A week ago, it was around 50 degrees…..in southern Michigan, in January.

Starting a soup: Cubed celeriac stand in for both celery and potatoes at once. Browning lightly in a little chicken fat or olive oil starts laying the foundation for flavor depth in a good soup.

I got all riled up about it.  Granted, it was hard to complain….getting around without snow is so easy, less fuel use for heating, chickens laying in record numbers for this time of year, and digging in the garden as though it was October.  I generally try to avoid complaining about the weather, and I find wonder and joy in weather changes, season changes, and day-to-day differences.  However, I found myself longing for snow and worrying that it wasn’t cold enough.  After a super-hot summer, and ground that still hasn’t really appreciably frozen, in January, (I easily dug carrots and leeks today), it can be a little scary to contemplate the climate changes I believe I’ve seen in my own back yard.  What if every year increases in temperatures the way this past year increased over the year before?

Next ingredient - some of our lovely leeks, dug from the garden earlier today.

But now, with the temperature in the teens this morning, and the longed-for snow covering the ground,  I feel a little better.   Waking to the brilliance of sunlight reflecting off snow, and filling the house with light is a welcome change from the two months+ of warm but sullen grey skies and ground.  Even though I could still dig vegetables out of the garden, we came in with bright-pink faces from the cold.   Settling down with seed catalogues and a cup of tea feels much more in-tune with my expectations for this time of year.  And soup is a frequent quick meal.

One thought that has struck me this winter was to contemplate how much more food I might have grown if I had known the late autumn and early winter would be so mild.  I’m missing lettuce and spinach.  In our hectic fall, I passed the usual dates for re-sowing these greens, and figured I might as well not try.   Turns out, they would have

Some of our piddly carrots - small, yet brilliantly-colored and amazingly sweet. Sliced carrots, a chopped onion, and minced garlic all get added to the pot.

done well.  We’re not suffering for salad, we do fine substituting cabbage, endive, baby chard, tatsoi, and baby kale for other raw greens.  But lettuce and spinach would be a welcome touch of luxury.

My next thought was that if we are indeed experiencing warming of climate, there is even less reason for us northerners not to grow our own food.  There is even less reason to ship in food from milder climes, when well into December, (and now even January) it is possible to harvest greens and roots - even without a hoophouse.  If you cannot grow your own, you can buy it locally.  Support and pay for local farm goods, and more farms will come into being, increasing availability even more.  And at the same time, we will be working to reduce what food transportation contributes to global warming.

Growing our own food or purchasing it from someone close by, and learning how to cook it solves so many problems at once.  Last month, a study determined that eating commercial canned soup for just five days raised urine BPA levels 1221%. The lining of the cans contains this chemical, leaching it into food. “Bisphenol A is an endocrine disruptor , which can mimic the body’s own hormones and may lead to negative health effects. Early development appears

When the veggie mixture is lightly browned and softening, I deglaze the pan with a little white wine. This really rounds out the flavor and makes a soup delicious, but it can be omitted. All the veggies added to this point are only the ones that need time cooking - the roots, mostly. Save the delicate things for later.

to be the period of greatest sensitivity to its effects, and some studies have linked prenatal exposure to later neurological difficulties.” (Wikipedia)  As a midwife, you can guess how that makes me react.  Why do humans tend to take a nourishing food and ruin it?  (Unfortunately, it’s not just soup.  BPA is also found in many other food containers, cans, lids, and the lining the metal canning lids that many of us use to preserve our food at home.  The price of lovely Weck jars still makes them prohibitive to me - but they would be a safer solution for home canning.)

Every day, I am upset with what our species is doing to the world we live in, the food we ingest, the chemicals we instill in the bloodstreams of our unborn fetuses.  I am trying to do my small part by refusing to participate with at least some of it.  I wish more people would join those of us who are making these choices.  Maybe it sounds silly to talk about changing the world by growing and cooking your own soup, but maybe it doesn’t.  Because every time each of us purchases something like canned soup, we consent to waste, pollution, and chemicals in our food.  If you buy it, if you eat it, you have agreed to it, you have helped put off demanding that manufacturers must change.  I am not suggesting I am perfect - there are many ways in which I am still too complacent.  There are many days I am exhausted from late work hours and feel forced to resort to food I haven’t grown or cooked.   But I’ve got the soup down, at least!   Here’s a recipe that starts with pre-made chicken stock, and

Adding more flavor: For this soup I added a pinch of tumeric, a very light sprinkle of cayenne, and generous amounts of dried summer savory and parsley. We dried the peppers, savory, and parsley in the food dehydrator. Savory has proven easier to grow in quantity than thyme, for me, with a similar flavoring.

pre-cooked beans. (Many blogs cover how to make broth or stock, so I won’t - here is a good one, for example.)  Except for salt and tumeric and sweet corn, every ingredient in this soup was grown or harvested by us, on our land.  Most of them are doable for a backyard gardener.  Most of them can probably be obtained locally in most northern areas, unless you are in a food desert.  No cans were opened, all garbage from the making of this soup could go onto the compost pile.  This is not my once-a-week local challenge meal - this sort of eating is daily fare for us whenever possible.  If nothing else - learn to make soup.  A pot can provide meals for days, and keep chemicals out of your food.

