We eat veggies for breakfast a lot.  Quite a few people have looked at me like I’ve got a third eye in the middle of my forehead when I suggest having veggies and protein for breakfast, instead of carbs and sugar.  Thought I’d post a few pictures about how to do it.

Not shown - I make hashbrowns first that cook while chopping the rest of the veggies:  grate up a few potatoes, fry in olive oil in a cast iron pan with salt and pepper.  Set aside/keep warm while finishing the veggies.  If I’m in a hurry, I just start adding veg to the hash browns as they are nearing doneness.

The usual vegetable mix is onion or shallot, zucchini, pepper, and tomato, plus whatever else is available.  This time I added broccoli and the first 2 pods of okra of the season.  I chop the veggies in the order that they should cook in - onion and green pepper get the most time, then zucchini. Then greens or broccoli, tomato, or basil get just a quick cook at the end.  Start adding them to a hot cast iron pan in that order, with a little olive oil.  This can be spiced up with some hot pepper if desired, seasoned with salt and pepper.  Cooking is usually pretty quick - 5-10 minutes maybe, and ideally things stay colorful and a little crunchy, not soggy. It comes out of the hot pan, and fried eggs go into the hot pan.  Mix the hashbrowns and the veggies on the plates, top with eggs a few minutes later.  Yum. The only thing here we didn’t grow at home is the salt, pepper, and olive oil.  This is also really delicious with a little feta cheese topping it.

And the idea is that the eggs are somewhat runny, and the yolks run all over the mix deliciously.  In fact, there is little to compare at this time of year with the flavor of salty fresh tomato, basil, and egg yolk mopped up with toast or hash browns.

Yes, those words were chosen to conjure up Margaret Hamburg.

Margaret Hamburg, the Food and Drug Administration chief, was recently featured on NPR as follows, talking about the giant egg recall:

“She also had some practical advice for consumers: Reject over-easy eggs. She said that as federal investigators continue their work with the companies involved, consumers should strictly avoid ‘runny egg yolks for mopping up with toast.’ “  (National Public Radio, August 23, 2010)

Now, I’m an odd bird when it comes to runny eggs.  I’ve gotten nauseous at the idea of eating a soft-boiled egg before… when it was someone else’s eggs.  I won’t touch raw cookie dough because of an experience with getting food poisoning from eating it as a teenager.  But our own eggs, that we know the history of, we know the health of the chickens, and every detail about the eggs every step of the way, are another story.  Instinctively, I prefer them more softly cooked than I ever have any eggs with an unknown history.  And on occasion, I make ice cream, caesar salad dressing, or pasta carbonara with our raw eggs.

It’s a pity that all eggs are castigated in one fell swoop - after all, we can’t hurt the giant factory farms’ feelings by singling them out for criticism in comparison to the health of backyard and small producers’ chickens.  I am wondering what the fallout of this situation will be.  Legislation that punishes the small producers?

Well, time will tell, but in the meantime, I purposely cooked our homegrown eggs even just a little runnier than usual the morning after I heard that NPR report.  Must be that third eye that makes me so contrary.

Coffee is just one of those things for me.  I can (do) drink it pretty much all day, and even a bit in the evening, and not feel too much effect.  I like a good cup, but am not much a snob about it.  Well, not true… I don’t like bad convenience store coffee and dislike styrofoam-like cups (some are truly evil, especially some of the newer fine-grained foam ones).

But this isn’t about dislikes, its about what I like right now.  What I am liking right now.  Here is a photo of this morning’s Joe… Mandyrose’s cup is on the right, mine on the left, presspot by Bodum above, maple syrup from 2008 above left.  Our blend du jour is 2/3 ground beans of French Roast by Coffee Express here in Michigan, and 1/3 Irish Creme Decaf from By The Pound in A2.

Grind it medium-fine, add near boiling water halfway up the presspot and stir well, then add the rest of the water and set the top on.  Wait a couple minutes for just the right combination of caffeine and other goodies to move out of the beans and into the water (and perhaps even some of the ions in our well water to adsorb onto the coffee grounds) and then give it a slow, 30-second press to the bottom of the pot.

Meanwhile, the rest of the hot water has been warming our coffee cups.  Pour those off into the dishwater, and pour Mandyrose’s coffee first (she likes it hot).  Add maple syrup to sweeten a bit, pour in a dose of good (really good, fresh, non-homogenated) whole milk (shake a bit first so it’s not all cream), stir once and serve.  Then pour mine and sweeten, sans milk (ok, sometimes I add the milk too).

