Dropstone Farms

Too many delicious meals in my blogs today to round up, but I will write ours up soon.

Novella Carpenter’s non-published op ed on Thanksgiving. Novella is smart and awesome and bad-ass. Thank you, turkeys.

Via Kimberly, a fantastic poem:

Grace
Rafael Jesús González

Thanks & blessing be
to the Sun & the Earth
for this bread & this wine,
    this fruit, this meat, this salt,
               this food;
thanks be & blessing to them
who prepare it, who serve it;
thanks & blessing to them
who share it
     (& also the absent & the dead.)
Thanks & blessing to them who bring it
        (may they not want),
to them who plant & tend it,
harvest & gather it
        (may they not want);
thanks & blessing to them who work
        & blessing to them who cannot;
may they not want — for their hunger
      sours the wine
          & robs the salt of its taste.
Thanks be for the sustenance & strength
for our dance & the work of justice, of peace.

Gracias

Gracias y benditos sean
el Sol y la Tierra
por este pan y este vino,
     esta fruta, esta carne, esta sal,
                este alimento;
gracias y bendiciones
a quienes lo preparan, lo sirven;
gracias y bendiciones
a quienes lo comparten
(y también a los ausentes y a los difuntos.)
Gracias y bendiciones a quienes lo traen
        (que no les falte),
a quienes lo siembran y cultivan,
lo cosechan y lo recogen
       (que no les falte);
gracias y bendiciones a los que trabajan
       y bendiciones a los que no puedan;
que no les falte — su hambre
     hace agrio el vino
           y le roba el gusto a la sal.
Gracias por el sustento y la fuerza
para nuestro bailar y nuestra labor
        por la justicia y la paz.

(The Montserrat Review, Issue 6, Spring 2003
[nominated for the Hobblestock Peace Poetry Award];
author’s copyrights.)

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… 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.

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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.

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So we recently figured out how to turn on stats for the blog and it turns out that many people get here by searching for “straw bale root cellar,” which is something I posted about earlier after shamelessly stealing the idea from Throwback at Trapper Creek.

It's a Futurama joke. Sorry

Unfortunately, our straw bale root cellar failed miserably. While Throwback built her cellar in the barn we, sadly deficient in barns, built ours under the back porch and stretched a tarp overtop of it. End result was that critters and water got in resulting in the food and straw bales being eaten and rotted respectively. Bummer. But live and learn, food storage is a skill and, despite losing about 30% of what we stored over the winter I think we did alright. Mostly we don’t want anyone following our example thinking it’s a road to success.

And the great thing about gardening is that, even when food goes bad, it’s not wasted. It’ll either get fed to the poultry or composted. Either way it turns into healthy soil and healthy food. It’s just a matter of time.

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Amusing top-to-carrot ratio, originally uploaded by laurenipsum.

I was picking carrots for dinner and I thought “Oh the tops are all small, I’ll gather several” and then I pulled up this tiny carrot top and I got this huge lovely carrot. My six-inch santoku knife included for reference.

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It’s getting brighter. Slowly. And the snow is starting to melt and maybe the hoophouses will uncollapse and the poultry will get to go outside and play. In the meantime, please enjoy the following reminders of summer, when you could wear shorts and dig potatoes out of warm dirt.

Handfuls of potatoes!

Attentive readers will recognize Lord Potato. He was regally delicious.

Also, Mr. Klassy may have laid an egg. Rooster fail.

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We’ve been processing tomatoes, originally uploaded by laurenipsum.

… a little at a time. We don’t have a pot that holds more than four quart-jars anyway so it works out.

We have also slow-roasted and frozen a couple of pounds, and have dried some too.

Pictured: Green Zebra; Ananas Noire; Black Prince; Brandywine; more varieties whose names I don’t know; some basil; an apple.

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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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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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Impromptu harvest, originally uploaded by laurenipsum.

Garth’s mom was over and we were showing her the beets and the carrots, and we decided to pull some up for dinners and preserving.

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Lord Potato and his underlings, originally uploaded by laurenipsum.

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