Dropstone Farms

We had sort of a lull in the meals around here in general, after Thanksgiving. We had a lot of sandwiches and the like. But recently, we have had a few meals that were wonderfully farm-based!

Bean & veggie soup, to counteract the over-meatiness of Thanksgiving

• homegrown Scarlet Emperor beans
• homegrown kale
• homegrown chard
• homegrown carrots
• jar of homegrown tomatoes! first use of a tomato jar
• farmers’ market onion
• farmers’ market garlic
• turkey stock from our farmers’ market Thanksgiving turkey, market onions, homegrown carrot.

Last night, for a dinner party:

Farro risotto with scarlet runner beans
From Lorna Sass’ runner beans with farro risotto and saffron.

• homegrown Scarlet Emperor beans (a variety of scarlet runner bean)
• another farmers’ market onion
• stock made from homegrown pea shells (yes, it worked)
• homegrown rosemary
• Bluebird Grains farro (emmer)
• organic walnuts from the bulk bin
• saffron! which was brought to us as a gift!

The olive oil, wine, parmesan, salt, and pepper were, as always, imported.

It was accompanied by salmon baked on salt and a green bean and almond dish, and then a delicious homemade ricotta cheesecake for dessert. Yes, I mean the ricotta was homemade, not just the cheesecake. No, not by me.

Tonight:

Semi-traditional cassoulet

• homegrown carrots
• homegrown rosemary & thyme
• homegrown leeks
• homegrown chard
• a pint jar of homegrown tomatoes
• yet more farmers’ market onions
• farmers’ market garlic
• dried white beans from the bulk bin
• Beef short ribs from our cow, separated (from each other! not from the fat and other deliciousness! keep all of that.)
• Andouille sausage from Skagit River Ranch
• Bacon from the Bacon of the Month, Garth’s last-year Xmas present

We didn’t so much use a recipe, but here are the steps we did:

1. Soak your beans overnight, or use the quick-soak method, or use canned beans. Drain before using.
2. Preheat oven to ~325-350°.
3. Chop and fry 1-2 slices of bacon in the bottom of your 6-quart cast iron dutch oven. (Did I forget to put that on the ingredient list? Well, you need one.)
4. Remove bacon with a slotted spoon, and plop in your short ribs, flat-side down, to brown. If you have too many for your pot, do it in shifts. Brown both sides. Remove when done.
5. Add your sliced sausage and brown both sides of each slice. Remove.
6. Add chopped onion and leeks. Soften.
7. Add chopped chard stems (use them like celery), carrot medallions, and minced garlic. Cook until chard is soft-ish.
8. Add chopped chard leaves, and make them sort of wilty. Also add the herbs at this stage.
9. In whatever order you want, add all the meats, the drained beans, the jar of tomatoes, 0 to 1 cup of wine, and water to cover. You don’t really need to use stock, as there are plenty of bones and other deliciousnesses in here. Don’t worry if they look to be layered; it will all mix in as you stir and as it boils.
10. Stick it in the oven and cook it until it is done. We left ours at 325° for ~2 hours, and then moved it to the stove top to continue simmering for a few minutes while we heated up some bread in the oven.
11. Don’t over-serve yourself. It is very rich. We only ate half a bowl each (but Garth wants me to note that as I read this to him, he is becoming hungry again!).

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This is a big bag of onions, sitting in a chair. (Day 22), originally uploaded by laurenipsum.

Today we went to get our turkey at the Port Townsend Farmers’ market, which was AWESOME. Someone there had this enormous bag of storage onions; we have been unable to get good storage onions at our market because of the wet summer — folks are selling eating/cooking onions but no one wants to say they will store. So I was super excited to find this HUGE bag for $40 (we didn’t weigh it but figure it is ~50 pounds?) that was advertised as storage onions. Now we have onions for the winter!

(And some to share … email or comment if you are local to us and want some of these. This is a LOT of onions.)

cross-posted to my silly personal blog; sorry for the repeat

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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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I have taken eggs to coworkers a few times already, and I will again, but today we got our first non-acquaintance/friend/coworker customer. A friend of our neighbor, or maybe a friend of a friend of our neighbor, she has food sensitivities that don’t allow her to eat chicken eggs. She emailed to say “is it true you have island-grown organic-fed duck eggs??” Happily, it is true, and we now have a regular customer, and she gets to have delicious non-sick-making eggs! Win all around.

One thing we currently do not have, unfortunately, however, is power. Farm blogging from (admittedly a hand-me-down) iPhone: what sort of person does that make me?

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Hey new chicken! Let’s have cuddles!, originally uploaded by laurenipsum.

This is Mr. Klassy. He is a Polish rooster. He came from our friend in Seattle, who cannot have roosters due to noise. He is not crowing yet, but he is trying …

I am on my way to a Kitsap Community & Agriculture Alliance meeting right now. Local readers should read their blog and get involved! Meetings are the second Tuesday of the month in Bremerton. If you’re coming from Bainbridge, or anywhere in between, let us know and we can see about a carpool situation.

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So in response to Monday’s semi-cryptic post, the full story is that Monday I went over to Shannon’s (of Red Barn Farm) place and helped her process the batch of birds from which we’d purchased a half-dozen a few weeks before. I emailed to see if we could help with the processing and the answer was an enthusiastic yes. So I took a few days off and, with a certain amount of trepidation, drove over to the peninsula to dispatch some birds.

We set up a processing line under the guidance of Nikki of Pheasant Fields Farm. Nikki also supplied a mess of equipment and a neato keano eviscerating table. Eviscerating tables are awesome. It’s just a seamless stainless steel table with a hole in the middle you can use to wash away… let’s go with “material.” My contribution was enthusiasm and a Granton boning knife.

The transition from animal to food was surprisingly quick, I’m relieved to say. Processing chickens is an unpleasant and pretty distasteful chore, but it does not entail either cruelty or untoward angst.

Some things that I’d recommend for processing chickens:

1) Wear rubber boots. There is a lot of water sloshing around.
2) Bring more ice than you think you’ll need.
3) Bring more cutting boards than you think you’ll need.
4) Sharp knives. More humane, less work, safer.
5) Bring pliers for plucking feathers. The plucker won’t get everything.

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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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Solar hen house vents. Solar fence energizers. Solar everything.

It seems that at some point in the past few years we’ve reached a point where solar isn’t an “alternative” power source, it’s just the easiest way to do something. Why would I, for example, want to deal with a battery charger to keep my electric fence charged? Why would I want to run wiring to the roof of the hen house or greenhouse to power the ventilation? I don’t. I’m a lazy man. It makes me wonder at what point it’s going to be cheaper and easier to wire houses for solar and wind instead of dealing with hooking them to the grid. It wasn’t long ago that the cool kids were wiring their houses with Cat-5 ethernet for their home networks. Then wifi became ubiquitous and that’s just a mess of useless cable now.

In other news, we finally got real growlights installed for the seedlings. I ordered them over the internet. I’m hoping that the cheerful vegetables clearly visible from the outside of the house will at least give pause to the paramilitary DEA agents as they conduct a no-knock raid on my home in anticipation of finding a stray, growlight-enable mary-g-wanna plant.

On a related note, craft distilling is a lot closer to legal in Washington state. There is a lot of tremendously good work being done around food and small farming by Washington regulatory agencies.

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From here or, less pull quotably, here.

Turns out that the state of Washington is running a pilot program to allow retailers to offer samples of beer and wine. I approve.

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