A Homegrown Pumpkin and Beans Feast

Menu:

Mashed Roasted Pumpkin

Bean & Kale Soup

Home Fries

Steamed Brussels Sprouts

Toasted Pumpkin Seeds

Homegrown (sustainable, organic, local, ethical):  Pumpkin. Beans. Onion. Leek. Celery. Potatoes. Garlic. Tomatoes. Parsley.  Savory. Thyme. Kale. Brussels Sprouts. Chicken broth.

Not local/storebought: Butter, Salt, Pepper, Tamari, Brewer’s yeast.

No wrapping, plastic, or garbage to the landfill from this meal.

Beautiful beans grown in the back yard. This meal requires some planning ahead; the beans started soaking the day before. I have lost track of what kind of beans these are. They started out as a rogue sport coming out of "Snowcap". I just keep saving and planting the seed.

One of this year's gorgeous pumpkins from the backyard. I had a lot of old seed and just planted it all together into a big pumpkin patch....sooo....I'm not sure who this is. I think it may be a Galeux d'Eysines that did not finish developing its corky warts on the outside. It was delicious enough to be. And a few bits of corkiness were developing here and there on the rind.

Cutting open the pumpkin. A bit of work and a good knife

Got the pumkin split open, now to dig out the seeds and clean them. This pumpkin had a ton of well-developed seeds. They got rinsed clean, dried in a colander over the woodstove, and then spread on a cookie sheet and toasted in a low oven. When nearing done, they are sprinkled with tamari, brewer's yeast, and a tiny bit of hot red pepper, and roasted until dry.

Pumpkin cleaning complete. A wonderful yield of pumpkin seeds for toasting, and pumpkin halves are ready to go cut side down in pans in the oven to cook slowly. Pumpkin refuse goes to the chickens. Not shown: During the pumpkin prep, the soaked beans were also rinsed and started on a boil. Turned down, the beans simmered while the pumpkin baked, and we went outside to cut wood.

Pumpkin half cooked and ready for scooping. This pumpkin was so smooth and delicious that we just mashed up some of it with butter and salt and pepper and ate it for supper. We were still left with a huge bowlful of mashed pumpkin. It lasted throughout the week to make us 2 double batches of pumpkin bread, and a big pot of mashed-together pumpkin-and-potatoes - leftovers of which furnished 3 meals. One good pumpkin = base for lots of food.

Fast forward to the finished meal: The soup was a simple combination of chopped leeks, onions, garlic, and celery, sauteed. Pour in chicken broth and a jar of our canned tomatoes. Add the beans. Simmer together and season with salt, pepper, oregano, savory, and parsley. Shortly before serving, add chopped kale and cook until wilted.

So I’m sitting in the half-dark working at the computer.  It’s early, it’s cold, but the woodstove is starting to heat the room up.

Go-Go-Girl has found a 1″ wooden ball somewhere (where do these cat toys appear from??) and it is careening wildly across the wood floor.  She loves soccer, so across the room like a shot it goes with Go-Go-GO!-Girl right behind it.  Back and forth with pauses to lick some part that needs it.  Into the kitchen.  Back into the dining room.  Background music as I compute.

Suddenly as the ball flies by under my feet, out of the darkness by the bookshelf comes “Hisssssssssss!”  It’s F-Cat, lashing out as Go-Go-Girl flashes past.  I had no idea F-Cat was there, and I jumped.

Meanwhile Go-Go loses the ball behind the woodpile next to the stove.  So I retrieve it, and send it back out into the playing field.  But this time F-Cat tackles the ball on the fly and starts her more gentle and controlled dribbling, moving the ball in careful slalom around the rocking chair, a perfect practice drill.  Go-Go watches from the sidelines.  F-Cat tires of this quickly though, and mews to leave the room into quieter colder parts of the house.  I wait a bit, then let her go.

