Monthly Archives: September 2010

On loose ends

Posted on September 27, 2010 | 7 Comments

I got a request for what I thought was a throw-away bean dish from my daughter Thursday night.  “You really need to make that shell bean toast thing again,” she said.

Can I just call this the Lazy Gardener’s Redemption Dish?  I take Deborah Madison as a cue here:  there’s a similar dish in one of her books that is quite divine.  But considering how I do know that not all of us can keep up with picking our green beans, this is a dinner that takes advantage of your distraction.  It takes a while to make, and, unlike most of my meals, comes fully plated (a la a restaurant, completely unlike the normal family-style serve-your-own dinners that I make, which is probably why my daughter liked it:  it is special somehow).

This is what you will need:

Shell beans.  Onions, garlic, dried herbs of choice; chives, fresh herbs of choice, especially parsley.  Vinegar or wine.  Bacon, or not.  Big thick cuts of bread, old (good) bread works well.  I assume you have olive oil in your house, as well as salt and pepper.  Butter.  And an hour to an hour and a half of your time, depending on both how dried-out the beans are and whatever else you’ve got going on.

Take about 3/4 of a cup of shelled green beans per person.  What are shell beans?  They’re the beans that are too overgrown to be green (mange-tout) beans but not dry enough to be dried beans.  You typically can see the beans telegraphing through their shells at this stage but the shells aren’t so dry they rattle like bones…hopefully that gives you a picture.  And because they’re in this in-between stage, the time it takes to cook them falls somewhere between dried beans and fresh ones:  your time will vary accordingly! While you’re shelling them (which does take a while), make up your mind if you’re doing a vegetarian dinner or a meaty one.

Hopefully you are chatting with someone while cooking, and enjoying a post-work glass of wine.

If meaty, then dice some bacon (“some” being relative:  I use ends, which are something I can pick up for free from the boutique local butcher:  they don’t fit in the cutter and are therefore worthless; otherwise, it’s about 2 pieces per person.  Dice with a pair of kitchen shears, it’s fastest, easiest to clean) and brown, reserving the grease.  If veg, sweat a diced onion with some dried herbs in a good glug of olive oil.   If you’re doing veg, then spend some time slicing and dicing up a good slice or two of that lovely bread you are going to use:  you will need to make some GOOD bread crumbs for this dish to toss on top.  Saute the crumbs in hot olive oil and throw two diced cloves in at the very last minute; remove, salt to taste.

Remove and dry the bacon and cook the onion in that lovely grease OR progress to the next step if veg:  you’re going to put the beans in the oil/onion, and add a whole bunch of minced garlic.  My family LIKES garlic so for us that means half a head or more.  Saute for a couple of minutes then put the same 3/4 cup of broth or water in per serving of beans, or to barely cover.  Cover, simmer, and taste:  add salt and pepper and more herbs as you think it needs it.  Add a good glug of vinegar to the beans after they’ve cooked for about 10 minutes.  For me, that means a shy tablespoon per serving if I am using my own cider vinegar; it means a half teaspoon per serving if I am using Balsamic or white wine vinegar.  Taste again after the vinegar’s  foamed up and cooked down.  Tasty broth?  Good.  Keep cooking the beans until they’re al dente, not too mushy.  You want to serve them sloppy:  they should be standing half-deep or more in their broth, so add more liquid as required.  If  you’re doing veg, add a good pat of butter in at the last minute.

Toast or cut up and then butter that bread.  Set two slices per person (one if it is a monster loaf) and scoop out a plentiful helping per slice, topping with minced chives and parsley, maybe some hot pepper flakes or a twist or two of the grinder, then either crumbled bacon or those garlicky toasted bread crumbs.

This is a humble meal, but a tasty one.  I usually serve it with a big salad, and finish with some simple sliced fresh fruit, some tea or an apertif.  It’s good to gesticulate a lot while telling stories over this meal.  I sure do.  Discussing or, better, solving world problems also helps.  Or, you can do chicken jokes:  this works for our six-year-old.

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Posted in food

On morning mental math

Posted on September 20, 2010 | 8 Comments

Sunday evening harvest at a neighbor’s apple orchard:  it’s all who you know.  The girl was so excited for a ride.  We got 8 bushels, gratis.

In the gray half-light of a predawn Monday I am madly pulling Blue Coco pole beans off their vines.  I am puzzling a math problem in my head that goes thus:  If it takes me x time to do something and x+y+z=the time I have before I have to leave the house, why is it that if I shift x with z I am late?  The time is the same.  Yet late is what I will be if I don’t get these things harvested.

Yes, I think I have it all figured out, this harvest, these tasks, but I didn’t quite figure that it’s still REALLY too dark at 6 in the morning after milking to harvest said beans.  And they’re blue (dark purple, actually) beans after all, which makes them even harder to see.  So here I am, running around the garden with hair quite wet from the shower, an hour later than I thought I would be out here.   Mondays are a delivery date for two of my CSA customers, and I need to bring the beans and the boxes to our daughter’s school with us.

I am doing other math in my head too.  One is a simple check of the status of three nappa cabbage (big enough, even though I can barely see them) and the carrot row:  I have just cleaned out the small fermentation crock so I think kimchi is next-up for cooking.  Do I have a knob of ginger, I wonder, as I nearly trip on a hose in the darkness.  Another is a mental calculus about how quickly meat birds grow in relation to the hen-raised birds.  I do believe I need to call back the butcher’s wife and bump up The Date With Destiny I had slated for the Freedom Ranger meat chickens out in the tractor.  I have just let out the yard birds (regular chickens) and two of the dashing young roosters have followed me to the garden gate and have commenced a crowing session.  It’s more like throat-clearing, actually, with a touch of teenaged bravado.  The meat birds in the field are responding, which is amazing to me because they’re a full six weeks younger than these two scrappy creatures at the gate.  I wouldn’t call it outright crowing but I do give them all an A for effort.  And I am doing a mental check on how much freezer space I have.

