Monthly Archives: January 2010

Dark Days, Week 11

Bean carnage

Let’s just say our meal this week is terribly…beany.

Gosh, I think I have even posted about beans, what, twice before for this challenge?  Three times, maybe?  We do love our beans, it is true; probably one dinner a week is Beans.  That leaves six other meals per week that I could choose from that are Not Beans, pretty good odds!  I have a couple of things to say in my defense, though.

Mainly, it’s a bit of a crazy week.  Our daughter turns 6, and every day, it appears, there’s something else to be done to aid the celebration.  There are at least three meals that are directly birthday-related (food is love) and sadly not all of them will be Dark Days-worthy…or they would be if Michigan grew chocolate.  But!  My husband wanted to cook (is the sky falling?  was that just a pig I saw flying?  did hell freeze?) and he said he wanted to make some beans.

A LOT of beans, it turns out!  And:  I was so shocked I forgot to photograph it.

Menu:

  • Cuban Black Beans: our Black Turtle beans, Turino red (sweet) pepper, Hungarian (hot) ground red pepper, Copra onions, garlic, nonlocal cumin/pepper/salt, and greenhouse thyme and my friend’s greenhouse bay leaves.
  • Baked Beans: our Navy beans, Copra onions, garlic, Golden Self-Blanching celery, smoked pork belly, local honey, and a friend’s maple syrup.
  • Biscuits: home-milled hard red spring wheat, butter, home-made yogurt from our milk share.
  • Greenhouse salad with homemade, homegrown yogurt dressing (yogurt, shallots, apple cider vinegar, parsley, applesauce with Michigan sugar).

On the hidden costs of cheesemaking

Last week’s (top) and this week’s yogurt made from our milk share

Over the years my husband and I have had a bit of a tussle over finances.  This of course is the typical marital story.  Defining our particular story is my yen to DIY, and almost every little project I undertake, financially, has a big start-up cost.  It has a start-up cost (mainly in materials) that almost always requires no huge outlay of later cash…no bubble, as it were; only maintenance money.  So I have been able to persuade him that my *needs* are, well, inexpensive if you amortize!  At this point he trusts me.

The things I am thinking of are the chicken coop, the chicken tractor, the greenhouses, the goat(s), the (so far unfinished) masonry oven.  Smaller things likewise can be considered:  the pressure canner, the grain mill, the chest freezers, the tiller.  The orchard.  Raised beds for the gardens.  All of them have paid for themselves or will do so within the first year or so of owning them.  And any of my kookier ideas also have an out, financially:  2010, to name one example, will be the first year I don’t have to order chicks because we have roosters and a tom turkey, thus, self-sufficiency in egg and meat birds.

But cheesemaking.  I mentioned a while back how I found life as a single vegetarian to be much less expensive than omnivory…mainly because I almost never bought cheese!  I adore cheese, but it was rare that I would shell out for it, despite my love of the stuff…good butter being the one exception.  NOW there’s a goat in the shed, and she’s bagging up quite nicely, and within about a month I will don the bonnet of Resident Milkmaid.  And fresh milk means cheese.  And homemade cheese means…damn, another start-up cost!

A few years back when the homemade cheese bug bit me, I purchased a starter kit from Hoegger Goat Supply.  It’s served me nicely and I haven’t gone back to that well, but then again, I didn’t try to make hard cheeses or aged cheeses.  Now, though, now I have printed out little plans for my husband to build me a cheese press (he likes to feel handy) and now I have finally purchased and read Ricki Carroll’s Home Cheese Making.  And I am discovering that that woman is a pusher.  Seriously:  is she any different than the guy on the corner who’s giving you a little taste for free so you can keep coming back to feed your habit?  I read the recipes and I think:  hmmm, thermophilic culture, I need that; how about a bag of penicillium candidum, and might as well get a bag of p. roquefortii while I am at it.  And then, well, use it up and keep coming back for more.  Yogurt sure doesn’t have this problem:  make it once, always have it (like sourdough).

