On the Importance of Suntan Lotion
I would just like to take a moment out of my busy schedule of weeding to remind everyone of the importance of sunblock. Sunblock keeps you from getting skin cancer. It keeps you from developing liver spots and wrinkles and moles and many other unpleasant things. And possibly most important, sun block keeps you from developing the most ridiculous farmer’s tan ever endured.
When Good Carrots Go Bad…
Many days I finish at the farm and I simply can’t imagine spending the time and effort that it takes to write an entry. All I want is to enjoy a glass of wine, a home cooked meal, a chapter of Harry Potter, and my indecently comfortable pillow-top mattress. The time that I feel the most inspired to write is in the middle of the day (for me this is about
Today, however, I am determined to pull myself out of my linguistic ennui and give you, my readers, a taste of my day.
It occurs to me that the vast majority of my blog posts since I moved to the farm have been perky beyond all sense. The baby goats are frolicking, the cabbage is heading, the beans are flowering, the corn is tasseling. These things are all true and at the end of the day we tend to remember the good rather than the bad, but the truth is, sometimes things on the farm go bad.
Let’s start with something that’s beyond our control: the weather. It’s been a wonderful, cool, wet spring. Weeds have been a problem due to the almost nightly rain showers, but bugs haven’t. Until last week that is. Suddenly the rain stopped and the heat started. We adjusted our hours of operation, installed fans and upper our water rations, but nothing we humans did to beat the heat was able to help the lettuce. 1000 heads of romaine and butter lettuce decided that their lives were drawing to a close and that this was their final chance to pass on their genes. They all shot up three and four feet tall and started to flower and in the process became tough and bitter and utterly inedible.
While the weather is beyond our control there are other things that are not such as listening to the weather report and planning ahead. If we had thought a bit beforehand we might have cut all the lettuce before the heat started and been able to save it in the cooler for a few days to put into CSA boxes or sell at markets. But alas, instead it has become fertilizer for some new, heat resistant crop.
The same weather that caused our lettuce to grow big and beautiful and to then hit puberty at lightning speed is also somewhat responsible for our weed problem. Although, to be fair, we’re more than a little responsible ourselves. As Richard says, “I know how to farm better than I do.” In an organic garden without the help of herbicides weeds can quickly grow out of control and the best method for subduing them is to kill them before they take hold. Till the plot once to kill the current weeds and then again to kill the seedlings before they have a chance to breed. But pressed for time many of the Coon Rock garden plots were only tilled once and the weeds are now threatening to crowd out the crops we were in such a hurry to plant. Now we’re in a race against the weeds to harvest our crops before the weeds can go to seed and infest every corner of our 5 acre garden. Score? Coon Rock:0 Weeds: 1,000,000.
And finally the carrots after which this post is named. It’s hard to figure out what to blame in their case. I think it’s more like a learning curve than a failure. As you saw in a previous post, our carrots were started in compost and then transplanted into the garden which is compost infused local soil. The problem is that the local soil here in NC is naturally clay-filled. Carrots apparently prefer softer soil and these carrots quickly gave up in our dense, orange dirt. As you can see the carrots manage for about two inches and then begin to grow in spirals to compensate for their lack of ability to dig in deeper. Jamie has compared their appearance to many anatomical features, none of which I like to think about while eating.
No matter what small or large tragedies you have to face in your own garden you’ll still have to eat. With that in mind here are some late spring/early summer menu suggestions:
- Start your day with Zucchini Fritters and sour cream. A great way to use up the zucchini that many of us are already getting overwhelmed with (Unless, in another stroke of bad luck, your zucchini plant have been killed by blight)
- Lunch can be a quick-to-prepare affair with Grilled Cheese and Zucchini Sandwiches or a wonderfully light plate of Cucumbers with Yogurt Sauce.
- Dinner can take advantage of the plentiful broccoli in Spicy Broccoli Garlic Pasta and your mutant carrots may be cut into normal-looking pieces and tossed with the last snow peas of the season in Buttered Peas and Carrots.
- With strawberries and rhubarb a wistful memory it’s time to look towards herbs to provide dessert until the next batch of berries comes into season. Personally I think there’s nothing better at the end of a hot day than a scoop of homemade Mint Chocolate Chip Ice Cream.