What is this?? This is what good homemade broth looks like! It has gelled nicely. A couple of our excess roosters went into the making of this stock a couple days earlier.

Adding the cold broth to the soup pot. Add some water too, and bring the whole thing to a simmer.

The stock is steaming - now is the time to add some precooked beans. These “Snowcap” beans grew in the backyard garden, and they’re better than any beans I’ve ever bought from a store. Add precooked beans near the end of cooking so they don’t fall apart.

Add the delicate vegetables closer to the end of cooking, after the stock has been bubbling for awhile and the root veggies are cooked through. Here, I added kale picked frozen from the garden today, and some frozen sweet corn. Other things to add now would be green beans, peas, or broccoli.

Finished soup! Chopped chicken was also added near the end of cooking. This soup can be stretched over several days, by adding some more water and seasonings and another vegetable here and there.

Crazy weather.  It was 14 degrees, and then it was 50.  After freezing solidly, it rained for two days, and my boots sank ankle-deep in mud, trying to salvage a few more things from the garden, and to pick a salad.  Pick a salad??  After market exhaustion, other work, and some travel, I did a spectacularly poor job this fall with arranging low tunnels or cold frames to ensure our winter salads.  There is no lettuce.  The kale is damaged but hasn’t given up.  Unbelievably, I did not do my fall planting of spinach, or mache.

salad picked in December mud needs several washings.....

And yet, we continue to eat great salads.  This is the time of year when salad comes into one of its fullest degrees of appreciation, for me.  This is the season of mashed potatoes, soups, soft cooked vegetables, grains, and meat-eating.  I quickly begin to crave crisp cool crunchiness.

So what’s for salad if I failed to plant some of the staples and house them under cover for the winter?

I am a big scavenger when it comes to greens.  I guess I don’t know if I just find tasty things that most other people won’t eat, or if there is a huge untapped potential here, and you just have to know how to prepare and season it.   I like to think it’s the second one.  But there are so many people who are convinced they don’t like flavorful greens, or anything with any bitter undertones.

....a good salad spinner is essential.

cold brings out the reds in the greens

So tonight’s salad - collected at dusk, in the cold breeze, and with that mud bogging me into the ground:  There is some gorgeous tatsoi under a light covering - I gathered the outer leaves from some of the rosettes, leaving the rest.  It tolerates cold and freezing amazingly well, and its thick succulent dark green leaves stand in perfectly for spinach.  Then, I moved on to the remains of the kale plants - the young small leaves in their centers are tender and easy to eat raw.  The hearts of a few spent celery plants continue to send up pale soft leaves - these and a bit of the baby celery under them go into the salad.  A stray radicchio brings color and flavor. (I leave the base of the plant to grow more.) A few small center leaves from the fading chard plants (they overwinter and send up useable baby leaves if mulched heavily or covered.)  And baby curly endive that didn’t get far this fall, but may survive under the mulch, rounds out the bitter greens part of the salad.  If it was early spring, I’d be adding the first dandelion greens.  The mache has self-seeded for random rosettes popping up here and there throughout the garden.

A salad like this can be helped, or a bitter edge to it can be softened, by some of the veggies no longer in the garden, but in cool storage.  Thin slices of red cabbage, chunks of savoy cabbage, matchsticks of carrot, kholrabi, or jerusalem artichoke, or finely shaved fennel, all add more crunch, or a neutral element, or a subtle sweetness.  Sometimes I grate raw beets into salad.  We grow it all in the backyard - no petroleum miles on this salad, noone’s E.coli contamination. The brighter, stronger the colors, the more nutrition.  A pale grocery-store romaine with bland tomato wedges is not on our menu.

I would much rather have seeded beautiful beds of winter greens in a greenhouse, at just the right time, and be picking new plants under cover, and have lettuce and spinach in our mix.  Sadly, we’re not quite there yet, and we seemed to have missed the boat this fall in particular.  Maybe next year…maybe next year.   But it’s still remarkable what can be had for greens now, even without that greenhouse.