Man!  What would Ma Ingalls do?  She’d culture her own.  Something else to figure out, I guess…stay tuned.

Goat coat!

Farmyard fashion.  Caprine couture.  Goat glam.  Dairy duds.  Ruminators’ raiment.  You get it.

On getting one’s (pregnant) goat

Forever, it seems, I have wanted to own a couple of goats.  I have always considered them singular creatures, intelligent and goofy at the same time, regal and clown-ish.  Dairy goats figure in quite well with small farms like ours, too.  Their needs are few yet their byproducts are many (bedding for the compost, milk for us, and kids to sell or to add to the herd).  Unlike sheep, goats don’t think you’re always going to kill them; unlike cows, you don’t need acres of pasture for their sustenance; unlike non-draft horses, goats are actively contributing members of the small farmstead.  T-bell is a friendly, happy soul, and I feel terribly lucky to have her.

I found her on Craigslist, if you can believe it.

Our goat girl is a sundgau-colored French Alpine.  She’s kidded before, twice; both times unassisted…in point of fact, she kidded before the family could get there in time to assist her: her kids were there in the straw!  She is in every way very much what they call “an easy keeper.”  I found a housecall-making vet who specializes in goats and sheep and she has confirmed that T-bell is in great shape, AND pregnant (yay!).  And, the vet confirmed she’s free of a certain disease that is fairly common in dairy goats…this was a big concern of mine, as it would require that I sterilize the kids’ milk (it seems convoluted, but I will milk her to bottle-feed her kids).  Heating colostrum (first milk) is tricky because it wants to turn into caramel!  (No disease = no need to pasteurize the milk.)

At her previous home, she spent much of her time indoors, so her coat is not as thick as those hardy Michigan goats kept outdoors.  Like people, they’ll avoid going out into the snow if they can help it…wouldn’t you?  Anyway, my vet and I were concerned.  Her new home is draft-free, but it’s an unheated, concrete-floored shed.  She’s in deep bedding in her pen but we figured a little goat coat wouldn’t hurt.  And my mother-in-law loves to sew.  (Oh:  and the kids will need coats for their first week or so…depending upon the weather.)

Look at the header to see how much plumper she’s getting

She’s due Feb. 26th.

All my dabbling in cheesemaking will soon find some purpose.  And the gardens can’t wait, frankly, for the additions of this great bedding…just think how I’ve doubled my compost quantity by adding one animal.  And I keep having dreams, too, about the birth.  My daughter thinks she’ll have four kids.  Two is more like it, but, well…let’s hope for at least one little doeling!

It’s all about the poop you know

On January gardening

It was another sunny day yesterday, which prompted me to spend my lunch hour in the greenhouses.

Normally, the greenhouses require zero active gardening attention between December and February.  This is a time of harvests only; it’s rather freeing, I must say.  But December through February, in this hemisphere, are when a gardener misses gardening most!  Luckily, I am a succession-planting fool.  I’m not “required” to garden, but garden I do.

Cute little babies!  YES, things grow through the winter, albeit very very slowly.

I threw down a whole bunch of Red Sails seeds on a 1′x3′ patch in one bed in November.  I was putting seeds away, and noticed that a mouse had decided to make her nest in the paper bag where I was drying this particular lettuce’s seeds…it was quite pee-filled and disgusting.  No way I could’ve saved those seeds.  So I tipped out the bag to let the baby mice “escape” to the waiting jaws of Penny, Little Edie and a few chickens (hey: it’s recycling) and then I stomped on and shook out the remaining seeds and fluff into this bed.  They’d be fine to transplant in January, I thought, and I was right.

Each lettuce bed has a few holes where the resident plants died due to the cold or an overzealous harvest.  I plant two baby lettuce plants per hole.  They’ll be in shock for a bit but they’ll start puffing up when their neighbors wind down.  I expect to eat lettuce out of the greenhouses until late April, just about the time when I transplant little lettuce seedlings and plant lettuce seeds out of doors.  Mangia!

