Dropstone Farms » comestibles

More making

Lauren — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 04:54:05 +0000

I have all these tabs open so I don’t lose track of the recipes, but my browser is starting to drag … so that I can close them, here is what we have been making, in no particular order:

Portuguese-ish clams and sausage, except I basically barely followed the recipe. I used soft, not cured linguiça from Uli’s, and more sausage and fewer clams, and I added kale. It was delicious.

Leibovitz’s marshmallows!!! with the egg whites left over from …

Goat milk ice cream, sweetened with honey, with a strawberry swirl. Except I am not very good at using the ice cream maker, so it isn’t really very icecreamey. But it is super tasty. I added some freshly ground white pepper to the strawberry mixture, which is pretty awesome.

Candied ginger (Leibovitz again) so that I could make …

Blueberry ginger jam, which turned out pretty dang good too.

Ramp greens kimchi, except I used onion greens and a bit of garlic scape, because that is what I had. I haven’t tried it yet, but it smells fantastic, and Garth made some fried rice with it and pronounced it “omg noms.”

Rhubarb liqueur, still steeping, and strawberry vodka (Lebovitz *again*!).

Garth’s home-cured and home-smoked bacon.

Garth’s home-cured and home-smoked HAM.

We’ve also frozen about 10 lbs of cherries, with more coming soon, and yesterday we blanched and froze a GIANT cauliflower in florets. A few weeks ago we had a good canning day, with pickled asparagus, cherry jam, strawberry jam (which didn’t gel, so it’s strawberry syrup), strawberry-rhubarb jam, pickled scapes, and sweet and spicy pickled rhubarb. There has been beef jerkying, and marinated and grilled top round made into burritos, and short ribs on the grill with homemade cherry-rhubarb barbecue sauce, and roasted chicken that later turned into chicken salad and also a tortilla soup with last year’s frozen corn and the last can of home-canned tomatoes. Fried chicken. Fresh potato and homegrown fava bean salad. Fresh cabbage and carrot coleslaw. And tonight, our four tiny ripe tomatillos from the garden, combined with with storebought avocado (only way we can get it), Laughing Crow garlic and Persephone onions (from the handy farmstand at Bay Hay), home-grown and -pickled jalapeños, and Laughing-Crow-intern-grown cilantro all combined to become approximately this avocado salsa verde, which we put on our grilled scallop tacos.

Oh yeah, and we’ve been gardening too. The fall brassicas are in, along with the winter’s carrots and leeks (I hope). If all goes well, there are 3 pigs coming in a couple of weeks (alive!).

What I made this weekend

Lauren — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 05:59:40 +0000

I have been MAKING!

Many days back, at the Country Living Expo, I bought a little one-ounce ingot of beeswax with the intent of making some lotion or lip balm … someday. Then this weekend when I read Stephanie at 3191′s post about being able to make salve from what’s already in the cupboard, I frantically scrolled down to see if I had the right things in my cupboard too!! And indeed, if I didn’t mind using olive oil instead of almond — which I didn’t — I was set to go. I halved the recipe to work with my precious ounce of beeswax, and warmed half a cup of olive oil with some homegrown lemon balm steeping in it. (It didn’t make much of an impression; the olive oil’s aroma, though faint in the solidified salve, overpowers anything from the lemon balm.)

Both G. and I are liking it as lip balm and on minor scrapes and such; I’m also using it on dry hand skin and I’m testing it as a face lotion too.

And today I headed in to Seattle to take a class on miso fermentation! We learned about the starter culture, which is made by inoculating a grain or bean (usually rice, soy, or barley) with Aspergillus oryzae, a most delicious mold that can be purchased at GEMcultures.com. The resulting starter thingy is called koji. The koji is then added to the main food thing (food substrate?) in a particular proportion depending on how long you want it to ferment, what flavor you want it to have, etc. In the miso most people are familiar with, this food subsrate is soy, but it can be any number of things; the instructor let us sample misos made of yellow split peas; black lentils; black-eyed peas; and garbanzo beans. We made koji, tasted many misos, and then prepared some miso — two garbanzo and one made with quinoa! — to be harvested in 3-24 months. (Yeah, some of them take a long time!)

