Dropstone Farms

Apparently. The Territorial Seed catalogs arrived today!

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I was home not-quite-sick-but-not-great on Monday, the solstice, so we built a big fire in the fireplace and did our Solstice stockings at noon instead of after work as planned. And we cooked all day, which is what really makes it a holiday, I think.

Our pretty Blue Slate hen turkey met an untimely end back in October, about four weeks ahead of schedule, when she got over the fence into the neighbor dogs’ yard. Poor girl. They didn’t kill her, but we had to. Wanting to make the best of it, we were able to salvage about 3/4 of the meat, only discarding the portions with puncture wounds and bleeding.

After also checking Julia, Bittman, and some butchery books we have around, I consulted the one with the best photos — The River Cottage Meat Book — for info on breaking down a bird, since it’s not something I’m very good at. I’m the Evisceratrix, but a carver I am not. At the same time, also in the Meat book, I noticed the author suggested using turkey legs to make coq au vin rather than a, well, coq. So when I bagged up Poor Girl, I set aside the legs, thighs and drumsticks still connected, in their own bag, ready to be coqauvinified.

We started by cubing and frying Garth’s home-cured bacon, made of Skagit River Ranch pork belly. Removed that from the pan and added one chopped shallot, organically grown by Alvarez Farm just outside of the 150 mile range, over near Yakima. Removed the shallot and then pan fried the turkey legs, separated into thighs and drumsticks, which we’d lightly rolled in flour seasoned with salt and pepper.

And then! We have hit a milestone in our cooking lives! We added a quarter cup of vermouth (it called for brandy, but we had none) and lit it on fire, on purpose! It was neat. Whoosh! Then chicken and vermouth were removed, and wine went in to deglaze, and then some stock. The whole mess — bacon, shallot, and turkey legs, plus chopped homegrown carrot, thyme, rosemary, parsley, and market bay leaves, and homegrown and -canned tomatoes went in to the pan. At that point it just simmered in a 250° oven until the turkey was fally aparty — a couple of hours at least. Then we put it back on the burner, removed all the solids from the broth, and added some butter and a couple pinches of flour and whisked to make a thick, delicious gravy.

I also made some quick oven fries from Yukon Golds grown by farmer Laura at the Soup Garden here on Bainbridge — just toss the cut potatoes with some oil, salt, pepper, and minced garlic (Laughing Crow, as usual). If the fries are accompanying burgers or something less rich and flavorful than coq au vin, I often also add ground cumin and cayenne. I cook them at about 425° until the fattest fry is cooked all the way through.

Coq au vin and oven fries, garnished with homegrown parsley, and served with island-grown and -produced wine, made for a fantastic Solstice meal and celebration of the past year and the year to come with the returning light.

Homegrown: turkey, carrots, tomatoes, parsley, rosemary, thyme
Bainbridge Island farms & market: garlic, potatoes, bay, drinking wine
Local-ish: shallot (Alvarez)
Organic: butter (Organic Valley)
Unknown: the usual (salt pepper oil), cooking wine (from somewhere in France), vermouth

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We were both off our game this week as far as cooking went, so there was a lot of “what’s in the freezer? what’s in the cupboard?” One of the things in the cupboard was a crockful of homemade sauerkraut, made with cabbage from Laughing Crow Farm, that needed to be decanted (?) and put in the fridge. Only about 3/4 of it made it to the fridge, though, as several tongsful of it went into the pan with some seared Skagit River Ranch sweet Italian sausage, braising until the sausage was done. (I don’t know if Italian sausage and sauerkraut go together historically, but we decided to just go with it and call it a Swiss meal.)

I made some quick sausage-shaped buns from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes A Day — get this book if you eat bread! — omitting the steam step so the buns were not too crusty. The whole mess, sausages and kraut, piled onto the buns to make a quick and easy and delicious wintertime dinner.

Homegrown: none.
Bainbridge market: cabbage, onion, garlic (in the kraut)
Seattle market(s): sausage
Organic: non-local wheat
Unknown: spices in the sauerkraut (mustard seed, peppercorns, etc.), salt, the usual.

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… another “part 1″ because we eat piles so much, I am pretty sure they’ll come up again.

Looking for something easy early last week, I fell back on the category of meals that we call “piles.” Food piles generally consist of leftover meat if there is any, whatever veggies are available, and one of the following:

• Potatoes — a potato pile is a hash (sometimes served with a fried egg on top)
• Rice — a pile on rice is stir fry
• Eggs — a pile built in a cast iron pan easily turns into a frittata or faux-frittata
• Pasta — a pile tossed with pasta is a variant of carbonara (we often do the thing with the raw egg on the hot pasta)
• Stock — a pile built in a stock pot becomes soup.

