Dropstone Farms

Subj: NEED MORE CHICKEN!!!

[We] are in ecstasy over here, post roast chicken. Do you have any more we could purchase? Also, could we sign up to order more now? How many can we reserve? We LOVE your chicken!!!

On being told the 48-hour deadline has passed so we can’t legally give them any more:

The chicken was *INCREDIBLE*. We had it last night.

And

And seriously the guy we ate last night was amazing. We roasted w/ 2 lemons (Marcella Hazan recipe) — nothing else — and it knocked it out of the park. We’re converted!!

Aw, thanks! (And thanks, chickens!)

I assume they’re using this recipe, Chicken with Lemons from Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking by Marcella Hazan. It looks wonderfully simple, which I find to be my favorite method of cooking these chickens, who have plenty of flavor of their own. (My current obsession with HF-W’s barbecue sauce notwithstanding. [I can't find the recipe online but it consists of garlic, salt, ketchup, mustard, soy sauce, and brown sugar, and a smidge of apple cider vinegar.])

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Our first batch of chickens this year went pretty well. We didn’t lose very many of them, and they had a good and uneventful life. Processing went smoothly too, once we resolved three different electrical issues (wrong extension cord = another trip to Lumberman’s; tankless hot water heater not working = trip home for a bucket with a spigot; fuses blowing at the house = trips back and forth to flip the breakers).

That batch of 75 birds all got claimed by existing customers, blog readers, or via word-of-mouth, so that was nice too — less work for us to market them!

Coming up soon here we have another smaller batch. These guys are the ones that the raccoons got into when they were still at home, so the flock is small. We will take reservations for about 35 chickens, then a waiting list beyond that. Eight are already claimed, so get your name in soon if you want chickens! They will be ready on July 31.

Sign up for this batch here: http://tinyurl.com/chickens2010-2. Don’t forget that the WSDA requires you to pick them up from us within 48 hours of processing — so you’ll need to be around on the 31st or Aug 1-2 for pickup.

Unless we sell out more quickly than I expect, I’ll be down at the farmers’ market next week (the 24th) taking reservations and meeting new customers. You can bring deposits to me there, if you like.

As always, thanks for your support!

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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.

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Our locally-raised pig was slaughtered a couple of weeks ago and was finally butchered and ready to pick up last Saturday. Yay! We put everything into the freezer but kept a package of 2 pork chops out for dinner that night, and grilled them up with my favorite not-very-local marinade — red wine vinegar, soy sauce, and garlic (island-grown).

There had just been a Dark Days email list thread about what to do with winter squash, and I thought the squash mac & cheese sounded fantastic, so I improvised. We don’t have a pasta extruder (?) so I made some short wide pastas from organic flour (Utah) and homegrown eggs, and mostly followed the recipe … except I used a homegrown acorn squash*, a homemade chicken stock cube, half-and-half (Fresh Breeze Farms), full-fat homemade ricotta from Fresh Breeze cream, Tillamook cheddar cheese (non-organic but non-rBST too) and an artisanal parmigiano reggiano imported by an independent cheese company in California. The recipe turned out great — more of a casserole than a cheese saucey slippery thing, but that’s OK with me; I like casseroles.

Rounded off with a fresh salad of greens grown by Butler Green Farms, this made a lovely warm homey meal. And pretty, too; I should get back into the habit of taking pictures.

Homegrown: squash; chicken stock; eggs for pasta
Homemade from local ingredients: ricotta
Homemade from organic ingredients: pasta (flour); bread crumbs for mac & cheese (ground up by me)
Island-grown: pork; garlic; salad greens
Local: half-and-half
Local-ish: Tillamook cheddar cheese
Happy: parm
Unknown: red wine vinegar; soy sauce; salt; nutmeg; cayenne; olive oil.

* After I cut its top off, I doubted my original idea, as the recipe calls for peeling and cubing it, and acorn squash are so deeply grooved on the sides that I wasn’t sure I’d be able to peel it effectively without wasting lots of squashflesh. Here is my current method, which seemed to work OK: I peeled what I could reach (the peaks) with a vegetable peeler. Then after cutting the whole squash in half, I used the big heavy knife to cut it along the valleys — that is, I made several spears with half a valley on each edge and a (naked) peak in the middle. Then I used a paring knife to trim the skin from the sides of each spear. It worked pretty well, and wasn’t even as fraught with danger of stabbing oneself in the hand as I had worried.

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I missed a Dark Days meal this week — not because we weren’t eating delicious local food, just that there was no one big meal, and we were out of town for the weekend. We’re out this weekend too (and the next, ack) but I may write up a generic soup (“Piles part 2″) if I get a chance.

By the end of the month we’ll have a half a pig! I look forward to tasty pork recipes coming up.