For those who are still skeptical about eating anything stronger than lettuce:  It can totally change your mind to try some of these greens, when the mix is good, you put some toppings on it, and a dressing is well-chosen.  I make a lot of my own salad dressings.  One favorite is a sweet-ish dressing made with our maple syrup, olive oil, sesame oil, balsamic vinegar, frozen raspberries, a dash of mustard, and a finely minced shallot.  This, over a bitter salad, with some raisins or dried cherries, chopped dates, or grapefruit wedges, or pumpkin seeds, can be fantastic.  A little grated asiago or parmesan cheese, or crumbled feta, or maybe a softly cooked egg, or a chopped hard-boiled one… there are so many ways to use a base of greens like this. Another great dressing for a salad on the bitter side is a classic Italian dressing traditionally served over puntarelle:  Tons of mashed raw garlic, mashed anchovies, salt, olive oil, lemon juice, mustard, red wine vinegar.   Something about this combination with a bitter green brings out a sweet aftertaste, and it can be totally addictive.

I think maybe it’s a good thing we don’t grow lettuce year-round, even being salad-lovers.  It makes me experiment…it helps us learn how to make other things taste good…and you can feel how nutritious these alternative greens are for your body, when you give them a chance!

This blog is not abandoned.  :)

It didn’t even go off my radar, get forgotten, nor did I take a deliberate break from it. I am a diarist at heart, and most days this fall when I’ve been in the garden, bringing in the harvest, or walking in nature, I have composed a blog post in my head.  The trouble is with the time it takes to transfer from thought to paper or computer.

I thought of a blog post as we wrapped up the final market day, and switched our focus from feeding other people, to preparing our own winter food supply.

Our table last day at the Westside Farmers Market - incredible celery, leeks, and celeriac this fall.

I thought of a blog post as the first frosts hit and we started to say goodbye to the garden, and began to light a fire in the woodstove daily.

I thought of a blog post as we dug potatoes, and more potatoes ….and more potatoes.

Tiredly, I thought often about posting about the sanctuary I felt in the garden, even if for only half an hour of twilight at the end of a frantically busy work day.

Last big harvest before frost.

I thought of a blog post as I walked through a wooded patch, hearing the birds, noticing how green the moss looks after a rain, when everything else has turned into winter browns.

I thought of a reactionary blog post every time I listened to news about Occupy Wall Street, “consumer confidence”, anti-consumerism, and the Plastic Ocean.

I composed words in my head about our harvest as it filled every bin, bucket, and tray we had, as we worked in the rain and by flashlight to bring the last of the perishables in by the first hard frost.

But with all this doing, our hands have been a bit busy for blog posting.  I am continually thankful and amazed by the enormous amount of food two people working two other jobs can produce from a tiny little plot of land.  We grow so much of what we eat now.  Eggs, chicken, greens of all sorts, beans, potatoes, cabbage, broccoli, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, celery, celeriac, rutabega, squash, popcorn, apples, berries, herbs, onions, garlic, leeks, radishes, carrots.  Our own pickles, krauts, jams, sauces, cider.  So much to write about, and so little time to write!

Remains of the market garden

Some people call us a farm.  Some are amused that we call ourselves a farm.  Some get grand ideas in their head of how we must live and what the garden looks like, imagining an orderly organic utopia.  Sometimes their silence when they come to visit seems to tell of their disappointment.  We are small.  The “market field” is just a big messy garden.   The shutters are falling off the house because most days, we’re too darn busy or exhausted to fix them.  Our furniture is mismatched, and our kitchen needs remodeling.  This is what it looks like to live as much as we can right now from a patch of land, trying to reduce the need to buy, to turn less garbage loose into the world than we might. This is what it looks like to make do, purchase less, grow more, work hard.

Digging potatoes, and immediately replanting the bed with endive seedlings - just barely visible at the top of the photo.

And yet, somehow, we manage to grow enough beautiful produce to sell to others while feeding ourselves.    Somehow, we had an enormous Thanksgiving supper where the only store-bought ingredients I used in the cooking were milk, butter, cream cheese, salt, pepper, flour, arrowroot powder, olive oil, vinegar, anchovies, cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, sugar, and wine.  There was so much joy and pride in roasting the 10 lb 3 oz “turkey” chicken who grew running around in our back yard, and so much peace and fulfillment in carrying baskets of greens and roots in from the garden, rather than braving the crowd at the grocery store.

The promoters of monoculture farming retaliate against the rise of interest in local food.  They try to win support by saying we can’t feed the world with small farmers, local produce, and organic techniques.  Yet I don’t see how 7 billion+ people will eat sustainably without digging up our lawns to grow chemical-free food.  I’m thankful for those who grow their own, or support others who do.   I’m thankful for the shoppers I know who are trying to buy less, buy locally, and use less plastic (in all senses of the word).  For me, Thanksgiving is about celebrating what bounty we can produce, rather than what bounty we can buy.  It’s about celebrating the wonder of being able to grow our food.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Almost there tomatoes!