I bought some koji at Uwajimaya on the way home, and promptly set about making a batch with white beans. I chose to go with the fast version, which calls for koji at 60-200% of the weight of the cooked beans. I had only 20 oz of koji so I used 30 oz of beans. That fast version also calls for salt at 6% of the combined weight of the koji and beans. So, 30 oz beans, 20 oz koji, 3 oz salt. I mixed it all up with a dollop of liquid — I used the bean cooking liquid as Favero did — and another dollop of prepared miso just to kick everything off, and put it all together in a pickling crock that was happy to be in use again after having been shelved in the laundry room for months.

Next I’ll try inoculating my own koji, hopefully on Washington-grown farro. The instructor has not tried it, so apparently I’ll be blazing new ground! It would be great to have miso entirely from Washington-grown ingredients, so I’ll try to keep it to beans from Alvarez or more local.

The meat closet is getting full.

garth — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 07:40:44 +0000

Lardo on day one, mocetta on day 18

The lardo has finished curing and has been hung to dry. The mocetta is on day eighteen and is doing very well. There’s either salt or good mold on the outside of it.

Look! I actually weighed it this time!

574 grams of pastured goodness. You can much more clearly see the resident hairs in the skin. Today I learned that industrial/conventional pork producers aim to produce a carcass with no more that 0.6″ of back fat. The minimum thickness for curing into lardo is 1″. It’s truly wonderful to have so many artisanal producers in our neck of the woods.

Ruhlman doesn’t, I think, talk much about before/after weights in Charcuterie or, at any rate, I missed it. Either way, it’ll be interesting to get the data on moisture loss. Come to think of it, what would the percentages look like in pastured pork versus industrial, saline-injected meat?

Ten days later, it's unwrapped.

This is what the fatback looked like once unwrapped from the plastic wrap and tin foil that held the cure in the fridge.

No, it's not exciting, but it's documented.

Poor lardo spends all of its time in the dark. Light will cause the fat to turn rancid so it’s wrapped in foil in the fridge and cured in the dark. On top of that, it’s swaddled in cheesecloth while it hangs.

All wrapped up in cheesecloth to protect it while it hangs.

I confess that it has more than a little to do with my odd reading habits of late, but locking things away in a darkened closet seems a little sinister to me. While charcuterie has very little to do with unnamable evil, there are a few commonalities.

Cure Your Belly Fat Now! Making Lardo.

garth — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 04:25:22 +0000

That’s not actually true, it’s back fat. However, I once saw one of those godawful women’s magazines at a grocery store and, after reading the headline “Cure your belly fat now!,” was honestly confused that they weren’t talking about bacon.

As I alluded to earlier, there’s a little over a pound of fatback curing in the fridge right now in anticipation of joining my mocetta (goat prosciutto, roughly) that’s hanging in the Harry Potter closet under the stairs.

First, let’s check in on the mocetta. It’s been hanging for 11 days and is definitely looking more like prosciutto that rotten meat.

As you can see, I was in the middle of doing knife maintenance and sharpening.

There was a bit of white mold turning to blue green on it so I performed a little surgery.

The nice thing about the bad mold was that I got to check on the progress of the drying. It seems to be moving along nicely. It’s distinctly firmer and the cured texture goes about a centimeter into the ham. It turning into food instead of rotting meat!

After a few more days (okay, a week), I checked back in on it and the “wound” seems to have healed itself and the ham is drying as intended with no more blue mold.

Moving on to the lardo.

First of all, it’s fat. Pure fat (almost) which has been salted and dried. I’m not sure if I’ve had it before but I hear good things and have a lot of fat back. Now, I’ve been served pork belly confit* (Yeah, that was these guys). And it was fantastic. Not cured though.

I started with Michael Rulman’s recipe from the book Charcuterie but, as ever, fiddled with it. Juniper berries were added and white pepper substituted for 1/4 of the black pepper.

From left to right, juniper berries, bay leaves, peppercorns, and basic cure #1

And now the meat. The recipe calls for fatback or, you know, the fat from the back of the pig. This may sounds obvious, but butchery terminology is rarely so straightforward. The boston butt, for example, comes from the part of the back directly over the front legs. What this implies about bostonians is unclear.