And then, it’s harvest time:  July-seeded Scarlet Keeper:  insane size, but…look at the one to the right center!  “What did you have for dinner last night?”  “A carrot.”

Dark days, Week 10

I’m cheating this week by showing you something I made for dinner last week.

Oxtails:  The majority of Americans just have never eaten them, despite their high overall beef consumption. As a newly-returned carnivore, I was shocked by how much meat cost, even the “cheap” cuts of meat!  Sixteen years of not having a “meat tax” on my budget…let’s just say life as a veg was cheaper.  S0 as a carnivore I’m predisposed to be cheap, or, rather, thrifty. Well.  This means I’m not afraid to try new-to-me cuts, and oxtails were a revelation.  So much flavor!

Of course by cheap I don’t mean cuts from cruelly treated feedlot animals.  Nope.  We buy our beef and pork by the quarter and half, respectively, from small farmers who pasture their animals, raising only a few per season.  By ordering these quantities, you can usually have your say about how you want the meat processed (lots of chops, say, or more ground) AND if you are adventurous, you can request the odd bits that the butcher usually just takes as his, er, cut of the cuts.  Like oxtail, which is simply the tail of a steer.  In my last beef order, I asked for it: and got all 3!  It seems nobody else wanted it so the farmer sent all the tails to my order, gratis.

So maybe Americans don’t eat it much (hey: more for me at the butcher), but leave it to thrifty folks like the French (indeed) and Koreans (among others, of course) to really know how to use oxtail.  Pot-au-feu is a double dish:  a beef broth, then a meat dish; pho, likewise, often utilizes oxtail to give it its strength.  Many French recipes do suggest oxtail be used for two meals.  Gotta like THAT kind of meat thrift.

Singularly unattractive photo

Menu:

  • Gnocchi in Oxtail Ragu: Russet potatoes, winter white flour in the gnocchi.  Roasted cut-up oxtail, braised in red wine then stewed in our tomato sauce with our celery, onion, garlic, and herbs.  Recipe very loosely based on this one.
  • Mokum Carrots, julienned and pan-roasted in brown butter and thyme
  • Greenhouse salad
  • And the rest of that red wine, a Meritage.

Yum!

On winter squash…in winter

Congratulations!  8lb, 1oz and 18 1/2″ long…pink banana squash!

One astute commenter noted that my family’s probably not hurting for Vitamin A in our diets, what with the monster winter squash harvest this year.  And it’s true, we’re awash in the things.  It’s okay, really it is, especially since the school garden’s squash patch was a bust (deer predation) so I have a…somewhat willing population to whom I can feed the things.  AND:  happily:  all our animals (except T-bell the goat) eat squash.

Surprisingly easy to slice, especially when you have a great hand-made chopper like this one

I do love squash, always have.  But I find that, as a gardener, my esteem of any one vegetable goes up or down in direct proportion to how well it grows for me.  Squash is quite the flatterer, so…I love it.  I’ve got a very fox-and-the-grapes attitude about things that don’t grow so well for me (i.e.,”bah, Brussels sprouts, who needs ‘em) and it proves to me that if nothing else I am terribly…human.

The now-indispensable food mill.  Usually reserved for separating tomatoes from their seeds and peels, and stewed whole apples during the saucing sessions, I realized how handy this thing was once I killed my immersion blender.  It’s now out all the time, especially to cream hot soups and hot squash.  And, unlike the damned hand-held stick blender, I could never break this thing.

But my family is on the “likes” squash part of the spectrum:  it ain’t “love.”  I therefore only feed them one squash per week, if that.  Mostly, we love creamy squash soup (with a splash of curry), but it also finds its way into baked goods.  Only butternut is tolerated in other forms (pan-roasted, say; or candied) and luckily I planted plenty of those, too.

5 cups of puree for us people!  The basement worms get the skins, the poultry and bunnies vie for the seeds and pulp…a true no-waste food.

