Monthly Archives: February 2010

Dark Days, Week 15

Posted on February 28, 2010 | 7 Comments

Five more weeks to go in this challenge! I am wondering if the Dark Days will truly end then…and is spring truly around the corner?  With new snow falling daily here, I am highly dubious.

To fit with the stereotype that all that can be eaten in winter are dull root veggies and cabbage, this week’s meal features…cabbage!

Slug-tattered but highly edible

In my quest to end root-cellaring certain items, I planted cabbage seedlings into one 3′x6′ greenhouse bed in early September.  I had just cleared it of its blooming lettuces, so I figured I would transplant about 12 and see if they made it through the winter.  (The twenty-odd other seedlings got transplanted outside and harvested while still small (3-4″ diameter) until the snow came and stayed in December.  This size, incidentally, is perfect for our small family:  not practical for kraut, maybe, but no waste.)  Well, the greenhouse cabbages did make it.  In fact, they continued to grow throughout the winter.  These were Des Vertus Savoy, a somewhat crinkly cabbage that can reach 5 lb. easily.  So, my root cellar this year houses ONLY potatoes!  No root veg, no cabbage.  Apples and pears on the back porch.  Whew, that was easy.

Menu:

  • Bubble and Squeak (Mashed Burbank (russet) potatoes, Copra onion, Des Vertus Savoy cabbage, salt and pepper, fried up in homegrown goose fat)
  • Round Steak (Tenderized, marinated in salt/garlic/water/homemade red wine vinegar all day and then pan-seared; from Pekel Farm in Shelbyville)
  • Bitter greenhouse salad with roasted foraged walnuts (Giant Winter spinach, mache, mustard, Triple Purple orach, Italian Dandelion, arugula, red and green lettuces; chopped shallot and greens; buttermilk dressing from our milk share)
  • Pumpkin bread (Triamble squash, home-ground hard red spring berries, our eggs, buttermilk, Michigan butter, Michigan sugar, nonlocal baking spices and leavener)

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Posted in Eat Local Challenge

Happy Birthday!

Posted on February 27, 2010 | 25 Comments

Our goat girl had three healthy babies today, Sat., 27 Feb., at 8:30 p.m.

And they’re all break-your-heart cute!

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Posted in dairy goats

On the unending winter

Posted on February 25, 2010 | 18 Comments

A bit of Florida sunshine in my cloudy Michigan kitchen

Our winter has been a fairly “regular” winter this year, unlike in other places.  The only thing I have noticed that has been slightly different is it has not gotten terribly cold, or windy…good for the home-heating bill, frankly; we’ll squeak by on one 250-gal. tank if all’s well.  But I am itchy for spring.  Maybe it’s the unending predictions of “lake-effect snow” which means we’ll get 5″ where others get but a whisper, maybe it’s because I know it’s nearly March but it feels like the last week of January, maybe…it’s because the kids aren’t here yet.

I am perennially looking for signs of spring.  My sighting of that robin yesterday means nothing:  he’s been here all winter.  I haven’t heard the whooping cranes flying north above us yet, I haven’t had a decent day to either tap the maples or trim the fruit trees and grape vines.  I, in other words, am in a winter funk.

The only sign of spring so far is that the turkeys, both of them, are horny.

SO!  If life hands you lemons, well…what to do?  Tom came home with three bags of organic lemons “on super sale, I know you don’t go in for the imported things but maybe we can make a lot of lemonade.”  Lemonade, bah!  Many of these will become lemon curd before the weekend is out.

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Posted in weather

On new hobbies

Posted on February 23, 2010 | 26 Comments

Like I don’t have enough to do, I have decided that 2010 is the year I will make wine too.

In my aim to make this a full-service farm, wine has intimidated me.  I have said for years that indeed I will do something more readily enjoyable (for grownups anyway) with those 50 grapevines.  And wine as we all know certainly doesn’t start and stop with grapes:  dandelion wine, anyone?  Strawberry, blueberry?  Plum?  Well.  The process intimidated me, that is, until another D.I.Y. someone I’m getting to know kind of stopped, looked me up and down and said, well, why AREN’T  you making wine, considering everything else you can do?  It’s easy, he said.

Easy!  Well, we’ll see about that.  In the meantime, Craigslist is again my friend, this time with finding glass carboys.

(Now I am wondering if anyone’s ever made wine out of winter squash….)

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Posted in sweat

Dark days, week 14

Posted on February 21, 2010 | 17 Comments

Tasty if not pretty

A bit of Michigan on the plate tonight!

