Catan aside, how would this trade really work out?

Well, this isn’t specific to laptops, but hey, what do you know:  (a) You can power a car truck with wood.  I had no idea that was possible, but: … neat?  And (b) here’s an article comparing said truck on wood and on gas.

Answers!

Sort of!

According to some awesomely crazy folk over at Mother Earth news, you can outfit a truck to run on wood.  Those of you with a handy welder, anyway.  And a woodlot, I suppose. There are hitches, they report, but overall they were happy with the results:

“little did we realize, at that time, just how well the unlikely form of “solid” energy would work in a “liquid” world,”

OK, so, not going to hack apart the Focus to do this.  But, I’m still intrigued by what this might imply re: wood-burning vs gas-burning power.

• The truck was more efficient on wood. Which raises the question, would that be true in other (non-car) applications too, or is that unique to their Dodge?
• 1.25 miles per pound of dry wood.
• 5,200 miles per cord
• “Firewood in most rural areas sells for around $50 per cord. So if I were to buy wood, I could travel for less than a penny per mile”

Of course, it’s not just about money. There are other costs.  But, these folk are arguing that farmland currently devoted to corn for ethanol “could produce wood for nearly 23 million drivers, assuming 1.5 cords/acre (managed for max yields)” and, moreover,

“Current “readily available” logging waste is about 49 million tons per year. This can fuel about 9 million drivers.”

The French are right about a lot of things.

Add a notch to the spatula. Our recipe for “Pub Gougères with Anchovy and Cayenne” has been selected as a community pick on Food52 as part of their “meat as a flavoring” contest.

Anchovies give this riff on traditional cheese gougères a bistro-pub feel and a bold taste. Salty, spicy and savory, these are best with a strong, hoppy beer. These are great right out of the oven or made ahead for a crowd. Go check it out.

We didn’t know what to look for at first.  We’re learning fast, but it took us some time to identify larva and brood – signs of a laying queen.  A team was always the busiest colony, so we thought they were doing well.  We gave them more space to expand, but nothing happened.  Then came the fateful day when we opened the hive and the bees were just hanging around, no energy, lethargic and listless.  They had all the honey they needed, but nothing to do with their time since there were no new brood to care for.  A team was queenless – the Revolution had commenced.

How did we end up without a Queen?  Maybe there wasn’t one in the nuc when it arrived, or maybe we accidentally squashed her when we were doing our first installation.  Maybe the old Queen ran out of sperm…  Whatever happened, things were looking bad.  We decided to take drastic measures, gifting A team a frame of B team’s brood.  This would give them something to do, keep bees in the hive via reinforcements, and also (hopefully) give them some fertilized spawn to work with.  There were a few Queen cells with incumbents developing from A team’s original frames, but we aren’t sure if they were / are viable or not.  Where did they get these eggs, if the Queen was kaput?  There were no other signs of laying.

We speculated that we might have a laying worker (their ovaries will turn on without Queen pheromones in the hive, which suppress this development) – in this case she’ll only lay drones (aka males, which only ever come from infertile eggs; this is how Queens keep the hive numbers so imbalanced, they literally decide which gender they want to lay by choosing whether or not to release the stored sperm when placing the egg – but laying workers don’t have the choice, are not fertile, and only lay drones that are good for nothing in this scenario).  Well, I don’t think this is the case anymore, because there isn’t evidence of laying workers, who tend to plop several eggs in the same cup.  This is a good thing, because they will actively kill new queens once they seize power.  Still – where did A team get these eggs?  Wouldn’t there have been other egg-laying evidence outside of these cups?  Will they attempt to raise a queen from non-fertilized (i.e. male) eggs – a drag Queen?!?  [If you know, please drop a reply below.]  When we checked the hives yesterday, it looked like one of these had opened, but the result was a white / larval / underdeveloped bee.

The Restoration.

Whatever was going on, A team has clearly decided that it wants to go full-time in the Queen rearin’ business.  This is the frame of brood we gave them from B team.  You can see drone cells (the little bumps – and you know what males are good for) and a few Queen cells (they look like elongated peanuts – top left, top center).  Right now we’re just rooting for a Queen, the end of Anarchy and a new era of political stability in Aland.  (I usually root for democracy, but given the evolutionary circumstances…)  We’ll post an update later.

Oh – B team is going like wildfire.  They’re working the frames on both deeps right now (20 frames total).  C team has been behind them for a while in development.  They still haven’t move up into their second deep box, but they have a bunch of brood coming of age.  Hopefully they fill it out in the next two weeks or so.  We hope to get honey from B team this fall, and are mostly rooting for A and C’s survival as they establish.

-Dustin

Beer Soup.

Brewing:

Tradition:  All brewing works on the same principle: the yeast eats the sugars extracted from the grains to produce alcohol.  The hops are a more recent brewing staple in history; they add flavor and are anti-microbial, helping to keep the beer from spoiling.

Intermediate Brewing:  The line between basic and intermediate brewing seems to fall between all-extract and partial-extract brewing.  Malt extracts are made by companies who malt the grain, extract its sugars, and convert it into a concentrated liquid or dried form.  Homebrewers can then use 100% extracted sugars for the base of the brew, which is what the yeast will eat.  Starting with extract saves a lot of time.  Basically, you can add extract to water and then jump right to the hour-long boil when hops are added to give the beer its bitter flavor.  Cool, rack with yeast, wait for the critters to do their work, bottle.  This yields perfectly good beer, but it puts an intricate part of the process in the hands of others.

Partial-extract brewing begins to bring extracting sugars from the grains back into the homebrewing process.  It is a bit like cooking from fresh ingredients rather than out of the can or out of the box.  Like making pancakes from scratch.  It takes more time and knowledge, but you gain flexibility, control, and a higher-level awareness of your beer.  You get to work with grain rather than syrup or powder, bringing you closer to the natural reality of the process.

Malting:  Think of grain growing in the field.  Ok.  It is a harvested seed.  We’re working mainly with barley, but some beers use rice or wheat.  From seed to malt is a genius process.  The grain is wetted so that it begins to germinate, transforming (via the seed’s own enzymes) its starchy energy reserves into a form that the plant will use to grow.  Before the little tail / sprout emerges from the seed, the grain is dried out in a kiln.  The temp at which this happens roasts the grain (kinda like coffee), developing color and flavor.   Bam.  Malt.  This takes around a week.  I haven’t done this yet, but keep an eye on the blog this fall.

Extracting Sugars (Mashing):  Unless you help it out, however, most of the malt’s raw materials (sugars and proteins) will remain locked away in forms that the yeasts cannot eat.  Mashing is the process by which the homebrewer converts them into a fermentable “wort.”  Really the enzymes do the work, the homebrewer just sets the conditions for the process.  The enzimes cut up the long molecules into shorter bits, making them available to the yeast.  From 140F to 150F the wort produced is more fermentable than that produced from 150F to 160F, based on which enzymes are active.  (Check this book out if you want an in-depth rundown on the process, along with other enzyme processes.)

This Barley has been CRUSHED.

To mash, you mill the malted grains, exposing the kernels.  A roller grain mill smashes the grains apart, rather than shearing them.  This affects the surface area during the soak and the overall quality of the beer, but we’ll save that for another time perhaps.  A mash tun is a bit of equipment that allows for controlled temperature during the mash, but I don’t have one yet.  Instead, I’ve been using a grain bag in a pot, wrapped in towels for insulation.  You get the temp set and let it sit for an hour or two while the sugars extract from the grain and the enzymes render them useable.

The “I haven’t built a mash tun yet” experience.

Ok, so why partial rather than full?  There is the line where you can get away with less equipment if you do a partial mash (steeping of grains) + extract base, and you still save time.  Basically, doing a partial mash allows you to convert sugar from, say, three to five pounds of grain with relative ease.  Then you add roughly five or six pounds of pre-made malt extract to flesh out the mash.  This splits the difference, giving you some control over your flavors, keeps the mashtun optional, and hastens the brewing process.  I haven’t done the full mash yet, but I’ll be building the equipment for it this summer and will post about it once I can speak from experience.

Hops are flowers, ergo we should all start calling it flower juice.

Final Boil: From there, you combine your homemade wort and the pre-made malt extract in a kettle, boiling for one hour.  During this, you typically add a “bittering” hop early, then a second and even a third “aroma” hop addition later.  The idea is that by not boiling the “aroma” hops for more than a few minutes, their floral flavors remain in the beer.  Then you cool the wort, put it in the carboy, and add yeast.  I’ll post more about hops, which are a flower, later this year.  We’re growing a few varieties in the garden.

India Red Ale:

The pictures above show the IRA being made, based on a recipe by Randy Mosher.

The grain bill calls for differing amounts of Munich, medium crystal, dark crystal and black patent malts.  The hops were Cascade (bittering), plus Cascade and Goldings (aroma).

Cost: The total cost of this beer was a little high because of the different grains.  Some I had to buy a whole pound even though the recipe called for half or less.  The total cost for hops and prorated grains, plus tax, came to $52, not counting the yeast.  I used a White Labs yeast strain (WLP001: California Ale Yeast), spawned from a previous batch.  I think it cost around $7.50 originally.

Yield: So what did I get?  25 bombers, the equivalent of roughly two cases of beer – $26 a case.  Compares favorably to craft beers at $33 – $37 per case before tax.

This is actually quite expensive, and I’ve already begun efforts to reduce costs.  (Reusing yeast from batch to batch, growing hops, looking for volume discounts.)  I’m not sure it pays yet: a $20 payout (the difference between cost and estimated value) doesn’t begin to reward the time it takes to brew at this volume.  However, at this point I’m still learning (increasing knowledge and skills), and the savings can count toward recouping equipment investment.  The most recent beer was in the neighborhood of $20/case, yielding about a $30 offset.  Over 5 batches since the beginning of the year, that equates conservatively to roughly $100.  What a great reason for brewing more beer!

