Okay, maybe not lemons, but how about a lot of snow? We’ve endured a minimum of one snow day from school a week for the last 5 weeks. We’ve had a LOT of snow this year. It makes one a little stircrazy. So, this is my husband’s answer:
So then I asked my daughter to model the greens I had just pulled out of the greenhouse, as a point of incongruity:
but I did not ask her to eat them (yet). And we’re, what, 22 days from spring?
Posted in Uncategorized, weather
Open the door and look right (and yes, that’s snow outside the plastic)
Now look left. You can’t see the front two beds, though. And sorry the angles make you seasick.
Welcome to my bonsai greenhouse garden. Nothing is allowed to get big, what with my compulsive outer-leaf harvesting. In the main, though I am growing vegetables in the greenhouse this winter, I am growing them for their leaves. Kohlrabi, shallots, beets: they may not be getting enough energy to make their bulbs, such is my fondness for their above-ground outputs.
Before breaking ground on the greenhouse, I seriously looked over the winter-approved list of hardy lettuces and salad findings, and, yes, I even planted these. But as I readily admit, I am not one to follow directions to the letter. My family, for example, really adores Amish Deer Tongue lettuce: it is a kind of cross between upright romaine and head-forming bibb lettuce, neither of which is especially cold-hardy. Nor is lime green leafy Grand Rapids, but I grew a lot of that too: we LIKE it is my stubborn answer. And you know what? They’ve both been okay in there, even if the mercury dips below 20* nightly.
In fact, everything is doing well. (I should clarify that my standards might be low: by “doing well” I mean “not dead yet.”) Nothing is robustly growing: there’s not been enough sun to make that happen. With the lack of sun there’s been a lack of heat, too. I have followed others’ questioning of heat-retaining methods like black plastic water-filled barrels, freshly manured hot beds, etc., to add to the greenhouse and I kind of scratch my head. Any plant will grow when its needs are met, and the top of any plant’s needs is sunlight, not warmth. I happen to live in a rather cloudy corner of the globe. Those clouds dump lots of snow on us, it is true, but those clouds also blanket us to keep us relatively warm. Global warming fears aside, this is a typical winter for us. Yes, it’s been chilly and dark in that greenhouse this last month or so, but the greenery is hanging on. I would say the secret to my success here is raised beds, deep/well composted soil, and a 24/7 covering of the agricultural cloth (Reemay), and not something high-tech.
The one botanical rock star of the greenhouse, though? Arugula. I transplanted a couple of my wildlings (they of the slim leaves and the yellow flowers) and planted a row of fleshy Italian salad arugula, too. I love arugula, but I stand alone in my admiration. So I have been making fairly decent warm-served pesto with it (warming it slightly in a pan before serving takes a bit of its bite out that my family finds offensive); thank you dear Cookiecrumb for the suggestion.
Other eager plants include mizuna, chard, radicchio, tatsoi, broccoli, and parsley. Perennial scallions have kept us in onion-y greens; they DO look sad, but just wait until the weather warms up. Cold-loving herbs, too, are having a field day in there. I have a huge, ever-expanding patch of chervil just crying out to be cut up and tossed with scrambled eggs. Even the thyme, rosemary, sage and marjoram in there have never really gone to sleep: they’re at the back of the greenhouse, uncovered, in the old herb garden that I didn’t have time to relocate.
So experiment, is my advice. Go with what you like, avoid what you don’t. Your greenhouse needn’t just be cold-approved mache, spinach and kale, but if you love them, it should!
Posted in greenhouses, weather
Trusty Tom sharpens up my trusty Felco #8
Yes, I claim I love living a life indoors but really I was just kidding myself. I really like being outdoors. And lucky for me, I got outside a lot this weekend.
It’s a ways off yet, spring and the outdoor growing season, but we’ve had a few days of sunshine, which means sap’s rising out there on the grapevines and fruit trees. Time to get out the pruners and do this year’s trimming. This year I am taking (love her. love her husband.) Barbara Damrosch’s advice this week and am using the longer tree clippings for pea vine supports. Can I tell you how much I hate hanging twine for the peas? I do it every year but it makes me slightly crazy.