We don’t buy much at grocery stores.  In fact, I always feel a bit embarrassed by our cart, or actually, by our basket, since we rarely buy enough to need to roll the cart through the store.  It looks like a terrible diet - often some combination of baking supply, flour, sugar, chocolate, pasta, coffee, butter, raisins, rice and grain products, olive oil, corn chips, cheese.  Maybe, more rarely, some kind of packaged treat or cracker.  And condiments, like vinegars, anchovies, capers, soy sauce, etc.

But most of the rest of what we eat, we grow, or get from someone else who grows it locally. If it’s not in season, we don’t eat it in its fresh form.  So for a big chunk of time now, we’ve dreamed of tomatoes, zucchini, cucumbers, green beans, okra…the things that we just don’t eat fresh for the parts of the year they aren’t in production or lasting in storage.  All spring, new fresh foods trickled in slowly here.  We’ve had lots of greens since March, but adding to that was a challenge - asparagus, green onions, and herbs were mainstays through May and June, but didn’t feel like much variety after a couple weeks.  We’d had no potatoes since last year’s ran out  about the beginning of March.  Radishes and peas and new celery stems in June brought in more variation, and the wild black raspberries were our first fresh fruit.  But even though it is so much anticipated, the suddenness of the classic summer produce is always a surprise.  When it starts to come in, it just really is suddenly….in.

Impossibly skinny haricots verts

The garlic gets harvested in July, and suddenly after months without fresh garlic, we have garlic in everything.  Zucchini, other summer squashes, cucumbers, green beans, the first cherry tomatoes followed by the first magnificent slicing tomatoes, and then, just last night, the first okra.  The first few days of a newly ripening vegetable are treasured and savored as they only can be when, by eating seasonally, your palate knows how special they are.  We had the first tiny potatoes for the 4th of July, then tried to leave them alone, only harvesting enough to have a taste a couple times a week.  I thought nothing could be as delicious as a plate of herbed new potatoes and sugar snap peas. But then after watching eagerly for the first green beans, nothing compared to the first lightly steamed tiny green beans with butter and a fine grating of parmesan. And the first handfuls of cherry tomatoes never made it out of the garden, of course, savored right on the spot. First eggplant arrived last week, and the rain came just in time to plump up a great harvest of wild blackberries this week.

Produce that was only two weeks ago longed for, for months, is suddenly in such full force that it is our daily staple. Last month’s fried eggs over a bed of greens, radicchio, or side of peas, has given way to a huge frittata full of new potatoes, summer squash, corn, shallots and onions, green peppers, basil, and topped with sliced rounds of tomato.

We’ve been eating this salad daily for about a week now:

Dragonwood variation on Caprese salad, with Asian Cucumber and Cherry tomatoes:

Dice up a “Suhyo Long” cucumber.  Halve some cherry tomatoes.  Dice desired amount of mozzarella into half-inch squares.  Finely slice a small onion or a shallot.   Finely slice or tear basil leaves, according to your preference (I don’t like large chunks of rough basil leaf in a mouthful, but rather prefer it delicately through the whole dish, so I finely slice it.  I’ve been adequately informed that this is improper, and basil must always be torn, thanks.)  Toss all vegetables together.   Combine olive oil and a little red wine vinegar, salt and pepper, and shake dressing in a jar until emulsified.  Pour over the salad, toss again.

This is what summer tastes like.  And we are celebrating it at every meal.  Soon, tomatoes will become commonplace, and then they will even perhaps become burdensome, something to be laboriously canned and dried for the winter months.  The green beans are already commonplace, eliciting a “well, we have to eat the green beans twice a day to get rid of them” reaction now, compared to the eagerness a couple weeks ago.  Soon, they will go into pickles and krauts as we truly tire of them.  Such is the life of a seasonal eater.

A sweltering day in the garden, a sunflower manages to stay looking fresh

Last Thursday was a hard day at the Farmers’ Market.  In record-breaking heat, we got up and out before dawn to harvest for the afternoon market before it got too hot to pick vegetables.   Usually we get a good chunk of preparation done the night before, but this week we had spent Wednesday night up until 11 pm unexpectedly butchering meat chickens, instead of prepping for market.  They had begun to fail to tolerate the heat wave, and we we lost three of them to it before realizing we just had to butcher them early.  (At least, they have gone to a much cooler place now, relocated to the basement freezer!)

So by the time we arrived at the market, we were already well on the way to exhaustion, overheating, and in my case, salt imbalance from chugging enormous amounts of water, sweating a lot, and eating very little.   The vegetables and herbs were difficult to keep fresh, wilting and heating up no matter the best planned attempts to keep them cool. The pavement was too hot to set the coolers on when we arrived, and one of them toppled from its stack, breaking some egg dozens.  The first potential client of the day, arriving before we’d finished setting up, became fairly disgusted upon hearing the price of a bunch of our basil.  After shaking his head and making some unpleasant comments, he moved on, but only to return shortly, brandishing a large bag of basil at me, and testily telling me that “THIS is a dollar’s worth of basil!!”  I made an unfortunate comment about anybody being able to go pick basil for themselves in 90 degree heat if they preferred, and we went our separate ways.