Feeling possessive of our potatoes*, since our crop basically failed this year, we have been eating less hash and more of other types of piles. This week I was inspired to make pasta, so pasta-pile it was.

I made homemade pasta with homegrown eggs (thanks ducks) and organic wheat from Utah, following local food friend Anne’s recipe more or less (I haven’t used olive oil, but I intend to try).

While the pasta dough was resting, I peeled and cubed a medium-sized delicata squash that we grew. I sautéed it in olive oil (not organic) at medium-high heat to get some nice caramelization on the cubes. Towards the end I sprinkled some organic sugar on them to see what would happen, and it made an even nicer brown crispy sweet crust on the cubes. Non-local, but so tasty! I removed the squash cubes from the pan and set them aside.

A quick (because it was COLD out there!!) check outside revealed that our homegrown kale was either uncovered so frozen, or covered so under a sheet of frozen plastic — so, figuring that frozen kale is frozen kale, we grabbed some we’d blanched and frozen this summer when our market boothmates, Terra Bella Farm, had surplus. I added the chopped kale to some chopped market leek from Persephone Farms (Indianola, just off the island) in the same pan I used for the squash.

As the veggies were sautéeing, I boiled the pasta and dug around in the fridge to find some smoked peppered salmon I bought at my favorite fishmonger, Pure Food Fish at Pike Place Market. I don’t know how local the fish is, though it is surely Pacific salmon. I should’ve asked, but it was the end of the day and frantic, and I was trying to catch a ferry …

I suppose I also could have left the smoked salmon out of this dish, but when the pasta was done and I tossed it all together, the soft, smoky, peppery salmon turned out to go really well with the sweet squash and leek and the toothy kale and pasta.

Homegrown: eggs, delicata
Bainbridge Island Farmers’ Market: leeks, kale
Seattle market(s): Smoked salmon
Organic, non-local: wheat, sugar
Unknown: olive oil, salt, spices on the salmon. And the parmigiano cheese obviously, but we just can’t manage to give it up.

* We have since secured plenty of storage potatoes from other farmers, and are feeling well-armed now.

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It’s Part 1 because I am sure this won’t be our first display of cozy comfort food this winter.

My mom often made something she called Swiss steak, which I remember fondly. I was afraid that when I went to find a recipe, her version would be nothing like the canonical Swiss steak, but actually something with variations that moved it beyond recognition as Swiss steak — and therefore that every time I spoke highly of the dish in the past, I was either talking about something that didn’t exist, or leading people astray to a dish that was not tasty.

I should have realized that something with only like three fundamental ingredients is not only very hard to screw up, but also absolutely invites and encourages variations. So I went with memory, the Better Homes & Gardens Cookbook recipe, a phone call to my mom, a version published by one of Accidental Hedonist’s guest bloggers, and my current ideas of what tastes good.

Starting with two top round steaks, originally from On the Lamb Farm in Arlington, most recently from the freezer (one from last year’s cow, shame), I cut them into pieces and dredged them in flour (organic, non-local) spiked with salt, pepper, cayenne, and Hungarian paprika (from a great local spice store) and seared in canola (organic) and then olive (non-organic) oil when the canola ran out. After removing the steaks from the pan, I added two sliced onions from Laughing Crow Farm here on Bainbridge, and then after that cooked partway, several cloves of chopped garlic, also from Laughing Crow. When the onions and garlic were soft, I dumped in a quart jar of home-canned, homegrown tomatoes, as well as a couple bags/half jars of homegrown tomato product (some pizza sauce, some roasted and frozen) that I found in the freezer when I was looking for the meat. In went a splash of wine, an ice cube of homemade beef stock, an ice cube of homegrown oregano and another of parsley, and a bay leaf from the farmers’ market. Turned it up to simmer and left it until the meat was fork-tender (about a hour and a quarter).

Garth set out to make mashed potatoes (potatoes from Laughing Crow) but added too much milk (from Fresh Breeze, within 150 miles) so quickly added one of our eggs and some organic flour to make a batter for fried potato pancakes.

I quickly steamed some market green beans — also found while on freezer investigation — then drizzled with organic bottled lemon juice and served with a pat of organic, non-homemade butter.

Some brown stuff on a plate, with green beans. AKA Swiss steak (foreground) and potato pancakes (background).

While the meat was cooking, I made Anna’s simple plum torte with home-canned, homegrown Italian prunes, canned according to Food in Jars’ recipe, in honey (local, bought at Pike Place Market). The prunes weren’t solid when they came out, so instead of halved plums arranged on top of the torte, there is a sort of a thick smear of chunky jammy prunes across the whole thing. I ain’t arguing though; it tastes fantastic.