Everyday Farming…
I never get bored on the farm. I’ve had a few people write me and ask me what I do day to day and if it’s ever boring. The thing is, my days are all varied and so far I find them all interesting. A morning might start with bringing the horses out to the pasture or it might start with picking squash in the greenhouse. I might finish up with gathering and cleaning eggs or I might finish the day picking peas in the garden. The fact is, there is always something new to do on the farm.
When I first started working on the farm I kept bringing my ipod out into the fields to help get through the drudgery of planting rows of potatoes or cutting box upon box of lettuce. After the first week I starting to forget that I had it with me. By my third week it was more of a nuisance than a help. This big, clunky thing kept getting in the way of the business of squatting down in rows of vegetables and wasn’t adding anything anymore.
More important than Rilo Kiley or Ben Folds was the feeling of sun on my skin, the breeze in my hair, the sound of the bird in the trees or the cows lowing in the fields. Within a month I was addicted to the songs of the farm rather than the songs of my itunes library.
I love working on the farm. I love the dirt under my nails, the bitchiness of the hens when I gather eggs in the afternoon, and the sound of rain on the barn roof. I love the smell of freshly cut arugula, the taste of sugar snap peas right off the vine, and the prickle of squash plants on my arms. I love my bright orange “blue jeans”, the way the horses stamp when you clean their hooves, and the glint of a ladybug’s wings when she flies away from your finger.
The only thing I miss while working on the farm is you. I miss having a person there to experience it all with me. I miss you and I’m lonely out here. But I hope you have something in your live that I love as much as I love this.
What’s Up?
What’s up on the farm? Well…everything!
Remember those potato sets that I cut two weeks ago, all 250 pounds of them? Well they are now 16 beautiful rows of potato plants growing at an astonishing rate. Just look at how big the Cranberry Reds have gotten.
The best potato salad I’ve ever eaten is surely just around the corner.
We also have sugar snap peas ripening by the gallon. I’ve been sneaking into the garden to snack on them whenever I feel a little hunger pang between meals, but they’re also a fantastic addition to spring green salads.
Last Saturday I used Coon Rock sugar snap peas and Harrington Farm’s asparagus to make a Pasta Primavera which was too delicious to produce any leftovers.
Before this month I had never experienced truly fresh peas or asparagus. Those of you who are long time readers may remember how last year I had to cheat and buy asparagus from Peru because no one in the Piedmont Triad had any local stuff. Not so here in the Triangle (sorry Triad fans). I had never realized how fresh tasting and green asparagus is if it’s cut the same day you eat it. If you are one of those who believe that asparagus is bitter: the asparagus you were eating was too old. Fresh asparagus is almost too good to be true. And sweet peas! I know this is silly, but the I never understood where the name “sweet pea” came from until I ate a sugar snap straight from the vine. I had never realized how sweet peas could be. These are sweet, and crisp, and just full of juice. I could probably down a pint of them raw.
As for other plants coming up, it does really seem like everything is all at once. The new beets that we planted outside as seeds are now tiny rows of red and green leaves. The tomato seedlings are 5 inches tall and growing fast. The cabbages are beginning to develop tiny heads in the center of their broad leaves. The fava beans are flowering, which means that I’ll get to taste a new spring-time classic any day now (last years were grocery store finds from goodness knows where). Our turnips and radishes are ripening (Actually the turnips are more than ripe. They are HUGE.). The beans look like elementary school science experiments on an enormous scale. Did your 4th grade science textbook have a picture of a bean plant growing with the seed and the two heart-shaped leaves? Don’t these look just the same?
As for this to try cooking, my oh my. Here’s a little springtime menu for you to try.
- Start your day with Strawberry and Honey French Toast. It’s so decadent that it’s hard to believe it’s local and (sort of) healthy.
- For lunch whip up an all local Spring Quiche with Maple Sausage.
- At dinner it’s time to pull out all the stops. Have a Strawberry and Spring Onion Salad (inspired by Jamie), Pasta Primavera, and Lewisville Style Pork Ribs.