Beans, zucchini, and tomatoes now picked, I run into the house and bag them up into waiting paper lunch bags.  The share for these two customers is as follows:  one quart each sauerkraut and yogurt, one small chevre, two servings of savory bread pudding, a monster red pepper, the aforementioned vegetables and a dozen eggs.  And a good dozen apples.  I would say that’s a decent harvest.  And I am late!

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Posted in food, sweat

On plans

Posted on September 13, 2010 | 15 Comments

So, for the summer, I thought I would lighten my load by posting once a week.  You know what?  I *like* only posting once a week!  I am going to continue the trend.  It just seems sensible, what with all I have bitten off.

School is back in session for us, and with it a shift in the flow of the day.  It’s fun and good:  we’re all earlier to bed, earlier to rise.  Okay, maybe “fun” is the wrong word as we all seem a bit more harried, but that could simply be us adjusting our schedules.  And with a new year comes homework (!) and more nightly music lessons and projects of interest.  One project:  Learning to spin.  And knit what we spin.  Oh boy.

Me doing the usual bite-lip-in-concentration thing

Another new-ish thing for the late summer/fall is that I have begun an informal CSA.  I only have five subscribers but goodness, I didn’t plant my summer garden thinking I was to harvest enough for six households…in other words, it’s a stretch!  Fortunately, it IS informal, and the mix of goods is broad (yogurt/kefir/cheese, eggs, veg, fruit, bread, and canned goods, as well as fresh ferments like krauts and kimchi as I make them.  And leftovers.  My subscribers aren’t picky, and actually appreciate a quart of bean soup.).  We all just figured on a weekly dollar amount and I will scare up enough victuals to hit that number.  So far, it’s been working.  The summer CSA will focus more on veg and the fall/winter more on salad…and oven bread and beans and the like.

Next year is projected to be a Year of Meat.  We will be raising meat chickens for the CSA members.  I am also going to get into meat rabbits, and Tom wants to do bees (which are not meat but, you know, honey is wonderful).  We are also toying with the idea of a fiber animal or two (either one angora goat or two sheep…we don’t want to do angora rabbits as the brushing sessions seem too time-intensive).  It’s all part of a piece, really, about learning, sharing, and doing.  For us, doing is being, and when we’re growing and learning new things, we’re happy.

Everything is an evolution, whether one is adding to one’s workload or reducing it.  Right?

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Posted in sweat

On the killing season

Posted on September 4, 2010 | 14 Comments

From the Class of 2010:  Peaches (left, a roo) and Eagle (right, a pullet)

The wind is coming in strong puffs, and it’s bringing with it the smell of the lake.  I’m not too happy about the task at hand.   I am dry-plucking a chicken.  A half-grown chicken, actually, a half-grown bantam…that’s practically no chicken at all as he probably only weighs a pound, a pound and a half.  Four and twenty of them, yes, might just fit in a pie:  I am holding him by his legs and I believe I have eaten bigger frog’s legs in my lifetime.

I had to put the guy out of his misery, you see.  His foot had gotten stuck in the little fence surrounding our back yard garden, and his compatriots had pecked him into a stupor.  I seriously doubted he’d recover from his head wound.

Poor guy.  I know I am either grimacing or am biting my lip; I try to just relax and do what is needed before my husband and daughter get home.  Poultry deaths aren’t easy, unless they’re expected.

It’s been a year of lots of birth and little death around here this year.  Six turkey poults followed the original seventeen of this spring.  (We kept three.)  Twenty-eight chicks have hatched under various chicken mothers; of them, eight of those cute bantam babies died when their idiot bantam mother decided she needed her nest up on top of a box, and the chicks couldn’t reach it, dying of exposure in a 60-degree night.  I walked in to the goat shed in the morning gloom and thought, who left these kleenex lying around, when it was little bantam bodies I was seeing on the straw.  And then this little death in my hand:  we’re left with twenty.  Plus the twenty-five meat birds (Freedom Rangers, much overrated) and the five girls whose egg-eating habits have sealed their freezer fate…as you can see, exponentially, the poultry population explodes every summer here.  And it recedes in the fall.

We’re keeping two laying hens out of the twenty home-hatched babies that remain.  There are three female bantam chicks who might live another year too, depending on how generous I am feeling.  All the home-grown chicks are amazingly colorful, but all the bantams have their father’s boring white plumage.  With all of them, I stare and think “Who’s yer ma,” hearkening back to one of the putative definitions of Hoosier (i.e., one of the thing Indiana residents said in days of yore was this direct question of your parentage:  who’s your ma, who’s your pa, who’s your folks?, who’syer, hoosier).  Daddy is definitely known:  he’s our handsome Black Sex Link boy Mary Ellen, and he’s lent speckles to every baby.  All the chicks are named and cared for by our daughter, which is why I was hurrying in my grisly task.

Plucked, gutted, de-headed, de-footed; this little creature is reduced to nearly nothing.  He’s crowed his last croaking adolescent crow.  I pluck the last of his down off his waxy skin, hose him off and bag him up for the fridge.

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Posted in chickens, etc., death