. The other two girls laid a few eggs yesterday and Dahl promptly hopped up and switched boxes to sit on their eggs. Gary got those this morning and Dahl is back to sitting in her old box, who knows if she layed or not. The protective motherly screeches anytime we or the chickens come within 5 feet of her nest is killing our curiousity.

I’m not opposed to having a broody hen. In fact, I am kind of pleased to see that she still has that tendency (most chickens having had good motherhood almost totally bred out of them for factory farming). But none of these girls have had the romantic attention of a rooster since last April or so. It seems so sad for her to be putting all this effort in on a zero sum game. Perhaps next year we will get a few fertilized eggs to hatch out. But until then - she will have to get a clue at some point, right?

*Shameless takeoff on The Clash’s “Rudie can’t fail”, but I’ve been humming it since I realized she was broody. Be glad I work from home, eh?

I’ve been searching around lately for a 100% whole wheat pizza dough recipe. Most recipes that purport to be whole wheat dough are in actuality somewhere between 30-50% whole wheat with the remainder being either bread flour or all purpose. Now I’m not going to claim that I don’t like white pizza dough - but in the interests of using whole foods and better nutrition (and the 50 lb sack of whole wheat flour staring at me from a corner of my office) I really wanted to find a workable whole wheat version.

I found what I was looking for on The Nourishing Gourmet. I’m not a complete Sally Fallon convert and don’t exactly follow all of her guidance on never ingesting unsoaked wheat, nuts or seeds, but I do find a lot of useful and intriguing information in Nourishing Traditions -particularly the fermentation recipes. This dough recipe went the full 9 yards in terms of calling for an overnight soaking/fermenting of the wheat flour beforehand. I thought what the hell and went with it, using a few tablespoons of yoghurt to get it started since I didn’t have any whey defrosted (and I wasn’t about to defrost a gallon jug of when for two tablespoons).

The dough came together quite easily the next day and was a very pliable pizza dough. For toppings I used a tablespoon or so of roasted tomato paste and fleshed it out with some tomato sauce (both canned from our garden this summer). Mozzarella and a bit of blue cheese, minced garlic, fennel seasoned ground beef and baby spinach topped it off. The crust was most definitely wheaty - not at all reminiscent of the simple starchy 00 flour pizzas of Naples, but it wasn’t bad. More a flavor to get used to than anything else. And when you top things with cheese and goodies, who can complain?

Local Ingredients - Whole Wheat Flour, beef, fennel, tomato paste, tomato sauce, spinach, garlic.

Non-local Ingredients - mozzarella (didn’t make my own this time), Blue cheese.

I’ve been itching to get at least one of the new cold frames built since I scored free wood from a dumpster at Lowes the other weekend. Today was the day and I measured and calculated to see if I truly did have enough free wood to complete it (and I did, yahoo!). So here is the product of today’s efforts. We picked up two sliding glass door panels for free off CraigsList last fall. All the wood was free - so this is a 78″ by 39″ coldframe, all for the cost of a handful of deck screws.

I cut and assembled the four sides separately and Gary helped me to put it all together with his nifty corner clamps holding it in place while I fastened. I occasionally make fun of him for all the newfangeled gadgets he buys for the shop, but they come in handy!

The cold frame is now living in the new bed we built last summer. Eventually this bed will be a hoop house again and house peppers for the coming summer. But it usually doesn’t even get warm enough for putting tomatoes and peppers out until May around here, so in the interim I plan to get a good harvest of cold hardy greens going. I should get a harvest of lettuce, bok choi, mache and radishes before I have to move the cold frames and put the plastic back up.

I cleared the bed of its winter blanket of maple leaves yesterday. Hopefully the newfound sun and the addition of the cold frame in part of it will start warming the soil a bit. I’ve started some seeds inside already (details next post) and if the weather stays - I’ll direct seed some radish in the next day or two.

Puttering in the yard this afternoon, each of us pursuing our own little projects - it almost felt like summer was already here. I’m hoping today was a harbinger of the coming season.

I found this blurb on them at the Monticello Store website

Arikara beans, “Ricara” beans to Thomas Jefferson, were named for the Dakota Arikara tribe encountered by the Lewis and Clark expedition during their “Voyage of Discovery.” These beans were among the significant horticultural “discoveries” of Lewis and Clark, and perhaps more importantly, dried Arikara beans helped feed and sustain the members of the expedition through the arduous Fort Mandan winter of 1805 when temperatures averaged four degrees. Arikara beans were likely first grown in eastern North America by Thomas Jefferson at Monticello. Jefferson said the Arikara bean “is on of the most excellent we have had: I have cultivated them plentifully for the table tow years.”

Arikara beans were developed by Native Americans to produce in the remarkably short growing season of the northern plains. Jefferson referred to them as “forward” beans, because they bore so early in the season, as early as July 1 in 1809. Eastern North American gardeners need to sow seeds in sunny, fertile garden soil two weeks before the average spring frost date to avoid hot, humid temperatures. The beans can be harvested young and prepared as “snaps,” or dried in the pods for stews and dried bean dishes.

Further research found that Arikara beans are designated in Slow Food USA’s Ark of Taste and

because the Arikara Yellow bean does not fit the established classes for dry beans in North American, there is no ready market for the this bean and thus the bean’s existence is seriously threatened.

Hey, can I pick em or what? Given the short season/suitable for northern climates description (and Full Circles obvious success in growing them) I immediately pulled about 40 of the fattest looking beans aside to give a try at planting this year. I set about half of the remaining package to soak overnight in cold water. My beans were destined for soup the following day.

I started the soup by dicing about half an onion and two strips of bacon and set them to saute in a pot. I pulled out a quart of turkey stock (leftover from the Thanksgiving Turkey carcass I carried home with me this year). Diced up a few stalks of celery (organic and purchased from a local produce stand, but of unknown provenience). We had also picked up a replenishing stock of carrots from Full Circle and I prepped several of these as well.

After the onions and bacon were ready I added the soaked beans and quart of turkey stock to the pot and simmered for about and hour and a half. I tossed in the carrots and celery and when they were just about done I added the remainder of a quart of quartered green tomatoes that had been lingering in the fridge.

The beans were delicious. Savory and buttery and perfect winter fare, the soup wasn’t too shabby either! So there ya go - I tried something new and found something new to plant!

One of the goals Laura laid out in the intro to the Dark Days challenge was to try cooking with something unfamiliar. I have actually not really done that to any extent, mainly because I think I have done a lot of experimental cooking and tasting in my life. And in our household we really don’t have fussy eaters. That is unless  you count Gary’s ban on tofu of any sort, hot chile, bitter greens, super stinky cheese and large tapioca pearls (something about being a supertaster, but I ain’t buying it! ). Even then, these are items that I will either sneak into meals (telling him he needs his greens) or eat when cooking for myself (New Mexico green chile, yum!).

The items I haven’t eaten at least once stray into the obscenely expensive/ethically questionable (foie gras, caviar) or limited seasonality/availability (fiddleheads). There are a few out there I just need to seek out (goeyduck for starters…).

Who is that in my leeks?

In our failure to complete the upgraded fencing in of the chickens last weekend Blume and Dahl regularly go on walkabout during the day. We got a bit of sunshine this afternoon and as I scooted outside to absorb the last rays before the sun dropped down over the hills I spied an interloper.

Actually, there were two interlopers. Both girls had successfully made little wallows in the one slice of garden that was still graced by sunlight. When I came around and saw Dahl she had her head tucked securely under her wing and was in hot pursuit of a bonafide catnap.

Thankfully none of the chickens are very interested in the leeks. And as leeks and two surviving broccoli plants are the only things showing signs of life in the garden right now we aren’t too concerned. But they did scratch apart one of my poppies this afternoon. The fencing has got to go up!

]]> http://www.eighthacrebounty.com/2009/01/28/little-bit-o-sunshine/feed/ http://www.eighthacrebounty.com/2009/01/25/dark-days-catch-up/ http://www.eighthacrebounty.com/2009/01/25/dark-days-catch-up/#comments Sun, 25 Jan 2009 21:34:42 +0000 maya http://www.eighthacrebounty.com/?p=602 As I mentioned below, I missed last weeks Dark Days post so this one will cover two meals. First up was this weeks meal, a variation on keftedes as learned from a Moroccan friend.

I took a pound of beef from our quarter of grass-fed beef (Prairie Springs Ranch) and mixed it with a bunch of minced garlic, diced shallot, cilantro, ground cumin and coriander, salt, pepper and a drop of lemon juice. Hand molded into small patties and cooked em up on our cast iron skillet. Along with the keftedes I roasted some sunchokes in olive oil and garlic and also cracked and warmed a pint jar of green beans I canned this summer.

Last weeks Dark Days post would have been about the sunchoke gratin I finally got around to testing out. Despite never having tried this before, it came out pretty tasty and was surprisingly simple. I alternated thin slices of sunchoke with slices of leek from the garden. Between the layers I seasoned with salt, pepper and diced rosemary. The nifty little pottery casseroles I brought back from Turkey on our last trip there. These have been incredibly useful for a two person household when you don’t want to make a full size dish. Once all the layers were completed and seasoned I poured a bit of cream over each one to juice it up a bit. They went into the oven for around 45 minutes and came out a bubbling goey treat.

Local Ingredients: Beef, Sunchokes, Leeks, Rosemary, Green Beans, Cream, Garlic.

Non-Local (or unknown): Salt, Pepper, Olive Oil, Cumin, Cilantro, Coriander, Shallot, Lemon Juice.

I also missed last weeks Dark Days post, so the next post will be a double. Things around here have been cold. We got a bit of snow last night, but it is mostly melting off at the moment. We finally got around to getting some better fencing for expanding and splitting the chicken area. Blume and Dahl are regularly escaping thier 3′ chicken wire fence so that needed to be addressed. In addition I want to expand thier pen area but split it in two so that I can sow seed on one side while they scratch the other. That way we are growing at least a portion of thier food ourselves. And they can do thier own harvesting and fertilizing.

We knocked apart the last raised bed in the backyard in anticipation of redefining the coop area. I heeled in the two sage plants that needed to be relocated - still need to find a final resting place for them now. We also ordered several dwarf hazelnut trees that should arrive sometime in April. So if we don’t get the farm, at least we will have nuts in 10 years.

If it warms up enough we will work on a gate today (extreme cold ain’t kind to the burgeoning carpal tunnel of two career computer monkeys). Gary came up with a brilliant idea of wiring pvc pipe to the ends of the cattle panels we bought and then strategically sinking short rebar stakes in locations where we want to secure the fencing. This would be a sturdy enough fence when erected and when the girls were ranging in it. But at the times when we have them in the other pen, we wouldn’t have a big obstructive fence in the garden area. I am excited to see how it works. Part of the trick of working with such a small amount of land is figuring out ways to make it work for us, and still be somewhat presentable and pleasant for at least half the time.

While we were at the hardware store I noticed a dumpster stuffed with a good deal of odd-cut cedar boards. I asked if I could have them and came home with what I think will be enough to construct at least one of my Glass door cold frames. A lucky find. I am gearing up to start seed shortly and this year I am trying my hand at making newspaper pots. Several nights this week we rolled pots as we watched tv. I am a bit concerned about them holding together long enough for transplanting into larger plastic pots but I figure it is worth a try.

Huxley has been particularly needy since I left for 3 1/2 days. This is the look of a dog that really wants to sit on your lap and can’t understand why you won’t let him. (We regularly cuddle and he climbs up on my lap, but he is over 100 pounds and has a tendency to put my extremities to sleep if he stays too long.)

This weeks meal is essentially the same as last weeks featured meal - with a few additions. The truth is that the farmers markets have been pretty scarce lately and the main output from our own garden after the snow has consisted mainly of Leeks and Eggs. That, coupled with the fact that I am trying to eat something other than potatoes all winter led to a reinvention of the Leek and Chevre omelet of last week. The chickens are still putting out eggs like it is the height of summer. A pleasant surprise as I did not at all expect this sort of production in January. We don’t artificially light the coop, so they must know something that is escaping the humans of the household.

This meal was also an attempt to use some of the leftovers we have in the fridge from earlier meals this week. I decided to make a quiche with our abundance of eggs. Another simple and easy meal. I made a pie crust from whole wheat flour. I’ve been experimenting with proportions of white to wheat flour in my crusts over the past year and have found that I can use 100% whole wheat without sacrificing any of the flakiness or tenderness in the crust. For the quiche filling I pulled two leeks from the garden, sauteed the last of the salt preserved green beans (featured in my first Dark Days post), threw in some shredded beef from an earlier pot roast meal and topped with the remaining chevre I picked up at the farmers market last week. We also dipped into jars of salsa canned earlier this year for adorning the slices of quiche. One mild tomato salsa and one spicier tomatillo salsa for me.

One of the challenges for me in trying to eat locally this year is the lack of greens after a big freeze. I’ve mentioned in earlier posts my goals of getting together a much more comprehensive winter garden for next year, but this year everything that was exposed to the elements took a header and we are essentially left with sweet and starchy items until the first spring greens come in. It seems to be the case for our local farmers as well if the offerings at the markets are any indication.