(like posole!)

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I was home not-quite-sick-but-not-great on Monday, the solstice, so we built a big fire in the fireplace and did our Solstice stockings at noon instead of after work as planned. And we cooked all day, which is what really makes it a holiday, I think.

Our pretty Blue Slate hen turkey met an untimely end back in October, about four weeks ahead of schedule, when she got over the fence into the neighbor dogs’ yard. Poor girl. They didn’t kill her, but we had to. Wanting to make the best of it, we were able to salvage about 3/4 of the meat, only discarding the portions with puncture wounds and bleeding.

After also checking Julia, Bittman, and some butchery books we have around, I consulted the one with the best photos — The River Cottage Meat Book — for info on breaking down a bird, since it’s not something I’m very good at. I’m the Evisceratrix, but a carver I am not. At the same time, also in the Meat book, I noticed the author suggested using turkey legs to make coq au vin rather than a, well, coq. So when I bagged up Poor Girl, I set aside the legs, thighs and drumsticks still connected, in their own bag, ready to be coqauvinified.

We started by cubing and frying Garth’s home-cured bacon, made of Skagit River Ranch pork belly. Removed that from the pan and added one chopped shallot, organically grown by Alvarez Farm just outside of the 150 mile range, over near Yakima. Removed the shallot and then pan fried the turkey legs, separated into thighs and drumsticks, which we’d lightly rolled in flour seasoned with salt and pepper.

And then! We have hit a milestone in our cooking lives! We added a quarter cup of vermouth (it called for brandy, but we had none) and lit it on fire, on purpose! It was neat. Whoosh! Then chicken and vermouth were removed, and wine went in to deglaze, and then some stock. The whole mess — bacon, shallot, and turkey legs, plus chopped homegrown carrot, thyme, rosemary, parsley, and market bay leaves, and homegrown and -canned tomatoes went in to the pan. At that point it just simmered in a 250° oven until the turkey was fally aparty — a couple of hours at least. Then we put it back on the burner, removed all the solids from the broth, and added some butter and a couple pinches of flour and whisked to make a thick, delicious gravy.

I also made some quick oven fries from Yukon Golds grown by farmer Laura at the Soup Garden here on Bainbridge — just toss the cut potatoes with some oil, salt, pepper, and minced garlic (Laughing Crow, as usual). If the fries are accompanying burgers or something less rich and flavorful than coq au vin, I often also add ground cumin and cayenne. I cook them at about 425° until the fattest fry is cooked all the way through.

Coq au vin and oven fries, garnished with homegrown parsley, and served with island-grown and -produced wine, made for a fantastic Solstice meal and celebration of the past year and the year to come with the returning light.

Homegrown: turkey, carrots, tomatoes, parsley, rosemary, thyme
Bainbridge Island farms & market: garlic, potatoes, bay, drinking wine
Local-ish: shallot (Alvarez)
Organic: butter (Organic Valley)
Unknown: the usual (salt pepper oil), cooking wine (from somewhere in France), vermouth

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It’s Part 1 because I am sure this won’t be our first display of cozy comfort food this winter.

My mom often made something she called Swiss steak, which I remember fondly. I was afraid that when I went to find a recipe, her version would be nothing like the canonical Swiss steak, but actually something with variations that moved it beyond recognition as Swiss steak — and therefore that every time I spoke highly of the dish in the past, I was either talking about something that didn’t exist, or leading people astray to a dish that was not tasty.

I should have realized that something with only like three fundamental ingredients is not only very hard to screw up, but also absolutely invites and encourages variations. So I went with memory, the Better Homes & Gardens Cookbook recipe, a phone call to my mom, a version published by one of Accidental Hedonist’s guest bloggers, and my current ideas of what tastes good.

Starting with two top round steaks, originally from On the Lamb Farm in Arlington, most recently from the freezer (one from last year’s cow, shame), I cut them into pieces and dredged them in flour (organic, non-local) spiked with salt, pepper, cayenne, and Hungarian paprika (from a great local spice store) and seared in canola (organic) and then olive (non-organic) oil when the canola ran out. After removing the steaks from the pan, I added two sliced onions from Laughing Crow Farm here on Bainbridge, and then after that cooked partway, several cloves of chopped garlic, also from Laughing Crow. When the onions and garlic were soft, I dumped in a quart jar of home-canned, homegrown tomatoes, as well as a couple bags/half jars of homegrown tomato product (some pizza sauce, some roasted and frozen) that I found in the freezer when I was looking for the meat. In went a splash of wine, an ice cube of homemade beef stock, an ice cube of homegrown oregano and another of parsley, and a bay leaf from the farmers’ market. Turned it up to simmer and left it until the meat was fork-tender (about a hour and a quarter).