The pink that you see is muscle that came along when the fat was removed. The other side has little bits of stubble that remains from the process of scraping the pig. Pig, not carcass, is a deliberate word choice. It’s a carcass once it’s gutted or skinned, as I see it. Since scraping is the first step after killing and bleeding, I still see it as a pig.

Scraping is cool though. The pig doesn’t get skinned or plucked like sheep, goats, and poultry (the only animals I have firsthand experience with). Instead, the pig is scalded, or immersed or exposed to water around 145F and the hair and outer layer of skin is scraped off in an unpleasant and time-consuming manner. Basically, you skritch skritch skritch every inch of the pig’s skin with a knife or a pastry scraper or even a hog scraper if you’re well equipped.

The scraping process inevitably leaves a little bit of the hair behind. Like pinfeathers on broilers, this has resulted in a drive toward lighter-colored animals to satisfy consumer and producer demand for a blemish-free product. Like white poultry, the lack of pigmentation makes the animal less hardy in the sun. When I get pigs, I’m thinking a breed like the large black hog. Mmmm, hardy.

Due to misremembering the recipe, I was looking forward to posting this with pictures of the lardo leaving the fridge and being hung. Fortunately, I re-read the recipe and it’s got another three days. (Less botulism means more years to eat food!) I’m going with Ruhlman’s minimum this time as my stuff has been turning out saltier than ideal.

In other news, I’ve come into possession of a 5.5 pound leg of ram from a mature, adult ram who, until yesterday, displayed a bad attitude toward children. During the butchering, the meat smelled intensely of the flavor of lamb. He was also tremendously fatty with much more marbling than other lambs/goats I’ve and the meats has a deep red color. Much of the odor faded while he hung, which is why one hangs meat, I guess.

I am a bit bereft of recipe ideas for the leg. Suggestions? I’d like to find something to highlight the powerful flavor and muscle development in the same way that coq au vin is best with a gamy old rooster.

Thoughts?

Duck week chez Dropstone (Dark Days ’10-’11)

Lauren — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 06:54:10 +0000

So I’ve been feeling bad about not cooking the ducks from a while back. Garth, meantime, has gotten into charcuterie. This has led to an accidental convergence of Meals of Duck here at Dropstoneland.

Sunday night:

Alton Brown’s Mighty Duck, with homegrown duck (with Laughing Crow garlic, organic orange juice, market mixed kale from Stoney Plains, and Bluebird Grains farro/emmer.

Last year for my Dark Days debut, I made roasted duck with some other stuff. I wasn’t super impressed, and in the comments, a couple people suggested the Alton Brown recipe. So I aimed for that this week, though I used plain orange juice instead of pineapple-orange.


Crispy duck after Alton Brown	Kale in duck fat, and farro boiled with duck stock and a bit of the duck brine	Plated duck, kale, and farro

Duck Week Meal #1 Ingredients roundup!
Homegrown: duck (Canadian organic feed), thyme
Grown by people we know: garlic & shallots (Laughing Crow),
Local sources: kale (Stoney Plains Farm — used instead of chard); Bluebird Grains farro/emmer
Organic: Orange juice
The usual exemptions: Salt, peppercorns, sherry vinegar (Spanish).

Very simple meal, ingredient-wise, and though there seem to be a lot of steps it was pretty easy in terms of labor, too. The duck recipe included the greens, and we added the farro as a side dish in place of a rice-ish dish — a brown rice or hearty white would also suit. I added a dash of the brine to the grain cooking liquid, as well as a bit of duck stock, which definitely gave flavor and helped it stand up to the rest of the meal. Super tasty all around, though I was a bit confused at his cutting instructions (not to mention highly entertained by the instruction to “remove the popup thermometer”).

Monday night: duck prosciutto pizza à la Mrs. Wheelbarrow and Charcutepalooza.


Duck prosciutto pizza #1, in the oven.	Ingredients for duck prosciutto pizza, looking handsome.	Finished pizzas.