Creamy, a little bit Irish, mmmmm.

Now about presspots… there’s just something wonderful and clean about this coffee’s taste that I don’t get anywhere else.  I think it’s because no matter how fancy the machine, you just can’t get access to fully clean every part and hose and pipe that the water touches… or if you can, you don’t often do so.  Hot water with ions leaves residues when it evaporates away… period.  You can’t avoid it.  Distilled water? Maybe.  But not once it gets coffee in it.

But a presspot is glass and steel, with perhaps a bit of plastic near the top for a final strain (but my next one won’t have that plastic), but basically you’ve got hot water and coffee in an easily cleaned vessel, pure and simple.  And the taste of the coffee is all coffee, no residue.

My mother and I have discussed coffee over the years.  I had bought her some better beans a few times, and made my best for her, but she didn’t really like any of them.  Each time I visited I would try some different things to see what she liked, and finally one day she said, regarding a cup of joe I had not made, “Now this is what I’m talking about!”  The common denominator, after all these years, was the taste of the residue from coffee makers.  The particular coffee in question was from one of those enormous church percolator pots, with the big coffee basket on top.  The crew in charge had (fortunately) not over percolated this brew, so it was as good as such coffee gets, but was full of the unmistakable taste of years of hard water + ordinary coffee grounds with a simple rinse instead of cleaning.  Those big church-hall coffee makers are something else in that regard, building a patina of taste that lingers with me from my earliest coffee tasting attempts at church functions when I was 7 or 8 (lots of cream and sugar).  But that’s what Mom likes!  It’s that residue taste that is missing from all my other attempts to introduce her to coffee bliss.  So I just use her coffee in her coffee maker when I visit her, and all is well.

Ordinary coffee makers (of the Mr. Coffee variety) do the same thing, more or less.  Mostly less, of course, but unless you clean the heck out of them, with hot vinegar washes and the works, they gradually build up the same types of residue and produce the same types of extra tastes for you to get accustomed to.  I spent a week recently with a friend who makes espresso in a beautiful machine, a machine fastidiously cleaned… except of course it isn’t.  There are innards that get residue built up, and I could detect something like a residue buildup taste, or at least I believed I could.

But my presspot, it’s just coffee and the glass.  Pure and simple, and repeatable.  Our coffee always tastes the same.  Mom doesn’t like it much, but she doesn’t have to.  She knows what she likes.  We do too.  And with my third little cup finished, so is this post.  Have a good day.  Oh, and Hi Mom! :-)

Question from the market:  “Do you spray your vegetables, at all, with anything?”

mantis at home among the beanstalks

Thank you for asking!  It’s an easy and straightforward answer:  No!

I began growing my own food partly, as I’ve mentioned before, because of flavor and quality, and pleasure in the process.  But only partly.  The other reason has to do with my beliefs about pesticides, herbicides, and nutritional quality, and what we are doing to our health and our world by poisoning or compromising our food.  I reason that if I grow it, I really know what’s been sprayed on it, and what the soil it grew in looked like.  And I want food with no chemicals, to the extent that this can be achieved in a world contaminated by the drift from other peoples’ chemical applications. My family tree holds an enormous history of cancer.  All four grandparents, a parent, several aunt/uncles, a great grandparent at least. This is a conversation for another post, but the root of the matter is - I do what I can to avoid controllable carcinogenic exposures.  Please read Living Downstream, by Sandra Steingraber, for insight into this issue.

Baby bluejays beside the garden

I am also opposed to harming beneficial insects, and unfortunately, several of the chemical applications deemed acceptable for organic growing methods can do just that.  Neem oil, pyrethrins, insecticidal soaps, rotenone, and Bt, for example, don’t discriminate among which insect to kill, at times, or damage other animals.  Too often, people don’t discriminate among insects either.  This is also another post for another time, but in brief, without insects, we are without many foods.  Most fruit or vegetable parts we eat that contains seeds, and most fruits or vegetables whose propagation involves reproduction by seed, will be damaged in productivity if the pollinating insect population is damaged.  And you can forget about honey.

We also do not “prepare” soil for growing plants by spraying it one season and growing without sprays subsequently.  I have been astonished to hear farmers tell clientele their food is grown without any sprays at all, then describe to other farmers how they are increasing their growing area by spraying with Roundup one year to get the weeds down, then growing food there the next year and saying they didn’t use sprays.  I encourage everyone to ask the deeper questions:  “Do you use any kind of pesticide or herbicide anywhere ever?”  “Have you ever used _____?” “What do you think about pesticide sprays?”