A bunch of our leftover basil, three days after its appearance at market. We handle it so carefully, it can stay fresh for a number of days after picking. Quality is really important to us.

Sometimes the pricing issues of being a farmer are so saddening and disheartening I wonder, “Why are we doing this to ourselves?”

But that low point was immediately balanced by a glowing new client who had just discovered us and the Westside Farmers Market on the web, and was really excited about it.  Infectiously excited and happy about it, and eager to try our produce.  It was a pleasure to talk with him about how we grow our food, ways to cook it, and so forth.  We were so happy and smiling over someone else’s pleasure and interest, and I thought “This is why we do this…”

One of the few greens I had at the market that day were lamb’s quarters.  Lamb’s quarters this past week sprang up heartily and greenly  with new young growth in some of the replanted beds, and looked too perfect not to take along to market in glorious bunches.  Weeks ago when we had fresh spring growth of lamb’s quarters for sale, a number of people in-the-know bought them, and one customer actually squealed, “Oh you have lamb’s quarters!  I’m so excited!” The next week she brought by a copy of Linda Diane Feldt’s wonderful book, Spinach and Beyond, just to make sure I knew about it.  She was so thrilled that a farmer understood, and harvested and used lamb’s quarters.

The controversial Chenopodial culprit itself, aka goosefoot and pigweed. Succulent, nutrient-dense, and ready for the soup pot.

But this week the lamb’s quarters did not get such a good reception.  Three people insinuated there was something underhanded about trying to sell weeds, and looked at me with a “gotcha” kind of look, satisfied at having identified a fraud.  One spent a good bit of time talking about how she weeded those out of her garden and wouldn’t imagine eating them, because, well, they’re weeds. Often times these are great moments to talk a little, educate people a little.  But the heat must have been getting to everyone, because on this day, people’s responses mostly left me feeling like they thought we were trying to fleece them with the lamb’s quarters somehow (heheheh…I really didn’t intend that pun).  My descriptions of using lamb’s quarters in place of spinach, and claims that the flavor is really very mild, just brought uneasy looks and sidling away from the table.

So, deflated, and feeling rebuked for trying to market something that I hadn’t intentionally planted (therefore a weed), I browsed through some other farmer’s blogs for inspiration and healing.  El at Fast Grow the Weeds came through for me as always, and I felt relief flood me as I discovered that her current post is devoted to “eating one’s weeds” in the form of purslane gazpacho, and (gasp…wait for it…)  ….lamb’s quarters with pasta.  El, I love you.

(Just for fun, here’s another lamb’s quarters recipe link, whose writer begins with with the line, “Now that I’ve discovered them, I may never go back to spinach.”)

Fresh cut flowers - a bright spot in the hot day

And just for closure… later on that market day, a beautiful smiling happy-faced woman asked if we could arrange for me to provide the flowers for her wedding in a few weeks, because she liked our cut flowers so much.  Another little high point, a little affirmation that this is the right path, that there are people out there who put wildflowers on the tables at their weddings, who eat the weeds, who see the value.

Thanks everyone, regardless of your political views on weeds and the true cost of food, for coming to see us in the 100 degree heat last Thursday!

Young radicchio starting to head

Last week’s bounty we took to the market included what were - to us - exciting additions of puntarelle, endive, and radicchio.  People bought the puntarelle, to some extent, often because it sounded unique and they were looking for something new to try.  But the beautiful heads of radicchio and frisée endive with its pretty blanched center, stayed on the table with the exception of one sale each.  So we have been eating a lot of both of them, and loving it so much that I’m not sorry they didn’t sell at market.  Except, I’m sad for how much people don’t know about greens and what they are missing in flavor, variety, and nutrition.

So I thought I’d do a series of posts about my experiences with these more unusual greens, and what delicious things to do with them.  The bitter greens I am talking about are just that - the bitter ones, from the chicory family.  These are different from the mustards - arugula, mustard greens, etc.  Mustards are all degrees of peppery, hot, and spicy, but not really bitter, while chicories are all degrees of bitter, but really not spicy.   I am not as much of a fan of the mustards as I am of the chicories.  This first post is devoted to Chicorium intybus, the radicchio.

Radicchio beside young leeks

This one isn't forming a head - just loose leaves

I have a lot of radicchio this year.  Two kinds - Palla Rossa, and Palla di Fuoco Rossa. I have finally learned that to have a lot of heads of radicchio, you have to grow a lot of it.  About every third plant is forming a really good head.  Some of the others have gone straight to a bolt - sending up a flower stalk, and some have turned into a ridiculous loose fluffy clump of leaves that should be in a head, but didn’t quite manage it.  Fortunately, the chickens love them, and can eat their fill of the unusable plants.