Meet my nemesis: the Tree of Pain. I think I will have plenty of pea stakes now.
I have plenty of grapevines now for crafting projects (not)
Another tree, in better shape, and the best for climbing (note budding naturalist observing some wildlife)
Posted in sweat
The hard way: Des Vertus savoy cabbage under the lights downstairs (planted 2/17/08)
The easy way: Rapini in the greenhouse (planted 1/12/08)
I have admitted I don’t like starting seeds indoors. Part of it’s the dirt: we work so hard to keep the dirt outside the house; it’s antithetical to our thinking to actually encourage it across the threshold of the back door. The other thing, I think, is the rush of it all. Seeds planted in the house have a very predictable trajectory of growth that means that, ready or not, these puppies will need to be outside in the sunshine in as few as 4 weeks. Like many things, though, I realize I need to just take my own advice and just “get over it.”
Looking hard, what I realized that bugged me so much is having the seed trays upstairs, in the relative (and cat-free) tidiness of the guest bedroom. It’s warm up there; warm enough for all the seeds to sprout quickly and happily. Seeds, you see, are a lot like us: we’d all prefer a nice warm bed to lie in. Many things do sprout at 35* (onions, lettuces, etc.) but they’ll sprout faster (and grow faster) at 65*. So what, I decided, if the basement is colder than the guest bedroom. The seeds will still sprout, albeit a bit more slowly. And I won’t beat myself up if I spill some dirt down there. And, really: what’s my hurry?
So I finally got some of the babies going this last weekend, having first bumped off the top shelf of canned goods in the basement to a lower shelf. I started the alliums (2 leeks, 3 onions, 1 scallion) and brassicas (2 broccoli, 3 kale, 1 cabbage). These guys can be stuck in the ground a good 2-3 weeks before the last frost. They may not like it, but they’ll get by. I think I will slow them down further by sticking them (in their pots) in the greenhouse for a couple of weeks, too, before I stick them in the ground.
Like not seeing one’s shadow, will planting flats of seeds make spring come more quickly? One can only hope. I’m becoming snow-blind.
Posted in seeds
Long ago (wow, almost 20 years ago), I made the most sexist statement ever for me. Friends and I were discussing the division of labor in my household at the time: my boyfriend and I both loved to cook and bake, and the friends were wondering which of us had made the bread we were eating. “Bread,” I said, quite haughtily, “is too important to leave to a man to make.”
I’ve changed my tune since then. But I still make all the bread in this house.
If ever you wished to try to make bread on your own, I suggest you try something foolproof like Jim Lahey’s No Knead recipe. (Not, of course, because you’re a fool!) There is much to recommend this loaf, though, and its relative ease could be a springboard for you to try all other methods of bread-making. The path to being a great breadmaker is a path strewn with lots of rock-hard, barely edible loaves. Trust me on this. But this recipe can be a bit of a detour from this path.
I use a heavily modified form of Jim’s recipe about twice a week, and on weekends I use my regular recipe for sandwich loaves. The reason I modify Jim’s recipe is I find the normal one a touch flavorless on the second day; that, and I’m a whole-wheat baker…this recipe works best with refined (white) flour. But what’s great about it is the hot method of covered cooking. Even if you use a normal recipe for your bread, cooking the dough in a covered pot in a hot oven yields a nice crisp crust and a high crumb.
Other modifications: we tend to like a lot of “mixies” in our loaves (oats, ground flax seed, sunflower seeds, etc.) but the long rising time of the no-knead method just won’t work with mixies: the dough will just plain go bad. I get around this by adding more water to the recipe, letting it do its thing for at least 12 hours, and then I scrape the dough out onto the floured counter and I knead the mixies in, adding more flour as needed.
I also often use my sourdough starter for the loaf. Trace of Cricket Bread found a good modification to try to make that recipe work using your starter. It requires a bit more patience, but then, so does sourdough bread.
And I suppose the last modification should also be mentioned: I like to knead. So I mix the ingredients thoroughly at first, and, when it’s time to turn the dough out for its second rise, I find I give it a smash and a flip or two or four just to make sure it’s springy.