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Thanksgiving is our main holiday, now, since we started growing food. We had a low-key dinner, with just Garth’s folks and one friend, which was exactly what we needed. But we went all out all the same, with a pretty traditional menu that was mostly local and significantly homegrown. We grew the turkey as well as many of the veggies, and of what we didn’t grow, we know many of the other farmers by name.

Apparently I’m still recovering, though, as despite our enthusiasm and dedication to a local and homegrown Thanksgiving/harvest festival meal, I am late to the Dark Days update and can’t bring myself to do much more than list what we had. You’ll have to imagine the beautiful pictures and delicious flavors.

I prepared some things ahead of time, including making butter from Fresh Breeze Organic (saving the buttermilk for later). All of our dairy came from them, actually, as is usual for us. I also prepared the beets and cranberry sauce, listed below, ahead of time, as well as some sugared cranberries (very delicious), which were later joined on the snacks table by Bittman’s fiery roasted pumpkin seeds.

Turkey was homegrown, roasted simply with salt & pepper and basted with homemade butter for crisping in the oven at 425°, then moved to the Nesco roaster and finished at 325°. Gravy of course composed of delicious turkey drippings and stock made from simmering giblets and neck. Thanks, big guy.

Stuffing was made of homemade bread cubes were left out to get stale for a couple of days. Homegrown carrot, celery and garlic, and shallot from Alvarez Farms (within 150 miles) were sautéed with butter until soft. I added some apricots from Tonnemaker Farm (180 miles), which I dried at home this summer and reconstituted by soaking in warm water all day, and hazelnuts from a vendor whose name I don’t remember at the U-District market. All was tossed with the bread cubes and enough turkey stock to moisten everything. Added some more pats of butter on top to get everything nicely browning in the oven.

Mashed potatoes were a basic roasted garlic version with homegrown garlic and potatoes from Betsey at Laughing Crow here on Bainbridge.

We re-attempted a dish I burned last year at Thanksgiving, about which I was so heartbroken I never even managed to post about it: roasted Brussels sprouts with bacon and apple. This year the sprouts were from Rebecca at Persephone Farm. The bacon was home-cured and -smoked pork belly from Skagit River Ranch (<80 miles), and the apple was from Tonnemaker again. It made it through unburned this year, thanks to the newly-discovered warming drawer feature of our oven, and was delicious.

I cooked thick-sliced homegrown carrots in a pan according to Bittman’s quick-glazed carrots recipe and garnished with homegrown parsley.

A story on NPR about ginger a couple of weeks ago inspired me, so I gave in and used decidedly non-local oranges (organic satsumas, even though they were twice as expensive as non-organic!) and similarly decidedly non-local (though also organic) ginger to make quick-pickled ginger orange beets with homegrown beets, onion, and garlic. Huge hit. I am considering trying to grow ginger.

I used a very simple recipe for a very tasty cranberry cherry sauce with cranberries from Mt. Rainier Cranberries, also found at the U-District market. Sustainable Eats has the scoop on their organicness as well as an identical dish.

A simple salad rounded it out with greens from Butler Green Farms, here on the island, and sold at our great grocery store, the Town & Country. I used the last of the hazelnuts and some more non-local orange segments and non-local, non-organic (gasp!) but thematic! with the season! pomegranate seeds. Ground more pomegranate seeds and orange segments to combine with a bit of olive oil and vinegar for a fruity vinaigrette.

The buttermilk resulting from the homemade butter turned into buttermilk biscuits according to my favorite biscuit recipe ever, one of the recipes that convinced me I could cook.

Dessert was a pumpkin pie with a crust bought at Blackbird Bakery (it was too pretty not to buy) and custard from scratch with homegrown pumpkin and our duck eggs. Garth’s folks brought a delicious apple pie from Sluys Bakery in Poulsbo, just a few miles away.

Even our wine was local — pinot noir (and all their wines, actually) grown & produced on the island at Bainbridge Island Vineyards.

All in all, a delicious meal and good, casual, comfy company. It is good to be wrapping up the season, celebrating our harvest and enjoying the luxury of taking time off and resting, spending time with friends and family.

(And we’ll stop looking like such show-offs in future Dark Days posts, I promise. After two weeks in a row of homegrown meat and mostly homegrown veggies, I am ready to do, like, mac and cheese, or spaghetti, or something.)

Unknown sources: orange, ginger (beets); pomegranate, olive oil, white wine vinegar (salad & dressing); cumin, cayenne, canola oil (pumpkin seeds); flour, sugar, baking powder, etc.

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