- If by some chance you’re still hungry after all that food try some Strawberry Rhubarb Crumble and a glass of Mint Iced Tea.
Spring Planting Begins…
After two straight weeks of rain the sun has finally peeped out for long enough that we can start on the real work of spring: planting. Apparently spring planting is always a big rush as well as a bit of a gamble. You don’t want to start too early because a late frost might come and wipe everything out (remember the Easter frost last year?). You don’t want to wait too long though because every week you put off planting is another week between you and harvest. A late harvest not only means that other folks who planted earlier can outsell you at the market, but also that the tail end of your harvest might get cut short by a late season frost. As Barbara Kingsolver put it in Animal Vegetable Miracle, “The standard advice on potato planting time is the same as for onions and peas: “as early as the soil can be worked.” That is a subjective date, directly related to impatience.”
We started with potato planting because potatoes take a very long time to grow, around 100 days. Cutting potato sets makes me feel very old. Not old in my own chronological age (my first three days on the farm did that as I hobbled around the house every day after work clutching my back and aching worse than my 93 year old grandmother after a water aerobics class) but old in time. Cutting potato sets makes me feel like I should be wearing a bonnet and waiting for a buggy to take me to church.
Last week I cut potato sets from one hundred and fifty pounds of seed potatoes. In case you’re wondering, as I did for years without asking, a seed potato is just a regular potato. Potatoes evolved in the equatorial regions where temperature is not a factor in their seasons. Instead of having seeds that are ready to wake up as long as the temperature or the amount of sunlight is correct they simply go through a predefined “rest period.” So, a seed potato is any regular potato that has been stored in a cool, dry place for a season or two and is now ready to send out eyes that will become new potato plants. Unless you have purchased grocery store potatoes that have been treated with chemicals to keep their sprouting dormant any potato you buy for food can be stored and once it begins to send out eye sprouts it can be planted and will become a potato plant.
Our seed potatoes came in many shapes and sizes. They were from the Seed Savers catalog and were shipped to us from
After the potatoes it was time for the onions. Joe (one of the other interns on the farm) and Jamie planted the onion bulbs (a very similar process to seed potatoes) while I took care of the transplant onions that had been started in the greenhouse to give them a head start. I must admit that at first I was smug about my job being the transplants, which at first seemed like the easiest thing in the world. “Just dig a little trough, lay the onions in it, and mound the dirt up on both sides so they stand up when you’re done. It should be an hour long job,” Jamie informed me that first morning. By the end of the night I was incredibly dusty and smelled strongly of onion, but at least all the Cipolinis were planted.
Finally I got to plant the carrots. The carrots had been started from seed in the green house. The teeny-tiny seeds were planted in little trays that were gridded into eight by fifteen one inch squares. By the time I got to them each one inch grid square was growing an itty-bitty carrot in it. These baby carrots came out of the trays with a cheese spreader and each one went into a little hole I had made for it in the earth. I then covered each one with dirt and planted the next one until I had planted four of those trays full of carrots. All in all I planted 480 carrot plants and next I’ll be doing the seeds.
There are many other things that have been getting planted such as fig trees in the orchard, squash and cucumbers in the big garden, and blueberry bushes along the main road. The thing is, there are just so many things to plant that I can’t even tell you all of them. All day long between chores like feeding the animals, gathering eggs, and moving the cows and horses we plant plant plant. This time of year, I’m learning, you plant until you drop and then you get up at dawn the next morning and plant some more.
Posted by KeysAmy on April 22nd, 2008 under Local Agriculture, Farm Life | Comment now »When It Rains It Pours…
It began raining on Saturday, the same day we had to move our bed to the new place in
The reason I’m harping on the weather so much is because of the many things I have learned this week one of them is that rain is very hard to work in. To quote Richard, “You can farm when it’s cold and you can farm when it’s hot, but it’s hard to farm when it’s raining.” The reason for this is not just that rain will make you cold and damp and exceedingly muddy (I come home most days looking like I just suffered a very bad experience with a sunless tanner due to our orangey-brown clay-filled soil), but that if you work with the soil when it’s wet you’ll wreck things. You can’t till wet soil, you can’t plant in wet soil, and it’s very hard to weed in wet soil.