Now don’t get me wrong, I love potatoes, squash, onions, apples, leeks, etc. And if I were actually doing enough physical labor during the spring/summer/fall I would look forward to winter when I could hibernate, loosen my pants a little and binge on the starchy goodness until work season rolled around again. But as it is, I make my living sitting in front of a computer regardless of the season. And I’m afraid no amount of dog walking, manic gardening or home improvement projects is equivalent to the labor expended during a haying/planting/harvest season.

Therein lies the irony for us city slickers, when we try to eat with the seasons we realize that our bodies and lifestyles have become so disconnected from the production end of things that the normal nutrient balance/body weight bell curve doesn’t exactly curve downward anymore.  So we join gyms and pay them for the privilege of sweating under their roofs - all of that energy, food energy, being spun out into nothingness on the wheels of a recumbent bike. Or better yet a treadmill that takes electricity, burning energy to assist us in burning energy. The irony…

Local Ingredients: Eggs , green beans and Leeks (our backyard), Chevre (River Valley Ranch), Beef (Prarie Springs Ranch), Butter, Milk and Cream. Tomato Salsa (Tomatoes from our backyard, other ingredients from Summer Renton Farmers market). Tomatillo Salsa (Ingredients from Renton Farmers Market). Wheat Flour.

Non-Local Ingredients: Salt, pepper, nutmeg.

This weeks Dark Days highlight is perhaps the simplest meal of them all, certainly the meal with the fewest ingredients (I get carried away with things to put in my salads). A very late breakfast/lunch today of a sauteed leek and chevre omelet was just the thing to fit my mood, and completely local. I went to the West Seattle Farmers Market this morning. Pickings were scarce in terms of fresh produce, everyone’s fields seem to have been as decimated as our garden was by the snow and freezing temps. Nevertheless, I did get some more sunchokes from Whistling Train Farm ( I’ve got a hankering to turn these into some sort of gratin). A few bulbs of garlic and a sweet little package of made-yesterday chevre from River Valley Ranch.

I got home and picked a leek from the garden, sauteed it while cracking the eggs and in a short time had a simple, rich and tasty brunch. Two of the eggs came from our girls (they think spring is coming too). One egg came from Stiebrs Farms. I had a camera at the ready to take a picture, since I’ve been rather remiss lately in keeping the photo montage going for Dark Days. However, a omelet flipping incident rendered the product decidedly unphotogenic. Flavor however, was unaffected.

Local Ingredients: Leek, Butter, Eggs, Chevre.

Non Local Ingredients: None!

A Message by George Carlin:

The paradox of our time in history is that we have taller buildings but shorter tempers, wider Freeways, but narrower viewpoints. We spend more, but have less; we buy more, but enjoy less. We have bigger houses and smaller families, more conveniences, but less time. We have more degrees but less sense, more knowledge , but less judgment, more experts, yet more problems, more medicine, but less wellness.

We drink too much, smoke too much, spend too recklessly, laugh too little, drive too fast, get too angry, stay up too late, get up too tired, read too little, watch TV too much, and pray too seldom.

We have multiplied our possessions, but reduced our values. We talk too much, love too seldom, and hate too often.

We’ve learned how to make a living, but not a life. We’ve added years to life, not life to years. We’ve been all the way to the moon and back, but have trouble crossing the street to meet a new neighbor. We conquered outer space but not inner space. We’ve done larger things, but not better things.

We’ve cleaned up the air but polluted the soul. We’ve conquered the atom but not our prejudice. We write more but learn less. We plan more but accomplish less. We’ve learned to rush but not to wait. We build more computers to hold more information, to produce more copies than ever, but we communicate less and less.

These are the times of fast foods and slow digestion, big men and small character, steep profits and shallow relationships. These are the days of two incomes but more divorce, fancier houses, but broken homes. These are days of quick trips, disposable diapers, throwaway morality, one night stands, overweight bodies, and pills that do everything from cheer, to quiet, to kill. It is a time when there is much in the showroom window and nothing in the stockroom. A time when technology can bring this letter to you, and a time when you can choose either to share this insight, or to just hit delete…

Remember; spend some time with your loved ones, because they are not going to be around forever.

Remember, say a kind word to someone who looks up to you in awe, because that little person soon will grow up and leave your side.

Remember, to give a warm hug to the one next to you, because that is the only treasure you can give with your heart and it doesn’t cost a cent.

Remember, to say, ‘I love you’ to your partner and your loved ones, but most of all mean it. A kiss and an embrace will mend hurt when it comes from deep inside of you.

Remember to hold hands and cherish the moment for someday that person will not be there again.

Give time to love, give time to speak! And give time to share the precious thoughts in your mind.

AND ALWAYS REMEMBER:

Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.

If you don’t send this to at least 8 people….Who cares?

George Carlin

Note the gorgeous lid that he made from Walnut and Mahogany (he does beautiful work - you should see my kitchen cabinets). The crock came from my aunt and uncle who he had just visited down in Eugene, (Thanks Jim and Kat!). I was beside myself with the gift! Now I have the means to do large batches of sauerkraut, salt preserved green beans and whatever else I dream up. I think the first order of business will be to ferment a whole head of cabbage from the spring cabbage harvest. Howling Duck Ranch posted about this earlier in the year and the idea intrigued me. Once fermented, she peels off the whole leaves and uses them for cabbage rolls. I’m already pondering some homemade sausage from our half-pig stuffed inside fermented cabbage leaves with other goodies.

In other news, the first package of seeds arrived from Nichols Garden Nursery and are happily piled in the livingroom waiting thier chance. I’ve gone the route of complete and total OCD this year with the garden planning. Spending hours calculating out days to maturity and fitting in different crops who’s timelines work with each other. I made a to-scale excel template of two of the garden beds and mapped out the first planting too. At the risk of exposing exactly how obsessed I am, here is the first Feb-May garden plan for the year. It isn’t really that readable an image because it is (necessarily) done in pencil and has already been erased and written over a million times. I have two others in states of mid-completion for the summer/fall months.

I am working out a deal with my friend down south to borrow some of her land for growing winter squash this year. We love having squash to take us through the dark months, but it is such a space hog for our little eighth of an acre that I proposed doing a trade of some sort. In exchange for a few plots of ground to grow our squash in, I will start seed for her. We have a consistent warm environment here in the house so she should get a quicker growing season out of the deal. I’ve expanded what we are growing this year so it will be nice to have the space that the winter squash usually takes.

The chickens have started laying again. Apparently all it took was the passing of the solstice and they have kicked in to spring mode. The past several days have yielded us at least one if not two eggs each day. I am once again reminded how much better thier eggs are. Even when we do buy eggs at the store, we buy a local organic free range brand, but they don’t even come close to our eggs. The girls all came through thier molt and are flying thier coop regularly. Hopping over the fence to get at the bugs on the other side. Not a big deal as they stay in the yard, but it puts us in the position of having to do a chicken check everytime we are about to let Hux in the backyard. I clipped wings earlier this morning in an attempt to curb the breakouts, but not an hour later Blume and Dahl were pecking in the yard again. I think a taller fence is in order.

Gary wants to do an experimental planting of the 3 sisters, so he chose the corn variety, the Hidatsa beans and the scallop squash. We don’t usually grow corn, it will be interesting to see how it does on the windy hill. A lot of the seed ordered will be put in for a winter garden. I figured if I put my money where my mouth was up front this year and ordered the seed ahead of time, I will be more likely to get my act together in time for fall planting. Not to mention building the other two coldframes we have the materials for.

We finally started to thaw around here. I went out to the garden to see what survived the snow and it looks like the leeks are going to pull through will little to no loss. We did lose all the cauliflower and the nasturtium greens. A few of the broccoli look like they might make it, and I have hopes that the parsley will rebound. The rutabaga and chard may rally as well, so we may actually be eating some greenery before March if we are lucky.

I ordered from two new catalogs this year, Wild Garden Seed and Nichols Nursery - both based in Oregon. Hopefully they both work out. Wild Garden Seeds I learned of from Throwback at Trapper Creek. They also sell a chicken lettuce mix by the pound that can be broadcast sown. I bought a pound of that for the girls to keep them in greenery when we don’t want to share. I am working on a way to broaden then divide their pen area to grow in one area and range them in the other, then switch. It would be nice to get them more on food grown from our yard rather than feed from the store. Orders also went in to Territorial Seed and Seed Savers Exchange.

Nichols had amazingly good prices compared to the others. If their seed is true and I have a good experience with it this year I can see ordering more from them in the future. On average they pack envelopes by weight, with the average number of seeds much higher for a lesser price than competitors. And it is a second generation family business.

• Golden Bantam Corn
• Sunny Delight Scallop summer squash
• Lagenaria Longissima summer squash
• Hidatsa Shield Figure Beans
• Scarlet Runner Beans
• Giant Musselburgh Leeks
• Arugula (I saved some seed from last year, but am not sure it was mature)
• Ishikura Improved Green Onions
• Broad Windsor Fava Bean
• DeCicco Broccoli
• Early Jersey Wakefield Cabbage
• Early Jalepeno pepper
• Chervena Chuska pepper
• Early Radish Mix
• Mr. Big shelling peas
• Razzle Dazzle Spinach
• Envy Carrot (not my first choice, Oxheart was sold out already!)
• All American Parsnip
• 4 color Hierloom Mix Beets (Golden, Chioggia, Albino and Red)
• Ground Cherry
• Lacinato Kale
• Champion Collards
• Sugarloaf Chicory
• Pungent Mix Mustard Greens
• Behana Mustard Greens
• Miners Lettuce
• Machalong Mache
• Jersey Knight Asparagus (25 root crowns, $$$ ouch!)
• Tatsoi
• Golden Purslane
• Mammoth Sandwich Island Salsify

Roasted Leg of Lamb with Fennel Butter and Red Wine Sauce

Glazed Baby Carrots and Parsnips

Sauteed Kale and Spinach with Shallots and Garlic

Roasted Garlic Mashed Potatoes with Rosemary

Roasted Jerusalem Artichokes

and for dessert a choice of

Pumpkin Custard Tart with Anise Crust

or Espresso Chocolate Pecan Pie

both offered with a topping of maple whipped cream.

The leg of lamb was the last bit of lamb we had in the freezer from last years purchase of a whole lamb from Bradrick Family Farm in Montisano. We didn’t get a lamb this year (for some reason Bradrick has decided not to sell direct any longer) and it was sad to see the last of it go, but a Christmas dinner for 8 was a fitting goodbye. The fennel came from our golden fennel plant this year, I harvested a metric ton of fennel seeds in the fall and this seemed like a great use for them.

Most of the vegi’s for the side dishes came from the U district farmers market on the Saturday before. We ventured out despite freezing temperatures and snow to see if any farmers had anything. We picked up a bunch of sunchokes, some beautiful tiny carrots, and a bit more garlic. It was so cold on that day that all of the meat purveyors simply had thier individually quick frozen and wrapped cuts laying out on the tables, no coolers necessary.

The desserts both turned out well. The pumkin custard tart I made from a sugar pumpkin I picked up a month ago at the Columbia City Market. The pecan pie, decidedly the most unlocal part of the meal - was the bit hit. I worked from a recipe found in a December 2007 issue of Fine Cooking. I had been wanting to try this recipe for over a year and with good reason it seems. Now I will go about tweaking and experimenting to see if I can replace hazelnuts for the pecans for a more local twist. Does anyone know of a workable substitute to corn syrup in pies of this sort?

Local Foods: Lamb, Kale, Garlic, Fennel, Butter, Cream, Flour, Pumpkin, Potatoes, Carrots, Rosemary, Jerusalem Artichokes (sunchokes), Red Wine, Eggs.

Non Local Ingredients: Pecans, corn syrup, salt, pepper, olive oil, proscuitto (in the kale), spinach, parsnips (unknown provenience), Espresso powder and chocolate.

The snow is still falling here. I’ll pull my boots on soon enough to go check on the girls and maybe snap a picture or two. Our meals have trended toward the comfort food variety with the brisk weather outside, featured this week is the lazy womans version of enchiladas.

A few nights ago I broke down a Draper Valley chicken, poaching the breasts and reserving the rest for another dinner. As the breasts cooled from poaching I sauteed some onions and garlic with cumin and thinly sliced some raw sweetmeat squash. I grated several ounces of Tillamook pepperjack cheese as well. After dicing one chicken breast and letting the onions cool, I layered them with the squash, cheese and locally made corn tortillas.

Between the corn tortilla layers I spread liberal glugs of the green tomato enchilada sauce I canned up earlier in the year with our plethora of green tomatoes. I finished the top layer with the last of the cheese and popped it in the oven for about an hour. I probably used a bit too much of the enchilada sauce as the tortillas broke down into thier original components rather than retaining thier structure. But it all held together rather well, the squash merged nicely with the tart sauce and how can you say no to cheese?

And then, this morning I woke up with an urge for a warm breakfast (a rarity around here, we don’t usually even eat breakfast). I decided to make sourdough blueberry pancakes and topped em with butter and local blackberry honey. Yum.

