Garden planted

We got a bit of a late start on the garden this year due to a prolonged monsoon season. But on Friday all the tomato seedlings went in. They are (hopefully) protected from deer by adorable chicken wire cylinders.

Pumpkins and squash were planted last week and are starting to poke up. The turkeys rather enjoy dust bathing in the tilled up garden. They made a nice hole in this pumpkin mound:

Gobs of potatoes were planted about a month ago. They need some burying. Potatoes grow from the stem of the plant, so as the plant grows you keep piling dirt around it and you get layers and layers of potatoes.

Corn just sprouting. We have hope of knee-height by Independence Day.


Cultivated black caps starting to turn purple. We also have a million billion of these in the woods. This morning we did a taste test between the two. The cultivated ones are definitely bigger and sweeter. The wild ones have a nice tartness.

This is Bill's top-bar hive. He built it himself and baited it with lemongrass oil with the hope of catching a wild swarm of bees. So far, it looks empty. Which is ok by me...


...because he put it way up in a tree. As he was struggling to get it up there, I said "are you really going to try to get that down when it is full of bees?" He said "no problem."


Since that time, however, he has started reconsidering. I would be very happy if bees didn't move in until the hive is relocated to a less acrobatic position.

Mexican Midgets

Horrible name.

Ridiculously yummy tomato.

Today, I ate...

garden tomatoes with local goat cheese:

...vanilla ice cream with bourbon peaches (both homemade, natch)

...and meat on a stick.

At least the dough was homemade...

Radishes!!

Tonight we harvested some radishes.

Nearly 5 pounds of radishes.

I had trouble carrying them all in from the garden.

We've got three types. French Breakfast are the oblong red and white ones. They are pretty mild, and apparently grow well even in the heat of summer. We've been eating them for the past few weeks and they are nearly done. The roundish red and white ones are Sparkler Radishes and they were the bulk of this evening's harvest. The typical cherry belles are just starting to be ready to pick.

We've been keeping a garden journal to note our plantings, harvests and plant milestones such as sprouting, flowering and fruit production.

Bill and I had different ideas of how to organize the journal, so we compromised. In the beginning is a chronological list of happenings (for Bill).

In the back is a page for each type of crop (for me). An alphabetical table of contents helps figure out which veggies are on which pages. We (...I) enter some info twice, but I think both organizational schemes have purpose. In future years we can easily see what activities should take place in any given week, and we have easily locatable, crop-specific milestones to refer to. We'll probably get 2-3 years per journal.

I feel like George Washington. It's pretty cool.

Food is growing!

The turkeys are nearly two weeks old and have quadrupled in size.

The new raspberry plants are waking up.

Two strawberries are turing red (we hope to eat them tomorrow!)

Radishes...rows and rows of radishes.

Popcorn dreams

This is me moments before a life-changing handful of popcorn.

We had gone to the Traders Point Farmers market early this fateful day primarily to acquire local, healthy pork for sausage-making. Turns out that wealthy hippies like their pork pre-sausaged, so we struck out. We did meet a popcorn man and spoke with him at length about real popcorn and the amazing number of people who only eat it out of a microwave. He gave us a tip on using coconut oil instead of canola for popping and we bought some of his popcorn.

What a find, we thought! Local, organic - easy to prepare - snack to feel good about. We decided to pop it that evening. On a whim, Bill pulled out our homegrown popcorn which had failed to pop at all earlier this winter. It was massive FAIL. It was tons of finger-blistering work removing the kernels from the ears and then we had to wait ages for it to dry. This was likely a project we wouldn't complete again.

But then! Then! Our homegrown popcorn popped like gangbusters! So we opted for a side-by-side taste test with the organic corn we bought earlier in the day. The popcorn man (who also teaches a beekeeping class) had given us a sample of his product at the market and it was deelish. If our popcorn was half as good, we would feel victorious.

We grabbed a handful of our very pretty yellow and red popcorn. Anticipation grew as we popped a few kernels in our mouths. All the work...would it be worth it??

O.M.G. Our little baby homegrown popcorn was ahmazing. Light, airy, crunchy. And, was that a hit of nuttyness? Could our lovely farm and soil have added a touch of terrior in our humble snack?

Yeah. It was good enough to describe it in terms usually reserved for wine. As Bill and I fought over the remaining kernels, the farmer's market popcorn - organically and lovingly grown - wimpered a little from its bowl. I don't think I'll ever be able to eat other popcorn again.

So much for the easy to prepare snack.

Citrus canning and squash casserole

This weekend I canned two marmalades (grapefruit and orange) and one jam (cranberry orange). It's not quite as much fun as buying a bushel of fruit from the orchard or farmers market, but it provides my obsession with a nice little fix.

These were my first marmalades and they are bit more complex than jam. It is a two day process as the peels need a 12 to 18 hour soak. The first step involves boiling the peels for a few minutes. I made use of our wood stove for this process - and I used the wood stove again at the end for sterilizing the jars and the finishing hot water bath for the full jars. I'm not comfortable enough yet with either jam making or cooking with wood to trust this method for boiling the jam (it's nice to have the instant temperature adjustments of the stovetop), but maybe some day.

The cranberry-orange jam was so pretty. I used this recipe, and boiled it in a hot water bath for 15 minutes. The recipe doesn't have instructions for canning, but I did a little research and decided that it was similar enough to cranberry conserve that 15 minutes was sufficient. I like that the recipe called for honey, which is a local ingredient, instead of sugar, which is not.