Sunday, though, I brought out one of the pink bananas.  They were one of the first escape artists of the squash patch (up and over the fence, 16′ away) and one plant put out, what, three squash total of similar size to this one.  They’re really easy to cut up (bonus!) and I found the chickens and turkeys appreciated the seeds and pulp if I chopped it for them.  I baked these, cut-side down, arranged diagonally across my two largest rimmed cookie sheets.  Scooped, run through the food mill, and sweet!  Its great advantage appears to be its readiness to be cut into rings, and baked a la most acorn squash.  It did take a bit longer to fruit out than many of the other winter squash I had, and Fedco says it is not terribly reliable in really short summer areas but, well…if you like winter squash, you might want to try to grow this one this year.

On the other reason to get a greenhouse

World events can rock you pretty hard, but surprisingly so can little things like crummy weather.  I’m telling you:  weeks of snow and no sunshine can mess with even stalwart seasonal affective disorder naysayers like me.  All that bright snow outdoors, which otherwise perks up the darkest day, can wear you down!

Enter, sunshine.  Time to run out to the old greenhouse for some personal light therapy.

Doesn’t look very bright and cheery, but it was 75 degrees in there.  Can you find Penny?

May as well throw back the covers to see what’s growing.  Here, mache has self-seeded and is crowding out the resident lettuces.

Here’s a closeup of the mache.  I couldn’t help but nibble.

And speaking of nibbling, I might as well bring some of the greenhouse’s celery to the bunnies.  I wonder if our heretofore picky goat T-bell might like to try some.

Hmm:  what do you have here?  Hey, that’s rather tasty…

Burp!  (Excuse me!)

Looks like the bunnies will need another bundle.  And:  I feel a lot better.

Have a great weekend, everyone, and be sure to support The International Committee of the Red Cross/Red Crescent or find out how else you can help through The Center for International Disaster Information.

Dark days, week 9

Throughout this Dark Days challenge, I never go into each week thinking:  Tonight’s dinner is IT!  Time to post! Nope; it’s more like, what’s photogenic? I have, quite honestly, tried very hard not to show off for this challenge.  No real food pyrotechnics or frankly anything terribly difficult for someone with less-than-average kitchen skillz; what’s the point?  There’s enough to do just growing all this stuff, people!  AND:  that’s what I am trying to get you all to do:  get out and GROW IT!

bread and buttah

Tonight’s fare is, again, very simple.  This morning, I started the bread on a fast no-knead schedule (normally, 12-18 hours, I went with 6: just up the yeast!) so I could take advantage of the sprouting spelt berries I had growing on the counter.  Thinking, “what goes well with bread,” I retrieved a can of “bean starter” from my stash of canned goods and started some soup.

I’m always so happy when I can my dried beans for quick meals:  there are jars of black bean/carrot/onion, black bean/tomatoes/peppers, lentil*/kale/carrot/onion, and white bean/kale/onion, as well as just plain jars of beans downstairs.  I canned them in my pressure canner:  I would make the bases when I was making some other bean-y dish; I would chop a whole bunch of stuff and then, in a couple wine-besotted evenings with a friend, canned them all.  All I need to do now, then, is harvest something to augment one of those jars, or…open more of my own cans to create soup, chili or whatever.

Makes dinner really a no-brainer on those days I have no brain.

Menu:

  • No-knead loaf: half winter red, half winter white wheat ground up in my brand-new mill (!!) with sprouted spelt berries
  • Stew-y soup:  Black bean/carrot/onion starter, canned from our produce last October; one Mokum Red carrot, one Chantenay carrot, Red Russian kale, Lacinato kale, Par-Cel cutting celery and one Bleu de Solaize leek, all from the greenhouses; garlic from storage; homemade red wine vinegar to finish, with butter.
  • Salad:  Lots of reds in this salad, mostly lettuce.  Vinaigrette made with our vinegar, herbs, shallot; nonlocal olive oil (duh!) and mustard.  Nonlocal but home-sprouted alfalfa.

*Lentils are the only thing not home-grown.  With only 2 beans per pod, good golly who has that kind of time to shell them!