Local Ingredients: Chicken, sweetmeat squash, onions, garlic, corn tortillas, green tomato enchilada sauce, blueberries, sourdough starter, butter, honey.

Non-Local Ingredients: Salt, Pepperjack cheese (Tillamook OR), Cumin.

In an earlier post I mentioned that if it was going to be this cold here, it would be nice to have some real snow to accompany it. Well, it came! A day later than the forecast, but here on Thursday evening I am comfortably snuggled in front of the computer, a jelly jar of wine to my left and about 5 or 6 inches of snow layered over everything outside the window on my right. I woke up this morning to a slight dusting, but not long after 8 am it started to snow in earnest and continued all day.

I can’t express how thankful I am to be here in my warm house with my boy home too, all other critters tucked in , and a stocked fridge. A 100 pound lap dog who’s resting body temp is over 101 degrees also helps one to warm up quite quickly after playing in the snow. This time last year I likely would have been in my car, desperately trying to figure out how to avoid the idiocy of other drivers and scale the hill to get home from work. One year I left work at 2pm after it started snowing, and didn’t make it home until 10 at night. It is good to be here, we are warm, dry and the snow makes everything so beautiful. I love the calm and quieting effect it has on the regular ambient noise of the neighborhood. I could duck outside right now and just listen to the silence.

Highlander-hill-dwellers that we are, we may actually be socked in here for a few days. The forecast doesn’t show any warming temperatures above freezing for several days, and packed snow and ice on the roads that lead off our hill make things much more like a slip’n’slide than a thruway.And I haven’t even seen a metro bus go by on the main road today - a clear signal that the road is treacherous. If that is the case, so be it. Maybe we’ll make a snowman on the weekend.

How could you turn away from those faces just wanting a scruff?

I mentioned in a previous post that we headed down south to farmsit for the weekend for a friend who is currently in Kenya. A stormfront blew in on Friday night and rewarded us with increasing snow flurries on our way down. We took the backroads that circle near Mt. Rainier and it was actually a pleasant drive. Not so much snow to make the driving treacherous but enough to make everything very picturesque.

We stopped to look at an old homestead on 5.33 acres in a nearby town as well. The snow was deep there and as we tramped around the property peeking in windows and peering into the barn, Hux bounded around chest deep in the fluffy stuff. He was a very happy dog. The property was pretty neat too, a great old barn in good shape. a number of other outbuildings and some pasture with plenty of space for a large garden. The home needs some serious work to be habitable but it is a nice little spot complete with a little train running through the valley. It’s whistle reverberated off the hills as we were looking around and made it all feel very Little House on the Prairie-ish. So - if anyone has a spare 100K burning a hole in their pockets, I promise I’ll put it to good use!

After stopping at the grocery store we got down to the farm and immediately set about getting a fire going - a task which Gary diligently kept at until the cabin was about 100 degrees (the boy runs either hot or cold, no in between). I went  to do the evening feeding of the critters and break up the ice in their waterers. We were greeted at the gate by Liam, the newest addition to the farm. You’ll see him here in a picture from this summer, cooling his heels in a bucket of water in close to 100 degree weather. He wasn’t so hot in this picture - but look at that tongue!

Molly, the oldest resident on the farm was ever watchful. She has calmed down a bit in her old age though, lost a bit of that manic-obsessive border collie drive.

The geese started honking the minute they saw me and didn’t let up until some cob was dropped at their feet. Sociable, demanding and bossy creatures they are (and I never forget that they could probably break an arm with the flap of a wing). Ain’t nothing quite like a goose hiss.

The poor ducks just try to stay out of their way and follow you around hoping there is a bit of food left for them.

It was chilly out the whole time we were there and aside from tromping about a bit we holed up inside for the most part. Got Liam dried up a bit before he went tearing off into the snow again to make sure the goats weren’t misbehaving (that dog takes his job very seriously).

We returned to Seattle in still freezing temperatures. Not a lot of snowfall while we were gone, but it is still very cold and expected to stay that way for a while. More snow is predicted for Wednesday. The freezing temperatures have just about done in what remains in the garden. I don’t know if the cauliflower, broccoli, parsley and leeks will rebound - they are looking pretty beat down at the moment. If it is going to be this cold I would rather have some real snow to make it fun - but that is rare around here.

Whole Wheat Smoked Eggplant Ravioli with Crispy Jerusalem Artichokes

Apologies in advance for the horrible, overexposed picture. We haven’t quite worked out sufficient lighting in the kitchen yet. But truth be told, this meal just ain’t that pretty even in the best of light. But what it lacks in appearance, it makes up for in flavor.

Earlier in the year we borrowed a friends smoker while he was away fishing. I picked up several eggplants from the local farmers market and smoked them for a few hours. I pureed the eggplant, used half to make a big batch of baba ganouj (promptly frozen),  and used the other half to make up some ravioli. At that time we were rolling in the eggs from the girls and I was trying to preserve as much as possible in the form of pasta or ice cream. I made some ricotta with milk from a local dairy and combined the pureed eggplant with the ricotta, seasoned with salt, pepper and smoked paprika and sauteed leeks.

The ravioli was made with eggs from the girls and flour from Wheat Montana. Montana wheat isn’t exactly local, but we picked up two 50 lb sacks while we were out in Montana earlier this year - so I am going to count it, as it was local when we bought it and no excess miles were traveled to get it from there to here. Besides, it is a really cool thing to see a family of wheat farmers still farming after 3 generations, and they’ve established retail outlets attached to their mills, not only selling raw wheat and flour but any number of breads and treats from their product.

I made a simple sauce for the ravioli from a quart of canned tomato sauce, a bit of smoked paprika, oregano dried from the garden this summer and garlic from the West Seattle Farmers market. I sliced a few jerusalem artichokes (aka sunchokes) very thin and sauteed in olive oil until crisp.  A whole wheat buttermilk roll to sop up the sauce and push things around rounded it out.

From our home/garden: Eggs, leek,  tomatoes, oregano.

From local farms: Eggplant, milk,  wheat, jerusalem artichokes, garlic. Sources: Greenfresh Market, West Seattle Farmers Market, Renton Farmers Market.

Not Local: Salt, pepper, smoked paprika, olive oil.

These two have managed it - but it seems I have little to share lately. I’ve been doing a lot of mental processing and spinning for the coming year and it seems about all I can do to get my Dark Days posts up on time, much less anything else. I’ve been reading garden porn (seed catalogs) as they come in and am currently trying to figure out how to fit the three thousand things I want to grow in my paltry little backyard. This winter I’ll be breaking out the graph paper to make a to-scale drawing of our backyard and garden beds. Hopefully this will have a positive impact in making me more realistic on what I can cram in where.

We are headed down south this weekend to farmsit for a friend who is currently in Kenya. We will take the backroads down there to take a look at an old homestead up for sale on the way down. It is a little less land than I would like, but depending on what condition the buildings are in - it is a reasonable price for these parts (which isn’t saying much). I’m quite sure a number of you would choke on your cherios to know that the average price for rural land (no structures) around here is well over 10k an acre. It will be good to get out of the city for a weekend in any case. I hope to stop by Raintree Nursery while we are there too. I’d really like to get a couple of dwarf fruit trees going and they should have a decent selection.

Like I said - not much to share. But I figured I needed to post something. I promise to be more interesting next time.

We are still working off the Thanksgiving Turkey round here. Many of our meals for the week have incorporated it in some fashion - but this soup, which I’ve made variations on before, always hits the spot. I had two big bunches of collards hanging out in the crisper from the West Seattle Farmers market the previous week. I combined them with some farmers market carrots, local yukon gold potatoes and leeks from the backyard.

I’ve gotten in the habit of using almost the entire leek lately, not just the lighter parts. The dark greens take a bit longer to cook but they are full of flavor and a shame to waste (or compost as the case may be). I diced everything finely and sauteed with a pat of butter in the bottom of a large stock pot. I threw in 3 quarts of homemade turkey stock and set it all to simmer for a while.

Meanwhile I grabbed a bunch of parsley from the garden and pulsed a combination of cornmeal, chilled butter, flour, pepper, baking soda and salt in the food processor until it all resembled coarse crumbs. I added the diced parsley in and moistened with a bit of milk until I could form small dumplings. When the soup was about done, I spooned the dumplings into the broth and simmered until they puffed up. A relatively simple meal - but damn tasty, mostly local, and excellent for a fall evening.

Local Ingredients - Collards, carrots, potatoes (West Seattle Farmers Market). Leeks and parsley (backyard). Stock (homemade with Bay leaves from the backyard). Butter. Flour (Wheat Montana, picked up on a trip to MT). Milk (Golden Glen Creamery).

Non-local Ingredients - Turkey (Diestel farms, a good farm but from  Northern CA). Pepper. Cornmeal (unknown location)

Side Note:

My mom mentioned the other day that she had recently read one of my Dark Days posts and that it was something she hadn’t thought about before. Most likely this means I am not doing a good job of preaching what I practice. (4 years in Catholic School have left me very reluctant to preach to anyone). But it did get me thinking that I’ve assumed all readers of this little endeavor (this blog) already know the reasoning behind a focus on local foods. While that is probably the case for a good number of you (if this pertains to you, you can stop reading here), it also may not be the case for all. There are so many talented writers out there that have covered the local foods movement in much more eloquent ways than I can here. But I want to briefly outline my reasons for trying to eat locally.

• By purchasing my food locally, I know where it comes from. I can research, and in many cases visit where my food is grown and give my monetary support to farmers who are being ecologically responsible in their farming practices and working towards a sustainable agricultural system.
• By purchasing my meat locally I can ensure that the animals that end up on my table didn’t live brief and miserable lives in feedlots or factory farms. That they weren’t pumped full of antibiotics to ward off the disease that festers in those situations. That they played in the dirt, were fed a variety of foods appropriate to their species and were raised in a manner that takes the surrounding environment into account, not creating cesspools of manure that contaminate rivers, streams and groundwater.
• By supporting local farmers I know that the money I spend is going directly to support a family, not a ConAgra, Tyson, or Kraft CEO. It is going towards paying those working on family farms a living wage. It is going towards preserving an occupation and lifestyle that is given little recognition or respect, and is frequently the subject of derision. We live in a country that affords more respect to celebrities than the people who nourish us and make our isolated urbane lives possible.
• My local food dollars are going towards preserving open land ,and dollar by dollar, making it possible that suburban sprawl doesn’t swallow up every last available acre of surrounding land into a manicured green lawn for another mini-mansion or building block housing complex.
• By supporting local farmers I am much closer to paying the real price of food. I have a greater awareness and appreciation for what I purchase and think harder about wasting food. I  can’t buy a 10 pound bag of potatoes for $3 from a local farm. But I also don’t let any of the potatoes I do buy go to mold and waste away. And I know that the true cost of cheap food is much much more, either in underpaid human labor, fuel costs in transportation, a scorched earth monoculture, caustic fertilizer and pesticide/herbicde use or the greenhouse gases released in bringing me peaches from Chile.
• By supporting local farmers I am contributing to this region’s food sovereignty. I’ve put my money toward ensuring that there is land left to grow crops near my town. I’ve made myself a little less subject to the whims of politics or nation-states when it comes to basic sustenance. If something were to happen, I know where my food comes from-and it is not the supermarket.
• Eating local food connects me to where I am, makes me more aware of the changing seasons around me, makes me notice the outside world a bit more. It makes me aware of local food traditions and cycles.
• And last, after all the politics, issues and moral dilemmas - eating local food tastes good! Absolutely fresh spinach, hot chiles, sweet salmon, cream top milk. The list goes on. Food that hasn’t been on a trip around the world before it lands on your table, is simply amazing in your mouth.

The end of Thanksgiving had us hauling home a giant (29 lbs!!) Diestel Farms Turkey carcass from my relatives who were just going to throw it away, as they were headed out of town the next day. The following day I picked almost a gallon bag worth of meat off the bones before throwing them in a stock pot with some onion, carrot, bay and peppercorns to simmer all day for stock. I had also purchased a Northwest Naturals Turkey in the days preceding Thanksgiving so that we could have some for ourselves (we almost never have left over turkey on Thanksgiving, go figure). I broke down the whole turkey, portioned out the breasts and leg/thighs and packed them up separately for the freezer. I threw in the second carcass to the stock pot and set the giblets aside for gravy.

The next day I made up several recipes of pie crust (see my green tomato pie recipe for the proportions). Diced up a few Yukon gold potatoes, carrots and onions and coarsley chopped the turkey meat salvaged from the carcass. I simmered the giblets and added them to a gravy based off the stock from the day before. I canned all but a half gallon of the remaining turkey stock, 7 quarts). Combined everything and placed in a pie crust, then rolled out the top crust. I made two 9 inch pies with plenty of turkey and gravy left over. The pies went into the freezer.

Yes, that is a gallon of frozen whey in the background. I can’t bear to throw it away after making ricotta. It is great for soups, baking and the chickens really like it too. And yes, the freezer really needs to be defrosted despite doing it less than 6 months ago. Sometimes you really do pay for a free freezer. I have dreams of a newer, more efficient freezer someday - but they go for a pretty penny that I am not willing to pony up quite yet.

