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!

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.

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!”

That smorgasboard seems to sum up the week!   On our porch is a chicken in a cage, and two planters full of celery plants.  We butchered 17 meat chickens while enduring a communal cold, and something has been simmering on the stove almost all day every day.  I’ve had a bit of a break from work this week, and tried to use it for autumn catch-up, even while nursing a cold.

The young chicken on the porch in a cage has a broken leg. Total mystery how that came to be, she just turned up hopping on one foot with the other hanging, obviously broken.  Chickens are relentless at picking on someone who’s injured, and her companions turned bullies immediately.  She had to be separated from them to not be killed by pecking.  Between the options of putting her down, or going to the vet and ending up with a $500 chicken, I decided I couldn’t do either, and would try splinting her leg as best I could, and leave the rest up to her and the higher powers.  She has a break right in or above the equivalent of the ankle on a chicken.  She’s been doing great in her little homemade cast for the past week -immobilization made it comfortable, and she rests and eats and seems to be healing.  She is one of our new Aracauna pullets for next years’ laying flock; I was not happy about this damage.

On one particularly cold clammy afternoon, I made myself go out even with a throbbing head and runny nose and dig the celery to save it from hard freezing.  We are not as advanced with hoophouses/winter shelters this year as I had hoped we’d be.  We have a wonderful harvest of celery… finally!  It puttered all through the hot dry summer, but has grown to loveliness now in this last cool but not cold 2 months.  I harvested down as much as I can keep in the refrigerator, dug about 15 of the best plants, and replanted them in planters to bring in under cover.  They will keep on producing useable celery for us for a little while.  You just can’t make really good soup without celery, and yet it is on the list of the most pesticide-poisoned veggies you can get (and not easy to wash or peel!).  It’s so nice to grow our own, but it takes some strategizing to have it available more than only 1/3 of the year.

We’re filling our freezer with 6-9 months supply of homegrown pastured chicken, and traded some of the chicken for half a grass-fed organic lamb raised a few miles away.  I’ve been making stocks from boiled bones, from some organic grassfed beef we had in the freezer, and now from the chicken bones.  It is amazing stuff - lovely color, tasty, so full of gelatin and chondroitin that it gels up strongly in the refrigerator.  Making really good soups while we have colds has been wonderful.  Here’s one that disappeared really quickly…it was soooo good:  That rich chicken broth, our own Snowcap beans, and our veggies, including onions, leeks, celery, wax beans, garlic, and kale.

When the stockpot hasn’t been occupied with broth and soup, I’ve made a batch of quince jelly, and one of Green Tomato Chutney.  The chutney turned out really spectacularly.  Green tomatoes, apple, quince, red bell pepper, hot pepper, onions all get chopped and simmered in a pot with raisins, mustard seed, curry powder, cinnamon, cardamon, allspice, and ginger, some sugar, and some vinegar.  I use maple sugar/turbinado/sorghum when I can.  Oh, it was delicious this time!

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.

Here’s the recipe, to go with the post!  :)

This started as a recipe from The Zucchini Cookbook, by Paula Simmons.  I have modified it to my own tastes quite a bit.

• 1/2 cup butter
• 1/2 cup olive oil, or less
• 1 1/4 cup sugar, or less
• 2 T blackstrap molasses
• 2 eggs
• 1 t vanilla
• 1/2 cup sour milk (Or 1/2 c milk w/ 2 t lemon juice or vinegar added.  Or 1/2 c yogurt.)
• 1 c white flour
• 1 c whole wheat pastry flour
• 1/2 c barley flour             (So, 2 1/2 c flour total - you can experiment)
• 5 heaping T good quality unsweetened cocoa powder
• 1/2 t baking powder
• 1 t baking soda
• 1 t cinnamon
• 1/4 t nutmeg
• scant 1/4 t cardamom
• 2 1/2 packed cups grated green zucchini (original recipe called for 2 c, cubed)
• 1/2 cups dark chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Butter a 9×12″ square cake pan. (if desired, “flour” the pan w/ more cocoa powder.) Cream the butter, olive oil, sugar, and molasses together.  Add eggs, vanilla, and sour milk, and beat until smooth. Fold in the grated zucchini.  Sift together the dry ingredients. Mix wet ingredients with dry ingredients, stirring just until combined well.  Pour into pan, and smooth with spatula to evenly fill pan.  Sprinkle the top with chocholate chips, using as many as preferred.  Bake about 30 minutes (?) until toothpick comes out clean.  (Original recipe says bake 40-45 min at 325.  I tend to not watch the time, but

go by smell and the toothpick test.  Sometimes I turn the temp down to 325 halfway through the cooking.)

This cake is really soft and crumbly.  Barley flour gives it a soft heavy density that’s really delectable.

You can just use regular flour, but it will be a different cake.  I like the zucchini grated in it much better (than cubed), and can get more in that way.  If I’m using a big overgrown zucchini, I only grate up the outer portions, not the seedy inside.  Don’t use a zucchini so big its skin is getting tough.