The products! Orange marmalade, grapefruit marmalade and cranberry-orange jam:

Bill cooked up one of our many garden butternut squashes yesterday. I love winter squash. They are delicious and it's great that they just sit in the kitchen all winter waiting for us to eat them.

This is how the casserole looks the day after. Still delicious. But my food photography could use a bit a work...

Bill's sausagey butternut squash casserole:

1 medium butternut squash

1 lb spicy italian sausage

1 lb elbow macaroni

3 eggs

1/2 cup cream

2 cups milk

1 tablespoon thyme

bread crumbs

asiago cheese

Cut the squash in half, remove seeds and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Roast on a baking pan at 350 until tender.

Brown sausage. Cook macaroni to al dente.

Scoop out squash guts and mix with sausage.

In a separate bowl, mix eggs, cream and milk. Add thyme. Then add this whole mixture to sausage and squash.

Mix in macaroni, plop whole shebang in casserole dish. Top with bread crumbs and cheese. Bake at 350 for 35-40 minutes.

Yum.

Thanksgiving tacos

Our turkey was still frozen on Thursday, so we opted for Thanksgiving lamb tacos.

And, of course, margaritas.

The chickens, however, had a traditional pumpkin. The pumpkin is one of many from our garden which grew well due to chicken poop fertilizer.

Bill recently placed an order for 15 Narragansett turkeys to be delivered in April. The plan is to keep a few to breed, but to have a bunch of birds for Thanksgiving/Christmas, though not enough to make millions.

SQUASH!

Last weekend we dove into our summer squash. We had too much to use effectively for one weekend, so we grated the extra squash, blotted it a little, portioned it into 1 cup sizes and put it in the freezer for winter use.

And we made some zucchini bread. 

 

This acorn squash was ready too. Bill roasted it and turned it into risotto with the chicken broth from our earlier adventures. It was all delicious!

 

 

Productive chickens

Despite a bit of drama with a red-tailed hawk in our chicken coop on Friday (we lost a hen), we have been making use of the productivity of the chickens.

We're consistently getting one egg a day now. So Bill has been enjoying one home grown egg and one store-bought egg for breakfast. It is hard to tell from the photo, but the yolk in our eggs is more orange AND, our eggs (on the left) are now roughly the size of those found in the store:

Last weekend we cooked one of our meat birds. Bill boiled the whole bird in a stock pot for about 8 hours. When he took it out, the meat all fell off the bones - half of it was slathered in Dinosaur and eaten on a hard roll and the other half had garden beans and carrots added to it, along with a bit of stock and cornstarch and was eaten over egg noodles.

Yesterday we made our first attempt at canning apples (u-picked from our local orchard) to keep for winter baking. We learned valuable lessons on "packing" the jars. The first two jars looked really full to me...but then we added the syrup and processed them:

From Pictures

We did a little better on the third but there are still lots of air bubbles. I think I need special canning implements (and practice) to perfect this technique.

From Pictures

We also made our first jelly from local apple cider and store bought cranberry juice. Jelly is so easy - and very pretty:

From Pictures

Finally, we were inspired by Julie and Julia to start baking our way through a cook book. Ours, however, was probably a Barnes and Noble bargain book, though it is very pretty (also, as it is a cookie book, we won't have to worry about boning ducks.). First up: bacon cornbread muffins.

Reading through Julie Powell's initial blog, I came across this, alternative view of food, which I found interesting. Thoughts?

Enough of the $40 olive oils and imported semolina flour and "please, Turkish oregano only." If I read one more dining guru gushing about "honest ingredients, treated with respect," I shall vomit, sir. And "Market Menus"? Dont get me started. The well-meant "food revolution" Alice Waters instigated some thirty years ago has metastasized horribly. The Victorians served Strawberries Romanoff in December; now we demonstrate our superiority by serving our organic, dewy heirloom strawberries only during the two-week period when they can be picked ripe off the vine at the boutique farm down the road from our Hamptons bungalow. People speak of gleaning the green markets for the freshest this, the thinnest that, the greenest or firmest or softest whatever, as if what they're doing is a selfless act of consummate care and good taste, rather than the privileged activity of someone who doesn't have to work for a living.

millions of peaches

Two weeks ago we got our second half-bushel of peaches from a local orchard. In addition to doubling our supply of peach butter, we made some honey-spiced peaches from the 2009 Ball Blue Book. After boiling the peaches in honey-sugar-water, we put them in jars and added cloves, cinnimon and allspice. I have high hopes for making some shortbread and turning them into delicious winter treats.

 

 

We also enjoyed our first ear of corn from the garden. We've been sharing it unwilingly with the indigo buntings. 

 

This morning we also shucked some coco rubico beans (and a pod of red kidneys). We have barely enough for a bowl of soup... next year we'll plant more. Now we know.

 

Local dinner

Thrusday night we had a lovely mostly local dinner of Farmers Market lamb steak and garden green beans (uncooked). 

 

The wine was not at all local (but it was good, which Indiana wine is not). 

 

Homemade bread with ginger-spiked peach butter that we made from local peaches for dessert.

 

Sugar approved as well - the sheep had lots of fatty edges, which were a nice treat for the dog. 

 

Today - we can more peaches! We bought a half-bushel (our second of the season) at the local orchard with plans to make honey-spiced peaches and more peach butter.