Tree frog guarding the zucchini

None of this should be confused with an opposition to killing individual creatures.  We handpick japanese beetles, potato bugs, tomato hornworms, and various hungry hungry caterpillars, and squish them, drown them, or feed them to the chickens with satisfaction.  Row covers, staggered plantings, crop rotation, and good soil (to grow strong plants that can handle a little damage) are preventive measures.

Today I picked tomatoes in the rain, and a frog hopped out from under the plants swiftly, too swiftly to identify.  A few days ago, I found a green treefrog contentedly nestled against a zucchini leaf, almost perfectly camouflaged. Praying mantises, garden spiders, toads, birds, and predatory wasps are a common sight among the crops.  These creatures tell me something of the health of the microcosm where our food grows.  Hopefully, where they can live, so can we.

One of the interesting parts about doing the farmers market has been observing people, and their funny interactions with produce.

Sometimes it involves little experiments with human nature.  For example, last year, I noticed that as the garlic basket became picked over, people had left one very large bulb of garlic, and were choosing smaller ones instead.  I picked it up to see why - was it broken up?  Was it moldy?  Was there a crushed clove on it?  Nope.  The stem on top that the plant grows out of was twisted around the bulb at an unusual angle.  When we planted it, we probably got the clove headed the wrong direction in the soil, and the plant grew around itself a bit it compensate.  Do people eat the stem?  No!  It’s part of the dry papery coverings that get peeled and (hopefully) composted.  The rest of the bulb was enormous and perfect, but people were scared off by a kinked stem at the top.

So, out of curiosity, as the season wore on I left that bulb of garlic in the mix, and didn’t cut off its funny stem.   The garlic options became fewer and  fewer, smaller and smaller, but still, everyone rejected the bulb with the kinked stem. People were seriously buying garlic half its size, for the same price, instead of settling for a large but slightly unusual shape.  It never sold!  We took it home, and just to complete the experiment, I opened it up and peeled some cloves.  The largest ones were big enough to save as seed garlic, so I kept them for planting.  The rest was perfect - larger than the garlic we usually get to use.  We save the best for seed, sell the next best, and use the smalls for everyday ourselves.

Tomatoes always get a lot of debate and commentary.  We are growing Roman Candle sauce-type tomatoes this year.  One source description reads “… pure yellow banana shaped tomatoes…. very flavorful and have very few seeds. Excellent for making salsa, sauce, and gourmet dishes…”  They are lovely!  Bright yellow, they really do look just like a big strong candle flame.  Wonderful flavor.  Didn’t sell a single one at the market so far!  People ask about them.  They pick them up, exclaim, talk about them, and then say things like the person who asked in a woeful tone, “But what do you DOoooo with a YELLOW TOMATO???”  Or, “Well, my husband would never eat a YELLOW tomato.”

How I feel about all this depends on my mood, and most of the time my reaction is a jovial desire to educate people, tell them about what they could try, how good something is, encourage experimentation, etc.  There’s a bit of suppressing a laugh, grin, or teasing remark.  Sometimes though, I try not to wonder at their families eating FD&C yellow 5-colored cakes, candy, pickles, popcorn, jello, etc….but not, OMG, a YELLOW TOMATO.

To my delight, though, every now and then these sorts of interactions are offset by the really satisifying ones.  The woman who hurried up to the table and excitedly pulled the beautiful white-and-lavender unusually-shaped eggplants out and set them on the scale in a towering pile, for example.  She knew what she was getting.    She wasn’t among the crowd who “just can’t even think of it as an eggplant if it’s not dark-skinned”.

I think maybe I grow for these individuals.  We’re not big producers, and part of the reason I grow my own food is to get interesting produce I can’t afford to buy, or that can’t be mass produced:  The gourmet types, the thin delicate-skinned varieties, the colorful nutrient-rich varieties, the skinny flavorful beans, the finely textured baby veggies, chemical-free.  Not the mainstream.  The mainstream makes the money, I suppose.  But recognizing quality and uniqueness brings an incomparable satisfaction.

On a lighter note, the funniest overheard quote of the day?  Next door to us, the Humane Society had a table display set up.  Behind them was one of Zingerman’s permanent lunch menu advertising signs.  A woman came up to the Humane Society’s table, eyeing the Zingerman’s sign behind them, and asked, “So - What’s your Soup-of-the-Day?”  Grin.