Half of my family hails from the Lake Michigan coast of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.  Both sides of my dad’s family had long history up there, mainly on islands of both Lake Michigan and Lake Huron as they were all fisherfolk if they weren’t lumberjacks. This is knowledge that comes to me, incidentally, from my own genealogical research and not family yore: Dad wanted nothing to do with his family and died when I was 13, so all tales and secrets and recipes died with him. Suffice it to say I have since filled in a lot of blanks, and I would hope that at least one or two of my ancestors had a recipe for pasty up their sleeves. If not they, then loads of other Yoopers know how to make them.

These are basically meat-and potato-filled turnovers. The typical recipe includes rutabagas, and so I did as well; carrots, celery, onion…no other spices other than salt/pepper is customary but, well, I adore my spices and so added a few. Supposedly these lunchbox pastries hail from the Cornwall-born coal- and copper miners who worked the U.P.’s northwestern mines in the late 19th century. Now you cannot drive 30 miles on any major road in the whole peninsula without hitting a tourist-y eatery that sells PASTIES (all caps always).

Menu:

  • Pasties (crust:  home-ground hard red spring berries from Ferris Organics; lard and bacon grease from Creswick Farms; ground beef from the Pekel farm in Shelbyville; chopped side pork from Creswick Farms; Carola potatoes, Atomic Red carrots, Laurentian rutabaga, Clear Dawn onion, Golden Self-Blanching celery, sage/thyme/savory/parsley from greenhouses; salt, pepper.
  • Greenhouse salad with homemade buttermilk dressing (milk share milk, our shallot/garlic/parsley)

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Posted in Eat Local Challenge

On chicken saddles

Posted on February 19, 2010 | 13 Comments

I’ve wowed you with caprine couture, so how about hen habiliments?

Mary Ellen and The Colonel, our two full-sized roosters, have been fairly aggressive with a couple of our girls this winter.  They stand on their backs and pull the girls’ back feathers out in the heat of passion.  Poor biddies!  Time, then, for some costumes, straight from the bench of my dear mother-in-law’s whirring sewing machine.  And my dear husband whipped up this template for you to follow along at home.  Print it out on 8-1/2″x11″ paper.  Use elastic bands for the arm loops, heavy canvas for the body, and of course you can embroider “Keep Off” on the saddle itself!

Here’s a video

Poor Sister Wendy

As you can see from Helen’s and Caroline’s rears we need a few more.  Everyone else seems to be able to get out of the roosters’ way.

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Posted in chickens, etc.

On leeky finds

Posted on February 18, 2010 | 10 Comments

Trying to *find* reasons to stick around the sunny 85-degree greenhouse this weekend, I espied this leek throwing out little leeklets around its base.  Aha!  I thought.  Time to get a leg up on the new Leek Season.

Not all leeks put out these pearls.  In point of fact, I probably wouldn’t save the seed of one that does…these botanical diversions aren’t terribly welcome if single thick stalks are your gardening goal.  But as you can see the mother stalk is just fine, size-wise.  Mom was growing in a bed of mixed leeks and shallots:  shallots do divide, so I assumed that ground greenery was simply a shallot.  And I would have missed these altogether if I hadn’t decided that my time in the new greenhouse needed to be productive time.  Little Edie was just lying around in the sun, why shouldn’t I?

Why did you wake me up?  Put that camera away!

So I carefully teased the leeklets out of the clayey root ball.  Any roots that got broken got a leaf haircut too (balance being key:  you don’t want the plant to blow itself out supporting those heavy leaves on few roots and vice-versa) and I planted them 2″ apart in two rows.

Okay, that took 10 minutes.  Now what else can I do in here?

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Posted in greenhouses

On the nearly forgotten feast

Posted on February 16, 2010 | 10 Comments

Really, it’s just a jelly donut

We came home laden with a box of paczki today.

I’d completely forgotten about these sweet pre-Lenten treats until I moved back to the area.  Twenty-odd years of living a paczki-free existence:  don’t you pity me?  Well, you shouldn’t; they’re fairly nasty, and even as a kid I don’t remember eating them but once or twice.  But buying them and bringing them home, well, this is a little something I can give to my daughter as a bit of local food history.  And…we’re not even Polish.

I do swear if I lived to be 200 and could have 5 or 6 job paths along the way, “food ethnologist” would be one of the careers I would love to have.  Wouldn’t that be fascinating?  Limning the fact from the fiction, the tradition from the myth from the actual reason a food was eaten?  I have always been interested in that great Venn diagram of intersection between land, people, and religion/myth/culture:  there can be a fun mash-up when it comes to food.