Despite the insistent rain we’ve been trying our best to get things done. I managed to weed the garlic patch, which was so full of fescue that it was hard to tell what we were really trying to grow in there. I learned to gather eggs (our chickens are laying ten dozen eggs a day and we’re hoping for more as the weather heats up) and somehow earned the eternal enmity of the rooster who lives on the farm. Every time I climb into the chicken pen he edges over to me and then, one he’s sure he’s close enough that I’m watching carefully, begins displaying himself. I’m not sure if he wants to scare me off or have me lay his eggs. In any case, he never does it to anyone else.
We’re harvesting lettuce, spinach, braising greens, kale, and African collard greens at the moment and I’ve seen the arugala growing fast. It might sound silly, but it’s very exciting to have so much fresh food at your fingertips. The other day I wanted a salad to go with dinner so I just cut some lettuce. Then I walked over to the onion patch and dug up two spring onions and then sauntered to the radishes and pulled up four of the little red radishes. Ta-da! Instant salad, just add olive oil and vinegar and serve with a smile. I don’t think I’ve had food that fresh in my entire life.
My other uber-fresh food experience is breakfast. I eat Coon Rock Farm eggs that I gathered myself a day or two before with a side of Coon Rock Farm mild sage pork sausage from Coon Rock pigs that got processed less than two weeks ago. You know, I bet the African collard greens could be fried up with some garlic and would go really well with that. Maybe I’ll try that tomorrow.
Posted by KeysAmy on April 8th, 2008 under Thoughts on Foods, Local Agriculture, Farm Life | Comment now »How to Roast Garlic…
As the weather continues to get warmer I like to move away from warming foods and onto cooling foods. I enjoy things like hummus that can be spread on bread or crackers and things like homemade dips that can be served with raw vegetables. As you may have noticed from some of the past year’s worth of recipes, one of the flavors that I’m very fond of is garlic. In autumn and winter foods, which are so often slowly roasted or braised, raw garlic can be cooked into a more mellow flavor. To make dips and spreads you need to be able to bring out the mellow roasted flavor that is so popular in cold weather foods without spending hours in the kitchen.
Here is a step by step guide to getting wonderful, warm, mellow garlic flavor out of a head of garlic.
Remove the papery outer skins and use a sharp knife to cut off the tips of the cloves. The goal of this is to allow liquid to enter the cloves, so make sure that each tip has been cut.
The next step is poaching the garlic. I normally use plain old water as my poaching liquid, but this week every single person in my house decided to buy milk, and so I went with milk. Use any neutral, non-acidic liquid to poach the garlic.
You don’t need to measure out the milk. Just use enough that the garlic can be totally submerged. The smaller the pan the less poaching liquid you will need to use. Poach the garlic for about 8 minutes at a simmer. The garlic should give when pressed with a fingertip, but not be soft to the point of mushiness.
Cut a square of aluminum foil large enough that you can completely wrap the garlic head in it. Place the garlic in the center of the foil with the shiny side down.
Pour extra virgin olive oil over the garlic. Because the only flavors are going to be garlic and olive oil it is important to use the best quality olive oil. Use one or two teaspoons of oil.
Wrap up the garlic in the foil and place it in a glass baking dish or ramekin. Make sure that the foil isn’t going to leak or the olive oil will burn and smoke.
Heat the oven to 300-325 degrees. Here’s a hint, don’t scrub all the numbers off the temperature dial on your oven. If you do (not that I have any experience with this) all I can suggest is do the best you can and buy a good oven thermometer.
Roast the garlic for 50-60 minutes. Allow the garlic to cool breifly until you can touch it without burning yourself. Use a wooden spoon or the flat blade of a chef’s knife to squeeze the garlic out of its casings starting from the root end of the head and working down to the cut end.
You can use the roast garlic in soups, dips, or spreads or you can store it in the fridge in an air-tight container for up to a month while you await inspiration.