So now there are two meals waiting for a day when I can’t be bothered to cook. I still need to wrap them in foil so they don’t freezer burn. But either way these are guaranteed to be better than those microwavable packaged pot pies.

The above photo is a bit of a cheat. We haven’t eaten one of the turkey pies yet. This is a chicken pot pie I made a few months ago and intended to post about, but didn’t.

Garlic Sage Sausage, Sauerkraut, Sweetmeat Squash, Braised Leeks and Greens.

I tried my hand at making sausage for the first time! For my birthday my parents bought me the grinder and sausage stuffer attachments to the Kitchen AId that Gary got me (let’s hear it for collusion!). I had a goodly portion of a pork shoulder in the freezer left over from a get together earlier in the summer and decided to give it a shot. After grinding the pork I mixed in a good bit of sage from the garden, garlic from the farmers market, salt and pepper. Then I left it to mingle in the fridge overnight. The next day I fried up a bit for a taste, adjusted the spices and then headed out in search of sausage casing.

I found the casing at a local butcher in Columbia City, Bob’s Quality Meats. With a tub of salted lamb intestine tucked safely away I made my way home to begin the sausage process. I will spare you the details of flying sausage and the intestinal learning curve. Ultimately it all worked out and we were the proud owners of a half-shoulder worth of sausages.

For our dinner I cooked the sausages in about an inch of water until they were cooked through, then browned in the pan. I harvested 5 leeks from the garden and braised (both the greens and the whites) in a good splash of homemade chicken stock. The sausage was served over a bed of braised leeks, Sweetmeat Squash mash on the side and a big bowl of sauerkraut. The sauerkraut was my first attempt at lactic fermentation, and came from a large head of cabbage we picked up at Carpinito Brothers farm in Kent. Gotta say that this sauerkraut is miles above any canned or bagged variety I have had in the past. A simple greens salad rounded it out and we were all happily burping garlic for the rest of the night.

Local Ingredients: Sweetmeat Squash - Columbia City Farmers Market (I can’t remember the vendor). Leeks - our backyard. Chicken Stock - homemade. Sage - our backyard. Garlic - West Seattle Farmers Mkt. Cabbage - Kent, 7 miles. Greens - West Seattle Farmers Mkt.  Sausage Casings - Bob’s Quality Meats.

Non Local Ingredients: I cannot remember where the pork came from, but I would bet that it is unfortunately not local. . A bit of olive oil. Salt. Pepper.

Other local foods for the week included braised shortribs with clove and cinnamon and Roasted Chicken with smashed Rose Finn Fingerlings and parsley. Winter is treating us well.

Grass fed Ribeye, kabocha squash puree with parsley pesto and green beans

I threw my name in to take part in (not so) Urban Hennery’s Dark Days challenge this year. Details in full can be found here. Essentially it will be an attempt to once a week catalog our attempt to eat locally when there ain’t nuthin growing by highlighting one of our  meals. This appealed to me because it represents the challenge of trying to walk the talk when we aren’t in the full flush of summer’s bounty. For my purposes I am going to define my food shed area as 150 miles. I will strive to cut that down even more.

So our first meal for the kickoff of the Dark Days challenge is a relatively simple one. But sometimes simple is where it is at. I mentioned in previous posts that my father had brought us some beef that he got from friends of his down in Montesano that raise a small herd of grass-fed cattle. I defrosted two steaks from that beef for our first dinner. I also baked a whole kabocha squash that we had picked up back in October in our pumpkin hunting adventure. The easiest part of the meal was the green beans, canned during the summer and sourced directly from our garden.

There was no laborious preparation for this meal. The squash, after baking was mashed with a little butter and topped with a quick pumpkin seed and parsley pesto. The green beans quickly reheated on the stove. The steaks I brought to room temperature, seasoned with salt and pepper and seared them on my cast iron griddle. The steaks were HUGE, very lean and tasty. I adore squash and would have a hard time finding a way that I didn’t like it prepared. And the green beans, ummm - sure nuff - they were canned green beans. They didn’t have the tinny taste of store bought canned green beans, but the pressure canning does tend to destroy texture.

Last night we tried the first of the salt preserved green beans I mentioned in a previous post, to mixed reviews. I much preferred them over the canned green beans as they retained all of their crunchy fresh texture and color, but Gary thought that they suffered in the flavor department. More scientific analyses will be conducted.

Local Ingredients: Rib steaks - Montesano WA, 95 miles. Kabocha Squash - Kent WA, 7 miles. Pumpkin Seeds - Kent WA, 7 miles. Parsley - Our backyard, 0 miles. Green Beans - our backyard, 0 miles.

Non Local Ingredients: Olive oil, parmesan, salt, pepper (too many miles).

This year is the first year we purchased beef directly from a ranch. Last year we bought a whole lamb from Bradrick Family Farms in Montesano and it served us well through the winter. We now only have 1 leg of lamb left in the freezer. The lamb was great, but it was not enough to last us through the year. And I would really like to be in a position where we know that all of our meat has been pastured, treated humanely and is supporting local farmers/ranchers. This year we should come pretty close. This beef in addition to the half-pig we will be getting from Whistling Train should keep us in protein quite well.

Now for the numbers

The total hanging weight of our 1/4 beef was 191lbs. After cutting and wrapping that worked out to approximately 134 pounds of beef (approximate because I was using the bathroom scale to calculate, so no ounces included). The breakdown of the meat (cutting and wrapping) represented a 57lb loss (or 29%), which is about normal from what I have read. Below is a breakdown of what we got for that 134lbs.

• Pot Roast 22 lbs
• Ground Beef 63 lbs
• Sirloin Tip Roast 3 lbs
• Rib Steak (ribeye) 4 lbs
• T Bone Steak 6 lbs
• Short Ribs 6 lbs
• Rump Roast 4 lbs
• Top Round 5 lbs
• Cube Steak 2.5 lbs
• Stew Meat 6 lbs
• Bones 8 lbs

We paid $2.99 per pound hanging weight which came out to a total of $571.09. This works out to about $4.28 per pound of beef. Not bad when you consider the going retail rate for naturally raised grass-fed beef But sending out a big check like that all at once still gets me in the gut, ugh. Perhaps we could have gotten an equivalent amount of beef for cheaper by shopping the sales at Safeway religiously. But cheap and deliciously fatty steaks tend to sour a bit when I consider feedlots and their moral, ecological, social and political implications.

Of course the verdict on taste has yet to be delivered. So I suppose this makes this an five hundred and some dollar gamble. The beef was frozen solid so the soonest we will sample any of it is tomorrow. I took out a package of short ribs to thaw, perhaps this will be our featured Dark Days meal for the week. I anticipate some kitchen experimentation to figure out the best way to cook these leaner cuts, but that’s what winter is for, right?

There were several cuts that were conspicuously absent from our packages. I am pretty sure that this has to do with us only ordering 1/4. Cuts have to be uniform enough so that the beef can be readily split between two or more parties. But I in particular I had hoped to get at least one of the flatiron steak, hanger steak, or flank steaks. Most of these cuts are either 1 per side or 1 per cow, but who got them? Also missing was the oxtail, or more appropriately cow tail. My only other gripe is the generic labeling on the roasts. There is no indication of what is a chuck roast, bottom round roast, etc. And really the only way to even come close to figuring it out is to defrost and unwrap a 3-4 pound piece of meat, that in the end may not be what you wanted.

The butcher did a great job packaging everything, and it was a nice little family run joint. Good to see they still exist. Ultimately I think that I could finagle better labeling/specialized cuts if we were to order at least a half or whole. So, is there anyone in the area who would consider splitting an cow next year?

Katie, over at GardenPunks posted this and after writing a (mini-rant) comment on her post I figured I might as well memorialize it here and pass on the link. This is one of the more eloquent responses to Prop 8 that I have seen from the media/pundits,despite the fact that Oberman and all other tv personalities of his genre generally drive me batty.  I am still amazed that this county can manage to take a step forward and a step backwards at the same time.  How a nation and some of it’s citizens can be so preoccupied with taking away the rights of others, instead  of preserving the rights we have left - is baffling.

I can legally marry. I choose not to because I believe the government has no place in the romantic/personal relationships between people. Marriage, as a government regulated institution, is exposed as a social contract for the production of a labor force. Nothing more and nothing less. Why else would there be such an issue over two people of the same sex wanting to marry? For a professedly secular nation to even have  such spirited debate and disagreement over basic issues of equality like this is just embarrassing. Marriage is something that should be in the jurisdiction of one’s community, be it a church or other social circles.

I understand that the government has a vested interest in dealing with issues of inheritance and child guardianship. And the government could feasibly regulate that by requiring property owners and parents to establish inheritance and  guardianship plans at the time that they purchase property or have a child. But for the government to be deciding who can and can’t enter into a personal commitment is ludicrious. And even more ludicrious is the fact that we allow fellow citizens to take away others rights by a simple vote. I don’t fundamentally belive in the institution of marraige, but if I have the right to marry in this country, so should all of it’s citizens.

Saturday we took advantage of a brief break in the rain and packed up Hux to go down to Dead Horse Canyon, a trail loop at the bottom of our hill and just north of us. We once lived about 10 blocks further north from where we do now and would find ourselves taking this twisty turny road down the hill every once in a while. At the tightest hairpin turn on this road is a small turnoff for parking. I’d been meaning to check it out for years. It is formally called Lakeridge park by Seattle Parks and Recreation. But the story goes that it was originally named Dead Horse Canyon after a feral horse (that was a friend to pioneer children) was found deceased in the area.  And everyone who lives around here calls it that to this day. Romantic, no?

This is not really a park in the city sense of the word, despite the official name. It is a park only in the sense that it is a public space, there are no playgrounds or see saws. There is, however, a great little trail that takes you up the canyon along Taylor creek. The trail slowly climbs the hillside and has several bridges that cross back and forth high over the creek.

Fall was in full swing here, with big leaf maples and vine maples both shedding their leaves. There was a moment when we were crossing a bridge and a big wind came through. It was eerily silent in the ravine and thousands of orange, yellow and gold leaves were spinning in the air around us on their way to the forest floor. It was pretty spectacular. we tried to catch it on the video clip feature of my camera, but missed most of the big action once we figured out how to use the camera.

This was a great spot so close to the city and our house. In addition to the deciduous trees there were Western Red Cedars, Pacific Yew, Douglas Fir and even a few rhodies!

The epiphytic licorice fern was growing everywhere in the more established trees. The trail is short, I would have liked it to be longer and we had some disagreement about fording a stream (someone didn’t want to get his feet wet, and it wasn’t the dog). But I will definitely return to see If I can find an outlet here at the top of the hill. It would make a great trail if it could eventually lead back to our house.

So now is the time that we settle in and find other activities to occupy our free time. For me this means a lot of cooking and experimenting. We are still awaiting our meat orders for this year so meals in the interim have been veggie based for the most part, with an odd piece of fish or slice of bacon thrown in. My father dropped off several packages of grass-fed beef with us last week to tide us over until our order comes in. We made mushroom and Swiss burgers with one package of ground, and oh my god was it good. I haven’t had ground beef that flavorful in a long time.

I’ve also been experiencing a hankering to do something creative. There was a time when I made all sorts of things, leather work, jewelry and clothing. Between working, school and home remodel it seems I got away from that and I am starting to feel the twinges of that loss. But the trick is to find something that doesn’t 1) create useless (albeit pretty) things that clutter us up more than we already are and 2) doesn’t require some sort of capital outlay for supplies, materials and tools.

Gary’s mother gifted me with her old sewing machine when she upgraded and I would like to pull that out and try my had at sewing again. But I am having a hard time coming up with something to make. I honestly don’t need anymore clothes (aside from a sturdy pair of workpants, and those I will order). We have drapes for all the windows, no need for pillows, etc. What a charmed life it is to not want for any basics much less frivolities like throw pillows and drapes, eh? I am lucky - and in realizing that and not wanting to have things just for the sake of having them, I am unable to come up with an outlet for this energy.

I should work on welding a bit this winter. We need to run power out to the shed but I could definitely make use of some larger trellises and perhaps get a little ornate with a gate for the chicken pen. Perhaps that is where the energy will go. I still need to get a better face shield and some raw steel stock to experiment with. Hmmm.

In other news, the kraut is coming along swimmingly. We cracked a jar the other night for a test sniff. Smells very Krauty! It is exciting, all of these little beasties making food for us. I am fascinated by fermentation and bacterial action. I started two half gallons of kombucha yesterday, with another half gallon of tea left over in the fridge. WHEW! I am not used to sweet tea, there is a lot of sugar in there for the beasties to eat.

No pictures for this post as we are getting ready to go out to a movie. I’ve decided that I can go see the new Oliver Stone movie W. For the past 8 years I’ve hit the mute button, turned off the radio, or rushed away from the tv anytime our village idiot came on with a presidential address. But now, with the election over and an end to his reign in site, I may just be able to go watch a movie and laugh about it for an hour or two before returning to the very real mess outside the theatre.

