Dropstone Farms

We hosted Thanksgiving on Thursday for my mom and her husband and two friends of ours from Seattle and Port Hadlock. We had:

Turkey from Olympic Pastured Poultry
SMASHYpotato (Lauren’s name)
Buttermilk biscuits with homemade buttermilk
Glazed carrots
Green salad with pomegranate dressing from Butler Greens
Stuffing from our friend Skip.
Some sort of cucumber/dill salad from Finland that I don’t remember the name of.

Reactions to the menu:

Pastured turkey is something else. It’s more like duck than conventional turkey. There was a layer of fatty tissue on the front of the breast and the dark meat was a deep red like a fine duck. The drumsticks were shot through with heavily developed tendons that, I can only assume, arose from the bird running around doing turkeyish things. While I’m skeptical of Farmer Theo’s somewhat eccentric methods, I’m impressed enough with the product to start burying the occasional cow horn in my garden.

SMASHYpotatoes are, as they’ve ever been since we learned the recipe from Lauren’s Aunt Bonnie, just lovely. Potatoes and sweet potatoes combined with garlic and parmesan are such a satisfying alternative to marshmallow-coated orange potatoes.

I forget where Lauren got her recipe for biscuits, but there’s nothing like buttermilk biscuits to use up the leavings after making butter.

Green salad. What can I say? Every heavy meal needs a light course. Nom.

Stuffing a la Skip. He made two stuffings. One a conventional and delicious stuffing with mushrooms and sausage. The second had quince and cranberries and pecans. It was fantastic.

As I mentioned, I can’t recollect the name of the Finnish cucumber/dill salad, but it also was great. It was sliced cukes, dill, sugar, and vinegar. The fun part of this dish was that, in addition to being awesomely good, we got to discuss how cucumber salad with vinegar and sugar was reinterpreted in Finnish, Chinese, Japanese, and Thai cuisine. Some things have cross cultural appeal, I guess.

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Except, you know, I don’t think it was actually a killing frost. I love the pacific northwest.

There is also this potential guide to our being less utterly flawed. I’ve been wrong before, of course.

We also had our first frost of the year. The ducks ended up on the porch of the shop and one of them fell down. I like it when people/critters fall down. It’s high comedy.

The Fava Beans Have Some Frost on them

Peas with Frost

The Chickens Think Frost is Food.

The Ducks Commit Sluggocide.

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This is a big bag of onions, sitting in a chair. (Day 22), originally uploaded by laurenipsum.

Today we went to get our turkey at the Port Townsend Farmers’ market, which was AWESOME. Someone there had this enormous bag of storage onions; we have been unable to get good storage onions at our market because of the wet summer — folks are selling eating/cooking onions but no one wants to say they will store. So I was super excited to find this HUGE bag for $40 (we didn’t weigh it but figure it is ~50 pounds?) that was advertised as storage onions. Now we have onions for the winter!

(And some to share … email or comment if you are local to us and want some of these. This is a LOT of onions.)

cross-posted to my silly personal blog; sorry for the repeat

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I just installed a bunch of new things for the blog.

You can now subscribe to get email updates whenever we post.

If you comment you can also subscribe to get emailed whenever there are subsequent comments to that post — there’s a checkbox under the comment form. I wanted this one because we often come back and reply to comments a few days later.

On a similar note, in the sidebar on the right, you can now see the 10 most recent comments! This is mostly for me so I don’t have to click around and try to find which one I wanted to reply to.

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My camera is obviously not intended as a video camera, so the video quality is not great — at times the chickens appear to be made of lasers, zooming around very quickly — but the sound is pretty much exactly what we live with, all the time.

(For treats they are getting kale stems, parsnip tops and peelings, and some stale corn chips from last week’s tortilla soup.)

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Don’t ever let anyone tell you* that it’s too hard to eat local and organic in the winter! Look at this variety! Each of these photos is of a different vendor (except the turnips and the squash immediately following; those are from the same one).

I didn’t take a picture of my haul but I got: plums; Asian pears; tomatillos (admittedly late-season — they are usually a summer-ish crop as far as I know); parsnips; shallots; cauliflower. I also stocked up on sausage, and got a goat shoulder roast, and a package of lamb chops as a present for G.

* Where “you” are a Pacific coast resident. I know we are super lucky to have the growing season we do, but that’s why we stay here … woo, privilege.

Beets, leeks, chanterelles, etc. (Day 16), originally uploaded by laurenipsum.

Beets, leeks, chanterelles, cilantro. Carrots? Potatoes, onions.

Squashes, carrots, beets, tomatillos, green tomatoes, broccoli, originally uploaded by laurenipsum.

Delicata, acorn, and other squash; tomatillos, green tomatoes, purple potatoes. Carrots, beets, broccoli, and a smidge of kale in the frame.

Awesome turnips, originally uploaded by laurenipsum.

Does anyone have advice on cooking and eating turnips? They are so pretty; I would love to learn what to do with them.

So many squash!, originally uploaded by laurenipsum.

The variety in the foreground is called Long Island Cheese Pumpkin! Apparently it is quite tasty.

Olsen Farms potatoes!, originally uploaded by laurenipsum.

We love Olsen Farms potatoes! We got all our seed potatoes from them one year; it was great. They have a huge variety and they are so knowledgeable about all of the flavors.

Cabbage “flowers” for bouquets, originally uploaded by laurenipsum.

(Cross-posted from my silly blog, where I am doing a silly photo-a-day-for-the-month-of-November thing.)

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So, I keep trying to post, honest, but the thing is that Trent won so hard in the comments on Garth’s last post that both he and I have been sort of incapacitated since then. So I am promoting his song out of the comments, and hopefully breaking the spell.

Scroll down and look at the picture of Ruby first!

A SONG ABOUT RUBY, BY TRENT.

The saddest dog I ever did see
Was stuck all in a fence
She had a searching, soulful look
But had not any sense

She only wanted chicken poop
Fresh steaming from the pen
And now she’s on the internets
Betrayed by her friend

Oh dogs, oh dogs, oh do not do
As that dog Ruby tried
For if that fence were lectrical
That dog Ruby had fried

Oh dogs, oh dogs, oh do not do
As that dog Ruby would
Don’t go a-eatin chicken poop
Like it was any good

Oh go on, go on, doggies dear
Don’t eat shit from the fowl
Or you will feel as Ruby feels
Too shame-faced for to howl.

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