Dropstone Farms

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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Harvest moon dinner, originally uploaded by laurenipsum.

Corn: garden.
Artichokes: garden.
Cabbage for coleslaw: garden.
Bread: homemade.
Burger: from our cow.
Ripe Green Zebra tomato on the burger: garden.

The Harvest Moon is full tonight.

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I was sure it was just going to rain all through August (which it did) and into September and then for the rest of the winter, with no breaks. But it has warmed up and cleared up, and we have some tomatoes coming in after all. In fact, we harvested enough on Thursday to make two delicious pizzas.

We had a tomato taste test, originally uploaded by laurenipsum.

Unfortunately, I don’t know all their names, but, left to right, #2 is Black Prince — VERY delicious!; yellow (#4, let’s say) is Limmony, also tasty; #6, a favorite for 3 years now, is Green Zebra. One of the red bumpy ones (either #1 or #3) is a Brandywine and delicious as always. #7 is, I think, an Ananas Noire (”black pineapple”).

Delicious awesome pizza, originally uploaded by laurenipsum.

Background pizza: Red Tomato Pizza, cooked.
Foreground pizza: Funny-Colored Tomato Pizza, yet uncooked. Yellow, green, and black/purple/brown tomatoes.

Both have fresh mozzarella from the grocery store, and for sauce they have chopped basil and garlic, mixed with olive oil and some grated parmigiano — a sort of loose pesto.

There has been much more preserving around here. But most of it was today and I am too tired to post more, so, further updates … in the future!

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And it wasn’t even that bad!

I picked a gallon of blackberries on Saturday and on Sunday we turned it into … well … it was supposed to be jam. I didn’t put as much sugar as it called for because I tasted it and it was sweet enough partway through the sugar addition process. But then it didn’t turn into jam, it just stayed syrupy. My mom the Jam Queen said, add the rest of the sugar, and bring it back to a boil, and don’t think too hard, just can it. So I was very careful following the rest of the directions, keeping about a million things on my stove right at 180°, and ladling jam into hot jars fresh out of the dishwasher, wiping rims, placing lids and screwing down rings, then gently placing into the (180°) stockpot. Eight half-pint jars went in and then we turned it up to boil for 15 minutes. On being removed, almost all of the lids popped immediately — yay! seals! — and the last few popped a few minutes later. So I was happy with my eight half-pints of blackberry syrup. We can have yogurt, and ice cream, and waffles and pancakes and crepes … but this morning, it looked as though the jars have cooled into jam after all! So that’s exciting. But I am sure it will be delicious regardless of the consistency.

And just now we have put 5 pounds of peaches into jars, and put it on to boil. Five pounds of peaches makes 3 quarts of canned peach halves in light syrup. I hope they turn out. I want peach scones in February.

Now I want to can everything! What else can I make? Stories, advice, recipes?

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Burrito fixins, originally uploaded by laurenipsum.

Stew meat (from our quarter cow) was braising in the oven. Garden potatoes boiled like normal. Garden zucchini and garden tomatoes grilled briefly. All combined in a delicious tortilla with a sauce of sour cream + goat yogurt (island grown!) plus garden basil. Garden cabbage on top. Yum.

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Unfortunately, our zucchini and other summer squash plants are neither as prolific nor as numerous as those of Barbara Kingsolver, whose chapter on squash in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle I just finished. We appear to be further hampered by the wet spring and summer we’ve had here, unless I am doing something else wrong that would lead to what appears to be blossom-end rot on a significant portion of the little (and even the big!) fruits.

Zucchini with blossom-end rot? (That’s my six-inch santoku knife for comparison), originally uploaded by laurenipsum.

In any case, though it’s somewhat disappointing, of course, it might be OK, given Kingsolver’s struggles to eat it all, and the fact that last night I harvested a 2+ pound zucchini as well as a monster pattypan. If all the blossoms and fruits that rotted had survived and were this big, I think I would lose my mind. But these two monsters made a delicious dinner and two lunches’ worth of baked squash with breadcrumbs (I added garlic, of course).

Zucchini, pattypans, delicious malbec., originally uploaded by laurenipsum.

Wine for comparison and also for deliciousness.

Zucchini: 2 lbs, 4.6 oz.
Big pattypan: 12.1 oz.
Small pattypan: 3.3 oz.
Malbec: 2006 Alberti 154, Mendoza, Argentina.

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Here are some things we have harvested, and some meals we have made from them!

• Peas: omelettes. frittata. In a bag in the freezer. Also attempting to dry some, and some pods became stock.
• Chard: Grilled chard salad (which we modified when I couldn’t find edamame I thought I had in the freezer — used white beans instead). Chard and orzo soup for new parents. Black rice with chard and an egg on top (this was awesome).
  