Well the sog is upon us now. There are flood warnings for 7 counties in the state today, including our own. The weatherman reports that the equivalent of one months worth of rain has fallen within the past two days. We are ok, high up on the hill but certainly not dry. The backyard is a mud bowl. Our hill is gifted with a fine hardpan of clay soil about 6-8 inches below the topsoil. It doesn’t take much to saturate the topsoil and we are left with pools of standing water in the grass. We have been trying hard to eliminate the grass and build the soil up with organic material as much as possible to increase the water retention but our efforts are no match for this kind of rain.

The chicken pen is a slip and slide. I have no doubt that one of us will end up on our butts in the morning and evening pilgrimage to let them out or close them in. I already had a close call this morning. Nothing like a mud crusted backside before you have even had your morning coffee.  I had high hopes of leaf wrangling this weekend. The crimson maple in the front yard has started to drop its leaves and I want to store some of them for mulching the garden next summer. In light of our straw eating chicken I figure using the leaves as mulch instead is worth a shot. Usually we run all the leaves through the chipper/shredder and spread them over the permanent beds in the front to decompose. But all of that will have to wait until it dries up a bit, wet leaf wrangling is no fun at all.

I picked up a giant bone for Hux yesterday when I went to restock on dog food. He has been lying on his bed in the living room, guarding it and occasionally licking it since about 2pm yesterday. He will do this for several days before he actually starts to work on whittling it down. You’d think that he wouldn’t make a dent in bone this size, but once he gets started he can clear off half a foot in one evening. I’m glad those jaw muscles are on my side.

http://solsaporta.com/

Hmmm, not so scary eh…wait

There we go!

So this is our pumpkin, hefted fresh from the fields by Gary last weekend. Almost 60 pounds of pumpkin, in fact. This little endeavor is the first pumpkin I have carved since being all grown up. I honestly can’t recall the last pumpkin I carved as a kid. I’d been toying with the idea of carving a pumpkin last year, but never got around to it. This past weekend, opportunity presented itself and we got this gem.

Gary actually picked the pumpkin. He was reluctant and was generally humoring me (he does that a lot, good man) when I mentioned making a jack o lantern. But once we got into the fields he was all business, searching out the perfect one. I suspect our selection of such a large pumpkin has something to do with a PBS (?) documentary we watched about a year ago, following people obsessed with growing giant pumpkins.

We had a really good time Sunday night, spreading squash guts over every inch of the kitchen and generally making a mess and getting obsessive. I think this may become a tradition. Besides, pumpkin seeds are inside pumpkins (yum). We live in a neighborhood where people still take their kids out trick or treating to actual houses. This seems to be more and more of a rarity with everyone so petrified of their neighbors and the world in general. So we get a lot of foot traffic on Halloween and vow to always stock the good stuff candy-wise.That is if we can keep our dirty hands off of it in the days leading up to the big night.

Our first real Halloween after moving in to the house we were woefully unprepared for the amount of kids we would get and ran out of candy. This was when there was still a grocery store in our neighborhood and Gary left me to go over to the IGA and pick up some more. I had a little bit of candy left in the bowl and the door rang while he was gone. I opened the door to a giant gaggle of children all clamoring for sweets. I rationed out the candy, one piece per kid, absolutely anxious that I was going to run out. But it worked, I saw the last kid come up with outstretched bag and I dropped my last piece in and heaved a sigh of relief. As the crowd of children moved off the porch and I started to turn to go inside, I heard the littlest voice say “trick or treat”. Horrified, I turned to see that behind all of the other crowding children had been one more child, the littlest Batman in the whole entire world. He was standing there, arms stretched out with his bag open smiling at me.

I just about died - I had no more candy. I didn’t even have cash as Gary and I had pooled our money to send him to the store. I had to tell him that I just ran out of candy. And before my very eyes the littlest Batman in the world got even smaller. He completely deflated. His arms dropped down to his side, his eyes cast toward the ground and his shoulders slumped. He mumbled a tiny little “ok” and turned to walk away with his feet dragging. My heart broke.

We do not live in a rich nieghborhood, far from it. Each year a number of the kids at our door don’t even have costumes. They come around guided by an older brother or sister clutching a pillowcase or a schoolbag as thier candy bag. So Halloween is always a bit of mixed emotions for me. It is nice to see some semblance of what I remember from my childhood nieghborhood preserved nowadays. But it is also tough to see kids who don’t have the chance to fully involve themselves in the excitement of picking a costume/charachter and playing dress up for a night. Kids who didn’t dress up because they had parents that were working and didn’t have the time  or cash to figure out a costume with them. Kids who are self conscious when they show up at your door in thier regular clothes and school backpack halfway unzipped as a makeshift bag. Older brothers or sisters in the background with uncomfortable smiles.

With the aforementioned biggest head of cabbage I decided to give a first go at lactic fermentation. In a previous post I mentioned that last winter I purchased a book all about preserving food without canning or freezing. Among other methods, the book goes over lactic fermentation of numerous vegetables and I decided to start with sauerkraut.

I ended up going with a recipe in the book for glass jar sauerkraut. Despite my best efforts, I have not had any luck finding glazed stoneware crocks of any decent size. Of course I could go buy one, but they are damn expensive. And apparently I’d rather whine about not being able to find them, or send evil looks toward all those people who have a ton of them but don’t use them for anything. Apparently these old crocks are now a collectors item (since so few people do thier own buttermaking, fermenting, pickle making, etc). So there are tons of crocks sitting on display shelves, or hoarded in someone’s basement instead of being put to use. The side effect of this ‘antiques’ business is that the price of any stoneware on ebay or craigslist is through the roof, even if they aren’t old.

However, I do have a dozen half gallon canning jars from this spring’s Craigslist purchase. This seemed like a good opportunity to use them. As we are usually only two people here, canning anything in half gallon quantities is a bit dubious. We would likely not get through it fast enough once the seal is broken. However, lactic fermentation does not require a seal, so we can chip away at the stores with less of an impending sense of doom (or rotteness). Once the kraut is done, I could also can it up in smaller jars if I like.

The recipe was quite simple. Grate or slice cabbabe and densely pack into sterilized jars, layering any spices or herbs you want among the cabbage. I snipped a couple of bay leaves from the tree out back and added those with a sprinkle of caraway every 3 inch layer. Once jar is filled with cabbage, add 1 tablespoon salt to the top for each quart of cabbage and fill to cover with hot water. Place lids on jars and set aside.

The instructions say to leave the sauerkraut in the kitchen for about 3 days before storing. I assume this is to expose the kraut to warmer temps to jumpstart the action before storing in a root cellar or basement (for all those lucky lucky souls that have such a thing). For now the jars are sitting on the kitchen counter and in a few days they will make thier way either to my office or out to our unheated workshop. Who knows if this’ll work out, but I am sure curious to see! Our one giant head of cabbage translated to 4 half gallon jars of kraut, so we will have plenty if it is tasty .

Our general plan was to buy some corn to cut off the kernel and freeze for the winter -but it was so fresh and tasty I had to cook at least a little of it right up. Luckily enough, our good friend (the salmon fisherman) had stopped by on Friday bearing a goodie bag of gifts including several frozen portions of King Salmon, Halibut and best of all - smoked salmon.

Now I have to detour from the chowder story for just a moment to pat myself on the back. A few years ago - for the holidays we bought our fisherman friend a smoker. And may I say that was the smartest gift I have ever given anyone? Talk about the gift that keeps on giving! He has gone through several experimental brines and cures at this point and makes an excellent smoked salmon (among other treats). Each year we receive the gift of the smoker back tenfold in freshly caught and smoked wild salmon - it doesn’t get much better I tell ya.

So I had all this corn, and I had all this smoked salmon and it seemed they were meant for one another. I took 3 ears of corn and cut the kernels off into a bowl (reserving the cobbs). These were really large ears of corn, less gargantuan varieties might take 4 ears or so. I diced an onion and two strips of smoked bacon and put them in the pot to saute. I diced up some leftover fingerling potatoes and a few yukon golds (probably about 1.5 cups all told) and added them to the onions and bacon in the pot. After sauteing the bacon, potato and onion mixture until the onions were translucent, I added the corn kernels. Gave it a brief stir and then poured in a quart of the corn stock I made earlier this year. I rounded out the liquid for the chowder with the remains of a half gallon of milk that we needed to use before it expired. I also ‘milked’ the corn cobbs I had reserved into the mix by running the sharp end of a knife along the cobb, draining the starchy-sweet goodness into the pot.

While the chowder simmered I broke up the smoked salmon into bite sized pieces. I then took about 3/4 cup of corn and blended it with some water and about one tablespoon of flour to thicken. I added this slurry to the chowder and seasoned with salt, pepper and thyme. When it was almost done, the potatoes soft and the corn cooked, I threw in the flaked salmon and called it good. I threw a few roasted pumpkin seeds on top for texture. A big bowl of chowder with a slice of Skyway Sourdough alongside made for a wonderfully winterish meal.

Hows that for a title? Sums up this week pretty good. Our cat Bukowski has gone missing and we are both desperately hoping he turns up fresh from a walkabout. He is chipped and we haven’t received any calls yet. Earlier this week we went down to the Animal Control shelter just to double check that they hadn’t picked him up and not scanned him. The shelter was horrifying and  traumatic, so many animals without homes. They are stuffed to the gills and to the point that they are creating extra rooms to house the animals in the parking lot with straw bales, tarps and space heaters. Let me underline once again how important it is to fix your animals. And if you are even considering getting a pet, please get one from rescue or the shelter.

Ok - end of plea/lecture. Unfortunately after going through 8 or 9 rooms full of cats, we didn’t find Buk. I am hoping this means that someone has just taken him into their home, not realizing he already has a home. He is such a sweetheart and although he is our most recent addition (showing up on our driveway about a year and a half ago injured, skinny, stinky and with all his manly equipment) we have grown quite attached to him. Watching an animal go from a half to three-quarters feral state, to cuddling on you lap in the morning sun does something to ya.

In other news, Dahl - the queen bee chicken had an impacted crop. Turns out she is a straw eater (nobody ever said chickens were smart, but c’mon!). Her crop swelled to about the size of a tennis ball this past week, was not reducing and was hard to the touch. My research on the subject indicated that there were essentially 3 methods of alleviating the condition 1) Use a dropper to squirt oil down into the crop to loosen things up (downside: if you didn’t push the dropper far back enough you could suffocate the chicken by dropping oil down the trachea). 2) Massage the mass in the chickens crop back up the throat and make her puke it out (downside: a big risk of suffocation due to sticky nasty masses of stuff covering the trachea). 3) Slit a hole in the chickens breast skin, directly over the crop, then slit through the crop and pull out the nasty stuff - then let the chicken heal. Strangely enough, this third option seemed to have the least number of downsides or horror stories attached to it. I read the forums and a number of people had killed their chickens using the first two methods, but there wasn’t a single chicken fatality (reported) going the surgical route.

I decided to try and find a middle ground before chicken surgery or a several hundred dollar vet bill. I soaked a bunch of breadcrumbs in copious amounts of canola oil and hand fed them to Dahl. I then went out to massage her crop, trying to assist in the breakdown of the mass several times. The following day we created a separate pen inside the regular chicken pen and put Dahl in there with more oily breadcrumbs and water. I removed the regular chicken food at night so she couldn’t sneak anything and continued the several massages a day. As of yesterday her crop was noticeably reduced and she seems to be on the way to a free flowing system again. Now I need to rethink my mulching material for the garden if the dumb chicken insists on gobbling straw and stuffing herself up!

And peppers! I mentioned in my last post that we were just headed out to the last farmers market in Columbia City. One of my favorite farms (Alvarez Farms) has a stand there and they were selling their ristras of peppers. Every year this family grows the most amazing variety of peppers, it makes me homesick for of New Mexico just looking at the colorful tables. I bought several milder varieties of peppers for a batch of mild salsa I will make with the last of the tomatoes. But I also decided to buy a ristra of hot peppers for this winter.

Not only is it beautiful, but these peppers will dry within several weeks (while retaining thier color) and I can harvest off it for the winter anytime something needs a bit of spice. Food as decoration is a burgeoning theme around here, more due to lack of space than anything else. We have winter squash and sugar pumpkins sitting on side tables in the living room too. I get a lot of joy out of the aesthetics of squash….is that wierd?

I completed what was the last of the tomato sauce canning batches last night - and am I glad! It was frustrating this year having to do small batches, bit by bit waiting for the tomatoes to ripen. The majority ripened in boxes in my office, instead of on the vine. Not my chosen method by any means. Seven more quarts of tomato sauce leaves us with 18 quarts canned and another 4 quarts frozen to get us through the winter. I had hoped for more, but this will do. I also made a huge batch of hot salsa. 12 half pints, 2 pints and 3 quarts to be exact (can you tell I am running out of jars?). I have one more smallish box of San Marzanos ripening which I will most likely use to make some mild salsa for Gary (the stuff I made earlier is way to hot).