Posted by KeysAmy on March 24th, 2008 under Cooking Adventure, Thoughts on Foods, New Recipe | 2 Comments »The Arrival of Spring…Onions
I have taken a very long break from posting. The reason for this is no that my work has been slammed (although it has), or that I’m lazy (although I am), or even that I’ve been reading the Golden Compass trilogy in every spare second I’ve had (although I have), it’s that I’ve been hibernating. Honestly, I’m sick of winter. I’ve made the stews, I’ve simmered the soups, I’ve roasted the root vegetables, I’ve baked the casseroles, and I’m so done with it. I decided to go to sleep and not wake up until it was spring again.
And so I have. Then this weekend when Nick went out for his run he came back with news, “Every breath of air tastes lie onions! I can’t run in this.” That was the sign that my hibernation was over; wild onions are out. Spring is literally in the air.
Wild onions are delicious treats that are probably hiding out in your yard this very moment. The tops look a bit like chives or garlic scapes, tall and rounded with a slight curl to the tips. They are a dusty shade of green and if you snap of one of the stems you’ll smell the perfume of onions in the air. The bottoms of the onions are much like spring onions. They are small, white bulbs with a mild, sweet onion flavor.
Nick and I went out for a walk today and dug up a batch of the onions. Possibly the local park won’t be too thrilled when they find a big hole in their turf where a patch of wild onions used to be, but my need for dinner trumps their need for pretty grass. I’m going to use the tops as a substitute for chives in my Deviled Eggs this Wednesday. The bulbs are going to get sliced up and used in a vegetarian fried rice dish for dinner. And in case you couldn’t tell, the first eggs of spring are out as well. The chicken won’t be ready for about another month, but we have eggs already for deviled eggs and fried rice.
I must admit, I’m feeling a little guilty that I’ve left you with a month of winter and no recipes. So, as an apology to you and a farewell to winter I’ll give you my final winter recipe. A few weeks ago I found some beautiful leeks at the farmer’s market. I already had some bacon from Ward’s so I decided that Baked Leeks with Cream and Bacon would make a nice dish at dinner. I had never made baked leeks before, nor had I ever read a recipe for them. However, as usual I had an idea of what the finished dish should look like and as usual it was nothing like the traditional recipe when I did go back and read it. Unlike the recipe from my French cookbook, my recipe uses whole, halved leeks, both white and green parts.
I hope you enjoy the recipes, and more than that I hope you enjoy the coming recipes that I’ll be sharing with you this spring.
Posted by KeysAmy on March 17th, 2008 under Cooking Adventure, Local Agriculture, New Recipe | 1 Comment »French Rolls with Cheese
Just as when I read The Omnivore’s Dilemma
My routine is this, I wake up at 7:00, hop out of bed and preheat the oven to 350. Then I take a quick shower, get dressed, pull some French rolls out of the freezer and pop them into the preheated oven. I start the coffee and by the time I have a freshly brewed cup in front of me my rolls are perfectly golden brown and ready to come out of the oven. I smear them with cheese (Port Salut this week) and eat them while re-reading In Defense of Food or emails from my blog readers.
This is a great routine, or at least it was until disaster struck. Remember my post on Vegetable Cheddar Pot Pie? Remember how I mentioned that if you aren’t very careful about sealing the top and bottom crusts that filling will bubble out of your pie which is why you should be careful to place a pizza pan or cookie sheet under the pie plate? I told you this because my pie did in fact spit filling all over the bottom of my oven, a fact that I considered a minor cleaning inconvenience until this morning when I realized while still in the shower I could smell smoke.
You already know what happened, but I’ll tell you anyway. When I set the oven to preheat the goo on the bottom of the oven began to burn. Not only did this make the house smell terrible, but it also meant that our smoke detector started going off at 7:10am, an hour that most of my roommates blissfully sleep through on any given day. Not today, oh no. Because I was in the shower I couldn’t hear the smoke detector (I guess being in a place with running water is a good thing if the house starts burning down, but this realization still makes me nervous) which meant that everyone else was woken up by the racket and had to leap from their beds to bash the smoke detector with the mop that we keep ever ready for just such an occasion, turn on fans, and open the kitchen door.
Boy do I know how to get a day started.