But what’s great about his recipe is this: the amount of yeast you use is entirely dependent upon how much time you have (less yeast = more time to rise). So, let’s say you get the grand idea to have bread with dinner, but it’s morning, and you don’t have the 18-24 hours required for the loaf to proof. Simple. Double the yeast to 1/2 teaspoon or more, and…you might want to knead it a bit on its second rise, around 3:00. Heat the oven at 5:00, cook it from 5:30-6:15, and serve it with dinner at 7:00. Voila.
So! in the spirit of democracy, I hereby say that even those of us with Y chromosomes can make this bread, and they should.
Posted in food
Leeksickles, complete with wormy roots
Leeks are known as the Poor Man’s Asparagus. Considering asparagus grows along the roadsides of my corner of the world, even poor men can have asparagus. But leeks? I tried nearly in vain to find organic leeks when we first moved here, and when I did find them, they were $8 a pound. As far as I was concerned, leeks were the Rich Man’s Onions.
Luckily, and unlike onions, I seem to have the knack of growing leeks. At this time of the year, I only need to find my garden fork, go into the frozen garden, and dig up some frozen leeks. With a bit of work, and a bit of patience, I am well rewarded. I even feel rich.
Homemade stuff with cocoa mustache
One thing we have done to keep our lives sane is give up our computers on Sundays. This is hard, as both of us make our money through these things.
This is what is different about a December-March weekend versus one spent at any other time of the year: we unabashedly (resignedly?) spend it indoors. It would only be on a January Sunday you’d ever, say, find me ironing linens. Likewise, the loom never comes out during the warmer months, but now? Now we’ve got rag rugs on our minds, and on the loom. Making Play-doh is also a fun cold-weather activity, though Play-doh is played with all year.
The only thing I don’t particularly like is doing laundry in the winter. The dryer is still unplugged, so the basement becomes practically unnavigable, such is the drape of the sails of sheets, towels, unmentionables. Ah, here’s one instance in which I long for spring: drying the clothes on the line in the sun.
The dough rises in its bowl, the bones from last night’s chicken are simmering in the stockpot, and I really should clean the upstairs bathroom.
Posted in weather
Yep, it’s a picture of our “garbage.”
So, this local diet? This lack of fresh vegetables? My compost pile is suffering.
I suppose this is, in a way, a good thing: we’re definitely low contributors to the waste stream. We eat every last little bit of our precious salad greens; all our frozen veggies likewise are completely eaten…there’s no waste there at all. The chickens are eager consumers of leftovers (pasta, oatmeal, bread heels) and resigned consumers of beet peelings. Peelings, in the main, are the ONLY veg detritus destined for the compost: potatoes, carrots and celeriac; onions and garlic. The occasional apple core also finds its way in the daily pot.
Coffee filters, grounds, and old coffee is probably 50% of what remains, that, and egg shells. Yum, huh?
(FWIW: I keep dumping the kitchen scraps atop the heap in the winter. Our pets’ fur, our sweepings with the broom, likewise, get thrown on top. Leaves, grass clippings, orchard leavings, spent garden plants, and all that wonderful chicken litter is the rest of it. On a day of a big thaw, you’ll find me out there turning the piles; I kind of can’t help myself, as I like the exercise. But otherwise, I am the most impatient composter I know. I don’t ever devote the year or more required to make a pile completely cakey and perfect: it doesn’t matter if I have 3 piles or 30, I will find use for them all, in whatever state of nonreadiness the piles’re in. The garden’s microbes will do the rest of the work for me!)
Posted in food
Cardoon flowers from a long-ago September: Thistles with an education?
So my seed orders have been placed, and many have arrived. Yet (yet!) my annual seed quest lives on.
Every year I try a few new-to-me, “out there” vegetables. You know, the kinds of things you would never find in a grocery store and would rarely find in the stall of a farmer’s market. For the most part, these items don’t travel well…that’s the main reason they’re hard to find. Plain old unfamiliarity account for their rarity too. Both of these things (their relative fragility and their rarity) really are a boon, though, to someone with a large vegetable garden and an even larger vegetable curiosity. Someone, in other words, like me.