SUPER successful. I followed the dough directions (except for the chives) because we usually make one specific pizza dough recipe, and I thought it would be fun to mix it up. It turned out really well, though it was a bit soft and I punched holes through the second dough ball. I think I will always brush crusts with olive oil in the future; it made them super crispy and tasty.
I had no arugula so I blanched some baby kale immediately after the potatoes, and used them instead to form the bed for the duck egg. I also used pesto from homegrown garlic and basil (imported Italian olive oil) instead of arugula pesto, and instead of the garlic scape pesto I was looking for — mostly because I found the basil pesto first, as it was on the top layer of the freezer.

Duck Week Meal #2 Ingredients roundup!
Homegrown: duck (Canadian organic feed), basil & garlic in the pesto, duck egg, cayennes for red pepper flakes
Grown by people we know: potatoes (Laughing Crow as usual)
Local sources: kale (Stoney Plains Farm), mozzarella (Golden Glen)
Organic, non-local: Wheat in dough (Utah-grown)
West-coast!: Olive oil! Hooray for non-imported!
The usual exemptions: Salt, pepper, yeast, parmigiano cheese

Wednesday night: Cassoulet.

This was mostly Garth’s meal to make, starting with the confit of the duck legs a long while back. But as far as I know he followed Julia’s recipe more or less, except for the inclusion of some wine and a quart jar of tomatoes, and the use of goat chunks instead of lamb. Also we have no fresh parsley, and no thyme to speak of. Julia had some other super-complicated-seeming instructions that we didn’t follow, but …

Garth’s blurry picture:

And Garth’s description of the recipe-ish.

Duck Week Meal #3 Lauren’s unofficial ingredients roundup!
Homegrown: confit duck legs (Canadian organic feed); goat (organic fed from various sources), a kaffir lime leaf
Locally grown by people we know: pork meat for sausage and as chunks, from Within Reach Neighborhood Farm; bay leaf
Home-processed from local sources: tomatoes distributed by All One Family Farm;
Local sources: white beans (Willie Greens)
Homemade from non-local sources: bread (organic flour from Utah)
The usual exemptions: Salt, pepper, cloves, yeast, wine, red wine vinegar.

Quick and Easy Cassoulet!

garth — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 05:44:19 +0000

This was the title of course offered down the street from us by the local parks and rec department. The joke, of course, is that we’d just ordered 15 muscovy ducks with the express purpose of making our own cassoulet. I now provide you with the timeline of the Official Dropstone Farms, LLC Quick and Easy Cassoulet.

1) Order ducklings. This saves you the tiresome labor of maintaining your own breeding stock.

2) Brood the ducklings on pasture and move them daily. Now you’ve got fewer slugs to deal with. Win.

3) Clean and process all 17 ducks in the pouring rain over the course of two days. Skip cumbersome hand-plucking by using a mechanical plucker and a labor-saving rotary scalder. Compost the leftover bits and use them to grow vegetables.

4) Reserve a pig from a neighboring farmer. Order it already butchered. Easy.

5) Grind, season, and stuff sausage. Use an electric meat grinder and mechanical stuffer. No sense putting in too much unnecessary labor, right?

6) Bone out a duck carcass and, after making prosciutto, render the fat and confit some duck legs.

7) Acquire two baby goats, deal with them for six months, butcher them at home (again composting), salt the hides, hang them for a few days, break down the carcasses with a broken meat saw, and bone out one loin roast.

8) Oh, just go pull a random hunk of pork out of the freezer! No sense getting carried away.

9) Let an entirely awesome farmer grow the beans for you.

10) Cut up and brown the sausage, pork, and goat.

11) Add beans, seasoning, and wine. Simmer on the woodstove for a day or so.

12) Add duck confit, home grown and preserved, natch. Home grown and home canned tomatoes. Season with some dried home grown chiles and cover with breadcrumbs.

12.5) Take advantage of the downtime to put some lardo on to cure. No sense not putting some more meat in storage.

13) Bake at 375F for twenty minutes. Stir in browned top layer and bake at 350F for another 45 minutes or so.

14) Eat. Collapse. Half-heartedly write blog post with promise of images coming soon. Also more about that lardo.