Garth set out to make mashed potatoes (potatoes from Laughing Crow) but added too much milk (from Fresh Breeze, within 150 miles) so quickly added one of our eggs and some organic flour to make a batter for fried potato pancakes.

I quickly steamed some market green beans — also found while on freezer investigation — then drizzled with organic bottled lemon juice and served with a pat of organic, non-homemade butter.

Some brown stuff on a plate, with green beans. AKA Swiss steak (foreground) and potato pancakes (background).

While the meat was cooking, I made Anna’s simple plum torte with home-canned, homegrown Italian prunes, canned according to Food in Jars’ recipe, in honey (local, bought at Pike Place Market). The prunes weren’t solid when they came out, so instead of halved plums arranged on top of the torte, there is a sort of a thick smear of chunky jammy prunes across the whole thing. I ain’t arguing though; it tastes fantastic.

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Thanksgiving is our main holiday, now, since we started growing food. We had a low-key dinner, with just Garth’s folks and one friend, which was exactly what we needed. But we went all out all the same, with a pretty traditional menu that was mostly local and significantly homegrown. We grew the turkey as well as many of the veggies, and of what we didn’t grow, we know many of the other farmers by name.

Apparently I’m still recovering, though, as despite our enthusiasm and dedication to a local and homegrown Thanksgiving/harvest festival meal, I am late to the Dark Days update and can’t bring myself to do much more than list what we had. You’ll have to imagine the beautiful pictures and delicious flavors.

I prepared some things ahead of time, including making butter from Fresh Breeze Organic (saving the buttermilk for later). All of our dairy came from them, actually, as is usual for us. I also prepared the beets and cranberry sauce, listed below, ahead of time, as well as some sugared cranberries (very delicious), which were later joined on the snacks table by Bittman’s fiery roasted pumpkin seeds.

Turkey was homegrown, roasted simply with salt & pepper and basted with homemade butter for crisping in the oven at 425°, then moved to the Nesco roaster and finished at 325°. Gravy of course composed of delicious turkey drippings and stock made from simmering giblets and neck. Thanks, big guy.

Stuffing was made of homemade bread cubes were left out to get stale for a couple of days. Homegrown carrot, celery and garlic, and shallot from Alvarez Farms (within 150 miles) were sautéed with butter until soft. I added some apricots from Tonnemaker Farm (180 miles), which I dried at home this summer and reconstituted by soaking in warm water all day, and hazelnuts from a vendor whose name I don’t remember at the U-District market. All was tossed with the bread cubes and enough turkey stock to moisten everything. Added some more pats of butter on top to get everything nicely browning in the oven.

Mashed potatoes were a basic roasted garlic version with homegrown garlic and potatoes from Betsey at Laughing Crow here on Bainbridge.

We re-attempted a dish I burned last year at Thanksgiving, about which I was so heartbroken I never even managed to post about it: roasted Brussels sprouts with bacon and apple. This year the sprouts were from Rebecca at Persephone Farm. The bacon was home-cured and -smoked pork belly from Skagit River Ranch (<80 miles), and the apple was from Tonnemaker again. It made it through unburned this year, thanks to the newly-discovered warming drawer feature of our oven, and was delicious.

I cooked thick-sliced homegrown carrots in a pan according to Bittman’s quick-glazed carrots recipe and garnished with homegrown parsley.

A story on NPR about ginger a couple of weeks ago inspired me, so I gave in and used decidedly non-local oranges (organic satsumas, even though they were twice as expensive as non-organic!) and similarly decidedly non-local (though also organic) ginger to make quick-pickled ginger orange beets with homegrown beets, onion, and garlic. Huge hit. I am considering trying to grow ginger.

I used a very simple recipe for a very tasty cranberry cherry sauce with cranberries from Mt. Rainier Cranberries, also found at the U-District market. Sustainable Eats has the scoop on their organicness as well as an identical dish.

A simple salad rounded it out with greens from Butler Green Farms, here on the island, and sold at our great grocery store, the Town & Country. I used the last of the hazelnuts and some more non-local orange segments and non-local, non-organic (gasp!) but thematic! with the season! pomegranate seeds. Ground more pomegranate seeds and orange segments to combine with a bit of olive oil and vinegar for a fruity vinaigrette.

The buttermilk resulting from the homemade butter turned into buttermilk biscuits according to my favorite biscuit recipe ever, one of the recipes that convinced me I could cook.

Dessert was a pumpkin pie with a crust bought at Blackbird Bakery (it was too pretty not to buy) and custard from scratch with homegrown pumpkin and our duck eggs. Garth’s folks brought a delicious apple pie from Sluys Bakery in Poulsbo, just a few miles away.