Go-Go collects the ball again, pauses, and she’s off again, into her fictional World Cup championship game against imaginary also-rans.  Then a pause (paws?) in the noise behind me.  My body tenses.  Waiting… waiting… suddenly it’s a full speed sprint across the floor and … but there’s no ball.  Go-Go changes fantasies and leaps instead for the bay windowsill to watch the early birds arriving at the bird feeder outside.  Active playtime turns to passive Cat TV time.  Sigh.  Mornings with cats.  Time for another cup of coffee. Then it’ll be time for morning with chickens.

Outside, the cold wind bites my face as I walk across the path next to our newest field, the one we covered with sheep manure compost a month ago, and then covered again in raked leaves.  I can feel my cheeks and nose getting red, and my fingers are wanting mittens instead of these ragged work gloves.  I’ve only been outside 10 or 15 minutes.

Twice a day I come out to open and close the chickens, and stay outside for a bit of chores each time.  Tonight it was restocking one of the woodpiles nearest the house, and gathering some wood chip snacks for the stove.

It’s not that cold tonight, about 20 degrees, but the wind is blowing hard out of the north.  I wear my coveralls and thick sweatshirt on top of a few layers underneath, doubled up gloves and a stocking cap.  The path is drifted over with blowing snow, but we’ve had so little snow (compared to the rest of the eastern US this year) that there’s only an inch or so covering this morning’s footprints - mine, and a small deer’s, and a polydactyl cat.

This is still new to me, this sense of being a farmer and not just playing at farming.  I’m outside working every day now, cold or rain or hot.  There’s always something to do, and always something to get out of hand if you don’t.  We have over a hundred creatures outdoors depending on us, so it’s not exactly a choice.  I lived fifty years as a city boy, and now I’m a farmer, inside and out.

The outer part is this, the cold wind and chapped cheeks, the everyday get up and go do and be.  The inner part is… well, what is it?  How do I explain the city-to-farm boy mental adjustment?  How do I convince someone that inside me there has always been a farm boy waiting to come out? Or is it something else?

I have journal entries from my teen years, places I kept lists of hopes and dreams for the future, visions of living off the land and living simply on less.  I wanted to grow my own food, I wrote, and chop wood.  I created these records apart from any attachment to any life partner plans… I didn’t have a girlfriend at the time, this was something of my own imagination.  And it was imagination certainly, because I lived in an Ohio industrial city and was allergic to every variety of mammalian hair and avian feathers… I couldn’t sleep under wool or down, I couldn’t ride horseback without getting asthma and just forget about pets.  Just a fluffy dream that fit with my growing aspirations as a 70’s environmentalist mainly, and sounded like fun even if I had no more idea how to grow my own food or chop wood than I did to build an airplane.

I chose a different path.  Oh I picked geology as a college major to keep my butt outdoors, but after college I took urban jobs and rarely did field work at first.  Then to another city for my PhD, then to another university to teach, a city boy teaching geology in the city, with the occasional field trip to keep it real.  I taught environmental truths and sustainable dreams, and personally recycled more than the average urbanite, but I never came close to my earlier aspirations.  I had left childish things behind.

It’s dark now, and the chickens are roosting, the woodstove is near and I’m writing this for… myself.  Outside is a tiny farm that I know nearly every square foot of, and everyday I’m tromping across part of it.  It comforts me to walk in the cold and rain and heat each day, to feel in my bones instead of my brain how short the days are now, and how long they were six months ago.

I have chickens who know me and trust me, as well as a few who know me and don’t (it’s mutual).  I have cats who climb onto my shoulder and ride shotgun for every chore except chopping wood.  If the wood doesn’t get chopped, we’re cold.  If the chickens don’t get watered, they’ll die.  I have to go out, I have to live part of every day outside, working on the farm.