Because I’m out of freezer space, that’s why.

garth — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 02:08:11 +0000

Well, not really. As Lauren posted earlier, we’re doing fairly well at reducing the contents of our still-very-full chest freezers. And, with the departure (ascension? transfiguration?) of orange and blue I’ve renewed my interest in curing my own charcuterie. And it turns out there’s a blog challenge underway.

As is typical, I’m both ahead of and behind in the game. My duck prosciutto was finished before it was supposed to be and next month’s isn’t started yet. Oh well. Orange’s leg is curing in the Harry Potter closet under the stairs, delicately suspended about a huge pile of musical instruments, so that puts me ahead of the game, maybe. Except that’s not what’s supposed to be curing right now. Now as in my youth, I suck at following along with the class.

Home-grown duck home-cured in the guest room. The knife is my souvenir Portuguese lamb butchering knife.The recipes is from Ruhlman's book Charcuterie.

The prosciutto turned out well. Perhaps a bit too salty but it’s supposed to be that way, right? Also, I don’t know if the white stuff is mold or or salt. Research time.

The mocetta (goat ham) is curing under the stairs. This is day four.

This is the hind leg of one of our goats. He’s curing according to Hank’s recipe for Mocetta or goat prosciutto. Well, except for the fact that I forgot the bay. Twice. It cured in the fridge for a total of three weeks and will need to hang for 2-6 months. I suspect it’ll be on the longer side of things because it’s pretty humid here. There’s a gob of white on the bottom left that I think is fat, but I’ve got my eye on it.

When I get around to it, I’ll hang some lardo in there as well because I finally managed to subdivide the fatback from our latest big. It’s inconvenient to work with a single bag containing all the fat from a pig. I did the same with the five(!) livers from the previous pig. No, the pig did not have five livers, the other customers did want their livers so I was forced to save them. And then toss them in a ziplock and freeze them into an undifferentiated mass of offal. Note to self: don’t do that. Also, make paté.

On the upside, seems like other charcuterizers on the internets have to build complicated temperature and humidity management systems. I checked out our unheated guest room/office/library and found it have perfect conditions for curing meat, right down to starting at a lower temperature and becoming slightly warmer as it cures. It is becoming clear to my why subsistence farmers have traditionally butchered in the fall/winter. And that I like my Cascadian climate.

If you look closely you can make out an ATA flight case for a Sho~Bud Superpro pedal steel guitar.Yes, I do have strange hobbies.

Freezer meatloaf (Dark Days ’10-’11)

Lauren — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 04:23:12 +0000

So it turns out that my challenge in Dark Days is not local food so much as it is new recipes. I’ll be in the kitchen cooking away, and thinking “this is awesome! this is delicious and super local! I should post it!” only to remember that I used it last year. This has happened to me, so far, with sausage and sauerkraut and smoked salmon/leek/squash/kale/pasta pile. And again yesterday, with meatloaf.

But wait! I said. This time it will be different! It will consist entirely of things from the freezer!!

Last fall we had a lot of too-imperfect-to-sell, farmer-grade produce from our farm mentor, Betsey at Laughing Crow. Usually that’s, say, onions that are fine but didn’t cure well so will spoil soon, or things with small blemishes. The outcome of this was that we’d suddenly have a few pounds of shallots, or onions, or whatever, that needed to be dealt with right away — so we’d spend an evening chopping and freezing onion-family bulbs.

In the case of garlic, I learned a cool trick where I put several peeled heads in the food processor (aka FoPro), whizzed it until it was pretty finely chopped but not paste yet, and put it in a quart ziploc and squished it flat to freeze. The result is now dubbed a garlic tile; when we are too lazy to chop fresh garlic, we can just break off a corner of the tile.

So here are my baggies of celery, carrot, and shallot, and my garlic tile.

Loosely following Elise’s recipe, I sautéed all that up with (clearly non-local) olive oil. The carrots were big because they had been frozen in round slices, so I pulsed it all in the FoPro for a couple seconds.

Into the big glass bowl with two pounds of ground beef, raised on the Kitsap peninsula; a cup of bread crumbs from homemade bread (organic Utah flour); and one precious backyard chicken egg. Salt and pepper and that was it! Baked at 350°. Following Alton’s instructions, I put it in for ten minutes and assembled my glaze while I waited.