Chicken family happily feasting on outer leaves of radicchio

The delicate way the Fedco seed catalogue describes this unpredictable unreliability of radiccio amuses me:  “These radicchios are easy to raise from transplants although they have not yet been refined to absolute uniformity…”

That’s okay.  I like it.  I like the imperfection, and the wildness of it.  Our heads of radicchio are often a little bigger, softer, and looser than the rock-hard, small, dry grocery store radicchio heads.  If you are buying radicchio from me at the market, I’ve left some of the larger outer leaves on to keep them fresher - you can strip these off and find more of a head inside.

Beautifully headed and ready for picking

These things are as gorgeous as a rose, to me.

Two of our favorite ways to eat radicchio are cooked lightly with bacon, vinegar, and maple syrup, or mixed with frisée endive and tossed with a garlic-anchovy dressing and parmesan cheese.  Ohhhh, deliciousness.  I think that people often don’t know how to work with the bitter element in bitter greens and cooking, and therefore avoid it.  If you don’t think you like bitter greens, the key is to either cook it, which softens the bitterness, or to mix it with other greens or other foods to dilute the bitterness, or to dress it with flavors that compliment and change the bitterness.  (Or all three!)

Vinegar and acid flavors work magic on bitter chicories.  It seems like the bite of the acidity covers, or cuts, or changes the bitter flavor, and somehow, leaves it tasting sweet in the aftertaste.  All kinds of vinegar, and lemon can be used.  I also like a sour-sweet combination, like the vinegar-maple syrup dressings we often make.  Strong flavors - parmesan cheese, anchovies, garlic, good olive oil, and salty meats all also complement the bitters and work to the improvement of both tastes.

Dragonwood Radicchio with Bacon, Maple, and Vinegar:

pink and white hearts of radicchio, being shredded for sautée

Slice up a head of radicchio, or two (it cooks down to a fraction of its raw size) into fettuccini-like ribbons. While you’re slicing, start a skillet heating, and fry some diced bacon.  Slice up an onion or some shallots.  When the bacon is done, toss in the shallots, then the cut-up radicchio, into the pan with the bacon, and toss and turn it to coat it with the oil.  Add a tablespoon or so of red wine, or apple cider, or balsamic vinegar, and a splash of maple syrup, and salt and pepper as desired.  The heat should be high enough to cook away most of the juices as they form.  Keep tossing and stirring while the radicchio wilts down and cooks - just a few minutes is all it takes, and then it is done.  We like this topped with a fried egg and toast on the side, for breakfast.

If you like to grill, there are all kinds of grilling recipes for radicchio - here is a delicious-sounding example.

It’s a great irony of being a blogging farmer, that when there is the most going on to write about, there is simply no time to write.  The days are growing long enough that I’m frequently working outside until 9pm.  Work is intense enough that it’s hard to carry a camera to document it.  It is such a race to get the little plants and seeds into the ground at good times - at the right time for their planting, before a good rain, before the days get too long…so much to think about and plan for.

And it changes so quickly; in the other job as a midwife, I went to three births last week and at the end of the busy time spent away, I realized the trees had leaves!  When did that happen?  So much has changed in three weeks…

Kitchen garden less than a month ago...

Kitchen garden yesterday.

Yesterday was a perfect planting day.  Cool but comfortable temperature, cloudy threatening to rain but holding off.  It was fabulous, and we really worked.  44 celeriac, 48 celery, 200 leeks, 80-ish spinach, 40 radicchio, onions I didn’t count, 2 kinds of potatoes, and long rows of radish, beet, chard, arugula, and other greens - all joined the hundreds already in the ground.  Weeded everything, moved tomatoes and peppers through hardening off rotations, mowed, rototilled, mulched, helped family with other planting projects.  It’s odd to mention numbers, as I know this is nothing compared to big farms and seriously rocking CSAs.   It’s new to me to even count - I don’t usually, but yesterday I was getting curious about the numbers.  We have just the two of us working this farm, around two other jobs, and we’ll take to market whatever we end up having.

We are harvesting enormous amounts of gorgeous salad greens. Two meals out of the day are usually a European-bistro-style greens mix with egg and good dressing to top it.  After a long winter, there is nothing so satisfying as a strong salad mix of dandelion, spinach, baby kale, and young lettuce leaves, with a green-garlic and anchovy vinaigrette and an egg on top.  We celebrated the first few spears of asparagus on this salad, sprinkled with chives!

We spent most of yesterday in the gardens, digging out grasses, planting out lettuces, readying other beds for more of the same. Two tables in the living room are taken up with sprouts under grow lights, and the porch overflows. Conservatively Mandy has 5000 plants growing in pots and/or already planted out.

It is so nice now to be eating fresh greens every day, and sometimes at two meals a day already. Fried eggs on a bed of baby greens, mmmm.