Flavor: The flavor is a bit sweeter than I tend to prefer and the hops a little subtle.  I’m hoping that as it continues to age its sweetness will mellow out a bit.  The rich red color is quite eye catching.  I might not want to drink this beer by itself too often, but it was an exceptional pairing to last night’s diner: braised pork shanks and polenta.

Some Tips:

1.  Plan to cook a dinner that will be very hands-off after a long day in the kitchen.  I suggest a slow-cook soup or stew.

2.  If you bottle the previous batch on the same day that you brew, you can reuse the yeast – saving cost.

3.  Like canning, you will spend a lot of time waiting for the beer to hit boiling and then to cool.  You can use techniques (like adding a lid or stirring the beer to cool) to speed up this time.

- Dustin

Many bee books and sites warn about working bees in the wind, but we didn’t have much choice on install day. Monday was the clearest day in the prediction, if windy. So we ran with it. Fortunately, A -Team is a champ! They were very sweet and calm going about their bee-business. Hivesmanship!

Bee Hats Are Cool

After much anticipation, the bees are finally here!  Nuc #1, aka the A-Team, arrived in the night on the back of a trailer along with 50 of their most-irritated friends.

Nucs, if you’re new to this like we are, are live colonies.  They’re small (about 5 frames — a regular size hive-body will hold 8-10 frames).  Nucs can hit the ground running because they’ve already formed into a “nucleus colony.” Bees that arrive in “packages,” on the other hand, haven’t necessarily met before being piled into their screened bee-cages and shipped (in our case) up North.

The takeaway: Nucs have their hivesmanship thing down.  They are already raising brood, collecting nectar, and defending their home.  And each nuc has about 3 pounds of bees. Give or take, that’s somewhere in the region of 10,000-15,000 bees.

We drove them to our new beeyard in the hatchback.  Under a bedsheet.  They were not screened in.

It was intense.

Needless to say, it looked nothing like the above (too dark for pics, see below).  But remembering where it all began last summer when a beekeeper showed us his hives — and cranking the hatchback’s A/C on high to keep the bees cold and please-god-not-flying-in-the-car — helped us keep calm through the Drive of Terror.  (I kid, I kid. They were on my face though. Well, one was. Like I said, intense.).

Updates to follow! We pick up B-Team and C-Team tomorrow in what promises to be a much easier, day-lit, and screened-in adventure.  B-Team and C-Team are packages (i.e. what beginners usually start with. Hahah. Oops?).

-Nancy

PS: No stings! For us anyway. Some fools with their no-gloves got stung up pretty bad at the pick-up site.

PPS: What was it really like? Drizzling, dusky and eventually dark, in a field with 20 other mostly-new beekeepers in a field across from a Unimart.

The bee-handoff: Not At All Suspicious

With the possibility of victory in sight, Katniss wonders what life as a wealthy victor will be like. She is afraid her very self will be lost once her time will no longer circle around the acquisition of food. By the end of the series, she has been so damaged that this question is put aside, or at least marginalized in comparison to the process of healing. I read these books like wildfire in about a week, so the Katniss that begins the trilogy in the woods was still very fresh in my mind even as the story came to its conclusion. Ability, skill, care, thrift, connection to home, and the natural world all loom large as beneficial virtues for rebuilding District 12. The same things that make the oppression of the Capital survivable could also make life enjoyable and strengthen the community in better times.

It’s worth noting what doesn’t fit. There is an essential element of freedom in the novel that is necessary in order for food to be such a powerful form of resistance: Katniss (hard, a hunter) and Peeta (loving, a baker) transcend expectations about ability and household roles. This didn’t happen because the characters were “free” to choose what they wanted to do. It happened because when the previous generation passed on skills they did not enforce divisions. At the same time, it was up to the children (Katniss and Peeta) to respond to their parent’s teaching, taking their lessons and developing further on their own. You can’t make someone want to express themself through frosting. Prim is hopeless at hunting, but she was offered the chance.

Plus, I especially like Prim’s goat.

In honor of the book, I wanted to share this hearty spring potato soup recipe. It’s not the clear green broth that Katniss tries at the Capital, but something that uses foraged and homey ingredients. (If you do want a good recipe for a spring green soup, check out Deborah Madison’s Vegetable Soups. The secret ingredient is sorrel.)

Within Season’s District 12 Potato Soup:

Ready to Rumble

Ingredients:
Potatoes (peeled, cut into 1 inch cubes)
Slab of Bacon (cut into 1 inch cubes)
Onions (diced)
Garlic (minced)
Milk and / or Cream
Stock (Chicken or Veggie)
Olive Oil or Lard

Instructions:
Heat a glug* of Olive Oil (or a scoop of Lard) in a good-sized soup pot to medium-high heat. Brown the Bacon, about one minute per side. (Don’t overcook it though.) Add the Onions and Garlic, turning heat down to low until translucent (5-10 minutes). Add the Stock and Potatoes, enough to cover everything. Bring to boil, then turn the heat down to med-low and allow to simmer for 30 minutes until potatoes are tender. Have a chat with someone while the soup cooks, or maybe plan to learn a new skill. Add the Milk or Cream when you are ready to serve, just enough to make it creamy. (You do not want the dairy to boil, though, as it can cause your soup to “break”. Reheat leftovers gently.) Taste your soup to see how much salt and pepper to add. Enjoy!

*Don’t be too concerned with measuring. Just balance the proportions as you go.

Meet Me At the Table

Our Soup:

1. We don’t yet grow our own potatoes (no space), but there are lots of different varieties to try. Some will be better for baking, others for boiling; some will be big, others small. Some are purple. Try out a variety.

2. We used our own bacon, which is pork belly that has been cured with salt and air-dried. We don’t have a smoker yet, but the flavor is great. Curing your own meat would be a key skill to have in District 12!

3. We are trying to improve our foraging skills. I used some “field garlic” I found growing wild to give our soup a unique flavor. They are spicy, oniony, and garlicky all rolled into one, but with a little something extra that comes from their wildness.

4. Making your own stock is really worthwhile. First, compared to store brands, you get to control the flavors in your base, particularly its saltiness. It is also something that you don’t usually make intentionally for a soup, because it can take a few hours for the stock to boil. Instead, think of it as a little extra skill that you practice when cooking something else. For example, when you poach a chicken, you end up with a great chicken stock. We usually only buy whole chickens and piece them ourselves. After we take off the breast meat, legs, and wings, (each of which will end up as a different meal) we’ll toss the remaining carcass in a big pot, add some pepper corns, a few bay leaves, thyme if it is around, and let it boil.  Your whole home will smell like the best place to be in the world.

This requires very little extra work, and stretches your budget quite a bit. The best flavor comes from the chicken fat, but this is also where toxins and impurities are found. It’s best to get local pasture-raised chickens that haven’t been given antibiotics (as factory-raised chickens often are) if you plan to start cooking this way. The only way to guarantee that is to get them from a local farmer’s market, and make sure you talk to the farmer.

Dustin

A few weeks back we had the pleasure of visiting with Roy and Julie at Blue Rooster Farm.  They are a grass-based farm, devoted to ecologically friendly practices.  Blue Rooster supplies meat and mushrooms to the CSA operated by Village Acres, a vegetable farm run by Roy’s extended family.  Way back when we were first expanding our own knowledge about local, seasonal food we subscribed to their CSA for two summers and a winter.  A CSA is a great way to get started: you pick up a box of veggies each week, and you get whatever the farm has managed to produce.  (You pay for the year in advance, like a subscription, providing the farmers with seed-money.  You also invest in their skills and share in the variability of the weather with them.)  It teaches you to cook seasonally by necessity, and it introduces you to many kinds of produce you might not otherwise buy.  I owe my love of parsnips and rutabagas to them!  Our gardening and buying habits have drawn us closer to one of the area’s farmers markets, but the CSA culture in town is thriving – and it deserves to.

At the market, labels help consumers buy food based on broadly defined principles: organic, grass-fed, hormone free, etc.  But quite frankly there is just no substitute for getting to know a farmer.  Standards such as these, even though they signal good practices, define a minimum requirement for entering the premium food market.  Industrial farming can produce products that fit such labels while still practicing high-density operations that run contrary to the principle of humane agriculture.  Roy and Julie are smart, sensible people; they are also committed to farming in ways that allow the animals to take advantage of their genius as animals.  They use dogs to move their flock of sheep, they select for good mothering skills in their livestock, and the ability of their animals to thrive in the local conditions of their farm (both heat and cold hardiness).   They want animals who can take care of many of their own problems, rather than needing the farmer to step in and take over the work that self-respecting living creatures ought to be able to handle themselves (like the intricacies of reproduction). The farmer guides, but the animal does their part.

Sheep Antics

Michael Pollan has written about these issues, suggesting that in order to promote the best interests of animals people should view the question from a moral perspective guided by evolutionary principles.  Rather than treating animals as individuals who may or may not have “rights,” he suggests that the best course of action is to allow a pig to be a Pig – to follow out the impulses that have led the species to its current point.  Above all, this means taking the animal out of the mentality of industry, and recognizing the fact that farming is an environmental practice dependent on living things.  Of course, eating is also an environmental practice, and it is a human conceit of truly gargantuan proportions to believe that human culture exists apart from the natural world.  This disconnect has produced a lot of nonknowledge about the reality of our existence, and, as always, ignorance breeds suffering.  Chickens burnt out in egg-producing operations, cows suffering from a bevy of problems related to the high acidification of their rumens because they are fed a diet of corn they did not evolve to eat, pigs living indoors in such dense populations that their health is fragile and their waste becomes a biohazard.