Garth has a thing about ketchup, as discussed in my meatloaf post from last year, but I wanted to see if I could fake it without actual ketchup, to his satisfaction. When I canned tomatoes last September, I had a bunch of juice left over, so I reduced it and froze it in quarter-pint jars. I combined one of those jars in a saucepan with a spoonful of honey. Garth wanted me to put some Worcestershire sauce, but I looked at the bottle (HFCS, of course) and thought about it, and decided that I would try some miso to get at the umami that the Worcestershire provides. So: concentrated tomato juice, honey, a couple dollops of miso: basically ketchup. Very successful as a meatloaf glaze.

While the meatloaf finished cooking — aiming for 150° — I boiled some Laughing Crow potatoes and mashed ‘em up with homemade butter and yogurt, from Fresh Breeze cream and milk, respectively. I had some Brussels sprouts from Nash’s Organics, which I halved and sautéed in bacon fat with garlic.

Nom nom nom.

Ingredients roundup!
Homegrown: carrots, tomato juice
Grown by people we know: shallot, garlic, celery, potatoes, Brussels sprouts
Homemade from local sources: Fresh Breeze dairy (butter, yogurt)
Local sources: Honey
Homemade from non-local, organic sources: bread (organic Utah flour)
Unknowns: miso (maybe someday I can make my own!)
The usual exemptions: salt, pepper, olive oil.

Freezer-emptying time

Lauren — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 21:20:18 +0000

Silly as it seems to have ripe peppers, freshly-processed chickens, tons of herbs, and tomatoes coming soon, but not use them, I’m turning to frozen herbs and frozen roasted peppers and tomatoes plus a chicken from last fall to make a variation on this pulled chicken recipe. Gotta get the freezer emptied out in preparation for another cow (next week?) and pig (August) and more chickens … not to mention the tomato harvest that I hope is coming.

Dark Days Challenge: Intro

Lauren — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 09:07:36 +0000

So, as previously mentioned, we are aiming to do the 3rd Annual Dark Days of Winter Eat Local Challenge (!) aka Dark Days. The challenge is to eat one meal per week that’s as Sustainable, Organic, Local, and Ethical as possible — for the whole winter pretty much! November 15 to March 31.

One of the things I feel compelled to do to start with is to 1) rearrange the criteria and 2) define “local” and our exceptions.

Because we tried (and mostly failed) to grow commercially this year as well as for ourselves, my first stop on this project would be to have the meal be as homegrown as possible. This year was our first year raising poultry for meat so it’s exciting to be able to have a complete meal grown by hand (since I can’t grow enough soy to make tofu, yet if ever, so local vegetarianism is still out). But, on account of how we mostly failed, I also need to learn to be easy enough on myself to move on to my next criterion — Local. We are fortunate to have lots of farmers within a 20-mile radius at the Bainbridge Island Farmers’ Market and winter market, and even more within a 100-mile radius if we make it over to Seattle for the U-District or Ballard markets. And we are even more fortunate to know many of our favorite farmers personally, and even when we don’t, to have enough visibility into their methods to be completely confident in the ethics and the sustainability of their products, even if they aren’t certified Organic (now a USDA-owned term that doesn’t mean too much to me at all, really).

So — I’m going with Homegrown, Local, Ethical (re: animal welfare, labor practices, and land use) and Sustainable (re: labor practices, land use, and economic viability), Organic. (HLESO isn’t as nice as SOLE though.)

The other question is — what does local mean? What are our exceptions?

Laura says:

What does local mean?
Traditionally, local food challenges call for a 100 mile radius. Winter time is more difficult in many climates, especially if you’re new to eating locally, so my default definition is 150 miles. You can choose to make your radius smaller or slightly larger as you need. Typical exceptions are oils, coffee, chocolate and spices. If you’re making fewer or more exceptions, please note that on your first post.