  Many different varieties of stir fry or hash, which is what we call it when you cut up a pile of veggies and fry them in a pan — its ancestor was corned beef hash. More things I can’t think of — we have gotten a lot of mileage out of the chard.
• Kale: mostly stir fry and hash.
• Onions, green: topping on everything.
• Onions, spring: grilled!
• Potatoes: hash. Boiled potatoes with butter and rosemary. Potato and fava bean salad (twice). Tiny baby potatoes made a frittata.
• Fava beans: 100% of them went to potato-fava salad.
• Carrots: mostly we have just pulled a few to check on how they are growing, and eaten them as soon as we get them inside. I did make a quick lunch salad in a jar.
  
• Cucumber: lunch salad in a jar (as above).
• Green beans: Grilled! drizzled with a little bit of garlicky olive oil when done
• Broccoli, Cauliflower: Hash. Steamed with garlic. Wrapped in foil pouches with olive oil, garlic cloves, red pepper flakes, cumin, and grilled.
• OMG SO MUCH LETTUCE: Lots of salads.
• Mustard greens: sauteed with garlic. A weird sort of calzone thing with ground beef. Fed to the neighbors’ goats when we became overwhelmed.

Coming up soon is … more of the above, plus summer squashes (zucchini, pattypan); more beans, both green and drying-style; a 2nd round of peas; cabbages.

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I had some chicken stories to tell, but there really are other things going on in our lives, which isn’t evident from the past few posts, so I will discuss those other things instead. So here is a list of things I meant to write about when they were current, and didn’t.

• We built 3 raised beds. Spent the hottest weekend of the summer so far hauling dirt across the yard to fill them up. Planted one immediately, with kale, broccoli, brussels sprouts, chard. Planted the 2nd one a few weeks later, with a second succession of winter squash, peas, beans, and carrots, as well as new parsnips (which we overlooked before). The third we started planting just this week, with 2 more rows of carrots, some lettuce, and 2 rows of beans. We’ll put more in this weekend.
• We made friends with folks who run the stable down the street and our compost area has grown from one pile to three. One (Ruby’s old haunt) is half-rotted leaves and kitchen scraps. One is horse poo and sawdust from the stable, and grass, and leaf litter from our woods. And the last one is the bad evil weeds I pulled up, mixed in with horse poo, so that it will rot hotly and the weeds will all die and not propagate. Thanks, horse poo!
• We have been haphazardly measuring our garden foods and photographing the meals thereof. I always mean to, but yesterday, for example, I forgot to weigh and photograph dinner with E&K that included a second round of potato and fava bean salad. At some point we’ll get a spreadsheet up and running with harvest dates, weights, etc., so we can figure out what produces best. An initial observation is that the Swedish Peanut potatoes don’t produce nearly as well as the Red Clouds, which are crazy prolific.

All my posts always have lists in them. I like lists, I guess. I’m going to try to have more frequent, shorter, non-listified posts.

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A while back, I emailed in response to a post over at (not so) Urban Hennery about needing folks to share a cow with, not expecting much response, since her post was a few weeks old at that point. But she replied almost immediately to say that they had three folks, and would love a fourth as that would let everyone get a quarter of a steer for cheaper than if there were just two. The beef would be coming from On the Lamb Farm in Arlington, where it seems like they got livestock because they loved training herding dogs so much. (Look at all the good dogs!) Laura at Urban Hennery knew and liked the butcher, Del Fox Custom Meats in Stanwood.

So we sent off our deposit to Laura, who was collecting all the checks and coordinating with the farm. She also coordinated with the butcher, sending them all our forms that we filled out with preferences like how many steaks per package, do we want various forms of roast left intact or ground, do we want stew meat and soup bones … (answers: 2; intact, as we can grind them ourselves; yes and yes). It was very nice to have her wrangling all that information. A few weeks later she forwarded an email from the farm, saying the steer, no longer a steer but now a beef, had gone off to the butcher, where it would hang for a while, then get chopped up and frozen and be ready for pickup. At this point we panicked a bit as we realized we needed to get a new freezer sooner rather than later, so, thanks to the many parental types who have provided us with Lowe’s gift cards over the last year!

Yesterday morning, packed up and headed off to Stanwood to the butcher. It was quite easy, it turned out; someone wheeled out some trays with my name on them, we dumped a whole bunch of packages into coolers, paid them for the butchering, and drove off.

On the way back to I-5, we stopped at a cute farmstand, Mossyback Farm, where we stocked up on eggs raised by their friends and neighbors (”the free-range-est ones you’ve got, please,” when she asked which ones we wanted), some Rainier cherries, and some other staples.

Then freezer pickup at Lowe’s in Lynnwood, about which the less said, the better. Places like that wear me out.