I particularly like this quote from The Omnivore’s Dilemma:

“There’s a schizoid quality to our relationship with animals today in which sentiment and brutality exist side by side.  Half the dogs in America will receive Christmas presents this year, yet few of us ever pause to consider the life of the pig – an animal easily as intelligent as a dog – that becomes the Christmas ham.  We tolerate this schizophrenia because the life of the pig has moved out of view: when’s the last time you saw a pig in person?” (306)

The last time I saw a pig was at Blue Rooster, and she was quite handsome.

Study in Sow

In addition, Blue Rooster Farm manages their wooded acreage with a similarly naturalist-agrarian mentality.  After Julie showed us their first trial run at mushroom cultivation, Roy described the history of the woods since it has come under their management.  Neglect does not equal natural.  Scrub trees would choke out those that once dominated the eastern woodland, since the natural cycles of fire are no longer determining the constitution of the woods.  Recovery from a few hundred years’ worth of selective cutting needs the help of someone who can mimic the natural conditions that are no longer in play.  Cutting “junky” trees so that others can thrive and spread seed is necessary if we want the woods to be anything like they used to be.

Walk in the Woods

Things don’t always go according to plan.  Roy told the story of how a storm took down several of the trees he wanted to be the backbone of his recovery effort.  The woods as they might have been.  But then, as we were heading back, he also shared that he liked to poke acorns in the ground during his trips to the woods and how (though he couldn’t be sure) he thought that this was helping to promote oak seedlings.  The woods as they might yet be.

In addition to her farming, Julie is also putting in a lot of time getting the Village Acres “food shed” up and running.  Well worth checking out if you are in their neck of the neighborhood.

- Dustin

L.F.C. Universal Food Grinder

The Kit:

Landers, Frary & Clark # 2 Universal Food Grinder.

My mother sent me this grinder just before the holidays.  (She had inherited from an older generation.) I haven’t been able to date it, precisely, but the history of the company and the grinder’s basic design is pretty interesting. The company made a wide range of metal items over its lifetime (from bull nose-rings to kitchen scales and ice-skates) which lasted from the mid nineteenth-century to 1965. It adopted the “Universal” brand in the 1890s, and introduced products that revolutionized the home kitchen, including a bread maker, a coffee percolator, and the food grinder. Grinders were common enough, but apparently their new design made it possible to process meat and vegetables into hashes. As I understand it, the rotating action of the screw generated a horizontal pushing force on food different than what you would get with a grinder that used gravity and roller blades. The screw pushes food through a series of holes, and a rotating star-blade chops the extruded food into a well-ground texture. This would have the benefit of cutting fibrous vegetables into small bits, when other designs may not have been able to deal with their stringiness. This same model was still being produced at least until the 1950s, so they’re not exactly antique worthy. From the success of these early products, L.F. & C. expanded into the early market for electric doodads and gizmos. Karen Hudkins from the New Britain Industrial Museum told us that the Corona Corn mill and the Universal Food Choppers were sold throughout South America and are still widely used. Both devices are associated with the Great Depression, when families turned to them in order to keep food costs low by doing more of the processing work in the home. After all, you can fire up the old Universal Food Chopper even when the power is shut off during hard times.   Check out here and here for more history.

Grinding in Process

If you look around on the net for videos of the Universal Food Chopper in action, you will find a range of videos. Sometimes the operator knows what they’re doing, sometimes they are trying out an old fashioned gizmo they found and are struggling. We’re here to set the record straight and to let you know the pros and cons to getting early-industrial on your sausage.

Pros:

The L.F.C. Chopper looks cool, runs quiet, and you can toss the whole thing in the freezer very easily. It is important to keep the sausage cool when you’re working with it so that the fat doesn’t separate from the meat. The result of our first batch was the best sausage we’ve ever eaten. The best ingredients handled with care, mixed with innovation.

Cons:

I haven’t used any other kind of grinder, but I do know that “smear” is a problem for all home sausage making. This happens when the meat’s sinew gets clogged on both sides of the grinder, and the meat gets pulled into a mush rather than ground. I’m not certain how much better of a job I could do in avoiding sinew when piecing a pork shoulder, but I’ll keep trying because it is worth it not to stop as often. You need to watch carefully and clear out the sinew several times as you go. This will take time, which is the main drawback. My hunch is that the Universal Food Chopper is more susceptible to this problem than modern devices. It could come down to the star blade, which hasn’t been sharpened in decades if ever on our grinder. (Newer versions of hand-crank grinders have internal blades that look very sharp.) However, we speculate that the result is a really great texture when you do it right, and that newer machines might not be able to deliver the same result if they slice / power through a certain degree of sinew. (When people struggle in the videos I mentioned before, it is because their meat isn’t cubed in small enough pieces or their sausage is smearing.) Be patient, clean out the sinew, and carry on.

Tip: Because the Universal Food Chopper’s action involves metal-on-metal contact, make sure to use vegetable oil to keep the rust away once you’ve cleaned up.

Conclusion: I am not interested in an electric grinder, but I would like to try a newer hand-cranked model in order to compare it to the Universal in terms of difficulty. If anyone has this experience, I’d be pleased to hear about it in the comments.

Chorizo Variation

If you go to the trouble of making sausage, you should probably make a lot of them. This time, we started with a 5lb pork shoulder butt, cut off the bone and cubed. We followed the Charcuterie bible by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn, doing half batches each of their breakfast sausage with ginger and sage and their Mexican chorizo recipes. If ginger sounds strange, let me tell you that it is the iconic flavor of breakfast sausages. And the chorizo. Please! It called for a shot of tequila, but a rum substitute worked a charm. Hands down the best two sausages I’ve ever eaten. We bought the pork from Cow-A-Hen Farm, because, among other reasons, Bill Callahan rocks.  He has always been kind in answering questions, even way back when we didn’t know that the butt comes from the front of the hog.

I used a little bit of the loose sausage to make patties for breakfast. The rest went into casings. Everyone in the universe seems to have a stuffing attachment for their electric hoozits. Then I found a snippet video on the net, which upon further research turned out to be part of an Anthony Bourdain tv show. Jump to 7.09 in the video to see some quick hand stuffing in action. I was a lot slower in my first attempt, but I know it is possible now. The dream is alive. Check back in ten years.

Tips:

1. Use natural casing. Grossed out? Don’t eat sausage.

2. When machine stuffing, you would put a whole length of casing on the spout and fill it as the meat flows forth. This is impractical when hand stuffing. I learned the hard way that if you try to fill multiple sausages from one end by working the meat down its length you’ll end up with tears and blowouts. The people in the video have them pre-cut to length, and that’s what worked for me.

Finished Sausages

Making sausage takes a lot of time, but like anything it will go quicker with more experience and skill. After you cut the pork, it rests in its seasonings overnight. Then comes the grinding, then the stuffing. You could easily buy this number of sausages from the store for a much cheaper price. The flavor of homemade sausage is superior, and when you have only ever bought sausage you simply can’t have a good sense of what they really are as food.

Sausage should be the centerpiece of a meal, on par with a nice cut of steak or pork chop. I would say that that a fair price for great sausage would start around $10/lb, about double or triple its cost at the store, which would begin to pay a good price to the farmer and the sausagemaker. They should be savored rather than scarfed, and this price would be offset by using a it in meals with lots of grains and lentils for balance. The nine sausages we made were put away in the freezer and have since become the anchor for great pasta dishes, breakfast tacos, and a Bauernsuppe.

The only problem is that I can’t bear to follow any recipe that begins “remove the sausage from casing.” I guess I’ll put some away loose next time!

- Dustin

First Crocus, February 20th 2012

Behold, spring. We are precisely a month ahead of the vernal equinox, but today a significant event marked the advent of spring. The first crocus arrived and opened, which shouldn’t be too much of a surprise considering how warm and mild the winter was. You’ll recall that last year they were blasted by a March snowstorm here, and they are some two weeks earlier this year.

The first signs of new growth are upon us, including chive sprouts! Fresh flavor has returned.

Swiss Chard, Post hibernation

And here is a glimpse from under our row cover. We stopped raiding the plants after having fresh greens for our Christmas and New Year’s feasts. A few leaves have yellowed since then, but they were older and somewhat damaged from insects anyway. The Swiss Chard looks particularly dapper with its new growth, no?

The gloves are off now. We’ll be ramping up the late winter planting this coming week and will even consider putting in the peas. It seems so wrong, but the ground is certainly workable. Now we have to worry about the pollen flow arriving too early as we establish our first two bee colonies this April!

I fully expect three feet of snow as punishment for my current exuberance.

- Dustin

pickled peppers via With a Glass via Punk Domestics

We’re just now cracking open our go at these pickled peppers.  Luckily, we actually wrote down where we got the recipe ’cause these are fantastic.  They’ve got just the right balance of heat, garlic, and savory.  We played around with pepper types and spices in ours.  So far, all the variations are great – from long cayennes to banana peppers and changing up the mustard+black pepper spices for things like sichuan peppercorns.

With a Glass’s blog suggests putting a tbsp of oil into each jar.  The dash of oil makes these peppers especially good.  I didn’t know what to expect from adding oil, but these have won me over and I’ll do this a lot more in the future.  The heat seems to be mellowed out and deepened by the oil.  I think the oil also helps the peppers not seem quite so vinegary and helps make the peppers work in a wider range of dishes than I expected.   They’re great with pizza, but also in an impromptu escabeche or even to add heat to stir-fries.

So far, the pickled peppers are working well as subs for fresh peppers in any recipes that have some kind of acidic or savory/sour component. The vinegary-ness of these peppers is mild compared to most pickled peppers, but you will still taste it in things that are trying to do that sweet+heat angle … like these breakfast crumpets… that was a bust.  But when you’re adding heat to stir-fries or doing something with a savory heat, the peppers blend right in.  It doesn’t need to be a very vinegary recipe, something with a bit of tomato has often been enough. Basically: anything that isn’t maple-syrup-candy-breakfast-crumpets.