On sprouts

Alfalfa sprouts

I’m making edible sprouts again:  it must be snowy outside.

Everything we eat here has a season.  With the exception of frozen meat* and the seemingly unending jars of tomatoes, every other food item has an on and an off period…everything has its season.  Lettuce cannot be found from mid-July to the beginning of September.  Potatoes are only found from July to March.  Stored garlic (sniff!!) winds down just when green garlic winds up.  And so on.  All of these things are seasonal by the fact that the calendar makes them so.  There are some harvests, though, that have me to blame for their seasonality.  Sprouts are one of those things.

I posted a while back about sprouting things. I find I have a higher tolerance for the sprouting process when two things happen:  1.  when it’s abominably cold out and 2.  when I don’t have vegetables growing under the lights downstairs, and thus am sick of seeing seeds.  So, in other words, the season of edible sprouts is a short one:  from December to February, usually.  I do tend to sprout wheat year-round, though, because I like sprouted wheat in my breads and pancakes etc….but that’s an exception.

And I could get all wackadoo and tell you the reason why I think sprouts are so very important…but I won’t.  Suffice it to say I think raw, living food is a very important part of our diets (and by “living” I mean sprouts, but I also mean yogurt, kefir, krauts, and of course my insistent salads); I feel their lack when I leave home and have to…you know, fend for myself!  To my gut flora’s** sincere dismay, I might add!

*Frozen meat has a season, too:  I “harvest” our birds, and we order meat shares (1/2 hog, 1/4 cow) and when the harvest happens, the freezer fills.

**Gut flora:  The human body, consisting of about 10 trillion cells, carries about ten times as many microorganisms in the intestines.

Dark days, Week 8

Today we put our muscles into our dinner!  This dinner illustrates three things:  one, how to feed a family of 3 on one little chicken breast; two, how delicious a non-rice pilaf can be, and three, how sometimes it’s too cold to go outside to fetch a salad.  Thus, the pantry/freezer meal.

She’s wondering if she can make dimples with the end

Menu:

  • Chicken breast prosciutto-free saltimbocca (thin-sliced chicken breast smashed into submission with rolling pin, dredged in flour and quick-sauted in butter; gravy from the drippings of garlic jelly, homemade white wine vinegar, hard white wheat flour and thyme)
  • Blue Coco green beans from the freezer
  • Spelt berry “pilaf” (butter, Copra onion, Golden Self-Blanching celery, Par-cel cutting celery/thyme/sage/oregano, in chicken stock)

On the egg onslaught

“She’s set it down, but it’s not food!” Disappointing Blanche, Nice Rose and Emilie just for a photo

So we passed something of a farm record last Friday:  one dozen eggs in one day.

Then, the next day, we got 13.  The next, 15.  Holy frittati!

This surprises me, though the numbers shouldn’t.  It’s one of those math puzzles I have such a mental block about:  I am getting eggs from hens whom I don’t consider egg-layers.  So, philosophically, I have three categories of chickens:  egg-layers, meat birds, and bantams.  The bantams, quarter-sized chickens, are simply cute yard decorations.  But all three categories of chicken (25 girls) lay eggs.  Year-round, apparently!  It really picked up after the December solstice.  So:  each bird lays an egg every 36 hours or so (less if they’re young) and so, duh, I should have a dozen eggs a day.

(If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, El…)

I “expect” eggs from my stalwarts like crazy Pauline the Egg Machine (she’s a Leghorn) and Verloe, the RIR.  And all the new egg birds are just that, new, so they’re in their most productive year.  Likewise, all those extra meat birds I couldn’t bring myself to slaughter (3 thus, still unnamed) AND their clutchmates are eggy now too…as are the cute Bantam chickens (Janet, LaToya, Rebbie and Featherfoot) with their even cuter half-sized eggs.

But yeah, we’re awash in eggs.  Luckily, I have customers!

On the weather

They’re 9 1/2 feet tall in the center if you’re wondering about how deep it all is.