Our 100-mile radius

We’re in a bit of a strange but sweet spot as we are in the middle of Puget Sound — our 100 miles includes a good deal of water (yay seafood) but also quite a lot of very good farmland, including our most excellent dairy, Fresh Breeze Organic from Lynden, WA. Of course we get all our local B.I. farms as well as Skagit River Ranch, Nash’s Organic Produce, and Bluebird Grains (yay farro!!). We don’t get quite to Wenatchee or to Okanagan, where a lot of good summer fruits come from, but that’s OK as it’s not summer. I wish we reached Alvarez Farms, where we could get beans and peanuts. I guess if we did 150 miles we could …

So — I’m aiming for 100 as ideal, 150 as a fantastic compromise … we’ll see.

Our regular exceptions shall be:

olive oil; other oils (butter will be within 100 miles)
salt & pepper — still looking for ways to make these
wine will often be from close to home, but not always — assume it’s not; we’ll note when it is
vinegar, until we learn to make our own
citrus, as needed for taste that is not vinegar-y (I had lemon trees but they died, and the turkeys ate the lime tree)
baking goods
- our organic flour comes from Utah
- our organic sugar comes from Hawaii
- our various other ingredients and flavorings are organic, and their origins will be described as appropriate (but most come from Bob’s Red Mill)

I am sure there are more additions and refinements to come, but for now … to bed.

Inadvertent 100% homegrown meal

Lauren — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 04:39:13 +0000

… with the obvious exceptions of the wine, salt, pepper.

Chicken: grown by us.
Beets, potatoes, onions, carrots, garlic, roasting under the chicken: grown by us.
Butter for basting: made by us from cream from organic, happy Washington pastured cows from Fresh Breeze.
Stock for helping veggies cook: made by us from another chicken we grew.

It wasn’t even on purpose!

PS Roasted chicken + root veggies = it must be fall. Also, it’s been raining ALL DAY.

Diagonal dinner (halibut cheek with asparagus, garlic scapes, and fresh garden peas)

Lauren — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 04:04:18 +0000

Diagonal dinner (halibut cheek with asparagus, garlic scapes, and fresh garden peas), originally uploaded by laurenipsum.

In a hot pan with bacon grease, started before the fish went on, went minced shallot and sliced asparagus and garlic scapes. We put the fat asparagus stalk segments in first, to get more cooking time than the skinnier ones, the flower buds, and the scapes. Partway through I decided it should have peas so I ran out to pick several pods, which I dumped straight into the pan as I shelled them.

Halibut cheeks went into another pan with melted butter. We worked from this recipe for the ‘but cheeks, lightly breading them with flour with salt, pepper, a bit of cayenne, and paprika. These cheeks were HUGE and took longer to cook than that recipe; I only bought three at the fishmonger today, and we only ate the two smaller ones, one each. The other will make fish tacos for both of us. HUGE. For reference, we often cook up 6+ normal-sized cheeks to make tacos — they are usually much, much smaller.

After frying and removing the cheeks, I deglazed their pan with some vermouth, lemon juice, and water mixed together, reduced a bit, combined that with the veggies in their pan, and plated (I’m like Iron Chef!).

All in all, a very successful meal. We are happy to have more than one way to cook ‘but cheeks now — previously we have exclusively grilled and served as fresh soft tacos.

Shelling peas on the couch

Lauren — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 03:47:37 +0000

Shelling peas on the couch, originally uploaded by laurenipsum.

The shelling peas are coming on strong so we picked a big bowlful to shell while watching Buffy. I use the shells to make stock in case we need to feed any vegetarians, and I blanched and then quick-cooled the peas right in the colander we shelled them into.

3 cups shelling peas, June 22 2009, originally uploaded by laurenipsum.

Does what it says on the tin.

I spent the day at the Ballard Farmers’ Market

Lauren — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 06:43:13 +0000

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.)

Harvest moon dinner

Lauren — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 04:41:15 +0000

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.

So it’s early fall, after all

Lauren — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 04:57:15 +0000

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!

YOU GUYS! I CANNED!

Lauren — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 04:16:53 +0000

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?

Burrito fixins

Lauren — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 04:37:47 +0000

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.

“Do I have to explain the obvious? … We have to lock the doors! Someone might put zucchini in our house!”

Lauren — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 14:52:37 +0000

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.

Harvests and meals

Lauren — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 14:35:28 +0000

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.