Make them: Pickled Hot Chili Peppers

More pickled peppers: Punk Domestics

Baked Potato Prep. The Wild Turkey is our olive oil container.

Growing up, I lived with my grandparents. This led to some interesting moments that are likely uncommon for people my age. I recall clearly the day they got their first telephone, for instance. We watched the Olympics on an older television in the upstairs room, black and white of course, that had a remote control “clicker”. One button. You clicked it, and the physical dial on the tv would jump forward one channel. I’m talking serious moving parts and loud resounding noises. Imagine a blow-torch lighter, the kind where you squeeze it and it sparks by scraping off a bit of steel, and you’ll understand what I’m talking about.

Anyway. Among other things I recall the first day that the microwave oven entered the household. Square, electric, on another order of technological achievement altogether than the gas stove. This time we were more or less keeping pace with the rest of the country in the home-electric technological arms-race. From that day on we were doomed to eat “baked” potatoes from the microwave just like the astronauts. They cooked so much faster! Ten minutes of wave bombardment and voila! Smashed with oleo and a payload of salt-n-pepper, this potato-paste was not even close to as tasty as my grandmother’s mashed potatoes, fried potatoes, scalloped potatoes, or home-cut french fries. I ate at least one potato dish nearly every day until I was 18. This is why in my adulthood I love rice, which was a foreign concept in our rural-midwestern community.

(Note: It’s only a cultural myth that the microwave came from NASA. Its origin lies in WWII radar research.)

Time heals all wounds. I have resurrected the baked potato.

Here’s how to make it:

1. Preheat oven. 450F. If you already have things in the oven (stews, roasts, bread), the potato can play second fiddle to the other concerns. It will just take a little longer or cook a little faster, though you probably shouldn’t push beyond 500F.

2. Pick your potato. Russets are great bakers. My grandmother swears by red potatoes and sometimes thinks that she’s been tricked into buying white potatoes that have been died. Yukon Golds are nice, too. The essential point is that it is a potato. This method works well for yams and sweet potatoes. Size matters. I like a medium sized potato that is roughly roundish, i.e. not knobby. If you are making more than one, pick them so that they are all nearly the same size or they will be done at different times and the littler ones will overcook.

3. Wash your potato. They grow in the dirt. I’m not talking merely getting them wet. Use a sponge and a bit of soap if you are dealing with grimy straight-from-the-ground potatoes. The cooking will sanitize anything that’s alive on them, but you’re going for taste.  From-the-store potatoes are generally well cleaned before distribution.

4. Stick a fork in it, all over, trying to get the tines into its center. Be careful not to stab yourself. If you forget this step, it will just take the potato longer to bake.

Potato, stabbed, with oil and salt.

5. This stage is the secret. Rub the skin with olive oil (no substitutes will equal the taste) and sprinkle it with a nice amount of sea salt. The oil will help with heat transfer to the skin and the salt will draw out moisture. Combined, these cooking methods will give you a perfectly crispy outer skin that tastes so good that it ends the debate over whether you should eat the skin or not. You should. (See step 3.)

Potato: Into the Inferno.

6. Put it in the oven where there is room, right on the rack. You’ll need a drip pan on the shelf under them. (I keep an old pie pan that lost its surfacing around for tasks like this.) You do not want them resting on a cookie sheet because the point of contact will overcook them and maybe make that spot burn. You’re going for ambient heating, not direct-contact cooking.

7. Turn the potatoes once or forget about them. Near the 45 minute mark, check them. Give them a quick squeeze, right there in the oven. The skin will be crisp and the inside will have pulled away from it a bit. You want to squeeze it enough to feel if there is an easy give to the inside. If it feels hard, leave it for another 15 minutes and check it again. Note: if you do this quickly it won’t burn your fingers, especially if you have dragon fingers. If it hurts, don’t keep touching them. Wet your fingers down with cold water to remove the heat you’ve put in them, dry them, and then give the potatoes another squeeze. If they feel pulpy, proceed to step 8.

8. Plate. Put them on before anything else. Take the palm of your hand and give your potato a smash. If it is done, it will flatten out on the plate. Cut one slit along the length of it with a knife. Smoosh the two ends together. The potato will pop back up into shape, and will have a nice cavity to hold butter, sour cream, or your choice of exotic topping.

9. Eat potato.

Pro tips:

If it isn’t done all the way when you smash it, eat it anyway and do better next time.

Baked potatoes take time so use it to your advantage. Have them in the oven while making a stew. Start them before you’re getting hungry for a snack. Think about all of the fun things you can do in the time it takes them to cook. At the very least, have a beer.

Don’t use foil, please. You want that moisture to escape for the crispy skin. These aren’t steamed potatoes, after all. If you want, you can use the foil to make a hat that will keep the alien microwaves out of your brain.

- Dustin

Lessons learned: Less is more ...

These vanilla, cinnamon, and anise extracts came out beautifully, in large part I think because we went with a small-batch approach.  Smaller jars, less booze — this seems to be the trick.  We used vodka on this round, both because we don’t drink vodka much (what better way to use up neglected booze), but also because if you’re using a clear booze, you can see the extract turn brown as it develops flavor — so you know you’re making progress:

Extract success!

It was nice to do that this time, since we’ve had mixed success with extracts in the past.  I have two theories: either your base booze makes a big difference, or, it’s all about the booze-to-stuff ratio.  It’s probably the latter. If you’re going to try this, I’d suggest small bottles.

From past projects, we’ve had some success but also some that are still not taking on much flavor.  We’ve had a vanilla+brandy sitting in the cupboard for over a year, and whoa does that still smell boozy.  This one has two issues. First, it was one bean to about 1.5 cups of booze.  This is probably the root of the problem.  That ratio seems not to be working — unless perhaps you tried a fresh/whole bean and, frankly, that feels silly.  I’m more inclined to use the bean pod, not its seeds (i.e. the seeds go into tasty things like this mascarpone tart) for an extract.

At the same time, I can’t help wondering if the base booze itself might also be making a difference.  While the vanilla+brandy trial hasn’t come close after nearly a year (maybe more even), the lemon+vodka smelled like sweet, sweet lemon drops after only 3 days.  Meanwhile, 8 weeks on, our latest cinnamon extract, anise extract, and (renewed attempt at) vanilla extract are deliciously fragrant & ready-to-go, I’d say.

Ratios have got to be playing a part here (I used smaller spice jars and enough peel/pod/spices to just about fill the jar) but I can’t argue with the fact that everything in vodka has really taken on flavor, while the brandy one hasn’t really done much.

Either way, lessons learned:

• Use small spice jars.
• Fill the jars near to the top with your spices. A rough guide to amounts I used:
  • For lemon or other citrus: 8-10 strips of peel, avoiding as much pith as you can.
  • For anise: Use star anise, not anise seeds: 5-7 pods.
  • For cinnamon: 3-4 two-inch cinnamon sticks.
  • For vanilla: Here, I seeded the pod for another recipe, bashed the pod a few times with the dull side of a chef’s knife and crammed it into a small spice jar.
• Pour your booze-of-choice around the spices/peels/pods, till the booze covers the spices and the bottle is full-ish.

You’ll arrive at your extract at anywhere from 1 to 8 weeks depending on the ratio of stuff-to-booze. Lemon and other fresh herbs/spices will probably finish faster than dried spices. More oils, maybe?

I think that in the future, I’ll always keep the ratio high on spices and low on booze, since I’d rather have stronger flavoring.  It’s easier to tone the flavor down that not have anything to build on.

Also: there’s no missing the finish line:  You’ll know when it’s ready because you’ll be able to smell the lemon/anise/etc very clearly above the booze. And, if you’re using a clear liquor, you might also see the extract turn brown (i.e. for vanilla extract… that won’t happen with lemon).

Coming soon: Anise candies!

- Nancy

For a good while there, our vinegar was puttering away.  All signs pointing to Mother-hood. A distinctive, somewhat sweet vinegary smell.  Then-BAM!  Mold City.  Ugh.

ok, yeah: yuck. but... maybe still ok?

People seem to be skimming the mold off and trying again, so I’m giving it a go (as in skimming it out, adding wine, and searching for some sources that can lay out if this will be ok to eat).  The mold actually came out easily and there seems to be a slimy mother-goo in our sieve.

Mold aside, things seem good.

our mother..?

About that mold:  As it turns out, we probably shouldn’t have turned our basement room into the catch-all garlic-curing, beer-fermenting, cheese-hanging, vinegar-aging, and bread-rising room.  Our house tends to the very cold in all areas except the main basement room, where the furnaces run.  With the humidity and temperature hovering within a temperate and fairly steady range, this has been the go-to spot for anything that calls for “room-temperature.” (Our other rooms routinely drop to 55 overnight and the non-insulated stairwell has been at 40 for weeks)

This multi-use room might be our problem.  We know yeast, being yeast, likes to travel .. but it hadn’t occurred to me that bread/beer yeast could mess with our vinegar so spectacularly. The timeline seems convincing though. In December, we re-launched our beer brewing ventures and have been pounding out ciabattas.  The basement is often the only place to get bread to rise. And so, somewhere between the beer-brewing and bread-rising, I’m guessing that we’ve fostered quite the thriving population of yeast downstairs.

It’s probably safe to say that the real culprit here is our latest homebrew: the Disaster Stout.  I’m still hoping the Disaster Stout will work out in the end, but it’s left us with a royal mess.  I’d bet that the geyser of beer-yeast is what led to these mold blooms.

the Culprit, aka Disaster Stout.