But I don’t.  I don’t have to.  I want to.  I have longed for this all my life.  At certain points in my urbanified life I tried to make more money per hour so that I could pay others at less money per hour to do some of my more mundane chores for me.  Now I rejoice in the opportunity to trudge through the blowing snow to feed chickens in an operation that barely breaks even, but makes us ever so happy.  The eggs are, of course, to die for.  And the joy of sharing those wonderful eggs with grateful others (at $4/dozen to cover our feed costs) is icing on the cake.

Outside, it’s cold and the wind is blowing - I can hear it right now.  Inside… inside me, I’m having my cake and eating it too.  I can’t wait to get outside in the cold and rain and heat every day.  I am thrilled that I have to plan my days to allow an hour before anything else to get those chickens out free ranging in the morning… it’s my childhood dream completely realized.  At one point I thought I’d have died if I had to live on a farm, what with my allergies and all.  At this point, I don’t know what happened to all those allergies.  I help drive horse teams for other farmers, stack hay bales in the mow, and live with cats and chickens.  I couldn’t be happier inside to be outside every day, and needed out there.

Yes, the wind makes my cheeks cold.  But that cold is all on the outside.  Inside I’m warmer on this winter farm than I ever thought I could be anywhere.  And it just keeps getting better.

Cooking the Chops

Week 3 Menu:

• Smashed Potatoes-n-Parsnips
• Pan-seared Lamb Chops
• Steamed Brussels Sprouts
• Roasted Delicata Squash

“Dark” Days is right.  Each day feels so brief.  It’s dark when we get up in the morning, it’s dark by the time we’re home from work.  Soon it will be swinging back to longer days, but now each day feels so cave-like and hunkered down.

Potatoes-n-Parsnips

Our potatoes are holding out very well.  We are so fortunate that they produced so well.  They are often a carb staple, allowing us to reduce the amount of processed grain we purchase/eat.  We can leave the skins on, increasing the nutritional value, because they haven’t been sprayed with all kinds of things, and they aren’t greened up from sitting in the light in a supermarket.

For this recipe, I simply scrub potatoes, cut them into ~2 inch chunks, do the same with a couple big parsnips, and boil them together in a pot of water until they are soft.  Drain the water, add butter, milk, salt, pepper, maybe some dried parsley, and mash it up with a masher. Simple, delicious.  Potatoes, parsnips, and parsley grew in the back yard.  Butter and milk are locally sourced. Salt and pepper are not. The potatoes are served with a dollop of homemade yogurt from local raw milk.

Pan-Seared Lamb

The lamb is from a farm a few miles away.  It is entirely grass-fed, without any contact with chemicals or antibiotics.  It is simply, quickly cooked in cast iron, with a smidge of olive oil in the pan, and seasoned with salt, pepper, and ground rosemary.  Not local:  olive oil, salt, pepper.

The Finished Meal

Steamed Brussels Sprouts

The brussels sprouts grew in our backyard.  We have a great supply of them, and they are holding out well in storage.  They continue to be a staple, filling the space for greens/salad, although I am starting to seriously miss salads.  They get a light steaming, then a quick turn through a hot pan with some butter (local) and balsamic vinegar (not local).

Roasted Delicata Squash

I am not a squash lover.  This year, with our homegrown Delicata squashes, is, without a doubt, the first time ever in my life that I have craved squash.

These little gems are so so delicious.  We cut them in half the long way, lay them in a pan, and bake/broil them, with a little butter and maple syrup in the hollow centers.  Nutmeg or cinnamon on them is nice too.  Or a little cream and sage.  For this meal, they got the butter and maple syrup, with a light sprinkling of non-local nutmeg and salt.  Squashes grew in our backyard garden.

Eating in front of the fire on a Dark Days Night

I haven’t been going into a lot of detail in these DD postings about “SOLE” - the premise of the challenge: I guess it would just feel redundant when it’s mostly our own produce that we’re eating. That fits the sustainable, organic, local, and ethical description, we hope.  We know we farm organically, although we can’t say that without certification, I suppose.