When we lived in Minneapolis, weather WAS the common point of conversation.  I am not quite sure why this was:  if it had one cause, say, or many.  Was it because winter weather could KILL you in Minnesota, and thus isn’t it fine we’ve escaped death, or was it because it was a common point of misery thus shared?  I would not say that Minnesota is filled with miserable people, so I think it was more of the former.

Here in Michigan, though, winter’s really not much of a point of conversation.  By the unwilling, it’s endured; by the winter-lovers, it’s smiled upon; in general, though, it’s not much discussed.  I cannot tell you how far down in a typical conversation with a friend that the weather factors in:  maybe Item #20, and only because the weather could interfere with our plans. Or:  the conversations go like this:  “Can you believe they didn’t close down school today?” when the local schools were closed due to the 8″ of white stuff that fell overnight.

Ruby, Earl and the poultry condos

But I know many people read this blog from snow-shy locales; places blessed by only a few frosts in the winter months.  And I know it seems, to them, just weird that we happily endure life in the snowbelt.  The snow has begun to fall in earnest now (earnest means a daily 2-8″).  This means my morning chore list grows a bit longer:  the poultry, because they’re so numerous this year, appreciate a daily plow through their run.  Their coop is in one area, I set water in another area, feed and their condominiums in a third area so that they’re forced to walk quite a bit during the day…which means I have a lot to shovel.  Makes them less stir-crazy, less (literally) cooped up.

And I dig out my greenhouses every morning.  It’s just something I like to do, as it makes the evening quest for salad so much easier.

The daily drift…

…and the evening salad…

See?  Salad, in January, in Michigan!  Come hungry for dinner!

Dark Days, Week 7

One thing you need to realize about dinner in this house, ANY dinner, is that it’s a bit of a process.

First, there’s the harvest, then the impromptu semaphore dance with the leeks.

Then, there’s the lengthy discussion about meat or no meat in this dish:  we went with meat.

Then, unseen, the kitchen fairies made pate brisee.  Salad.  Soup.  Galette, and pie.

Dinner:

  • Mache salad with Long Keeper carrot, toasted scavenged walnuts and non-local but homemade mustard vinaigrette (our herbs, shallots)
  • Chicken soup (our bird, Scarlet Nantes carrot, Golden Self-Blanching celery, Copra onion, our herbs)
  • Leek galette (2 Bleu de Solaize leeks, one cube smoked pork belly, thyme; spelt flour/butter crust)
  • Pumpkin pie (spelt flour/butter crust, Amish Pie pumpkin, our eggs, cream from our milk share, and nonlocal spices)

On the new year

New Year, blue moon, new decade (well, okay, technically a new decade begins a year from today)…I am trying to square the idea that “it’s all new.”  Have you ever awakened from a nap and have had no clue what year it is, much less the time of day?  I swear I have these Rip Van Winkle moments a lot; it’s the main reason I don’t take naps.  And somehow this New Year’s has snuck up on me too.

BUT:  the turn of the calendar does indeed goad me into recognizing that It’s New.  And, being an American girl, I have been taught to believe that all that is new = good.  Haven’t you?  This has been an amazingly hard thing to unlearn.  But unlearn I have, and you’ll find that I am happier if gifted something old rather than new; “new to me” being good enough, and more than likely hugely appreciated.

New Year’s is typically the era of resolution:  one resolves to, more often than not, change something, be it a behavior or an outlook.  I admit I am not one for resolutions either, not that I think I don’t need to change things (I do).  This is also the time we do look back, at the year we just left:  but I would rather not.  (“Not a good year,” end of story.) It’s all forward-moving we’re doing, not backward; each DAY is a point of resolution, and yes I know that in my saying this I sound like a 12-step graduate.  Alas, no; I just think every day is precious.

And each day is.  Today, New Year’s Day, I planted garlic (in the greenhouse) with my daughter, the third year in a row we have done such a thing.  And that, alone, is reason enough to celebrate the day:  planting the first seeds of the calendar year.

Happy 2010, everyone.