I can’t find much talk about this all online, but Rurification mentions not making your vinegar in the same area that you’re making bread or cheese.  We do all three of those and then topped it off by setting up our homebrew carboy in the same room.  Seemingly not a great idea, but why?  Now, I’m curious about what’s going on.  Off to the sleuthing!

-Nancy

A Very Happy Home-made Hoop House!

Hello Again!

The last post was in September? That means it is time for a reboot. We’ve been busy on the food front even if it has been quiet around here…

September was a flurry of canning and preserving. Our second year has been mega-bonus-awesome: the peas just keep rolling out of the freezer with their superior flavor; our retirement carrots are snuggled in a box of peat moss; and the berries we foraged continue to please in smoothies, in cakes, and as tea-party-fancy jams. Once you have a shelf full of home-made jams that go beyond the level of grocery store standards, you too will understand why the Mad Hatter and the Dormouse are so blitzed at the table. There are so many jars left to eat by the time Rhubarb shows up in the spring that every week involves a guaranteed sugar rush of delectable proportions.

And then there are the pickles, relishes, and canned tomatoes. I look very sophisticated when I hold a dilly-bean like a cigarette.

Our winter months involved three epic-level feasts.

We hosted Thanksgiving with friends and family, which involved a gorgeous Turkey cooked under buttered-muslin. The farmers estimated that the birds would come in at around 16 pounds. When they showed up at the pick-up location, tired and haggard from a day of wrangling their fowl to slaughter, the still-warm Turkeys were all pretty close to 23 pounds. At Christmas we served up a large ham from Bill at Cow-A-Hen farm – delicious. On New Year’s eve we busted out a menu for our twelve guests that included a roast rib of beef (a special cut from where the delmonico steak is normally taken – special ordered from Brian at Stone Meadow Farm), sauteed mushrooms w/ red wine, balsamic onions, Yorkshire puddings, roasted garden beets and carrots, and an almond tart w/ brandied apricots. Yes, we rock. Good food and several excellent bottles of sparkling wine… a karmic score when it comes to launching a new year.

This year we’ll continue writing about our adventures in the garden, in the kitchen, and at the market. Here are some new skills we’ll be posting about:
Charcuterie – Dustin’s madre sent us an heirloom meat grinder from L.F.&C. Company from New Britain, Conn. We’ll share our experiences in the world of advanced meat cookery: sausage, pate, stretching, piecing, and rendering.

Cheese Press – Nancy’s madre sent us a cheese press, which has led to experiments in temperature and humidity control for aging hard cheeses. More dairy is on the way!

Four Season Gardening – It turns out that when fall rolls around is not the optimal time to begin thinking about trying a winter garden for the first time. We’ve gained some valuable experience with home-built mini-hoop-houses, and we still have greens that would otherwise have been long gone by now. We basically put in whatever seeds we had that could hack a little cold and had to scrape the bottom of the storage cupboard to make it happen. On the plus side, we have rosemary and kale waiting for us outside, and even had garden radishes for our holiday feasts! On the minus side, our cilantro is tiny (hope it goes into overdrive in March) and plenty of our seeds have yet to come up. This year we’ve ordered seeds with a mind toward the fourth season, and we’ll have a better jump on it before the chilly weather sets in and the sun scorns our northern clime for the great southy side of the planet.

Beekeeping – Finally found a farmer who is willing to let us put hives on their land for the upcoming year! (We rent in the middle of town.) For this project, we took our time to research things before jumping in. We met with a local producer last summer who imparted some of his hard-earned experience. We also attended bee-school at the community re-skilling initiative Spring Creek Homesteading. Our goal is to equally promote honey production and bee vitality, combating colony collapse by using Queens adapted to our local conditions and allowing the bees to keep a larger share of their honey stores during overwintering.

Brewing – Four batches in, and I know just enough to realize that we are absolute beginners at this! We are ambitious, though. Mash-tun ambitious. Growing hops ambitious. Yeah. Plus, we’ve pressed our own hard cider for the past three years, which counts for something. Our goal is to begin curating some of the really excellent homebrew knowledge out there, and you can count on us to put our homesteading spin on it.

Looking forward to a great year!

Dustin

Red Wine Vinegar: Make Your Own!

In the latest series of crazy projects, we’re making vinegar.  We just inherited a vinegar crock and after realizing that a local brew supply shop had Mothers of Vinegar in stock, we’ve decided to just go for it. We’ll be posting updates of our go at this so you can see what a mother looks like.

I’m sure there’s a learning curve to this, though Food & Wine‘s instructions make it seem like a fairly simple (and worthwhile) waiting game.  It’ll be neat to see how it turns out and how it compares with the store-bought red wine vinegar.

Here Goes!

• Crock, with spigot
  • UPDATE: Our crock is quite large. Even at the full recipe for Vinegar Round #1, we were barely above the spigot line. As the mother formed, part of it grew into the spigot.  Cleaning that out was a chore, but not that big a deal. For Vinegar Round 2, we haven’t had this problem yet and have been able to decant through the spigot as planned. Lesson learned: making larger batches to keep the waterline (wineline?) high is a good idea. [Apr. 2012].
• Cheesecloth
• Mother of Vinegar (We got this for $19.95 from a local brew supply shop. It’s possible to find cheaper mothers online, but the shipping costs were high, so we just went with this one).
  • UPDATE: After the mold disaster — see January Update – we started anew with a bottle of Bragg unpasteurized apple cider vinegar – this is much cheaper (under $5, depending on shop/shipping) and is working well [Apr. 2012].
• Bota Box – Old Vine Zinfandel (On Sale: $16.99)

Cost-wise, for the curious, this comes to $36.94 in all, for 92 oz of vinegar. That’s just shy of 3 quarts of vinegar, or, 40 cents per ounce. Fancy vinegars from gourmet shops often runs around $1+ per ounce. And the good stuff is what we’re aiming for here. (Grocery-store level stuff will run $0.99 for 16 oz, but we’re hoping to get to a much higher quality here).

Granted, your initial costs might go up if you buy a crock or cheesecloth.  But, you could also just get a little creative — you can use other containers, like a large glass jar, and a tea cloth/ old tee-shirt can often sub in for cheesecloth.

Cleaning out the crock

8 oz. Mother + 16 oz Wine + 8 oz Water

We’re starting with an 8-ounce Mother of Vinegar from a local brew supply shop (the culture itself is from Presque Isle Wine Cellars).  There was no sign of a mother in the bottle, but after feeding it some wine and water, we should start to see something.  I think. We’ll see. It’s hard to know what it’ll all look like. But that’s why we posting this, for you.

The Food & Wine article and the Presque Isle label both recommended starting by adding 2 cups of red wine and 1 cup of water to the mother.  (We used filtered, from the Britta, hope that’s what they meant by filtered. We have very hard water, I hope that doesn’t matter in the end.)  As you can see here, the wine mixture looks clear (well, you know — no … growth or cloudiness yet).

Have cheesecloth, will ...wait?

We’ve covered the crock with a double layer of cheesecloth. I suppose this is to keep dust and/or creepy-crawlies out.  For now, I put the plastic rim that came with the crock over the cheesecloth to hold it in place. I’m considering also fastening with a rubber band, for a more solid seal, but the plastic is pretty snug, so…

All set!

On the theory that our basement area will have the most consistent temperatures (especially re: overnight low temps), we’re stowing the crock downstairs.  Our room temperature tends to fluctuate by 20 degrees come winter, so I’m banking on the basement’s relatively-steady sorta-warm temps will be best (the storage room is near the furnace and tends to be warm as a result).

Today, it’s registering mid-70s and about 80% humidity. A little low temp-wise, according to the Presque Isle Mother’s instructions (they said 80-90 degrees) — but we’re still within the range listed on the Food & Wine instructions (70-90 degrees), so I’m optimistic.

In future batches, we might use whatever red wine we have around the house. But, since this is our first go at it, we’re going to try to keep things consistent by using same kind of wine throughout the process. A Bota Box makes sense as a way to make sure we have the same stuff around.

Plus, their Zin is good and now I can be silly and tell people I’m making Zinegar. Hehheheh. Yay! Wordplay!

Next steps: (Sept 2011) After 1 1/2 weeks, we’ll start adding wine (three 2 1/2-cup installments over 1 1/2 weeks till the crock is  two-thirds full). Updates to follow!

Update: (Jan 2012) “Too Many Cooks: Vinegar, part II” … in which we learn some lessons about vinegar, yeasts, and mold.

Fauxkopitas: Zucchini-Fennel Phyllo Triangles and Cucumber-Dill Salad

Greens may not be surviving the August heat, but the zucchini, zucchini, zucchini! — well, that is mounding up in prolific piles.  We’ve done zucchini noodles, zucchini bread, zucchini in stir-fry and zucchini-as-soup.  Inspired by a round of fava-mint empanadas earlier this year, we’ve decided to try zucchini as a filling.  Empanada dough might be a bit on the heavy side, but phyllo might make for a better foil.  Plus, I’m craving something spanikopita-esque. Here goes!

Ingredients:

For the filling:

• 12 ounces zucchini, trimmed, coarsely grated
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 3 small onions, chopped
• large handful fresh fennel tops, chopped
• juice from 1/2 lemon
• 6 tablespoons almonds, roughly bashed or chopped
• large handful grated Parmesan cheese

For assembly:

• 1/4 cup spicy pangrattato  *leftover from something like this or, for a more spicy version, try this (or, can easily omit.)
• 1/2 cup olive oil
• 12-15 sheets phyllo pastry, thawed. Don’t open till you’re ready to assemble.
• light egg wash (1 small egg, beaten)
• Sesame seeds, optional

The Plan: Saute the Zucchini with olive oil and onion. Toss with herbs (fennel tops, since we have it around) and lemon. Add a little ground almond for body, parmesan for a touch of flavor. You can play around with this last part especially. Almond and parmesan work in pretty similar ways in a lot of the vegan cooking we’ve tried.  Here, we are going to use both because, hey, decadence. Subbing for just almonds or just parmesan would work well too.

