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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I couldn’t wait for the last holiday, but this one snuck up on me and I didn’t even prepare a holiday meal. All the same, we ate well, with ribeye steaks (we are using up the last of our cow from last year, in preparation for the new cow in a couple of weeks), and garlic scapes and spring onions, both from farmers at Pike Place Market, on the grill, as well as our current standard of plenty of salad with sliced radishes and fresh shelling peas.

I feel some stress about the fact that the year has peaked today; the garden is way behind and we are still not sure if we will do meat birds for sale and we have lots of lettuce but the tomatoes are still in pots in the greenhouse and and and … But we are doing OK. We are raising turkeys and a flock of 25 chickens for ourselves and our neighbors to eat, so we will be supplied with chicken for the winter. In spring I made a little spreadsheet to do the planting math for me, and it tells me that I still have 60-90 days of good growing season. So here’s hoping that the downhill side of summer is good and we have squash after all.

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In honor of yesterday’s equinox, I hurried home from work and Garth and I cooked dinner together, with a bit of prep done by him while I was still at work.

I had previously purchased some lamb chops from Skagit River Ranch with a spring celebration meal in mind, so Garth thawed them and rubbed with fresh rosemary and thyme from the garden, and some basil from a pesto cube that I had put in the freezer in September or so. When I got home I took out some bread dough from my new bible, Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day. I started cooking some of our homegrown Scarlet Emperor beans for the delicious scarlet runner beans with farro risotto and saffron.
We went outside and picked a few leaves from each of our lettuces that overwintered. We also got a nice tall leek that was a fall planting that survived the winter well, and some Merida overwintering carrots (but none as nice as this one). I sliced up the leek plus some farmers’ market garlic for the risotto, and while it was pressure-cooking (I even mostly followed the recipe!) we assembled a lovely salad of lettuce from our garden as well as that from another Kitsap farmer, with our carrots, plus a homemade dressing of olive oil hand-imported from California with vinegar and farmers’ market garlic.

Equinox salad closeup, apparently, originally uploaded by laurenipsum.

The lamb chops rested while we ate salad, and then we had the farro & homegrown beans in a bowl with chops on top.

Glossy, unfocused lamb chops with beans & farro risotto, originally uploaded by laurenipsum.

Welcome, spring! We missed you.

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So let the sun rise, bring hope where it once was forgotten

Just before noon, the snow started again, and I lit several candles on the hearth and Garth put another log on the fire. We made some bloody marys with homegrown and -canned dilly beans (just you wait, we’ll learn to make vodka someday!) and settled down to open our solstice stockings, which I sewed on Friday. Mine contained a super fancy mechanical pencil, and a delicious-looking German marzipan cake, some CUTE pink moleskine notebooks!!, and a beautiful bottle of Basil Hayden bourbon. Garth’s had a little gym-style whistle for calling the dogs in from the woods, and a small length of dinosaur-fossil-patterned fabric he was coveting at the fabric store but which sold out before we got there, a chunk of British goat cheddar, a cute bamboo rice paddle, a sink drain screen that we hope doesn’t suck, and the Seed Savers catalog that came in the mail this week. Garth’s big present was the welding class that he took in November, and I have some long johns on the way.

This afternoon we will walk the dogs in the snow, visit the chickens, and leaf through the first seed catalog of the year, dreaming about what will be in the next year, and reflecting on what was. And also we will drink some fancy bourbon. Happy new year!

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… I can’t wait.

Anyone have any good solstice plans?

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