I will say that most of these botanical oddballs have been hits here with my family. Sorrel, which is a perennial, is a wonderful green leafy thing that melts to a buttery lemony-ness in a pan with the smallest hint of water. Orach, all the dandelion-y chickories, mache, and claytonia are nice cold-weather salad items we’ve enjoyed as season-extended greens; they now grow all winter long in the greenhouse. Skirret, though it’s a bear to clean, has a nutty taste to it that is wonderful if browned in butter (like parsnips). Same with scorzonera and salslify, frankly; all three of these root veggies have successively taken over more and more of the root veg beds, moving plain carrots and parsnips aside. Hamburg parsley can be grown for both its root and its leaves: I concentrate on the root, though, as its taste is so green, despite the fact that that vegetable is white: it, like celeriac or kohlrabi, are great grated in a salad. Sea kale needs a bit of fussing in its first years, but this perennial can be blanched under a cloche to make its young cabbage-family shoots tender to the tooth. Cardoon is a strikingly gorgeous plant that should be grown for beauty alone. Its stems slightly peeled, steamed, and dunked in a bowl of aioli…well, this, with a big glass of red, is my idea of a perfect August dinner.
This year, though, my list of oddballs is only three deep: rampion, turnip-rooted chervil, and Good King Henry. I am especially excited about this latter one, Chenopodium Bonus-Henricus. Here, from my favorite (and sadly out of print) go-to primer of all things vegetable, the esteemed English translation of MM. Vilmorin-Andrieux’s The Vegetable Garden (1885): “(it) yields an abundant supply of delicious shoots a fortnight before Asparagus come in, and for some weeks afterwards. When properly grown, the little shoots should be almost as thick as the little finger, and in gathering, it should be cut under the ground something the same as Asparagus.” Another perennial veg, coming in before asparagus? Sign me up!
Posted in seeds
“Love and eggs are best when they are fresh.” –Russian proverb
Our kid will correct you if you say to her “a chicken says cluck cluck cluck.” She’ll say “No, a chicken says ‘bweAAAH bweAAAH bweAAAH.” Because they do. And guineas? “chuPWACK chuPWACK chuPWACK.”
So I think I have discovered the secret to getting fresh eggs year-round. It’s a simple one: always have enough young pullets around to lay them! You see, chickens need about 14 hours of light a day to encourage them to lay: anything less than that, they’re saving their reserves for other worthwhile ventures, like keeping themselves warm. Our older girls will give us an egg maybe every three days, but four of the five youngsters will lay just about daily. It’s a lot of eggs: more than we can eat, quite frankly. But: we have egg-loving friends, family and employers….
We do have one warming light in their coop. (Yes, sue me; but remember, our electricity is Nookeelar, as our esteemed president calls it: a carbon neutral but not guilt neutral power source. And I do feel guilty about the expenditure, but rather happier that I have happy chickens.) It’s on a timer, and gives them about 4 hours of light at night.
It’s cold out, so they spend most of their days all huddled up in the chicken condo (different, certainly, from the chicken coop: this is just their day house) shown in the picture above. It keeps them out of the wind, but I would think it would be kind of crowded with eleven of them in there. Ah, well, birds of a feather: they do flock together!
Posted in chickens, etc.
If I were running for president, the top of my list of priorities to tackle would include global warming, the stupid wars, health care, education, the deficit…and our effed-up food system. Had I that bully pulpit, I would preach the wonders of Dirt and Worms and Compost; Home-Grown Vegetables and Sun-Warmed Fruit. I would love to see a garden on every property, a greenhouse in every back yard. But my pulpit is small. So instead I’m making greenhouse postings for the benefit of some of you to bookmark for later use. There are plenty of you out there, I know, who have a greenhouse, cold frame, polytunnel, etc., on your wish list. So here is another little post about mine.
It’s the beginning of February and I am itchy to dig. I do have some thawed ground in the greenhouse I could push around. The eighth and final bed has not been made (the wood framing that is: the dirt is there). Maybe that’s where I should begin, and even plant some seeds in it too.