Once you have your filling seasoned and flavored the way you like it, you’ll start assembling the triangles.  To assemble the triangles: We found a double layer of phyllo to be the best dough-filling ratio. It helps to have 2 people for this part, but you can pull it off solo.

If you’re used to phyllo, just skip this aside … :  Phyllo will dry out quickly, so don’t leave it exposed to the air.  We open it out flat, lay a sheet of plastic over it and then a barely-damp tea towel. Don’t let the damp tea towel touch the phyllo. You can sometimes use the plastic the phyllo came it, if it’s large enough. We used our Silpat as the plastic layer.

1. Preheat oven to 350 and have ready: the zucchini mixture, a small bowl of the pangrattato, olive oil (or melted butter), the thawed phyllo, and egg wash.  Have a pastry brush ready to distribute the olive oil.
2. Put your first sheet of phyllo out on your worksurface. Working quickly, brush with olive oil and sprinkle a small amount of pangrattato.
3. Fold phyllo sheet over itself lengthwise, so you have a double layer of phyllo.
4. Place 2-3 tbsp of zucchini mixture in the top left corner of the phyllo.
5. Fold the bottom left corner up over the filling to form a triangle. Fold the triangle over itself again.  If needed, you can pause here to add zucchini to fill out the packet. Or, just continue folding to close off the open side of the triangle.
6. Place triangle on a baking sheet and repeat 1-5 till you’ve used up the filling.
7. Brush all the triangles with egg and sesame seeds (optional.) Bake at 350 till golden. About 20 minutes.

You can freeze these after baking for later. To re-heat, bake from frozen in a 350 degree oven.

Serve this with a light salad — cucumber dressed with rice wine vinegar and dill was perfect.

Use those Veg!: Summer Sautéed Ratatouillle

We made this quick, summer sautéed ratatouille in a wok to quickly cook the vegetables to crisp-tender.  You won’t need the heat at full-wok levels, especially if you’re using olive oil (the smoking point is much lower for olive oils).  But, using the wok is nice for a quick summer lunch since the pan transfers heat so well and it’s easy to toss the veg in to cook in turn.  Watch your heat levels, don’t crowd your pan, and you’ll be all set.

Summer Sautéed Ratatouille

Adapted from Serious Eats’ Spicy Summertime Ratatouille with Mint

Serves about 2 as a main, more if a side.

In this version, ratatouille inspires the flavor choices, but the final version will be more fresh than stewed — so, a perfect choice on a hot summer afternoon. Apparently, the “touiller” in ratatouille means to toss food, so I’m taking that to be license for our toss-in-a-wok approach.

CHOPCHOPCHOPCHOP

Feel free to add vegetables as you have them on hand. We added tomatoes since they needed using and fit with the ratatouille angle. If you use tomatoes, pick firm ones or use whole cherry/grape tomatoes to avoid having them fall apart in the pan.  Or, you know, just let them do their thing.

Once you have everything chopped, it’s just a series of quick sautés and you’re set.

Get your wok or sauté pan to a medium heat.  Add about a tablespoon olive oil and sauté each vegetable separately, combining into a serving bowl as each finishes. You’ll cook the onion, garlic, and chili together, last.  Season lightly as you go, and add olive oil as needed between batches.

Start with eggplant, then zucchini, pepper, and tomatoes.  Sauté or gently stir-fry just until crisp-tender.  Be especially gentle with the tomatoes.  Small cherry tomatoes, whole, will work best since they won’t fall apart on you. Last, sautee the onions for about a minute and then add the garlic and peppers together for another minute or two.

Toss with the vegetables and dress with lemon, olive oil, and mint.  Adjust seasoning to taste and serve immediately. (If this is going to be your main dish, serve over bulgur, couscous, or a similar grain to give a little extra heft.)

Lemon and Mint Chiffonade: Pretty Delicious

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Milk!

Part I‘s milk-marinaded chicken was a succulent, tender grilled success.  So, while we’re on a roll with this, we’re trying an overnight, milk-marinaded lamb.  We’re planning to use a stew cut (1 inch cubes, from the shoulder).  In the past, we’ve found this cut can be a little tough, so we have big hopes that what the dairy did for chicken, it can do for lamb too.

We went with a Tunisian flavor profile, somewhat adapted to suit what we have on hand. The lamb gets braised, and served with sauteed eggplant and over a bed of bulgur.  The caraway, tomato, lemon, and cinnamon are pretty spectacular in this dish. I didn’t know what to expect with the caraway, and I’m seriously impressed now. We’ve had caraway sitting in the cabinet from experiments with rye bread, so I’m glad to find another way to use it. Anyway — highly, highly recommend this flavor profile!  In hindsight, the long braising times for this recipe does so much to make the meat succulent that the milk-marinade effect might be hard to pinpoint.  But. I’m craving savory and do not want to go to the store, so I’m just running with this Tunisian style Lamb and Eggplant idea.  We’re adapting the linked version to sub in fresh red chili peppers and we’ve adapted some of the process based on previous braise recipes.

Tunisian Lamb with Eggplant

Adapted from Rocket Lunch

Preheat oven to 325.

Pull the lamb out of the milk and discard the marinade. Mix the lamb with the caraway-coriander-paprika spice mixture. Salt and pepper to taste.

Heat a Dutch oven over high heat and add a good glug of olive oil to the pot.  When the oil is fragrant and hot, brown the lamb in 2 or 3 batches (try to avoid overcrowding the pan). As you finish the batches, pull the meat off to a platter.

Add the remaining stew ingredients: stock, bay, cinnamon, allspice, and the reserved lamb (along with any accumulated juices). Bring to a boil.  Cover with a tight lid and braise in the preheated oven for 3 hours.

While the meat gets close to finishing, prep the eggplant:  Cut the eggplant into 1-inch cubes. Place the eggplant in a large colander and toss with salt. Allow to drain for 10 minutes. Pat the eggplant dry. Heat a large pan over high heat and add about 3 tablespoons olive oil. Add the eggplant and allow to brown for a couple of minutes. This could take a few batches. When golden brown on all sides (3 to 4 minutes), remove from heat. We never have paper towels, so we drain ours on a rack over a baking sheet.

When the 3 hours is up, check the lamb.  It should be tender and close to falling apart.  Cook for a little longer if needed. At this point, the original instructions have you strain the braising liquid to thicken it on the stove-top and continue to cook the meat slightly at 400 degrees. I tried this, but in hindsight, won’t bother in the future. I like the brothy-ness of the braising liquid and didn’t find that the extra heat on the meat made much difference since it was already divine.

This is delish and disappeared too quickly for photos. It’s that good!

Milk in the Raw

Since starting a recurring weekly order from our local raw dairy, we’ve loved it, haven’t looked back, and I am still surprised it took so long to get used to the raw milk idea.  Which is all great.  But then, Tuesday, aka Doomsday (kidding. sort of), rolls around and again, here we are, scouring the web for something, something, that will use up this milk we’ve got left so we can get the jug rinsed out and back to our lovely dairy stand. So. A learning curve.

And, so, what to do with that gallon, half gallon, quart of leftover milk? There have been blackberry peach and pecan puddings, accidental-clabbers, yogurt and sorta-yogurts, food revolution smoothies and quesos and paneers.  And lots of whey.  And now, there is meat.

You can marinade with this stuff!  How cool is that?

We’ve used milk in roasted chicken recipes before, but didn’t quite realize that the milk was not just there to be part of a tasty sauce at the end.  But, according to FineCooking, dairy products tenderize meat very well, too:

Buttermilk and yogurt are only mildly acidic, so they don’t toughen the way strongly acidic marinades do. It’s not quite clear how the tenderizing occurs, but it seems that calcium in dairy products activates enzymes in meat that break down proteins, a process similar to the way that aging tenderizes meat.

We’ve got two experiments with this going in the kitchen: 1. Chicken for the grill, tonight.  And 2. Lamb (a stew meat cut, from the shoulder) for a slow cook in the oven, tomorrow, in honor of the slightly cooler weather on the forecast.  Here we go!

Adventures in Milk: Round 1

Milk-Marinaded Spiced Chicken

• Legs and thighs from small/medium chicken
• 3-4 cups milk (we’re using slightly soured raw milk; buttermilk would work too)
• 3 large garlic cloves, chopped
• 1-2 tablespoons spice mixture
• 1 heaping teaspoon hot paprika. Or you know, a shake or two.
• 1-2 teaspoon salt (+ extra for seasoning)
• fresh ground black pepper

Spice Mixture: Use a mortar and pestle to grind the spices together as finely as possible. You’ll only need about a tablespoon or two for this marinade, so either scale it down or save the rest for a saag etc.  (yields 1/4 cup, can be stored for a few weeks)

• 2 tablespoons cumin seeds
• 1 tablespoons coriander seeds
• 2 teaspoons yellow mustard seeds (not black #learnedthehardway)
• ½ teaspoon red pepper flakes
• 1/8 teaspoon cardamom seeds (not pods #learnedthehardway)
• 3 whole cloves

Piece the chicken, if it isn’t already.  In a shallow bowl, add your chicken pieces, milk, and remaining ingredients.  Cover and marinade for 3-4 hours.

Get your grill nice and hot. Brush grill lightly with oil. When your grill is ready, pat the chicken pieces dry and season to taste.  Grill the chicken on both sides, over a medium heat, until cooked through. (12-15 minutes depending on size).