Coldframe littuces getting some fresh air. Missing ones in the middle have been planted out in the new bed, top left.

Two days ago I found Mandy planting out some rows of 3-4″ tall deer’s tongue lettuce… I didn’t recognize them from the sprouts she’d been growing. Instead, these had been planted as seed last fall outside and then covered with a cold frame… a small garden spot about 3′ by 3′ with a hay bale back end, bricks and hay sides, and a south-facing 50-year old wooden window frame to make a tiny greenhouse. All winter the lettuces sat there mulling things over, and in the past two months of slow spring they came out of hibernation. Now they’re so crowded that she took out just two handfuls and filled rows of lettuce sprouts ready to grow big and strong.

And much more to do in the garden.  Mmmmm.  Recently we’ve been doing a lot, as is our wont in April, weather and circumstances permitting.

Red, red newbarb.

There’s rhubarb to discover under the leaves, to expose and (for some of them) to cover under ceramic pots.  We get nice long juicy stalks with less energy going into making big big leaves.  The first of the season though (the newbarbs) are just so red and beautiful and luscious.  Rhubarb custard does not last long around here.  Very nice with coffee for first breakfast (before the eggs and greens).

Last week, not in our gardens but a few steps away in the hens’ free-range territory, I found a patch of white tucked away in the barbs of the black raspberry patch.  We hadn’t seen it before, but there it was, a nice patch of Bloodroot flowers.  I haven’t tried breaking off a stem to see the reddish juices inside.  They’re just too nice.  And the hens have completely ignored them, it seems to me.  They might know something I don’t about bloodroot’s flavor (or perhaps the aftereffects).

And finally, inside, we find Sassy expressing her innermost desire for the high diving board.  Nearly every day she finds a comfy spot and assumes a near-10 quality tuck position in her sleep, dreaming of her splash-free pool entry at the bottom.  May we all have such dreams to tuck into as we sleep.

Diver cat, tuck position.

This week, I was struck by two moments that made me think about egg yolks.  The first was a lovely salad in a nice restaurant.  This very unique local restaurant continually champions local farmers and local products, and uses these in their meals to a great extent.  So I was particularly surprised to note the color of the hard-boiled, halved egg on my plate.  I couldn’t eat it - I realized I’d grown accustomed to our eggs and their healthy-looking, brightly-colored yolks.  I used to have many egg aversions - utter nausea at the sight of a runny soft-boiled egg, distaste for other people’s scrambled eggs, complete avoidance of anything with a raw egg in it. Many of these feelings have changed a lot with using our own eggs. This egg, though, brought those aversions back to me suddenly.  It was pale, kind of beige.  It looked unappealing.  I brought it home in a box and photographed it to show what I’m talking about.  And then it went on the compost pile.

The other moment occurred the next day when I made our traditional springtime lemon curd.  Lemon curd is basically a pudding made out of lemon juice, sugar, and egg yolks.  I halve the sugar, at least, and increase the egg yolks and lemon.  Our homemade lemon curd is the most gorgeous bright yellow.  Again, I was struck by the comparison, and I took a photo to show it.  Lemon juice is pale or nearly clear - all the yellow color in this recipe is provided by the egg yolks. What you’re seeing is the color of egg yolks from pastured hens fed a wide variety of foods.   What this post is about is this naturally-sourced color that has gone missing from commercial foods.

When I was a kid, mustard yellow or autumn harvest gold were popular colors for kitchens, appliances, and linoleum.  Probably due to this oversaturation, I remember declaring that yellow was my least favorite color, and I would never have a yellow kitchen.

I find it fascinating now that this color fad of the late ’60s and early ’70s happened to be timed to coordinate with about the time that eggs were beginning to be castigated, and healthy yellow yolks systematically eliminated from Americans’ diets.  Americans were encouraged to remove and discard egg yolks and scramble the whites only (have you ever tried this? eww…), to use low-cholesterol egg “substitutes”, and to use boxed mixes for cakes, muffins, and puddings, brilliantly tinged with artificial yellow color that you mixed with zero to two pale supermarket eggs, rather than make a “high cholesterol” nourishing homemade pudding, custard, or dessert out of 6 or 8 farm eggs.  Our kitchens looked bright and nutritious, but the food?  Not so much.

I wish people asked themselves more often why there is any need for artificial yellow color.  I mean, if it doesn’t add anything to flavor, consistency, recipe performance… why should you care if your “yellow cake” is yellow or not?  The answer is, “Yellow just looks better - it’s supposed to be yellow”…  and this leads to the next question of why?  Why are people attracted to “golden” in their food?  Why was I averse to eating the pale egg?