Anyhow, if you don’t have goo all over the bottom of your oven you should really try this French rolls with cheese thing for breakfast. I’m in love with it.
Posted by KeysAmy on February 20th, 2008 under Cooking Adventure, Thoughts on Foods, Books to Read | 3 Comments »Vegetable Cheddar Pot Pie
Thanks you all for your support and good wishes for my upcoming farm job. The comments and emails were wonderful and will help me get through the transition. Now, as a reward for your patience after two recipe-free weeks I would like to give you an old fashioned comfort food recipe that I’ve been making since high school. The interesting thing about this comfort food recipe is that it’s a vegetarian recipe.
Most comfort foods seem to focus on the old “meat and potatoes” concept, fried chicken with mashed potatoes, meatloaf with macaroni and cheese, or New England boiled dinner are some of the classics. I must admit that I buy into that style of cooking quite a bit; it’s what I was raised on. However, I think that it’s important to have meat-free cooking options that rival meat dishes in satisfaction. As I went through my recipe database this week to check for typos and to add new recipe categories I realized that I’m lacking vegetarian entrées. I have many vegetarian side dishes, appetizers, and snacks, but I want to provide more than that. I want to provide main courses that have no meat and yet are hearty, satisfying, and filling.
This recipe is Vegetable Cheddar Pot Pie. I found the recipe online years ago and although I really liked the concept (A cheddar cheese pie? Who wouldn’t want it?) I found the specifics less than appetizing. For example, instead of using a roux to thicken the filling the original recipe asked for you to mash the potatoes and mix the mashed potatoes into the liquid. I have no problem with alternative thickeners like potato starch, but I really like hunks of potato in my pot pie and letting all the potato turn into paste wasn’t an idea that I liked.
If you’re one of those people who worry that a vegetarian dish might now have enough protein, fear not. This pot pie is nutritionally balanced. The cheese and edamame pack a double protein punch, and unlike with meat you’ll also be getting calcium and Omega-3 from the cheese and beans. I love it because it’s delicious, nutritious, and meat free all at the same time. It’s also adaptable. In the recipe I name specific vegetables, but those ingredients are guidelines rather than hard and fast rules. If you happen to have other veggies in your fridge that you want to use up you can easily substitute ingredients or add them onto the original list.
Don’t stress about messing it up if you adjust it. I almost always make the pie from memory and so what I put in depends not only on what we happen to have on hand, but what I happen to remember from the original recipe. This past attempt I forgot the mushrooms and ended up using mushroom broth instead to make up for the loss of mushroom flavor. The only thing that I suggest leaving alone is the cheese. The cheese is the centerpiece of this recipe. I suggest cheddar, but any aged, flavorful cheese would be fine. I have used an aged Gouda with fantastic results in the past. What you shouldn’t do is pick a cheap cheese or a young cheese, neither one will stand out enough against the hearty vegetable background.
Finally, I would like you to notice how the filling can leak out of the pie if the top crust is not properly sealed to the bottom crust. Don’t try to prebake the bottom crust of the pie, and more importantly make sure to place a cookie sheet or pizza pan under your pie dish so that any leaks don’t spill on the bottom of your oven. This is a good way to create lots of smoke and set your smoke detector off.
Posted by KeysAmy on February 18th, 2008 under Cooking Adventure, Thoughts on Foods | 3 Comments »
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What I'm Reading:
My Links:
Five Sites I Couldn't Live Without:
Food blogs and Local Foodies:
- 100 Mile Diet
- 101 Cookbooks
- 10 Signs Like This
- Delicious Days
- Cricket Bread
- Eat Local Challenge
- Low Mileage Food
- Orangette
- Roots & Grubs
- LaLaLa Blog
- Sin Noticias de Stew
- Tea And Cookies
Eco & Gardening Blogs:
- Deliberate Every Day
- Earth Friendly Gardening
- No Impact Man
- Organic Schmorganic
- Pocket Farm
- Slowly She Turned
- I Heart Small Farms
- Alix in Wonderland
Buddy Blogs:
- Adam's Travels
- Emily's Knitting Madness
- Laura's Thoughts on Life
- Megan & Rose
- Not the Motorcycle Diaries