Update:  The chicken was very good.  Way more tender than normal for these cheap cuts, and grilled to perfection.  We ate it with a quick-sauteed fresh corn, tomato N okra side.

Today is a cool summer day here in central PA, with a high of a heavenly 75 F. Even so, I can hardly conjure up the memory of those chilly days last fall that found us on our hands and knees poking garlic cloves into the ground. At that time of year, the garden is wrapping up for the most part, and planting the garlic is one of the farewell tasks. It wants just enough time for the roots to begin to grow before the first freeze hits. They need a bit of cold weather before they’ll really start to sprout. The garlic incubates in the ground all winter, and provides some much needed excitement the next spring when it provides some early green to otherwise freezing, drizzly, muddy-brown gardens.

This is our second year of growing garlic in our community garden plot. Apparently people pay a lot of money for garlic starters, and three “units” (or heads) are going for around $15 on a major seed website today. This makes sense if your aim is to avoid the typical store variety, which is a genetic picked with storage, friendliness to the bumps and tossing of machine harvesting, and transportation ability in mind. If you need to pay $5 for a head of garlic that has qualities (such as taste) outside of this CV, well, maybe make sure it is a one-time purchase? For our garden, this year’s stock came directly from a few normal heads that we could have eaten, but opted to plant instead. One bulb’s worth of cloves was saved from last season, which in turn came from a garlic from a CSA box the year before. The rest of our crop came from some heads purchased for 75 cents from a favorite stand at the Boalsburg Farmer’s Market, Littlefield Farm.  I mentioned that it was for planting, and Tom dug down for the choicest heads he had to provide good characteristics for the next generation. Basically, you pick what you like to eat, while considering flavor, size, and hardiness. From there all it took was to break apart the individual cloves, and put them in the ground. Basically!

Out in the garden in October, each clove needs a bit of fare-well attention because they have to be tucked-in with the root part down and the point upwards. This keeps the garlic from tunneling to the middle of the Pacific Ocean, or wherever is straight down from where you live.

Prepping the Garlic Beds

Basically, the cloves need only exact-ish spacing of 4-6 inches from their neighbors so that they can develop to full size, and need to be deep enough to have two inches of soil on top of it. For me, it is always easiest to just push my hands into the dirt of the bed and draw a trench down its length. The dirt has been worked enough each year that it is very easy to do. If you plan on putting garlic out in an area that hasn’t been gardened before, like freshly turned grass, you should spade around to loosen the soil at least five inches down so the roots can spread as the plant grows. Work like this gets easier every year as the soil unpacks and is lightened by harvesting, weeding, and end-of-the-year cleanup.

[Note: If you live in a climate without a winter, then you need to prep your garlic with a stay in the fridge for three weeks before you plant. I've heard. But you don't get to have snowball fights, so nah nah.]

Early Spring in Garlic Land

Somehow, even though it seems unlikely that two cloves could have been accidentally planted together, a few of the plantings grew as twins. Some of the dual-bulbs were both evenly full-sized, but others showed that one plant out-performed the other. In every case, though, the total production was at least as good as our general single bulb. I have a theory that some may have begun as very tiny, dual-cloved entities that looked like about the right size as a regular clove. Or, maybe they just vary? I’ll pay more attention this year to see if this is how it happened.

This is what a scape looks like.

By mid-spring, the garlic is up and leafy while everything else is puny. It lifts the spirits, and gives a sense of promise while the world is coming alive again. During their growth, garlics are low-maintenance. Because they grow so early, they out-compete many weeds. Some will still come up, and it is good to keep them weeded. But we’ve also done crazy things like growing radishes down the middle of rows to take advantage of the shade.

All grown up: This is also what a scape looks like.

Then the first scapes appear. This is a long, curling, pointed shoot, and if left on your plant it will turn into a flower. Though not-unbeautiful, they’ve got to go. We heard some lore about taking them off so that the plants focus on developing the bulb in the ground. The garlic is thinking: I’ve got two options. 1. Flower (sex), and live on for the ages through reproduction.* 2. Something ate my flower, so now I’ll store up energy in my root (the bulb) and give it a try again next year while the juices are flowing. This is pretty true, but from experience I’d say that the garlic bulb is pretty well developed by the time the scapes will flower. Rather than producing more growth, it seems more accurate to say that removing the scape keeps the plant from metabolizing the already-stored energy for its next phase of growth. Within a three week window or so, the scapes appear, grow long, and then the leaves begin to yellow and fall over – a sure sign that harvest time is here. We were still taking the last un-blossomed scapes off on the day of harvest, and all is well.

*Update: This part about flowering seems to be not exactly accurate, though it is the reasoning behind the lore. The scape is trying to form “bulbils,” which can be planted and will eventually form garlics in one to three years. They are not flowers, though they look flowery. It comes down to the means of reproduction, I guess. The bulbils don’t swap genetic material, and plants grown from them will be genetically identical to the original, as is also the case with the clove method. They avoid soil borne diseases, and there are many more of them to plant so that you can sell / use all of your garlic if you care to. Doing it this way seems to be more for farm-volume production. Putting the cloves in the ground is still a good approach, and you get garlic bulbs in one year. Going the bulbil route can sometimes take two or three years, and you still have to dig them up over the winter.  Taking the scapes off does have the benefit of keeping the bulb large, as described above, since the plant doesn’t use up that energy growing bulbils.

Harvest Time

The scapes are ready to come off whenever you get around to it, but definitely if they are curled. They have a good garlic flavor, and store well in the fridge until you’re ready to eat them. Just slice them up into little rounds if cooking them. If they’re going into something without cooking, like potato salad, I like to slice them in half long-ways first so that they are easier to dice finely.

Pile o' garlic

There are two types of garlic: hardneck and softneck. Hardneck garlic produces scapes, does better in northern climates, but stores for a shorter time in the cellar. Softneck is typically what you find in the grocery stores; it does not produce a scape, is typically grown in southern climates but some types can do well up north, and stores longer. There is a good conversation about planting experience here.  We used our garlic for months and into the spring last year before it ran out, which was hardneck and lasted well. A few had started turning green at the core, ready to grow. Whatever. Still good to eat! To get over the hump of no-garlic cloves in the spring is easy anyway. There were spring garlics at the market, chives in the yard, and scapes on the way. Cooking with green garlic is fun, offers a variety, and is very welcome after a winter of storage veg.

Garlic Curing

The next step is curing the garlic for winter storage. Rub off the dirt, as the moisture will promote dampness and spoilage in the bulbs. Trim the roots short with scissors. Leave on the outermost layer of papery skin, even though it has already begun to decompose in the ground. This can be removed later after it dries if it bothers you. Hang them somewhere with descent circulation, cool temps, and out of the light. Basements can be damp, but will work better than nothing. The rafters of barns also work, but we don’t have a barn. (Yet.) Softnecks can be braided for country-chic décor. Hardnecks are more rigid, but can be tied into bundles of ten with a little butcher twine. They can also be dried on flat surfaces, but that looks less cool. Our garlic stays hanging all winter, but if space is an issue the tops can be removed once the bulb has dried out and developed its typical papery feel.

This year the garlic came out during the same week as the summer solstice, making it a true spring crop. From its first showings in the dreariness of early Spring, its lush green two-foot leaves, the first sightings of scapes and the quick growth of their tight spirals, and to the harvest of big bulbs just in time for summer, garlic is a perfect calendar that rewards each new part of Spring with a bit of excitement. The dried bulbs in turn speak of fall, and in no time at all it will be time to tuck them in the ground again for the next season! Quite a lot to think about when dicing fragrant, delicious garlic all winter!

From two beds about six feet in length and three feet wide, planted with two rows each about a foot apart, our year-two haul is 57 heads of garlic. More than one head of garlic a week for two people. At our farmer’s price of .75 cents per head, that comes to a value of $42.75. Will we need more next year? I hope so!

At last count, we have 57 scapes on our hands right now.  Which is awesome since what that really means is that we now have that many garlic bulbs hanging in the basement.  It also means that, like greens, there will be scapes with every meal for the foreseeable future.

In other news, we found a jar of dried cayennes from last year’s garden.  Looks like there will be cayennes with (almost) every meal too.  ( <= fun!)

So, without further ado: the first of what will probably be many garlicky-spicy creations: Hot cauliflower, with spring onions and scapes.

I suppose I should also add that Ardry farm had their first cauliflower today, so that might explain more of this too. We managed to grab their last, tiny head with a mezze spread in mind. I know a lot of folk don’t like cauliflower much, but these are pretty fantastic in my opinion and are worth trying.

Back to scapes:  Scapes took the place of garlic cloves in this spring-summer quick pickle.  There’s a good chance these will be excruciatingly hot. We’ll know in a day or two whether 3 cayennes was an … ambitious?… idea

Hot Cauliflower, Onions, and Scapes

Yield: 2 pint-sized mason jars

Prep and pack your veg into a heat-safe jar. These will be fridge pickles since it’s such a small batch and I expect to eat them this weekend. NOMNOMNOMNOM.

• cauliflower florets, from one small head, broken into tasty sized bites.
• 1 scape, cut into 2 or 3 pieces.
• 2-3 spring onions, whole or halved depending on size.
• 1-3 cayenne peppers.

A word on prep: you can use carrots, garlic cloves, kohlrabi — I’d recommend things that are crisp, crunchy and relatively robust. Follow your heart.  You could probably also cut these pieces up more.  I cut the scapes into a few pieces and I think you could chop/mince them up more for more flavor, but I wanted the shapes to be interesting and opted for longer, curling/showy pieces. Scapes. Such show-offs.

scapes, showing off.

Next: Brine.  Mix up a brine and bring into a boil.  You can play with the flavoring here; we’ve used dill flowers in the past and other assorted dry & fresh herbs.  These amounts will provide enough brine to pack 2 pint size mason jars.  Give the hot brine mixture a good stir and fill your jars.