I wish there was one more component to SOLE.   Maybe it would be “U”, for Unpackaged.  “R” for “Reduced/Recycleable”?  “C” for “Compostable”?  I guess what I’m thinking is that to really do low-impact eating, we have to think about the packaging that food comes in as well, and the trash that we are generating with each meal.  With this meal, for example, the only obvious packaging we will send out into the world as trash was a layer of plastic wrap the lamb chops were packed in at the butcher, and the packaging the butter came in from the store. No other plastic or bags or paper were produced or used to buy, transport, wrap, cook, store or dispose of this meal. No food products went into garbage.  The milk comes in reuseable/recycleable glass. The chickens ate the trimmings from the brussels sprouts, and the squash rinds and seeds.  The outdoor cats got the lamb bones, and what was left after that went on the compost pile.  If you think about it - it adds up.  Grocery bags to bring food home.  Prewrapped/overpackaged foods, even the organic ones.  Single-use cartons and wrappings.  Foil and cooking bags used in food preparation; plastic wrap and bags and foil used in food storage of leftovers.  One single meal can rack up a pretty high cost in trash.   Part of my personal goal for these Dark Days meals preparations is going to be noting the elimination of trash associated with eating and meal production, as well as sustainable, organic, local, and ethical concerns.

Why I feelz lik howling? What es howling?

Winter is here.  Today is the solstice, and the full moon, and a lunar eclipse.  The moon came up a couple hours ago… here’s M. and Possum (the cat) pondering the ramifications. We’ll probably stay up late playing Dominion so we can bundle up and go out and howl for the 1:30am peak.

Over the past weeks of pre-winter, we’ve had hard freezes and only one snow.  There’ve been flurries, little ones, but while the southern midwest (and south!) got hit hard with ice and snow, we were only dusted with a dainty 2″ of snow, although it has been cold, barely into the 20s at the warmest these past many days.

Although not actually crinoids, I pretend they are.

My phone is always in my pocket when I go out to open up chickens (or shut them in at night) or split wood, or whatever.  So in the freezes, I snapped a morning shot of these ice dwellers in our flower rows in the front yard.  It’s hard to get a good focus on a gently waving crinoid calyx like this, but it obliged me.

Then on the path over to the East Flock, I crunched into a flock of tiny castles.

No one lives in this castle. I knocked, no answer.

These tiny dwellings are no less elaborate for their size than any human constructs… amazing things. Pine needles for scale.

Finally, after our 2″ of snow fell and sat for several days, just beyond the site of the ice castles I found the most amazing snowy Christmas trees.

Again, amazed that the phone camera can focus this close and catch the details… these crystals grew right on the snow in this sheltered place with morning-only sunshine.

Snowy little Christmas trees.

………………..Second Week Of December……..A weekend brunch………………..

Fruit and Yogurt: Raspberries from about 40 miles away, we picked and froze; Pears from about 30 miles away we picked and I canned; Homemade yogurt made here from locally-sourced milk; our maple syrup.

Our homegrown brussels sprouts and radicchio, sliced and quartered for the saute...

Cooking in Cast Iron: Radicchio-Brussels Sprout Sautee, with shallots and onions - all ingredients except salt and pepper grown here, including a little chicken fat from our chickens to sautee in. Other pan: Egg Scramble, with onion, potato, and dried tomato chips - also all produced here in our backyard, except for the smidge of olive oil for the pan, and salt and pepper.

The Local Brunch Spread. Coffee not local; Milk and maple sweetener is local.

Brussels Sprouts and Radicchio: This is so wonderful it deserves a closeup! Delicious, colorful stuff.

Warning to those who may be offended:  This post is about meat…..organ meat.

And let me just begin by saying, I had no idea how good this was going to be.