And participating in eating that food can be fun:  kind of like world travel without the burdensome passports and vaccines and pesky TSA involved.  And:  there’s something SO unifying to me when you know a whole bunch of other someones are doing the same thing as you (i.e., bringing home a box of paczki), at the same time.

Even if the food is gross.  (The chickens, though, disagreed.)

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Posted in food

Dark Days week 13: we (heart) local

Posted on February 14, 2010 | 11 Comments

Blueberry waffles with blueberry syrup is a great way to start the day

I’m posting this before I even make the meal:  is that cheating?  No, it’s beating the posting deadline!

Victory!

For Valentine’s Day, the girl and I got up early to harvest a Monster Carrot.  It’s been a gorgeously sunny weekend, so the greenhouses are quite warm:  warm enough to pull off the Reemay covers and let that sun shine in.  (I spent a lot of the weekend just puttering around in there:  who can blame me, working in a t-shirt in February?)  This carrot, a Long Keeper storage carrot, is the main ingredient in tonight’s carrot cake.

Don’t discount fresh herbs:  they add a substantial kick to what I consider The Good Life.  Par-cel cutting celery (a nice cross between parsley and celery) grows nicely year-round in the greenhouses

And while we were in there, I harvested a bunch of different herbs for the marinade for the evening’s main course.  Morning is often when I start making dinner. When the girl and I made the waffles, I also started a batch of no-knead whole wheat bread, thawed the roast, and started a new batch of buttermilk.  Then, with our carrot and herbs all cleaned up from the greenhouse, she peeled a head of garlic while I stripped the thyme and rosemary from their branches and pounded them, along with a large bunch of the par-cel cutting celery, salt, pepper, olive oil, and homegrown paprika, making a nice paste to coat the pork loin roast.  Fresh herbs are marvelous, and thyme, parsley, rosemary, sage, and savory keep green and ready all winter in the greenhouse.

Alice Waters has a wonderful method for braising those tougher cuts of meat like a shoulder or loin roast.  Including the long marinade, the roast is cooked in a low (350 degree) oven and flipped quite often in its half-bath of cut-vegetable filled broth.  It alternately caramelizes and tenderizes the meat that way, and the resultant pan juices make a wonderful gravy.

The greenhouse’s leeks are thickening rapidly and are quite sweet, so lots of them are finding their way into most savory dishes lately.  Tonight’s treatment was in a milk bath with radicchio.  The milk calms the bite of these chickory hearts, and sweetens the leeks.  Two leeks and one radicchio are halved, quick-seared in brown butter in a skillet, then baked in a casserole and bathed in an herbed cream.  A quick trip under the broiler at the end caramelizes their tops.

Menu:

  • Blueberry waffles with blueberry syrup for breakfast (Ferris Organic flour, our eggs, homemade buttermilk from our milk share, nonlocal butter, and blueberries from a half mile away; syrup made from the same batch of blueberries with Michigan sugar)
  • Greenhouse salad with homemade buttermilk dressing (milk share milk, our shallots and herbs)
  • Braised loin of pork (Amish-raised piggy, above marinade from greenhouse herbs, Copra and red onions, Chantenay carrots, red potatoes in the broth)
  • Oven-braised Bleu de Solaize leeks and Treviso radicchio in cream
  • No-knead sourdough whole wheat bread (Ferris Organic flour, my sourdough starter)
  • Carrot cake (Ferris Organic flour, our eggs, our buttermilk, our carrot, Michigan sugar; nonlocal spices and cream cheese for the frosting)
Sue J. Smith / LeAnn Morales
Environmental Sciences Technology Program / Calhoun Area Career Center
475 E. Roosevelt Avenue
Battle Creek, Michigan 49017
(269) 968-2271 ext. 5254
(517) 712-8097 cell

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Posted in Eat Local Challenge

On the new season

Posted on February 11, 2010 | 5 Comments

Garlic shoot, Freckles romaine seedlings

Another fun thing about growing in an enclosed space like a greenhouse?  The weeds that show up are most likely something YOU introduced.  Like these lettuces we found this weekend!   Two feet of snow outside, nice greenery inside.

“Eat your weeds.”

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Posted in greenhouses

On appropriate technology

Posted on February 9, 2010 | 19 Comments

New milk stand with recycled materials:  reused 1x4s, old metal base from the basement’s concrete washtubs, and our daughter’s old table’s top.  It is wider than it needs to be:  I intend to sit on it to milk her.  “Scootch over, sister!”

I got an interesting technology request the other day from a reader.