As it is now, I have been using it for a dumping ground. Sheet composting, I suppose this could be called, but in reality, I was just lazy (and thus call it Sh*t composting). When I trim the leeks or remove spent leaves off of the other plants, the junk goes atop this eighth pile. (The compost is some 20 steps outside the door to prove how lazy I have been.) My point in mentioning all this is, well, look at this pile. Unlike in your regular gardens, the cool damp air in the greenhouse keeps this stuff from rotting! It’s kind of distressing, actually.
This is what I mean by distressing. Like all seeds, weeds also pop up in the greenhouse beds, and I will pull them out and dump them on the path as is my outside habit. Come back a week or two later and those little grass blobs or weedlings are still on the path! And occasionally they’ll have rooted themselves. Hmm.
All I am saying is greenhouse gardening is really different, in some rather unexpected ways.
Posted in greenhouses
We seem to have been having the “normal” amount of snowfall this winter. I love snow so this is good news to me. What is kind of icky is, every week, it gets into the mid-40s, so any snow we get goes away…or goes sloshy.
The other day we had an ice storm before it decided to turn to snow. Penny the Overactive Blue Heeler and I went for a walk on the property to see what we could see.
Ice on a maple branch
Fox and rabbit tracks
Some ice-burdened, droopy pines
Posted in weather
Yes, that’s an extension cord running out of the cover. The problem is the buried electric service to the pump. In the spring, it looks like we’ll have another round of digging on the property to fix it.
Would that I had one (staff, that is): I think I would start with a housecleaner. Wouldn’t that be nice? Or maybe a weeder, or a poison-ivy eradicator. But I’ll turn the compost piles myself, thanks.
But this is an interesting thing. Perhaps it is simply the kindness of neighbors, or life in a small town…I am not sure what it is. Our old house, though, has a series of repair guys (always guys) who seem to like to work unpaid.
This is a photo of our septic tank cover. It’s a bizarre system: we have clay soil, so we cannot expect the waste water to seep into the ground, so it’s pumped up, instead, to sand-filled Mont Merde, where it (hopefully) evaporates. So there is a pump down there under this cover that pumps the waste water up to Mont Merde, a pump that keeps tripping out the breaker first, and, once the breaker gets reset, it blows itself out! And keeps getting replaced for free. The only way we know the thing isn’t working is that the light in our powder room doesn’t turn on: it shares (not my idea) the same circuit as the pump.
And today our heating guy came and fixed our boiler again. For free. Somehow, this oil-fired boiler’s fuel pump (see? we have a pump theme going here) gets clogged, and the thermostat won’t kick the boiler on. We only know this because…well, it suddenly feels a LOT colder in here than it is normally. So we call and he comes.
The well guy works this same way: he came back twice just to make sure ours was working. And our electrician has come out a couple of times too since we had the upstairs rewired. So I scratch my head. I am not, you know, upset that these guys don’t want payment; they are standing by their work, after all, and are just doing what needs to be done. As a business model, though, this method is probably not taught at Wharton or Harvard Business School. Or is it?
Posted in sweat
Hooch for her mama, too?
Believe it or not, I had–and liked– a wine made of 100% concord grapes this weekend. It was Great Lakes Red from Leelanau Cellars, a good 4 hours north of us, in good old Michigan.
Considering the headache I woke up with on Saturday, I think I liked it a little too much.
It bodes well, though, for my winemaking ventures this year (rubs hands together expectantly).
Posted in sweat
The first salad of February
Friday was our third snow day in eight days. Crazy.
It was also Tag El for a Meme Day, it would appear. Pattie hit me for the 7 Random Things meme; seeing as I have done this one twice before and really don’t think you all are interested in Things 15-21 That You Don’t Know About Me, so I will simply rehash my other two. (Yes, it’s cheating. Oh well.) Danielle, though, hit me with one I hadn’t even seen before, much less fallen victim to. This one is an Archive meme wherein you cite some of your own favorite posts in five categories. This one has legs, I thought; maybe I will try this…if only because I am sure many of you haven’t the patience to backread 500-odd posts. I’ve put the rules of this one at the bottom.
