Dropstone Farms

Lately we have been making a lot of dishes that will last a long time, because we have also been canning, and the prospect of cooking anew each evening is too daunting. So it’s been soups that last for days, for convenience’s sake.

Recent eatin’:

• Eggs! omg eggs.
• Frittata with green and white things (zucchini, leeks, fall peas, mozzarella)
• broccoli and cauliflower cheese soup (veggies from the market; secret to success of a cheese soup is to make a mornay sauce first and then thin it)
• Potatoes in various ways
• Tortilla soup featuring zucchini, potatoes, tomatoes, corn
• Corn on the cob!

Upcoming very shortly:

• Eggplant — probably miso-marinated and then roasted
• Artichokes — steamed as usual, unless I can learn how to grill them
• More corn on the cob

Coming sooner than I am really ready for: greens, greens, and more greens, thanks to winter.

Things we have canned: that’s another post for another day.

Projects we are currently in the middle of:

• Expanding the chicken coop, as Garth mentioned
• Making a makeshift above-ground straw bale root cellar, as Garth also mentioned
• Getting some cards printed up to hand out at the Tilth Producers conference
• Getting some mushrooms going (will be getting spores from Fungi Perfecti)
• Figuring out if we will actually build a greenhouse this winter

… and so much more I am sure I am forgetting about five things. And that doesn’t even include the basic things like “make sure I have clean clothes” or “do not let the bathroom be overtaken by mildew”! But those are overrated, right? Right?

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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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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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1. Can we dry overripe shelling peas, which are too starchy to eat fresh, and use them like split peas?
2. Is there any use for the fibrous but still fresh and juicy shells of the peas that did not get overripe? Make stock maybe?
3. If one boy duck is picking on the other boy duck, pulling his feathers out and whatnot, and we want to get rid of one and keep the other to breed, do we keep the aggressive one (to breed strong babies) or the passive one (to breed docile babies)?
4. Where in the world am I supposed to find time to post more often?

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Sometimes someone writes a really well-researched and well-written book on our relationship with food and sometimes someone draws a smart-assed web comic about the same thing.

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It was FREAKING HOT here today. I didn’t get around to unpacking the thermometer we bought today until about 6pm, at which point the thermometer still read 80°. Too hot for Laurens!

Every time we go to the farmers’ market, I come home with more starts. I think Garth is becoming frustrated with this, but they always look so healthy and happy and delicious! First it was the broccoli, then like twelve cauliflower (I didn’t realize there were 4 plants to a pot; I should have looked more closely), and today it was two containers of 10-15 leeks each, plus one container with four thriving little fava bean plants. I have only ever cooked fava beans once, when they came in our veggie box and my brother- and sister-in-law Cyrus and Anna were out to visit, and Anna taught me how to peel and cook (and peel again) them. So I am excited about those. It doesn’t sound like we’ll get a whole lot of beans from just a few plants, but all the same, post recipes if you’ve got ‘em.

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