She’s trying to do more things herself, whether it’s growing or preserving or just looking at lifestyle choices.  Considering that many people reading this blog are on a similar path, I must mention that where she is making this quest is a little different:  it’s in a now-peaceful, war-ravaged country, and she’s not completely at home in the language.  She doesn’t have the liberty of being able to choose which big-box store to shop in for her greenhouse plastic or her canning jars or gardening equipment.  She can’t just go to the local library to read up on these things.  And simply ordering goods over the internet is not exactly something one can do in a not-fully-operational state.  Even considering her circumstances, though, there are many parallels we can draw to our own quests:  sometimes it’s money that’s the limit, sometimes it’s time, sometimes, it’s know-how.  But always, we should consider what’s appropriate.

The great equalizer, thankfully, is the internet!  So much information found “out there,” some of dubious value certainly, but if you have your own bullsh*t-o-meter pretty highly tuned, you can find some gems.  What I recommended to her is that she’s got the great good fortune to be living in an area that’s not as cold as Michigan (!) so there is a lot open to her, greenery-wise.  You don’t need a lot of technology to grow your own food:  a hoe, a shovel, maybe a garden fork and a decent hand tool can be found in any corner of the globe.  Seeds are cheap.  And compost happens everywhere….even north of the arctic circle.

So grow more of your own, and try to grow it year-round.  Build your own cold frame or greenhouse to extend the season.  Use scraps!  There’s no shame at all in recycling; you’re making a better environmental choice by reusing what you can find.  My first cold frame was a transparent plastic sweater box, frankly, the first winter I lived here:  that’s where I sprouted my first salads and hardened off my tomato plants.  And you don’t need to can things if you can try to figure out a way of growing year-round.  Swear off tomatoes for half a year if you have no way of preserving them, but…drying the small ones is something most people can do in their ovens or on the roofs of their buildings in the summer sun.  Pickling, lacto-fermenting, and salt-curing are other methods of preserving one’s harvest.  As is a root cellar:  that could simply be a box in your basement or garage, it doesn’t need to be a proper cellar.

I think so much of this…whatever it is I am doing (homesteading? DIY?) is simply a mindshift.  I could not duplicate what I was eating before, so I switched our diet.  (I can no longer walk to get sushi, for example, or a cappuccino, or that delivered-to-my-door CSA, or get Thai food delivered; but I can get fresh eggs and fruit and garden produce.)  It’s not the same; it’s different.  And it takes longer, and I have less time.  (I am a parent now too so I’m dividing that time pie into pretty thin slices, come to think of it.)  But I am far happier for learning these new skills, for choosing to live this life, financial challenges, failed harvests, blisters and all.

Here’s a few sources of decent information:

The only thing I had to buy was the hook and eye to keep the head gate locked.  This was her maiden voyage so I hadn’t set the eye yet.  Appropriate technology:  no milking machine, just me and a bucket and a milk stand.  Oh and a goat!

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Posted in dairy goats, sweat

Dark Days week 12

Posted on February 7, 2010 | 8 Comments

Serious child minding the crepe.  It’s a glorious, wonderful, spectacular day when your child becomes tall enough to reach the stove unassisted!  It also means she can turn on the kitchen faucet and load the dishwasher.

Illness has visited our house this week, so Saturday night it was just the girl and me eating solid foods.  And, as is typical, I revert to my vegetarian ways when I don’t need to feed my husband, so…the girl and I made crepes.  Crepes are wonderful.  They can be savory, they can be sweet, they can be in-between.   And they hide all manner of leftovers, should you have them.  Leftovers, or food failures, as was the case with the feta I made this week, which came out decidedly unset and lumpy (oh it tasted fantastic, the texture was off), so melted with a little butter and milk, it became the topping for the crepes.

Menu:

  • Whole-wheat crepes (milk share milk, our eggs, Ferris Organics wheat berries, Michigan butter)
  • Choice of fillings: our leftover oven-roasted chicken with sauteed Bleu de Solaize leeks for the girl; Grex beet greens/Bleu de Solaize leeks/white onions for me
  • Feta/cream sauce topping (milk share milk)
  • Big greenhouse salad (carrots, turnips, lots of arugula and mache; homemade yogurt/shallot/parsley dressing)
  • Applesauce for dessert (our apples, Michigan sugar)

Cropped photo so you can’t see the unpretty feta sauce

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Posted in Eat Local Challenge

On gardening from the outdoor pantry

Posted on February 5, 2010 | 13 Comments

I have blogged a bit of a theme this week:  how to plan my spring garden according to what I will eat next February.

By looking into shortcuts (and take them where I can), and by doing a tally of this February’s stored goods, I can see what needs to go into the ground this spring.  But I have not mentioned one very important piece of this puzzle:  eating out of the greenhouses, and eating out of the outdoor gardens.