Confession. When I think “meme,” I don’t think “Meem,” I think “memememeMEEE” because, frankly, that’s what they’re mostly about. Snore-boring, in other words. But I take my hat off to Pattie and Danielle. These are two selfless individuals who regularly blog and work for greater change, greater awareness of food and the making of food. Pattie works to make everyone consider themselves part of a foodshed: we’re all connected, she says. She is also gung-ho to get people gardening and has begun a Victory Garden quest for us. Danielle’s love of food and family have led her to do what we did: uproot and move to the country for a better life. She’s a lot more selfless about it in that she runs her own CSA. (Me? I won’t part with my veggies unless I really LIKE you.)
So here’s my take on these memes (remember, ME figures highly, sigh).
Family: One’s family should be the raison d’être of anything they do. I don’t blather on about my family much here. I’m a fairly private person. But moving to the farm was done to put magic into our daily existence, and this post exemplifies it.
Friends: I don’t mention real, actual, flesh-and-blood friends much here, but my friend Tim has consistently tried to keep me honest. He really thinks this nation’s issues with food are positively psychotic, and I readily agree.
About Me: There is one post that defines me and my beliefs absolutely, and it is this one. I garden for the food. It might be the only socially acceptable form of gluttony. But I still scratch my head often about how little our society values what it eats, and I was really on a tear about it a year ago(1, 2, 3, 4, 5). I still wonder, but I think I have moved more into the Let Them Eat Twinkies camp; maybe I have simply lost hope that America’s redemption will be found in a Brandywine tomato or a hybrid car or a compact fluorescent lightbulb.
Something I Love: No surprise, folks: it’s compost. It’s more about the compost, though: it’s about the circle of life here, about befriending things you don’t see. It’s as close to faith as I get.
Wildcard: It’s here I will answer Pattie’s call to the 7 Random Things. I answered Monica’s call to a 6 Weird Things, and then Tracy tagged me for a gardening-related meme in the 7 Random Things.
(Archive Meme Instructions: Go back through your archives and post the links to your five favorite blog posts that you’ve written. … but there is a catch: Link 1 must be about family. Link 2 must be about friends. Link 3 must be about yourself, who you are… what you’re all about. Link 4 must be about something you love. Link 5 can be anything you choose.) I am thinking heavily if I want to force people to do this meme. It is useful, though; I might just tag Pattie back with it!
Posted in Uncategorized
Big, messy, cold freezer: our best investment for the local diet
So today is February 1st. The darkest of the dark months are here: the Janebruary month of this slagging winter. What the heck have we been eating?
I have always had a keen interest in la cucina povera (Italian for: dang, there ain’t much to cook here in this pantry, is there?). I also have an absurd fascination with Depression and/or world-ending narratives of any stripe: I think I got hooked very young on the writings of Laura Ingalls Wilder and Dickens, frankly; the notion of plenty was all around me in life, but it was mostly absent in my active young imagination. Those “what if’s” of my early dreaming have carried into adulthood, and they (I think) have served me well with the notion of feeding ourselves locally in the depths of winter.
So, how are we doing. All that canning and freezing has paid off, is the short answer to my tale.
The second answer is my new meat-eating. CERTAINLY I could prepare meat for three meals a day every day and be quite thankful that the meat I get is both humanely raised and humanely killed: I feel quite fortunate in my sources. But I don’t prepare that much meat. Fleshy things have extended the menu around here, truthfully; and they’ve become…another personal challenge. But I will tell you this. I am not preparing tenderloin, steak and pheasant here. Meat is not the headliner of any meal. Instead I am preparing things with parts, like oxtail stew, or roasting one tiny cornish hen for the three of us. We are eating parts; we are eating bits; we are indulging in lots of stews and roasts and braises…but it’s not that often. Maybe one meal a week.