Beef stats roundup time!
Cost: $150 deposit + $218 more after weighing + $95 for the butcher = $463 total
Hanging weight of a side: 297lbs and we got half so ~150lbs (with bones and all), so about $3 per pound of hanging weight
I don’t know the total weight of the butchered meat, but the receipt says:

• T-bone steaks: 4
• Sirloin steaks: 3
• Top round: 3
• Flank steaks: 1
• Pot roast: 3
• Rump roast: 1
• Sirloin tip roast: 1
• Boneless crossrib roast: 1
• Stew meat: 5
• Short ribs: 2
• Brisket: 1

And then there’s a big stamp that says “BOTTOM ROUND.” Not sure what that means. And the receipt doesn’t mention the at-least-2 packages of soup bones we got, too. AND there is probably about 30 pounds of ground beef. Which, combined with some green onions from the garden and some fresh market garlic, and topped with sharp cheddar, fresh market garlic scapes, and home garden lettuce, made an excellent burger last night.

So yeah, I think we’ll be doing this again in the future. I’ll put out a call when it’s time.

In the meantime, please share ideas for ground beef, other than burgers! Shepherd’s pie and spaghetti sauce are in our repertoire, but we welcome recipes for those and anything else you’ve got.

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I got dropped off at the market today, fortuitously!
Co-workers were going downtown to see Iron Man (I was jealous but too busy to attend) and they pointed out at 5:45 that if they drove me to the ferry, they wouldn’t have to pay for the 15 minutes of parking they would owe if they instead parked at 5:45.

So I was deposited at the market, which is always a good deal, even when the market is closed … which it turned out not to be! I was lured in by the buckets of tulips, and found that the tulip vendor was still open, and also found that the pre-assembled bouquets were $4 each, instead of the usual $10. Score two tulip bouquets for Lauren!
The next surprisingly-open place was my favorite veggie stand, Sosio’s, who had local asparagus and spring onions. Plus peaches, which smelled so good I couldn’t resist getting one ripe enough to eat tomorrow. (I have found it to be very valuable to tell the produce chooser when you will be eating your fruits; it helps her to pick good ripenesses, such that you have one good fruit for juicy eating tonight, and one for each of you for lunch tomorrow, and more for later this week … when left to my own devices, I get all the ripest ones and most start to go bad before I can eat them.)

Dinner, then, was grilled balsamic-and-olive-oil soaked spring onions and fresh asparagus, with steak from our pals at Skagit River Ranch. I am so happy about grilling season, but am freaking THRILLED about asparagus season, and the reminder that it is just the beginning of delicious food time.

Man, food is awesome.

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The Seattle City Council passed an absolutely lovely resolution about local food incentives and planning policies to encourage urban gardening. Full text is here. Waves at Joe working in the city archives!

The deal with a resolution is that it doesn’t actually *do* anything, but laying out that these are the values of my beloved, troubled, condo-ifing, $6-per-dozen-farmers-market-eggs-buyin’ city makes me very pleased.

In other news, I had a mess of tabs open for a link dump post but my session saver screwed up and I’m digging through my del.icio.us and RSS feeds to put the collection back together.

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Late last summer, we bought half a flat each of blackberries and strawberries at the farmers’ market, and zipped them up with our handy FoodSaver and froze them. I’m on a clean-out-the-freezer kick lately, combined with a don’t-waste-food-from-the-CSA project, and it has led me to get creative with fruit. The delivery box includes pears, which I am not very good about eating fresh, and Mark Bittman suggested a clafoutis. I didn’t have quite enough fruit the first time, so I dumped in a couple cups of blackberries from the freezer. I didn’t drain them, so it was soupy, but delicious. The next time the pears piled up, I thawed and drained the berries before putting them in. This time I saved the juice and used it to make simple syrup, which is not even work a full-fledged recipe — equal parts liquid and sugar; simmer until sugar is dissolved. I used the blackberry juice and some water to total 2 cups. It turns out to make a very delicious Italian-soda-like drink when mixed with tonic water, soda water, or plain seltzer (is that the same as soda water?).

I also made lemon simple syrup with a few bits of lemon peel when I made lemonade to celebrate the warm weather a few weeks ago. Simple syrup is the cure for gritty lemonade or iced tea or coffee. Sugar won’t fully dissolve in cold drinks, but plain simple syrup in the iced tea/coffee will sweeten evenly and not leave crunchy bits. If you can, put in the syrup and the liquid to mix it with before putting in the ice; the cold makes the syrup thicker and it doesn’t mix quite as well.

I haven’t tried the lemon syrup in an Italian soda yet, but I have put it in a vodka tonic, and it was great.

I’m thinking about getting a seltzer maker so I can make lots of fruit flavors throughout the summer: we have pear, apple, and plum trees, plus blackberries and raspberries, and might get blueberries. Oh, and I’m getting a lemon tree. I thought about getting one of these, but it seemed kind of spendy and big to have on the counter all the time. This one is smaller and cool-looking, but ordering cartridges doesn’t seem to be quite as easy. Seltzer makers in general have been popular on the food blogs lately, to mixed reviews. Does anyone have experience with any of these models?

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