This is the third year that we have raised and butchered our own meat chickens.  As my dog-eared, stained copy of Nourishing Traditions can attest, I have read about the healthfulness of consuming meat, including organ meat, from animals raised cleanly on grass without antibiotics.  I also believe in reducing waste and honoring the life of the animal and its sacrifice by making full use of as many parts as one can manage.  So…every time we have raised and butchered chickens, I have dutifully “saved the livers!“  But there is reading about it, and there is doing it.  Ha.  Some of our chickens’ livers are still packaged carefully in our freezer.  Some livers sat with good intention in the refrigerator a tad too long and became cat food.  Each time, I told myself, “Chicken liver pate!!  Yeah!!” And I didn’t do it.

So this time I made up my mind to take action.  I wasn’t entirely happy somehow with any of the recipes I found.  Actually, they sounded somewhat awful, and I couldn’t believe that was all there was to it, and it would be palatable.  I made myself start, though, the livers had been residing in the refrigerator for a couple days at this point.  In desperation at 10:30 at night, I went ahead.

Out of all the recipes I found out there, this one appealed to me the most, and I did a variation on it.  But, I was terrified of the taste of liver!  I didn’t trust that most of the recipes, including this one, had enough onion and herbs in them to make it appealing (though they seemed to have enough butter).  So I followed the recipes loosely, but upped the amounts of flavorings considerably.

I started with about 6 tablespoons of butter, melted in a skillet.  I very finely chopped 3 small shallots and 2 small-medium onions, and sauteed these in the butter over a medium low heat, making sure they didn’t brown much.  I minced about 3 cloves of garlic and added that, along with some whole bay leaves.  While this was cooking, I picked over the livers and removed membranes and gross things, and washed them again.  Then added the livers (about 8? 10maybe?) to the onions and garlic mix.  As predicted, they gave out a lot of liquid.

Now I was stymied.  Some recipes say cook them just until they are pink on the inside, only a few minutes.  But that left all this liquid in the pan, and the other recipes said cook down until most of the liquid disappears.  I decided on that approach instead.  I probably ended up cooking them for about 10-15 minutes.  Once again, I had serious doubts that I was making anything but catfood.  Frankly, they looked terrible, and they smelled awful.

When the liquid finally was beginning to disappear, I started adding herbs.  First the rubbed sage.  I raised some beautiful sage from seed, and had harvested and dried a good supply.  I put in about 2 tablespoons of the crumbled sage leaves.  Then, I also added thyme, maybe a teaspoon, some summer savory, (1/2 to 1 teaspoon), black pepper, salt.

The recipe called for sherry; I didn’t have sherry, but did have some homemade wine that seemed to have changed into something else that could have been sherry.  About 1/4 cup of that, plus 1/4 cup of brandy went into the pan.  Actually, that was another confusing point.  Some recipes say to add it to the livers and cook it more, some say to use it to deglaze the pan after removing the livers.  So I did both, half the booze  cooked with the livers, then the livers were poured into a food processer, and the pan deglazed with the other half of the sherry-brandy. I waited maybe half an hour or so to let the mixture cool a bit, then added another few tablespoons of butter, and ran the food processor on pulses until the consistency was smooth. (I picked out the whole bay leaves before processing!)

I worked up the courage to taste it again at this point, and didn’t know what to think.  It wasn’t bad, it was sort of neutral.  I still wasn’t sure about it.  By this time it was well past midnight, and I turned the mess out into a glass pan with a lid, dotted the top with a few olive bits, and stuck it in the refrigerator.

Next day, while P. was out, I cut a very skinny little piece of bread and toasted it until it was very crisp.  I got out the pate, determined to only taste it when no one was there to witness whatever my reaction was.  The consistency surprised me - beautiful, spreadable, smooth.  I took a little bite.  It took a moment to sink in, and then, I suddenly realized I had something utterly delicious in front of me.

This stuff was sooo good.