And, today - just a few minutes ago I finished harvesting all of the fennel seeds. I cut the seed heads off our golden fennel plant several weeks ago when it started to get really damp and rainy. I threw them in a paper bag and hung them in my office to dry for a couple weeks. Today I finally got around to separating the seeds from the plant material. I am currently sitting in a licorice flavored cloud. We ended up with just under half a pound. This is a LOT of fennel seed. No doubt some of it will be put to good use in sausage when we get our half pig order later this winter. But I need to find some other uses too. I know it is a key ingredient in Indian/Pakistani cooking and also is one of the five in five spice powder. But if anyone out there has other ideas, I am open (and supplied).

I would guess you could make some version of liqueur out of it, is that what Sambuca is based on? It seems every Mediterranean country has their own version of licorice flavored concoction (Raki in Turkey, Ouzo in Greece, Pernod in France, Sambuca in Italy). Maybe I will have to experiment a bit  -(beware friends and family who are in grave danger of getting nothing but salsa and Fennel Liqueur for the holidays).

It is a beautiful day today, I hope it lasts. We are about to head out to the last Farmers Market in Columbia City before they shut down for the season. The Renton market we usually frequent is already done for the season. Winter comes and we start having to go further and further afoot to get local produce. I think after this week the closest year round market will be in West Seattle.

Early this morning we wrapped up a whirlwind visit with my best friend from high school and her family.  She spent Thursday and Friday night with us along with her husband and five year old daughter. Thursday was a mellow day for the most part. A grocery trip (because we were not at all stocked ahead of time - crazy work week) and a quick stop to pick up the latest Harry Potter movie set the tone for the evening. It was nice to just sit around and catch up as the last time we had seen them was a bit over two years ago (and then just for a few hours).

Saturday morning we had decided to take a trip downtown to the Pacific Science Center. It has been years since either Gary or I had been there and I had heard tell of a butterfly house that had my interest piqued. We spent a solid 4 hours at the Science Center, I suspect some of the adults had as much fun as the little one. The butterfly house was way cool - a tropical haven in the middle of Seattle with a huge variety of butterflies flitting about. And then, on our way out I discovered the mole rat complex.

My fascination with mole rats came from years ago when Gary, myself and a good friend of ours were suffering from severe hangovers on a Sunday after a late-late night. This was back in the days of a service called Kozmo (now since defunct) which would deliver just about anything right to your door, including movies. We rented a movie called Fast, Cheap and Out of Control. A documentary about 4 different individuals with (seemingly) nothing in common. However, one of these men was an expert on the African Mole Rat and had dedicated his life (every part of it apparently) to mole rats. It was a loooooong and weird movie, only exacerbated by the state of our bodies. But something about the extended mole rat footage seems to have burned itself into my consciousness.

I had assumed that the extended footage I watched so many years ago was as close as I was ever going to get to a mole rat in real life. But there it was, a full mole rat complex with them scurrying through tubes and piled in naked little heaps in thier sleeping boxes. They moonwalk, and can move as fast backwards as they can forwards even though they are totally blind.

I know, i am probably killing any readers with the pictures since they are so creepy looking. Creepy but fascinating. The high point of the day!

My friends daughter met the chickens soon after arriving and quickly became enamoured with them. After hanging in the yard with them and hand feeding for a while she went back inside, broke out her craft kit and proceeded to make numerous golden eggs out of construction paper. I think we will find them hidden in corners for a while to come. It was very sweet.

The two little spoiled Princesses of this household had thier first true faceoff earlier this week. While Nin is undoubtedly the queen of indoors (being the only girl aside from me in a house of boys), Blume is the spoiled princess of the yard. As I mentioned in my earlier post, we have been ranging the hens out during the day to clear up garden beds for the winter. The fencing we are using does nothing to keep Blume inside though and she regularly jumps the fence to see what we are up to on the patio.

Nin has been beside herself the whole time. Yelling at us whenever we happen outside “THERES A CHICKEN IN MY YARD! THE CHICKEN IS OUT OF THE PEN. PUT THE CHICKEN BACK IN THE PEN, IT IS IN MY YARD!”. Blume has absolutely no fear and even flaps her wings a bit to intimidate Nin (and it works).

Nin seems to be torn between being absolutely disgusted with the whole situation and taking it upon herself to monitor the chickens whenever we put them out. She does not come inside during the day now. Instead she stays in the back yard and alternately yells at and watches Blume cluck about the yard.  I think it is some deep battle of the animal wills going on out there while we sit at our computers.

And then there is the Pookawn, I capitalize it because it is indeed a proper name and thing of its own. How to describe to you what a Pookawn is…I suppose I will just have to show you.

Have you been blinded by the bright flashes of immense white furriness? Are you now afraid that the Pookawn is coming to eat your children and lay waste to your towns? You should be!

While not a slim cat, to be fair Nin is more fur than fat in a lot of places, except for her belly. All of her excess body weight is concentrated into one specific point on the underside of her belly. And when combined with the immense amount of fur she has, it seems to almost wiffle in the wind and sway when she trots around as a separate-yet-connected entity.

We came upon the word pookawn when playing a game of Balderdash with friends. For those unfamiliar, Balderdash is a game in which you are given a word and then each team member has to make up a definition of it. The person to get the most votes for thier definition wins the round. Well pookawn came up as the word and without hesitation Gary blurted out his definition as Nin’s belly. Needless to say, it stuck and Pookawn has wormed its way into our common household lexicon.

For those dying of curiosity - pookawn is indeed a word. According to the definition of the game it is a small boat of some sort - but I prefer our definition.

The changing season is making itself evident in our yard now. The signs have been elsewhere for a while. If the falling leaves and biting cold didn’t convince us already, this morning I saw the evidence of our first frost while going to let the girls out of the coop. It had already warmed a bit so the frost was rapidly melting, but there was a good patch of frosty grass.

The Japanese Maple’s leaves have colored and will shortly fall. Tomatoes left on the two remaining plants are looking sad and sickly - I may be able to convice Gary now that thier time has come.  I mentioned in a previous post that we had taken down the hoop house and cleared the tomato bed earlier this week. We’ve been turning the girls out in the bed for the past few days and they are doing a bangup job of turning the soil and working in the straw mulch (while consuming all the damned slugs that displayed such a fondness for our tomatoes this year). Dahl lets out the happiest little cackles and giggles whenever we drop her into a new section of bug rich earth. Chicken happiness may be one of the simplest pleasures in life, judging from her exhaultations.

The past week or so the girls have spent the days turned out in one of the two garden areas we have cleared, fenced in by mobile wire panels that work quite well. Except when we are late or there is work to be done. Now we have always known that Blume can fly - despite the fact that her wing is clipped. She has hopped the fence of the pen to get to me on the other side and sit on my lap. But generally she just stays where put as long as the other girls are there and there is ample entertainment. But earlier this week we were late in getting to the backyard to move the girls back to thier pen/coop for the evening. The sun had not yet set, but had dropped down below the house and it was getting dark. We went outside only to find both Blume and Cleary had jumped thier temporary enclosure and were milling about the fencing to thier normal pen. Clucking and pacing worriedly. Poor Dahl, who is molting right now, had not the feathers or the energy to make the same escape and was still inside the temporary enclosure.

Cut to a few days later when we went out to the back in the middle of the day. Gary checked the temporary pen and only saw Cleary and Dahl. We started looking around for Blume only to realize that she had jumped two fences and was settled comfortably in a nest box in the coop. Because we couldn’t possibly expect her to do her business in the great wide open, could we?  Cleary, on the other hand, will drop an egg just about anywhere and walk away without a second look.

The calendula has rebounded with the cooler weather. It was overtaken by aphids during the peak of summer. When the night temperatures dropped enough to kill off the aphids, the calendula came bounding back and is in a dead heat with the marigolds for a fall display.

I’m thankfull for these last little bits of color before we go into our gray and wet winters. The sun has been shining the past few days too - which makes for cold cold mornings but affords us pleasant cleanup time in the yard.

So with this in mind I was going about my day to day work in an increasing state of unrest. I am sure everyone feels it to some extent. Honestly, if you didn’t have to work at the job that pays your bills - would you? I am sure there are a few people who have found that perfect occupation and would answer yes (and good for them), but for most of us I suspect the answer is a resounding NO.  What I found most, among all of my frustrations - was that I missed my home.  I kept thinking about how I spent all of my time working to pay for and maintain a home that I only spent time sleeping in 5 out of 7 days every week. Weekends would come and I would hole up - not wanting to go anywhere, do anything except cuddle with the boy or critters, play in the dirt or work on one of the multitudinous projects round here.

I spent a lot of time working for something I rarely got to experience. Back in April I decided to take a big leap and accepted a job working part time from home. I didn’t see a pay increase with the job switch and working part time effectively cut my salary in half. It was scary, but I didn’t want to continue on the same path I had been on. There was a bit of transition time. I was diligent about watching my money and expenses, and spent a lot more time planning purchases and looking for deals than I had before. And now, 6 months into my leap of faith (or exasperation?) I have learned a ton.

I cut my earnings in half, and yet I still make enough to pay the mortgage, bills and usually stash some money away in savings. The biggest surprise was perhaps the amount of money I spent working outside the home everyday. When you add up the fuel costs, lunches out, coffee breaks, semi-mandatory happy hour excursions after work (but never on the company’s buck), holiday gifts and the liquor therapy/self medication it takes to get over the work week - I realized I was paying a hell of a lot to earn a living.

I fill my gas tank up about once a month now. I have not spent any money on clothing (save for one pair of overalls) since I left my city job. Our highest expense outside of the mortgage is still our food bill, but that is in part due to the fact that we are willing to pay extra for local produce, dairy and humanely raised meat. We don’t eat out nearly as much as we used to, in good part due to the fact that I am not exhausted come dinnertime. It used to be that (if I wasn’t staying late at the office) I would get home around 6:30 or 7:00 and roll dinner out by around 7:30-8:00. The reality of overtime (a lot of the time) made a more normal day getting home closer to 8 or 8:30 and facing the decision of making dinner and eating by 9:30 or just picking something up.

Even on a high month in the summer when we are putting out a good deal of money in deposits on meat and stocking up on produce to preserve for winter our average grocery bill comes to just about $7 per person per day. The more accurate number would probably be closer to $5 per person per day over the whole year. Six months ago I would have blown through $5 on coffee and a scone on my way in to work, and now it feeds me for the day.

And the time! Oh the time! Realistically I am still working between 60% and 75% of a full time job, averaging between 24 and 30 hours a week. But I instantly reclaimed 3-4 hours of my day back by not commuting (we live 10 miles from city center and it takes almost 1.5 hours to get there by bus). I can get up in the morning, put some coffee on and get a load of laundry going - then go work while the washer does it’s thing. I can take a break from work around 3 to prep a meal for the evening that needs to braise for 3 hours, throw it in the oven and go back to work. I try to work around 6 hours a day, mostly in the morning so that by 2pm I can get outside and work in the yard if it is nice. No commute, no gas, no chaos (except that I have created for myself).

I have shifted my spending habits, and I definitely don’t spend as much as I used to (ugh - I just cringe inside to think of all the cash I wasted). I’d like to think we are on a very comfortable austerity plan. We eat well, we occasionally go out to a restaurant, we even go out to the movies every once in a while. We meet friends to play pool at the local bar but intersperse that with evenings at home, where the drinks are cheaper and the games are free. We live a good life - and perhaps for the first time as an adult I feel like I have a life outside of work. Or more accurately, my work life doesn’t overshadow and consume all the other aspects of my life. I have time to do the things that interest me and spend with the friends, family and critters I love.

Throughout this learning process, this six months of the most rewarding austerity I have ever experienced -the rest of the American economic system has been veering toward collapse. The past few weeks of emergency measures, corporate bailouts and implosion of credit markets has spurred me to think more and more about the fatal flaws of our system. The looming collapse of our markets, and the rationale for the bailout is all based on credit (or lack of). It is all based on the need for both ever expanding growth and ever expanding consumption. What ever happened to “enough”?

On a personal level this translates to recognizing excess. I have enough clothes, we have enough cars, our small house is enough for us. We don’t need to upgrade our closets, cars and homes every two years based on fads and what we will be allowed to borrow. I realize that systemically this acquisitive tendency is crucial to a capitalist economy. But at what point do we all stop being dupes feeding the system and say enough?

I have a hard time feeling pity for the couple that took on a 400k ARM mortgage for a 3,000 square foot house. I know that there were some people out there that were geniuinely misled, but I think that there were more people just chasing the dream. Trying to materially represent thier social class comeuppance when they couldn’t afford it.

Laura over at (Not so) Urban Hennery posted a pantry expose a few days ago that got me thinking. I dropped out of regularly posting for Independence days and have yet to do a full assessment of what we’ve managed to get from the garden this year. Now I don’t even have a pantry to expose - all of my canned goods are stuffed into corners, on top of dressers and shoved in among books on our bookshelves due to a complete lack of storage space. So these pictures should have been closeups in order to avoid exposing our chaos. But it is a good exercise to see where we are in terms of storing away food for winter.