• 2 cups cider vinegar
• 1 cup water
• ½ cup sugar
• 2 tablespoons kosher salt
• 1 teaspoon yellow mustard seeds
• 1 teaspoon black peppercorns
• ½ teaspoon ground cumin
• ½ teaspoon ground turmeric

Done!

Almost.

Loosely cover the filled jars and let cool. Be careful handling the jars, obviously — they’re super hot.  After they’re cooler, you can tighten the lids and toss in the refrigerator. After a few days in the fridge, the flavors will have developed, so wait, if you can.

Ahh.. Sunday morning breakfast!

A couple years ago, we had a green-eggs-and-ham something sorta like this.  We’re flush with spinach and garlic scapes from our garden, so we decided to wing it and see how it’d turn out.

The Plan: A lot of recipes online have versions of this that use a lot of prep work and pans. Our theory: layers, lots of fresh ingredients, and no more than two pans. Cause really, who wants to clean up after breakfast.

Here we go!

OK – well, maybe slightly more than two pans cause biscuits are good and pretty easy if you have self-rising flour around. Which we didn’t this morning.  We tried subbing a flour+baking powder+salt mixture, but I think the proportions must have been off, definitely needed more salt.  But anyway — while you’re starting the biscuits, you can get the egg layers all set up.  Here’s what you need:

• Olive oil
• 2 pieces of bacon, thinly sliced/ chopped
• 1 garlic scape, thinly sliced
• 2 large handfuls baby spinach
• 4 tbsp heavy cream
• 4 small eggs
• thyme, salt and pepper to taste

1.  Start your Bacon. (… Oh, and preheat oven to 375 F)

Thinly slice/ chop up about 2 pieces of bacon.  Start your bacon frying in a small dash of olive oil.  When bacon is nearly done, add the thinly sliced scapes for just a few seconds for flavor.

2. Start layering!

layers, not quite clockwise from top right. use your brain.

While your bacon is cooking, lightly grease your muffin tins (or ramekins) with olive oil.  Then:

• Pile spinach into 4 ramekins or muffin tins. The more spinach the better — this will wilt down, so really go for it, I say.
• Divide your bacon-scape bits between the 4 tins,
• Top with a dollop of heavy cream,
• Crack 1 egg into each and garnish with thyme, salt and pepper to taste (salt sparingly: the bacon is going to take care of most of this for you).

Bake the eggs in the preheated oven for about 10-15 minutes. Watch the time and check every so often so the eggs don’t overcook.  (The eggs will continue to cook slightly when you pull them out.)  Serve immediately, with biscuits!

Prolific and delicious, our Champion of England Peas are a total success this year.  Recipes to follow; for now –  Note to future selves: Tall varieties are awesome. So is harvesting at dusk.  Also: give tall varieties an extra post to support all the extra weight. Oops.

This year, we’re bringing back some tried-and-true and testing out some new, unusual varieties we found at the Seed Savers Exchange.  Successes, flops, and other updates to follow!

We’re growing in central PA, in a valley that tends to the milder side of PA winters, but still with a shorter(ish) growing season. It’s been well, well worth the effort to get zucchini and eggplant varieties intended for cooler climates – while our Rosa Bianca eggplant failed miserably the first year, Galine has done much better.  Fedco has had a good line of cold-weather varieties, and we’re using up the remainder of those seedpacks this year. I hope our germination won’t be too affected by using the older seeds, but for the most part everything seems ok for now.

Line-up, after the jump

The Line Up: Round 1 (Early Season)

The Accidental, Overwinter Parsnip. Spring is full of surprises!

Things that came back:

Jump start on the PA season

Under the Row Cover:

• Piracicaba Broccoli (fedco)
• Kale, Red Russian OG
• Spinach, America
• Pak Choi
• Radishes: Cincinnati Market, French Breakfast OG, Plum Purple
• Carrots: Danvers, Dragon, Scarlet Nantes
• Heirloom Lettuce
• Scallions
• Lincoln Leeks (fedco)

Go, go, fava!

Early Spring:

• Pea, Champion of England
• Strawberry Spinach
• Windsor Fava Bean (fedco)
• Grocery Fava experiment: We’re also growing, rather than eating, some dried fava beans we had gotten from the grocery store ages ago. They didn’t cook up well, so we thought, why not use then to fix nitrogen? We’ll see how that goes.

Late Spring:

• Sweet Pea, Everlasting (not for eating!) We should have put these in the ground earlier, but forgot/got busy/still learning
• Beets
• Onion: Borettana Yellow, Long Red Florence, Yellow of Parma
• Chard, Five Color Silverbeet OG

After Frost:

• Squash, Potimarron
• Bean, Black Valentine
• Cucumber, Russian Pickling OG
• Watermelon, Moon & Stars
• Ground Cherry, Aunt Molly’s OG
• Tomato:

• Federle
• Italian Heirloom
• Nebraska Wedding
• Peacework Sweet Pepper OG (fedco)
• Early Jalapeno Hot Pepper (fedco)
• Long Red Narrow Cayenne Hot Pepper (fedco)
• Habanero
• Tomatillos
• Flowers, Gift Zinnia

• Sensation Cosmos
• Single Moss
• Snapdragon Mix

A chicken crosses the road in rural PA … meanwhile a blogger visits a farm …

Oh man. This is good. Seriously top ten.

Go with the freshest chicken and greens you can. The rest is magic.

Simple suppers, moosewood style, is probably where cooking started for us a few years back.  So, there’s a special place in my heart for that really simple, really tasty, quick fix.  This takes a little time to poach the chicken, but the hands-on time is less than 10 minutes, so toss that chicken in a pot, grab a glass, and kick back.

Herewith, a Simple Poached Chicken and Spring Green Salad.  I’m using arugula and baby pak choi that we thinned out of the garden earlier this week.  Any spring greens will do.  The super secret: toss in freshly toasted almonds and cumin seeds.  Un. Believable!

For the poaching: In a deep pot, add 1 small chicken (2.5-3 pounds), a few peppercorns, and a few bay leaves.  Cover with water. Bring to a gentle boil and then let it simmer for 40 minutes.

Or, one Dr Who. You know, just poach it.

Let it cool, if you can in the broth.  (Oh, and save the broth for something else). Then, remove to a cutting board, and shred off some of the poached chicken.

For the salad:  Toast a small handful whole almonds and about a tsp or two of cumin seeds.  Use a dry pan and medium heat.   You have time to rinse & spin your greens, but watch the heat!  The almonds and cumin’ll burn fast.  As soon as you smell their lovely aromas, pull them off heat.

Serve the greens with some of the shredded chicken, top with the toasted almonds and cumin.  And, drizzle over a simple lemon and olive oil dressing.  SO delightful!  I was going to add some thinly sliced spring onion, but in hindsight, I’m glad I forgot since the sharp onion flavor might have thrown off the balance.

We found these morels …. in a secret spot.  Hope there’s a second round in our future.  Last week’s tremendous thunderstorm and warm(er) weather probably had a lot to do with our fantastic luck.  I’m doing a rain dance. Right. Now.

After we struck the jack pot with our first-ever morel find, we had some work to do.

First, we had to identify our prey. About a year ago we purchased a copy of a local mushrooming book called Field Guide to the Wild Mushrooms of Pennsylvania and the Mid-Atlantic by Bill Russell. He is also very nice, and will regularly meet with you to tell you how poisonous your find is.  This is only convenient if you live close by, but it also goes to show that the best way to identify a mushroom is by consulting a knowledgeable person in your area.

This guide book gets tossed in the day-pack for short hikes, and it is fun to spend time looking around for interesting mushrooms as you walk.  (And promotes strolling while preventing the inadvertent march.)  Even so, the thought of finding and accurately identifying an edible mushroom seemed a bit far-fetched when we got this tome.  But hey, morels don’t knock twice!  We also had a key confidence boost with a positive id from a local mushroomer who didn’t begrudge me the haul since he had his own very productive secret spot.  We still double checked with the guide back at the house, and found out that the false morels have pretty reasonable identifying features involving whether the cap is attached to the stem or not.  Check around on the web for some more info, though, because I am a total novice!

[Note:  In retrospect, these mushrooms were delicious and did not make us sick.  So there.]

Finally, with a great haul of mushrooms comes great gustability.  An improvised breakfast with morels sauteed in butter atop eggs was perfect.  Simple, maximum flavor profile.  A great way to eat them and get acquainted with their flavor.  Fresh chives freshened the dish up, too.

With supper, we wanted to showcase the mushrooms, but also round out a nice hearty spring meal.  Steaks or pork chops?  We usually go with beef, but this time went for the unusual combination:

A Morel Menu

Seared pork chops with a creamy, savory mushroom sauce

Excellent baked potatoes, with crispy salted crust

Turbo-fresh spring green salad

Pair this with a nice full-bodied red wine. Usually we’d opt for a Bordeaux (French) or a Bonarda (Italian), as both have the sophistication and depth to pair really well with mushrooms and 4-legged meat.  These regions produce really good $10-$14 a bottle offerings consistently.  This time we went for the stack option at the local store, and had a bottle from Mendoza, Argentina that was a blend of Cabernet Sauvignon and Malbec.  The bottle has been recycled already, but we’ll try and update with the name soon since it was really good and a perfect match!

It turned out to be a great meal to celebrate a lovely gift from the mud!

rhubarb... or dinosaur egg!?

Finally — spring! asparagus! rhubarb even!  Three cheers! Now… how exactly to clear out the freezer and cabinets?  Jam by the spoonful?

Also: This, apparently, is what rhubarb looks like as a wee one.  Who knew?  Next year: Time lapse, so we can witness the emergence of the Rhubarbasaur.