P. says he at more of this pate the first day than he has sum total before now.  He too, was very skeptical of it before tasting it, which is rare for him!  This pate found its way into breakfast, lunch, snacks, and supper, and from now on, I will not hesitate to “save the liver!”

building and planting

We didn’t plan to be this far behind.  In my head, I see well-built sturdy cold frames, a little greenhouse built of recycled windows, French hot-beds, a nice high tunnel full of greens.  I never want to buy greens from anywhere else, I just want to grow my own.  However, in keeping with the nature of this entire past year, our winter greens this time around are in get-by-as-best-we-can mode.  Best we can do when short on time, money, and patience, but thankful to be able to accomplish at least this much for free, with what we have on hand.  In the last two good days of weather before the ground froze, I cobbled together a number of little cold frames and protective covers to at least extend the season somewhat for some things, and to ensure a crop of salad in February and March.  It’s not much, but it’s something!

Pretty reflections of a grey day

Bricks, boards, hay, and glass...

Bales of hay and straw we had around for mulch and bedding stack into a little 3-walled room.  A piece of wood, whatever’s on hand, goes on the front. It’s partly buried in dirt to make it secure - it will take the downward weight of the window.  A big pane of window glass found at the recycling station for free goes over all that, and there’s the cold frame.  As the short daylight of a grey day begins to fail, I hurry around the garden and dig the best specimens of chard, endive, seedling lettuce, radicchio, arugula, whatever greens I find.  Parsley, cilantro, green onions too.  They all get replanted in tightly together, and seeds of spinach,lettuce, arugula, mache, mizuna are scattered over the bare areas.  Water the whole thing down quickly (last task before the hoses get put away before they freeze).

Rows of kale were buried in leaves and hay and covered over with floating row covers.  We’ll get a little more from them for a few weeks, and under the leaves some stems will survive and send up the first kale shoots early in the season next year.

Kitty looks into another world...

My biggest cobbling experiment of all was to find a way to use one more window.  I  stacked bricks on their side at the angle I wanted, backed it with a hay bale, and stuck the window on the top.  One more little niche full of seeds that will germinate slowly under the snows, then be ready to send out leaves fast when the sun comes back and the temperatures under the glass start to warm.

Endive in the foggy interior

Harvesting leeks for the potato dish

Thanksgiving here was a great way to kick off The Dark Days Challenge for us! We hosted a family local foods Thanksgiving Supper the day after Thanksgiving. Unfortunately, I didn’t get pictures of that particular spread altogether, but we put together meals from its leftovers, right into December.
The Thanksgiving Supper menu included:

Homemade pate - amazing!

Chicken Liver Pate on Homemade Toast

pastured bird

(livers from our chickens, homegrown herbs, local butter, homemade “sherry”, 6 non-local green olives for garnish. Bread flour from local source, );
Enormous homegrown 9.5 lb roasting chicken (seasoned with our sage);
Locally hunted Venison Roast (hunted, processed, and expertly - deliciously!- cooked by the contributor);

Dragonwood Rumbledethumps (Potatoes, Parsnips, and Leeks, all grown in our backyard, mashed together, with locally produced milk and butter);

"Long Pie" Pumkin, ready for pie-making

Baby winter greens mix

Quince-Cranberry Sauce (Quinces grew in our back yard, Apple elsewhere in Michigan, Cranberries were, sadly, not local);
Huge Fall Greens Salad picked from the backyard garden (Dressing of non-local olive oil and vinegar, plus our own maple syrup, garlic, and herbs);
Small Delicata Squash Halves, with our maple syrup and local butter (Delicatas from our garden);
Pumpkin Cheesecake (Long Pie Pumpkin grown a few miles away by the contributor who brought the dessert).

Why no better pictures of the finished food? I was on-call for my other life as a midwife, and got the call from a  laboring mom around the time the food was done and headed to the table!

But here’s our next day’s plate-up of the leftovers:  Salad of leftover greens, Roast chicken, & Jerusalem artichoke (dug same day in the garden); Pate on toast; The brilliant ruby Quince-Cranberry sauce….