A month and a half now since we last posted.

We talk about writing more, writing our stories, about documenting our farming more.  We have eager readers telling us they love our blog and keep checking for the next post!  We have great intentions.  And then there’s life.

Recently I checked in with some farming blogs I like, and was comforted to find that many of them at times seem not to keep up with regular posting too, like us.  Or they take the summer off.  And then there are the familiar apologetic posts, mentioning how long it’s been, how busy it’s been, vowing to be better at posting…. And I slowly came to the lightbulb moment of realizing that if you’re really farming….you’re often simply too busy to compose an essay about it!

We took a few days off and went away for a break last week.  This has been a difficult year, and I badly needed to see something else…something like mossy boulders, water, sand, silent boreal forest.

We weren’t gone long, actually only had 4 days of not laying eyes on the gardens.  But when we returned at the end of the last day…..the place had turned to a jungle in 6 days.

It taught me how much I do in a day, and how much there is TO do in a day.  Day to day work, chores & activities make it hard to spot the differences we make, and it’s easy to focus on (and feel bad about) the things that don’t get done.

But stop doing any of it for even 6 days, and you really see it.  The weeds are miles high, the popcorn and squashes grew 2 feet.  The tomatoes I didn’t get to staking are horizontal on the ground, and nothing to do about that now.  The green beans were going past, and the chickens got to eat a lot of overgrown zucchini.  But it helps to remember that they were all just packets of tiny dry seeds just very recently. And, but for the invisible daily efforts, they would be still.

In this world, there are so many things and people telling us we aren’t doing enough.  We aren’t giving enough, we aren’t working hard enough.  We aren’t chipping in, going the extra mile, shouldering the pack, showing volunteer spirit, making the deadline.  I almost always feel like one of me isn’t enough.  I often feel guilty even for doing something for myself as simple as writing on this blog - when there are so many people wanting so many things out there.  I treasure these moments of perspective, before diving back in again.

Home from the offices at 6:30pm, been there all day.  Quick snack, no time for more, gotta use the daylight, when it’s not 90 degrees, or pouring down lightning and rain.  Hurry and gather eggs.  Out to the new garden plot.  Arms are sore from yesterday’s hoeing of heavy wet clayey soil up over the 160-odd feet of potatoes planted.  Carried out 21 more hot pepper plants, and 20 more eggplants.  Hacked holes in the same wet heavy clayey soil, planted the plants.  Mulched, weeded, checked other newly planted plants for bugs, moles, disasters, took stock of what we can sell at market on Thursday.  One branch of a newly planted apple tree is broken in the storms - the tree’s so little, the one branch makes up about 1/3 of it’s mass.  Branch is hanging by a strip of bark, and the leaves not wilted - position it carefully, and wrap it with grafting tape and splint it -it may survive and heal.  On one of the trips to and fro from the house, picked the asparagus and took it in, started pots of lentils and rice on the stove, returned a couple client phone calls.  Pulled up the wires from beds that don’t need row covers anymore, moved them to the other garden to cover the eggplants.  Quickly cut and placed TP tube cardboard collars around each new plant, to protect the little stem from cutworms and rabbit teeth.  Getting dark now, working faster.  P helps place new support wire hoops and cut and stretch and tuck and fasten the rowcover, to keep out the deer and the fleabeetles.  Carry the tools and supplies back to garage.  Run back to house to check on the rice and lentils on the stove.  Grab the salad spinner, hike back out with the scissors to pick lettuce for supper and tomorrow’s lunch.  Notice the slugs returning after the rains, grab the slug-picking container, go from row to row brushing slugs into it.  Now the hips and legs and back are really starting to hurt, end of a long day, kneel, squat, bend, stand, over and over.  Drown the container of slugs in a bucket of water.  Have I mentioned how I hate slugs?  Not as much as I hate chemicals.  P is shutting up the chickens for the night.  Give the lettuce a first washing out in the garden. Grab a fresh young garlic and handful of herbs for the lentils, handful of radishes for the salad.  Pull off the lettuce rowcovers for the night, and the rain.  Run in, check stove, start chopping herbs and radishes.  Was soaking some bean seeds for quick germination that didn’t make it into the ground before dark fell tonight - drain them and pack them to last the night until tomorrow.  Throw together the lentils and herbs and seasoning, a quick salad, pass the asparagus coated in olive oil under the broiler - done, supper by 10pm?