What follows below is a list of what has been harvested and preserved in one form or another from the garden this year. We still have a bit of a harvest to do outside through the winter as well. Swiss Chard is still going strong and I am hoping for a mild enough winter so that it offers greens through the dark days. We also have a bunch of Leeks that I am leaving in the ground until needed. If a frost comes I will protect them with straw, but they should keep for a good part of the fall and winter. The Italian parsley is going gangbusters and I need to harvest it before it dies back (in my opinion, dried parsley is just silly and a waste). Beets are coming up, spinach and rutabaga seedlings are faltering a bit and I don’t know if we will see any produce from them.

Preserved for Winter (Items with an asterisk denote produce we either picked ourselves or got at the farmers market)

14 quarts green tomato enchilada sauce (good for soup bases and braising too)
11 quarts tomato sauce
7 pints green beans
4 quarts Wheat berry* and Kale soup
9 quarts black beans* (we’ve already eaten a few more)
7 half pints of Peach Habanero salsa*
2 quarts apple sauce
7 quarts green tomatoes
8 half pints tomatillo* salsa
2 quarts corn stock*
5 quarts chicken stock
4 pints Rhubarb juice concentrate
4 half pints roasted tomato paste
6 half pints Blueberry Habanero Chutney*
8.5 ilbs Rhubarb, frozen
4 gallon bags chinese broccoli (kai lan), frozen
1 quart bag yin yang beans, frozen
1 quart bag peas, frozen
1 gallon bag smoked eggplant* ravioli, frozen
3 gallons blackberries, frozen
2 gallon bags kale, frozen
Approx 35 lbs Sugar Hubbard Winter Squash (1 not yet harvested)

We’ve still got tomatoes ripening, the majority of which will be turned into more sauce as they come along. I plan on making another batch of green tomato relish as well. I also want to give a shot at making and freezing a few of my savory green tomato pies this year (recipe posted below) - to see if they hold up in the freezer alright. If they do those will be a great quick meal for nights I don’t want to cook.

In retrospect, not too bad for a tiny yard in the city. It won’t be enough to feed us through the winter - but it is a good step towards producing a good portion of our own food. Our meat orders from Prarie Springs and Whistling Train will come in November and January respectively, giving us a bit more protein to go along with the veg. Next year I have goals of being much more together when it comes to planning (and actually planting) a fall garden. I was super industrious this spring and faltered when it came time to get stuff in for a fall harvest. I still need to order garlic for planting now, and also want to get some favas for an early spring harvest. I also need to make my mind up on what type of fruit tree to put in. We have very limited space but I think I can get a semi-dwarf in along the fence. I’m thinking paw paw…anyone round these parts have a suggestion?

Savory Green Tomato Pie

Pie Crust (makes 2 crusts)

• 2.5 cups flour
• 1 cup cold butter (diced into .5 inch cubes)
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon sugar
• Ice water

Mix flour, salt and sugar together in a bowl or food processor. Cut butter into flour mixture until it resembles coarse cornmeal. Using a fork, slowly add just enough ice water to make the dough come together. Divide dough into two sections (one a bit larger than the other). Take the larger piece of dough and roll out to fit a 9 or 10 inch pie plate, form dough to pie plate, (don’t crimp)  and set in fridge. Roll out the smaller portion of dough to be the cover piece for the pie and place in fridge.

Green Tomato Filling

• 1 medium onion (diced)
• 2-3 cups diced green tomatoes
• 4-6 ounces Swiss cheese shredded (or cheddar, Gruyere, whatever you have in the fridge)
• 1 teaspoon thyme
• Salt and pepper
• .5 cup breadcrumbs (if you don’t have breadcrumbs around you can sub a couple eggs and ¼ cup milk).

Preheat oven to 425. Sauté onions until translucent in a pan with a bit of oil or butter. Add diced green tomatoes and continue to sauté until the tomatoes have softened a little and any water from the vegetables has mostly evaporated. Add thyme and salt and pepper to taste. Let mixture cool a bit and transfer to a bowl. Add in the shredded Swiss and breadcrumbs and mix together thoroughly. Dump the Green tomato mixture into the pie plate (with crust) smooth out and then place the top crust on, folding the top crust edges under the bottom crust edges along the rim, crimping as you go. Cut a few vents for steam in the top crust. Place pie in the preheated oven and bake for approximately 45-55 minutes, until the crust is an even golden color.

Let cool a bit and enjoy!

** Bacon is really really good with the green tomatoes if you are so inclined. Just dice bacon and cook then add it to the other ingredients before putting in the pie crust.

My mom’s birthday was this past week. Birthdays in my family are usually a pretty low-key affair. A good opportunity to get together and catch up over a meal and cake. I am very lucky to have my parents living only about a half hour away, so on Wednesday night we had them over for a birthday dinner. I managed to get a lot of the prep work for dinner done the previous weekend so that I could spend Wednesday afternoon sweeping and decluttering the living room.

My mom loves pasta and chocolate. I am pretty sure those would rank as her top two favorite foods - so the menu was already set to some extent. I decided to make ravioli stuffed with homemade ricotta, leeks, chard and a few sun dried tomatoes. On Sunday I started some tomatoes from the garden simmering on the stove for sauce and made the ricotta and set it to drain. In the meantime I made the pasta dough and set it aside to rest as I sauteed the leeks, chard and a couple slices of bacon. Once all the components were complete I rolled out the dough and made several trays of ravioli and threw them in the freezer for the coming week.

I already knew I was going to make her a chocolate cake (obvious choice) but was pondering an ice cream to serve with the cake. I am not a huge fan of chocolate. I like it fine, but I don’t do backflips for it like some people. In fact I like a background flavor of chocolate more than anything like in a good dark stout beer. Then I came up with the idea of making a chocolate stout ice cream to go with the cake. A little bit of googling to get a general idea of proportions and I was on my way.

Tuesday I made the birthday cake and did a bit of a twist on my standard recipe by grating the zest of a whole orange directly into the batter before baking. I let the cake cool overnight (since it didn’t get in the oven till about 9:30 due to the 3 loaves of bread I had rising in there). The next day I whipped up a batch of cocoa flavored whipped cream frosting and frosted then decorated the cake. I am a big fan of using edible flowers to decorate cakes. I have little to no skill when it comes to piping icing and my penmanship sucks. It is a much easier (and prettier) affair if I just focus on growing several varieties of flowers for the special events throughout the year. I am luck in that nobody in my immediate family has a birthday in the dead of winter.

My mom’s birthday is the latest and there are always some flowers left in the garden. This year I decorated with Nasturtiums, Calendula and Marigolds. It was all very brown and red and orange - befitting a fall birthday. I sprinkled a few remaining white Alyssum blooms over the top and called it good. Notice the torpedo like calendula on the side of the cake. I had no idea they would close up like that when refrigerated.

My mother’s cakes almost always have marigolds on them. Again fitting, as Gary informed me that apparently every child except for me went through the kindergarten ritual of planting marigold seeds in milk cartons so that they were ready by mothers day. Last year’s cake had marigolds but also included lemon peel and pomegranate seeds.

I am bad about buying presents. I can never come up with the right thing and never remember the good ideas I may have had throughout the year when it comes time to actually get a present. I hate buying token gifts that I know will never be used. But food - food gets used. I know what to make and get true enjoyment out of figuring out a meal plan for a special person in my life. I love the process, the prep, the contemplation time I get when methodically making ravioli or kneading bread. It is the ultimate gift that you see a return on right away, if it sucks - plates come back full. If it was good - people smile and eat and laugh and talk story and the night can go on forever. It is basic, fundamental and nourishing not just to our bodies but our hearts.

I’ve canned 7 quarts of tomato sauce this past week. The San Marzanos are ripening slower than any of the others. So even when I fill my stockpot to the brim with cut up tomatoes, it really amounts to only 3 or 4 quarts of sauce once I have simmered all the extra juice/water off. Black Russians and Aunt Ruby’s German Greens are making up the bulk of it, with a few Tiffen Mennonites and Marzano’s thrown in as they see fit to ripen. We have boxes upon boxes of green tomatoes wrapped in newspaper strategically placed on every horizontal surface as I speak. It seems to be working well, I just don’t get the mother lode of ripe tomatoes all at once which made putting them up a bit easier last year. This year it will be a much more punctuated process.

I also put up 14 half pints of Dill green tomato pickles. I used up all of the green cherry tomatoes left from when I pulled the Sungold plant yesterday. I made green tomato pickles last year but tried a different recipe this time. Last years were a big hit with a friend of ours, and a good thing since they didn’t thrill me too much. I still need to get out there today and pull the remaining tomatoes from the hoophouse, as it has done all it can do. I will try to box ripen all of the Marzanos and also the larger Tiffens and Black Russians. The others I hope to make up a big batch of Green Enchilada sauce with and perhaps some more of Susans Green Tomato Relish. I need to get to the produce market or the Farmers market to get chilies and cilantro first though.

Other activities this week included alternately belly crawling and back crawling under the house for a few days. We needed to replace all of the furnace ducting and figured as winter approached, we should just start the job. Despite a seeming complete inability to find the proper supplies and days worth of hold-ups and other engagements - we actually managed to finish this past Friday. Hopefully the new insulated ducting will show its presence in a decreased heating bill this winter and warm warm toes. Both Gary and I have mostly recovered, save for the bellyaching about parts of our body we didn’t even know were there before, and the remnant coughing up of fine Skyway clay and fiberglass. I suspect Gary will go much more into detail on this project and I will leave that to him.

Also on the list for today is Duck Confit. In our weekend errand running we stopped at the local asian market and picked up a whole duck plus two legs. Yesterday I broke the duck down and rendered all of the skin for fat. I think I am still a little short, but will give it a whack anyway. I can’t go buy another duck right now and refuse to pay the highway robbery prices for mail ordered duck fat. Well, I could go buy another duck but that would result in another rendering event and I don’t know if my arteries could take it. You know what the byproduct of rendering duck fat is? Duck Cracklins, oh god - the pure, salty, crunchy bliss. Things like that can only happen once a year lest we give up all passion for everything else, sell the house and buy a million ducks in a freezer storage locker and spend the rest of our short days munching on duck cracklins while sitting on the truck tailgate over a portable propane stove.

I also have the two breasts from the whole bird which will most likely make itself known in some form for dinner. Or perhaps we will eat the garlic sausage we picked up from the butcher. We will see how I feel about it all after several more hours of canning and mucking about in the rain picking green tomatoes.

Yesterday was a steamy affair in the kitchen. I have finally acknowledged to myself that October is just around the corner and our traditional tomato glut is going to take a lot more coaxing this year. We got the plastic up on the hoop house the other weekend, but a combination of cold days and less than clear plastic (try white when advertised as clear) have thwarted my hopes of instant tomato ripening. I canned 7 quarts of green tomatoes the night before last. Half were larger tomatoes, sliced for breading and frying during the winter. The other half were whole or just halved for use in enchilada sauces and other creations as I see fit.

Today I made a batch of chicken stock(from the numerous cutoffs and saved carcasses I throw in the freezer every time I roast a chicken) with a healthy dose of fennel fronds, onion and carrot. I pressure canned these as I need to save room in the freezer for the beef and pork that will be coming shortly. I also made up a batch of corn broth. We ate quite a bit of fresh corn this summer and a few cooking gigs left me with an abundance of corn cobs whose kernels had been cut off for one recipe or another. I toss these into the freezer as well until I have enough for stock/broth. The corn stock is incredibly sticky and sweet when done. It makes a great base for a corn chowder using frozen kernels in the winter, really really corny - heh.

And last but not least, I roasted up 3 pans of tomatoes with oregano for sauce. Except we decided to go run errands right in the middle of my flurry of activity and by the time we got back and I ran everything through the food mill it was more like roasted tomato paste. So be it! 4 half-pints of roasted tomato paste won’t go to waste around here.

Do you remember the heat? We didn’t have a lot of it this year, but we had some pretty hot days. I mentioned a while ago that we headed down to my friends land towards the end of August. It turned out to be one of the hottest days this year. That morning right before we headed out was when I discovered that someone had crashed into my parked car and royally screwed it up. I was in a pretty foul mood that day but we packed up anyway for the 2 hour drive south. We arrived around 2 pm (after much traffic and back tracking, I’ll save that story for another day), and the sun was in full force. Wisely I asked Gary to stop at the general store in town and picked up some beer before heading out to the farm.

What resulted was one of the most pleasant days I had this summer. Did anything get done? Absolutely not. As soon as we got there we all found our respective spots, I parked my butt and cracked a beer. My guess is it got into the upper 90’s with plenty of humidity, mosquitoes and sweat. But it was wonderful, just sitting, catching up and talking, occasionally taking a stroll around the gardens and visiting the critters. The leading picture above is of the newest addition to the farm, Liam. He was pretty hot too and every once in a while he would return to our outside seating area to cool off his two front feet in a bucket of water, then he would run off to rigorously monitor the other animals, he is the epitome of a border collie.