In my opinion, at least, the answer is that our bodies are trying to tell us what’s good for us nutritionally. Naturally occurring golden yellow is a visual signal telling us that the food contains important nutrients, like carotenoids.  But we’ve allowed ourselves to be duped - we’ve taken out the natural food sources that make things yellow, and replaced them with an artificial color to fool our eyes and brains into being drawn to it because it looks like nutrition.  Or, in the case of the egg straight-up itself, we’ve gotten used to the pallor and forgotten how to think about what it means.  How outrageous that people have done this to themselves, and fallen for it.  I wonder sometimes if part of why so many of us are driven to blog about food, to marvel at what we grow and produce ourselves, is because it is so astonishing, so difficult to assimilate, the extent of the deterioration of quality we’ve allowed in our food.  Rediscovering the colors and flavors and nutrition of real food is a revelation, and shows up the sad state mainstream food is in.  Check out this site, sporting a sick-looking egg, that insists color has nothing to do with nutrition, even as it discusses the fact that pale yolks are associated with feed problems.  Strange disconnect, eh?  And here’s info about pastured egg nutrition from a source we trust more.

Before we started keeping chickens and making sure that their diets contained enough greens, berries, bugs, and vegetables to produce nice eggs, I never thought about the color of yolks and how that affects the foods that you make out of eggs.  I made lemon curd with commercial eggs, and never gave its weak pallor a thought.  I actually wondered why there was such a thing as “yellow cake” and why  it should need to be yellow.  My first baking projects with our own eggs were almost a shock - we couldn’t stop admiring the golden color of batters and the products.

This is a really interesting link to a European egg information site.  I have somewhat mixed feelings about it because if you follow the links, it’s done by a manufacturer of supplements - promoting feeding hens supplements to improve the nutrition of the egg.  I agree with improving the nutrition of the egg, but I think it should be done by the vegetable-and-bug approach if possible, instead of synthesizing the nutrients.  It’s not so hard to raise a pumpkin patch and some extra kale, and feed the hens from that well into or through the winter.  Still, regardless, I love that European site because it talks about things that just aren’t “significant” mainstream considerations here in the U.S., like how important the color of the yolk of an egg is to your nutrition.

Feeding hens bright fruits and veggies even in winter

A truly pastured hen on summer forage

Sugar Snow Last Week

The maple sap is running, and we are having adventures with the various forms of maple sugar!

It’s been pretty stop-n-start for the past two weeks.  For a couple days of warmer weather the sap will run, then it stops for the longer freezes again.  So the batches have been smaller, and more conducive to experimenting with going beyond the maple syrup stage.

Maple Cream

Maple Cream, fruit, and pound cake

With the very first boiling down, we made maple cream.  We haven’t had this since 2009, when we discovered this delicacy, and that it can be accomplished in your own kitchen.  We got the temperature wrong though, and didn’t take it quite high enough, so the maple cream was runnier than last time…. no problem!  That just made it easier to drizzle over things like fruit and homemade pound cake…

Maple syrup boiling

When you make maple cream, you take it up to a certain temperature above the boiling point, then cool it rapidly in an ice bath.  We didn’t pour quite all the hot syrup into the ice bath, but returned a little bit of it to the stove top, and while the part that would become maple cream was cooling, we boiled the rest some more, to a higher temperature.

pouring maple sugar over snow

When this was ready, we poured it over a bowlful of the incredible light beautiful clean snow that had fallen that evening - creating maple taffy/the original sno-cone.  Yes, it means eating yellow snow, and it’s exquisite.

The next maple sugar project was actually a complete mistake.  We had a couple days of a slow, small sap run, and just kept adding the small amounts to the big reducing pan that sat atop the woodstove.  The pan ever so slowly evaporated away, and we actually forgot about it, until I checked it finally and found a crust of hardened sugar around the edge of some very reduced syrup.  I knew that if you got the syrup to a certain temperature,

granulated maple sugar

it will granulate as it cools if you start stirring it, so I tried stirring it.  It was like magic - suddenly from dark syrup color, the whole thing turned light yellow, and began turning into grains.  It didn’t take much stirring, just another turn here and there as it cooled - and right before us we had two-thirds of a quart of our first homemade granulated sugar!  It’s amazing:  like a maple-flavored cross between turbinado and brown sugar.  It is much lighter than we thought it would be - likely being early in the season it’s a high grade syrup with a lighter color.

Wow, we sound like sugar fiends.  All this, after every day in my other job, I counsel people about how and why to avoid sugar.  I guess my bottom line is, if you’re going to have some sugar, have some GOOD sugar.  We have some processed white sugar in the house, but it is used

unrefined homemade granulated sugar

almost exclusively for certain baking projects and making jams and fruit preserves.  Nearly everything else we do is based around maple, or local honey, including sweetening coffee. And maple sugar candy and cream are special treats that only happen once a year or less!

Here’s my favorite reference page for temperatures and recipes for maple sugar products.