One of our lovely egg customers mentioned reading our blog, and I realized how long it had been since we posted.  Spring swooped in and carried us away, out into the yard, under the trees.  We tapped the maple trees, dug in the garden, clipped the first chives, uncovered fabulous overwintered spinach in the tunnel house, watched the chickens happily resume their roams into the shrubbery, with the snow gone.  Even as we delighted in the early heat wave, we uncomfortably realized its cost:  very little sap run for maple syrup this year.

We will not be selling any maple syrup, needless to say.  Last year I wrote about the dangers of warming climate to maple sap production, and this year it feels real.  We had about 5 days of real, useable sap run.  Compared to a more normal 4-6 weeks. It’s hard to be ungrateful to such beautiful weather, but somewhere in my instincts, it felt too warm, too soon.

I almost wrote about it then, but all my words and thoughts felt bitter.  I pictured trucks hauling corn & crates of fake corn-syrupy artificial syrup, coal-energy powered processing plants, and the ingredients of Mrs. Butterworth’s, and felt angry that what is real and good is suffering in order to feed people what is fake and nutritionless.

What you see here are the remains of an orchard.

An orchard I drive by often, on the grounds of an empty house. Last year, on my drives, I watched as the trees blossomed in billows of white that sent apple-blossom fragrance through the car, watches as the apples ripened, fell unused to the ground, or clung to the branches after the leaves were gone, shrivelling as they froze. I thought a couple times of trying to track down someone who might be able to give me permission to gather and use the apples, as they were likely unsprayed, in their abandoned state.

Now, as winter draws to a close, the grounds of the house are filled with bulldozers. Other large trees on the property have been felled and bulldozed into piles, likely for burning at some point. I looked at the orchard with a sinking feeling in my stomach - surely they wouldn’t bulldoze it? Surely, someone would value a pretty, productive, beautifully laid out little orchard right in their backyard? Surely, a community would not bulldoze an asset that takes years to establish?

But no, the day came when on my drive by, the beautiful little apple trees had been hacked down to these trunk stumps. The stumps have sat like this for weeks now. They must be awaiting the bulldozer. The bulldozer sits quietly beside them. I wonder, why not just bulldoze them, then, and be done with it? Why leave it like a mockery to spring? Was it important to chop the tops off the trees before the buds begin to swell and look alive? Important to start the destruction before the blossoms break and create a reminder of what is being destroyed?

Someday, I am convinced, (some of) our decendants will look back on this time as we do upon historical times of misled thinking, and wonder at how it could have been so. How could a society condone bulldozing trees into piles to burn, rather than at least providing firewood to the community? How could they destroy a productive source of local fruit, then pay in so many ways to ship what they eat thousands of miles? How does this make sense? I am filled with sadness when I drive past this spot.

I wonder what they will name the subdivision. “Apple Acres”, perhaps.

I keep thinking of joining the Dark Days Challenge, but don’t quite. We make locally produced food (much of it our own) a feature of most meals already, rather than a feature once a week. I think our general approach is to eat mostly local food, and most of that is grown by ourselves, or someone closeby we know. But our effort seems to be put into having a significant part of almost every meal be local… rather than having limited times of being completely local.

Brunch today: (A sub-average one for us actually - it’s rare not to have some kind of homegrown vegetable, either in an omolette, or a side of cabbage or brussels sprouts…)

Sourdough bread using the recipe from Jeff Hertzberg, published in Mother Earth News, and using local flour. Eggs produced here at home; quince jelly we made from quinces that grew here. Butter, salt&pepper, and coffee were not local. Milk in coffee from a local source.

It fascinates me to see how many people are photographing their food, and their cooking processes in the kitchen. I feel drawn to do the same thing. When you grow and cook your own food, there is such wholeness to it, such wonder in it. I think it shows what a rediscovery it is, to want to document it.

Friday the 13th:  We know now that we’ve been losing chickens this week.  About 10.  About one a day, since about when the leaves fell.  We’ve seen the hawk several times.  This morning I got up early and when it was light walked out in the morning mist.  The weeds and branches were softer in the fine rain, and didn’t cling to me so much as yesterday.  I found three spots, as though visiting shrines on a pilgrimage, where a sad soft cloud of feathers on the ground marked a chicken loss.  The cobwebs dripped teardrops when I brushed them.  And the complicated interwoven circle of life goes on.