This is Red, by far the oldest rooster I have ever known. Red is one of the first additions to the farm, I think he is 7 or 8 years old now. Somehow it is fitting that the only real pictures I took while we were down there are of the newest and oldest. I had intended to take many more, but it was hot and the beer was cold and my motivation for the day seemed to have been torn off along with my sideview mirror. Red is the bonafide yard bird of my friends place. The chicken, geese and ducks all have their own fenced enclosures but Red has free range over the entirety of her land. He hangs with the dogs and monitors the hens most of the time.

More and more I dream about having my own little bit of land. I am so impressed by what my friend has done with her land. Over the years I have had the opportunity to see it go from a raw bit of pasture and woods to well developed perennial beds, a small orchard and plenty of other critters. With all that is happening in this country at the moment I feel an increasing sense of urgency to check out. We do a lot on this little city lot, trying to grow a good portion of our own food and responsibly tend to our little patch of earth, but the size limits our independence. I dream about finally getting the mortgage paid off and getting down to the bare minimum of external work for money to keep us fed and watered. It still seems a long way off, and I am a bit short on patience lately.

The economic and political state of affairs has done little to redeem my faith in this country and its citizens. I know there are thoughtful folks out there, it just appears they are completely in the minority. After 8 years of a idiotic Texas frat boy in the office we are now facing the very real possibility that an aspiring Miss America will be a heartbeat away from the presidency. This terrifies me, and if it happens - if they win the popular vote, I believe this country will get exactly what it deserves. I just feel bad for the rest of the world that has to survive our blunders. I’m no fan of politics or politicians in general, democrat or republican. At base I believe the system is corrupt. But this is big stuff, and if over 500 billion dollars in costs for 6 years of war, a failing economic system and rising unemployment doesn’t stir the people of this country to demand a change from the status quo from both parties - once again, we deserve everything we get.

I checked out Joel Salatin’s recent book Everything I Want to do is Illegal. And up until yesterday I was enjoying it. Salatin is an intelligent man and a good writer. His discussions of the industrial food system and the bureaucracy that prevents small farms and local food systems from succeeding is both stimulating and insightful. I have the utmost respect for what he and his family are doing on their acreage in Virginia and have learned many things from him in other essays and his occasional articles in The Stockman.

But he jumped the shark. Big time.

This book is full of his personal libertarian analysis of the ills of modern society, and while some of his reasoning’s I tend to concur with - suffice it to say I am not signing up for the Libertarian party anytime soon (or any party for that matter*). But I could get over that, I could read past our political differences and still involve myself in the context of his arguments and the base rationale behind them. I even glossed over the frequent bible references he uses as his reasoned guidepost for public policy (ugh). We each have our own gods and opinions and still have a lot to learn from each other, right? (Note that this is a big step for a Catholic School survivor and avowed atheist to take).

And then, last night, I came to his chapter on Labor. It all started simply enough with a discussion of his difficulties in getting help on the farm and having to turn away kids who desired to apprentice because he did not have the infrastructure, cash and certifications for such a program. And then he started sliding into the precursors for an argument against minimum wage and child labor laws (I squirmed a bit, but knew he was a Libertarian when I started so I pushed on through).  I moved on to the chapter on taxes. And then, how do I introduce it? Well - lets let him speak for himself:

“Of course, if our civilization hadn’t killed 50 million babies that would have been paying into the system right now the shortfall would not be as acute. That is why we allow continued inflows of illegal aliens. We can’t afford to stop the flow because these are the folks propping up Social Security. And they are now doing the work that aborted babies would have been doing right now. We’ve executed our work force and must now accept whatever we can get.”

What the fuck? Is he serious? Really? Where do I begin….

So to restate his point. Social Security is failing because we aborted too many babies and the aborted babies are also the cause of all illegal immigration. Had all those babies been born, they would be paying social security taxes enough to cover our current deficit all based on low wage salaries (below minimum wage at Sataltin’s choice) for picking our produce, cleaning up our factory farmed chicken shit, cleaning our houses, mowing our lawns and tucking our kids in at night?

I don’t even know if I have it in me to compose a rebuttal to that sort of idiocy - but I’ll give it a shot.

Social Class - You know, Joel has a point. I don’t know anyone who would disagree with a 50 million strong uber-underclass caste we could use to do all of the jobs that the existing born and bred Americans don’t want to do at the going federal minimum wage rate of a whopping $6.55 per hour or $13,624 dollars a year before taxes and the much owed social security and medicare taxes are deducted from their paychecks. But wait, all of those aborted babies would actually be eligible for social security and medicare (unlike the illegal immigrants who (according to Salatin’s assertion) are supporting the system now without any access to its benefits. And I would put good money on the fact that someone making under 14k a year would have to avail themselves of Medicare or Medicaid services when a health issue threatens them instead of trotting down to the nearest for-profit hospital to get charges $100 per stitch (This comes from experience, I needed 7 stitches while in school and without health insurance - the bill came to just over $700).

Unemployment Rates - What about the unemployed we have now? Are they not figured into this rationale, or are they just good for nothings who don’t want to work? Do we have a guarantee that those 50 million (now un-aborted) babies will come into this world with a family eagerly anticipating their arrival and prepared to care for them properly and raise them with the good ole American work ethic that will be demanded for their lifetime of manual labor at a pittance?

Population Density - The current US population estimate is 305 million, give or take a couple hundred thousand. 50 million additional people represents a sixteen percent increase over our current population. Where are these people going to live? Salatin bemoans the conversion of prime farmland over to housing developments and big box stores (don’t get me wrong, so do I). But if these 50 million are intended to rescue us from our farm labor crisis where does he propose they live? In the nearest city so that they can commute to the farm everyday in the car that they bought on their 13k salary? Oh, wait..farm workers don’t even get minimum wage, do they? Not to mention the cost of gas. Or are they intended to live in ramshackle converted chicken huts and weathered lean-to’s like many of our immigrant farm workers do? This is an improvement? The living conditions of this country’s farm workers is already horrendous - and we are to assume that they will improve out of the beneficent farm owners desire to care for a largely migratory population that travels where the work is?

Settling for “what we can get” - Are you freaking kidding me? This country was built on the backs of immigrant laborers, legal and illegal. Our wealth and rise to the top of the dung pile is at the expense of millions of working class immigrants who wore out their bodies and souls just trying to feed their families and make a go of it “in the land of the plenty”. Settling? We have been coddled for so long and used the third world as our bargain Labor-Ready pool since we forcefully acquired this country - how can he possibly believe that we are settling for “what we can get”. Immigrants are the chosen caste in this country to do our dirty work. The born and bred American is too aware of his rights and abuses of power, employment law etc to be of any use to those who want the maximum work for the minimum expense. Or is there some inherently racist and nationalist undertone here? Does the value of a persons work increase or decrease depending on their citizenship.  Or does a US citizen make a better compost heap than an illegal immigrant?

It is absolutely amazing to me that a man who has spent so much time considering the intricacies and dependent relationships of earth, plants and animals could flip and expose such a sophomoric view of human social intricacies and dependent relationships. You’d think that maybe he viewed humans as a completely separate system. You will note that I am not even taking up the abortion argument here. He is free to not abort any children that may find their way into his womb, I promise. I tried to read past it, and got into the next chapter but couldn’t stop spinning.

I’ve been sitting on this post for a couple of days now, because there is so much more I want to add (and rant on about). But I figured I should just post it and let it go. I haven’t picked up the book again - don’t know if I will. Such a shame…

So I have been seriously remiss in posting lately. And I don’t really have a valid excuse short of life gets away from you sometimes. That and I have found myself not wanting to be in front of a computer for the remaining free time I have while the sun is still shining. I have been reading quite a bit lately courtesy of our local library. I checked out two cookbooks, David Lebovits’ Perfect Scoop and Edna Lewis’ The Taste of Country Cooking. The Lebovits book was good, I made peach ice cream and noted several others that I will try eventually. We are only two people here so I couldn’t run the course of recipes without filling the freezer and throwing us both into adult onset diabetes.

The Edna Lewis book was an absolute gem! It follows the seasons and is part cookbook part memoir of her youth growing up in a small farming community. Even if you are not into cooking that much I highly recommend this. It includes recipes for Blackberry wine and is a beautiful piece of writing, what more could you want?

Aside from food books, I have been reading several homesteading books. I checked out the River Cottage Cookbook and am convinced that I will actually need to purchase this. Far from just a cookbook this is a reference manual for almost anything having to do with producing, preserving and/or raising your own food. I also read Extreme Simplicity: Homesteading in the City. While I had high hopes for this book, I don’t really feel like I walked away with anything I didn’t know already. It has some good tips for someone just starting to consider the idea of small scale self sufficiency in urban settings, but it is a little too new-agey for my tastes. I read John Seymour’s The Fat of the Land: Family Farming on Five Acres, which is a classic at this point. I would recommend this, and have Gary reading it now before it is due back.

I do have a gripe about these homesteading/self-suffiency books though. Each one advertises how you too can make the move to a (at least partial) self sufficient lifestyle and support yourself with next to nothing. The extreme simplicity book originally intrigued me because in our current location I am constantly preoccupied with seeing exactly how much we can get/how much we can do with our teeny tiny eighth of an acre (including the footprint of the house). The reality of the Extreme Simplicity book is that although the authors do indeed live in Los Angeles, they have the luck of bordering their backyard on an abandoned orchard in the middle of the city. An orchard who’s owner is open to them keeping their bees and several wild chickens on his property as well as gathering wild foodstuffs for the market and burying their pet dogs there, collecting firewood, etc. The subtitle should be Extreme Simplicity: Provided you have a beneficent neighbor who will let you use his property for free. The Seymour book actually acknowledges his good fortune, and is a bit more dated but is a similar situation. He and his wife had the luck to sign a lease for a 5 acre parcel of land with two homes and outbuildings on a 25 year lease for $25 dollars a month. Show me anywhere in the States now that that is even remotely possible (that isn’t arid desert) and I will live on 5k a year with no problems.

I read another book as well, but that is saved for the next post - I have a bit of venting to do on that one. And the tomatoes are slowly coming in! (see, I had to come around to the leading picture eventually). The beaver lodge have been steadily dribbling out, I harvested the first two San Marzanos yesterday, several Russian Blacks in our bellies and today brought our first ripe Aunt Ruby’s German Green. We constructed a hoop house over the tomato bed the other weekend as a last ditch attempt to lenghten the season. But the snap clamps I ordered have still not arrived. I ordered them on the 7th and they didn’t see fit to tell me they were out of stock until I called in a week later wondering where my order was. SO as soon as those arrive we will put up the plastic and hopefully jack up the temp inside by 5-10 degrees. I have not canned a single batch of tomato anything yet and am beginning to get concerned that we will need to purchase our winter supply from the farmers market instead of the back yard. But maybe the hoop house will perform miracles.

I tried to include links to all the books mentioned above, but Amazon was not cooperating. So it goes…

This entry is late, the weekend got away from me. Yesterday was pretty nice but it is cold and cloudy again today. Right now the temperature outside is a balmy 54 degrees F. I am not ready for fall.

Plant -Ok, so I didn’t plant anything this week. I’m a bit demoralized, it appears summer is over.

Harvest - Kai Lan, green beans, bunching onions, 8.5 lbs rhubarb, butter crunch lettuce, 2 tomatoes (is it really just going to end like this, one or two tomatoes a week? ugh).

Preserve - 1 quart blackberries frozen, 1 gallon Kai Lan blanched and frozen, 7 pints green beans canned, 5 pounds Rhubarb frozen, 4 pints rhubarb juice concentrate canned. Stemmed and bagged another round of dried organo and another bag of dried spearmint. Husked arugula seeds.

Prep - Trimmed back the dogwood tree that was rapidly overtaking the path round the tomato bed. I am considering putting in a hoop house over the entire bed (this September if the weather doesn’t start cooperating with Tomato season). Cobbled together (again) the pole bean trellis which is suffering terribly from the rain and winds we have had. I just need it to last until the beans are done producing, is that too much to ask?

Cook- Corn pudding with Farmers market corn, roasted poblanos, okra and onions. Garden veggie mac n cheese. Sumac and cumin spiced chicken thighs roasted with summer squash and zucchini. Chocolate pistachio zucchini bread.  Red wine braised lamb shanks with red potatoes, carrots, fennel and onion. The ever present garden salad.

Manage Reserves - With the consumption of the lamb shanks this week we now have one leg of lamb left in the freezer from last years lamb. Our quarter beef won’t arrive until October and the pig arrives January/February so we will be eating a lot of veg til the meat comes in.

Work on Local Food Systems - No shopping at the markets this week.

This guy was huge! I don’t know what variety he (she?) is, but apparently he decided that the recent weather was not at all summerlike and escaped indoors. I found him in my makeshift proofing box over the weekend when I was about  to proof bread. I should have put something recognizable in there for the picture for perspectives sake. I’d say he was about 2-3 inches from front legs to back.

Saved from drowning and spending a few minutes regaining his composure while drying out on his rescue stick. We have seen more of these black wasps (?) this year than ever before. I am curious about them. Need to seriously consider getting a good insect identification book. Reccomendations?

Nin can’t help but insert herself into every possible picture I take out in the yard. Screaming and whining at me the whole time because I am paying more attention to my camera and the bugs than her.

Do you think she knows it is her shadow?