Yes, it’s February on 42N, 86W point of this globe, so indeed the gardens are covered with about a foot of that white frozen stuff.  And the earth remains unfrozen but by no means warm inside the greenhouses.  Still:  I am pulling fresh produce from these two plastic-covered tunnels daily.  Other than my lettuces which I continually blah-blah about, it’s the root and cole crops that shine in there now.  And outdoors I can likewise dig up a rutabaga, carrot, or a leek at my leisure, it just takes me a bit more work.

So here’s a partial list:  at least 30 types of lettuces; sorrel, chard, beet greens; endive/escarole; lacinato and red kale and savoyed cabbage; leeks, onions, scallions, shallots; beets, carrots, parsnips, celeriac, turnips, rutabagas; celery, par-cel cutting celery, parsley; and some herbs like thyme, sage, savory, and rosemary.  AND:  they’ll all be eaten (excepting the perennials like the herbs, the sorrel and scallions) by the time the peas are ripe.

Can you see how I avoid the grocery store?  Even in winter’s cold depths?

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Posted in greenhouses, seeds

On gardening for the pantry

Posted on February 3, 2010 | 24 Comments

Spooky dark basement storage

A big part of garden planning involves, for me, checking the State of the Stored.  Here it is, the first week of February:  how are my supplies doing downstairs?  Do I have enough tomato sauce to last me until this year’s harvest?  Salsa, chutneys?  How are the dried and canned beans doing?  How about popcorn, frozen green beans, jams, canned peaches?  How about pickles?  Applesauce, veggie broth, canned chicken broth?  Frozen fruits?  Ketchup, barbecue sauce, garlic jelly?  And the all-important apples, onions, garlic, shallots, potatoes, winter squash?  A quick check of my stash tells me what I need to plant this year, and what holes need to be patched.

All seems swell downstairs:  my general approach of “put away more than you can eat in two years” has worked well.  Not that I am a pessimist, but better gardeners than me tend to make a big harvest as insurance against a bad year.   Had the late blight hit my tomatoes last year (it did not, but took out half the school garden’s crop), I would still be in pretty good shape, except for ketchup and barbecue sauce.  As it is, canning twice the normal year’s amount frees me, somewhat, from the drudgery of canning every crop every year.  (This doesn’t work for frozen things, but canned goods:  check!)  And pressure-canned stuff is “good” for a long time.

Calico popcorn

Always, though, there are certain experimental things that I wish I had made more of (apple/pear moutarde, green apple/tomato chutney) but this can backfire too if I make a lot of something and it’s not quite so tasty (gooseberry jam).  But even failures can have second lives.  My calico popcorn, which I adore, is not the best at popping (hardly any homegrown one is: it has to do with moisture in the kernels and timing harvests perfectly…which requires a hydrometer, not something I am willing to spring for) but ground-up as a meal for cornbread or polenta?  Hooeey!  Hand me the honey!

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Posted in food, seeds

On gardening shortcuts

Posted on February 1, 2010 | 24 Comments

A pretty summer cabbage, from seed started in February

February!  Hark, I hear the swoosh of the swing of the season!

Admittedly, this is wishful thinking on my part.  We’re a long way off from spring, but we’re not far at all from spring planning.  And most gardening folk are thinking about the upcoming growing season, myself included.  I am about two weeks from stringing up the basement lights for early onions, for example; exciting, but also…the worst part of my own garden calendar.  I abhor indoor gardening.

No, I am thinking about how much less work I can do this year.  Every year, it’s my goal to bite off less, to realize the value of my most precious resource:  my time.  I will say that the longer one gardens, the more shortcuts one finds.  One needs to pay attention, though.  If I don’t want to weed, I must mulch; if I want to maximize the harvest out of one bed, I must be merciless about pulling plants and reseeding/replanting.  It becomes a bit of a game.  And games can be mastered.

So I am trying to master the game that is the onion family.  I seeded three greenhouse beds with those little hard black seeds yesterday:  leeks, red and white and yellow onions.  I placed them between the green sprouts of the rows of garlic.  If all goes well, this one step will save me days of anxiety pampering those damned indoor seed trays.   They’ll take longer to grow, but the conditions in the greenhouses are both out of my control and perfect for seed-sprouting, if you happen to be an onion seed.

I will of course plant them indoors, too, but, if it’s a successful experiment, then next year the basement lights will only come out for the tomatoes and peppers, and maybe celery/parsley.  And THAT will save me lots of time.  And swearing.

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Posted in seeds