Where meat has helped has been in pairing with other dishes. A couple of slices of bacon or simple leftover bits is all a pot of my Old Soldier beans need; that, and all the other things I normally throw in there. A cup of browned ground meat helps with a tomato-based pasta sauce or a huge pot of chili, but it’s not necessary to enjoy either dish. The fat and drippings left in the pan from roasting a chicken becomes gravy for biscuits at another meal. Meat, around here, is just the ultimate condiment.
It’s the bread-y things that come to the fore in these dark days. Spaetzle will pair nicely with that oxtail stew; gnocchi, made from the previous day’s mashed potatoes, are a nice backdrop to a sage/butternut squash/browned butter sauce. My ubiquitous loaves are usually paired with our weekly soup. Cornbread, polenta, and (just made my own!) posole are nice corn-y dishes that back up stews or stewed greens. And the off-farm items like California rice and Michigan barley, farro (a kind of wheat), quinoa, millet and cracked wheat are used really sparingly but feature in about one dinner a week. And I am a new fan of buckwheat groats: I’ve made a couple of batches of Russian kasha (thus fixing my love of all things Russian in winter).
Eggs. Eggs are breakfast, eggs are lunch, eggs are dinner (sometimes). If I am feeling really lazy, I’ll scramble a few for dinner, maybe with some home fries.
Frozen vegetables. I still have lots of them. Every dinner features one dish of green beans or summer squash or broccoli or edamame. These things freeze quite well; the texture might be “off” but the taste is not.
And fresh greens. We are squeezing two, maybe three salads out of the greenhouse per week. One dinner a week is just salad (usually paired with a leftover from the day before of whatever is on hand) with a poached egg on top. But I did have the foresight to can a couple of batches of beet greens: these, with garlic, are nice on their own.
Sprouts. Sprouts are now daily fare, atop the salad, atop an egg sandwich, etc. Love them, and so does everyone else here.
Dried beans. Still have loads of dried lima, black, cranberry, soldier, and cowpeas. I have maybe only a couple of meals of some of the rare beans (canellini, flageolet, Hutterite soup, Tiger Eye, kidney). One dried bean dish is usual for one dinner a week, then the leftovers are nice, especially mixed with rice or atop a salad or with some greens.
So it’s the fresh vegetables that are getting the short shrift with this all-local diet. Isn’t that funny, considering what a vegetable whore I am? The tables have turned and they have become RIDICULOUSLY precious. Parsnips will be the feature of a meal; the cabbage downstairs (steamed, tossed with browned potatoes and brown butter) is positively golden. Those carrots, those winter squash are as rare as hen’s teeth. Those beets? I’m still the only one eating the beets. But I do have tons of potatoes, onions, and garlic. (Whew!)
Fruit: Still have apples in the root cellar and they’re still great. Some even improve with time, which sounds hard to believe but that’s what heirlooms were grown for: things like long-term storage! I have lots of frozen fruit (peaches, blueberries, cranberries); we have rows of canned peaches and plums, and lots of jam, butters, and applesauce. Lots of frozen juice, too, from our grapes and apples.
Breakfast: either hot cereal or toast and eggs. On long weekends I might be persuaded to make pancakes or waffles.
Lunch: Leftovers. The kid’s lunch is usually the night before’s dinner, or a grain or pasta that she likes, or a sandwich, along with one of those rare carrots and ubiquitous apples. Or applesauce.
SO! What am I telling you here? I’m telling you that I cook a lot. That is no surprise, though; I have always cooked a lot. I did discover one surprising thing: I did a bit of a search on how much money we spend monthly on food now compared to before all this madness happened. If I look back to January of 2006, despite the home-grown supplementing of the freezer and the canned stuff, I spent about $270. on my California organic vegetables and Tom’s CAFO meat, and our organic milk/butter. This January, we spent $42 on dairy at the grocery store and $75 for meat at the co-op…and most of these purchases went to our daughter’s birthday brunch. Everything else was here. (I made one big push for flour, breakfast grains and rice/quinoa/farro in November; that bill was $240 for 5+ months of Michigan-grown dried goods. I also buy olive oil twice a year.) So I am also telling you that doing things this way was cheaper, too, than the way we ate before.
It’s still a long time until Asparagus Season rolls around, though! But we certainly aren’t starving.
Posted in food
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