Even our wine was local — pinot noir (and all their wines, actually) grown & produced on the island at Bainbridge Island Vineyards.

All in all, a delicious meal and good, casual, comfy company. It is good to be wrapping up the season, celebrating our harvest and enjoying the luxury of taking time off and resting, spending time with friends and family.

(And we’ll stop looking like such show-offs in future Dark Days posts, I promise. After two weeks in a row of homegrown meat and mostly homegrown veggies, I am ready to do, like, mac and cheese, or spaghetti, or something.)

Unknown sources: orange, ginger (beets); pomegranate, olive oil, white wine vinegar (salad & dressing); cumin, cayenne, canola oil (pumpkin seeds); flour, sugar, baking powder, etc.

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So, we really dropped the ball on keeping everyone updated on the broiler chickens via the website. We really intended to, but it turned out that 150 chickens took up kind of a lot of time. So, here’s a retrospective of their lives …

The chickens (affectionately known as nuggets) moved to pasture the last weekend of September, just before the TWL Harvest Fair. Thousands of people attend the Harvest Fair so the chickens had a busy first day, and it seemed we prompted a lot of family conversations about where meat comes from (which I think is good). From there, we moved the tractors the hill towards the top, then over towards the orchard, then back down into some extra-delicious juicy green grass, then sideways towards the cropland area — basically in a big rectangle to avoid some trees and some really hilly areas.

By the time we got back to our starting point, about 6 weeks later, and looked at the path up the hill that we had already grazed, we realized that the grass where the chickens had been (scratching, pooping, scratching, eating, pooping) was greener, thicker, and taller than the paths we had left between the tractors. Part of the reason we do chickens in tractors — aside from the extremely important fact that it’s the most humane, safest way for the chickens to spend their lives — is the soil improvement that comes with rotating poultry through a pasture. It was really gratifying to see it in practice. We were able to re-graze them on the land they had already passed through because the soil and grass had improved so much.

One of the first times we moved them, shortly after the Harvest Fair, I noticed one chicken with some sort of morsel that he had just found, and everyone else was chasing him around to try to get it. Kids at the Harvest Fair had been running around with balloons and I heard several of them pop, so I went in to chase him around to try to get it, too, to verify that it wasn’t balloon. It was a little salamander or newt. I felt sorry for the little guy but he was already beyond help, so I left the birds to finish their game of keep-away.

Never let anyone tell you chickens are naturally vegetarian. If you see “vegetarian” on the egg carton, you know those hens were never outside.

It only took a couple of days for them to realize that when we started pulling the tractors forward, instead of running away from us (towards the back), they should run forward to the nice fresh grass that we were dragging them towards. Chickens love grass.

We lost a few of them here and there, a couple for reasons we could identify (ate too much) and a couple we couldn’t. We had one bad day when the biggest tractor blew down the hill and ran over a couple of guys partway, leaving them pinned under the end — one was gimpy but still getting around OK enough to not let us catch him easily, so we left him; the other had a broken wing and a pretty mangled leg. He was big enough to keep so we processed him and were able to keep all the meat except the bad leg and wing. Poor guy.

This weekend we processed everyone who was left, minus the one little girl who was too small and cute to process, who we will keep until she gets bigger or starts laying. We had lots of helpers (though many novices — not like we’re experts!) and we processed all day Saturday and Sunday. By midday on Saturday we got into a rhythm and everyone was pretty comfortable doing all the jobs, so we were able to take breaks and work in shifts and move around between stations for some variety. It was great to see customers again — lots of people were really excited — and to hear about how folks are going to cook them. Lots of barbecue and roasting (my favorite), and some folks with Romertopfs, plus some recipes that might get me eating liver yet … breaded and fried; sauteed; pâté …

It certainly doesn’t make for a good day, and it shouldn’t be, but it’s a day of completeness. It’s thanksgiving all the time on the farm.

Thank you, chickens.

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After at least one (maybe two?) years of thinking about it, and deciding it would be too hard, and wishing I had done it, I’ve finally signed up for Laura at Urban Hennery’s Dark Days Challenge. From November 15 – March 31, eat one meal a week that’s as SOLE (Sustainable, Organic, Local, Ethical) as possible, then blog it. Laura will round them up weekly and we can all see what everyone else is eating, and get inspiration from each other. It’s extra hard in the winter, though it helps if you have been busy preserving all winter. We didn’t can nearly as much as I had hoped — it was a tough season in many ways, but we’re almost through — but there’s a lot of good stuff in the freezer and much still in the ground, plus our two easily-accessible year-round farmers’ markets to supply what we didn’t manage to grow ourselves (Brussels sprouts, parsnips).

Anyway — join us in the Dark Days Challenge! Sign up here, and let me know so we can commiserate in, like, February.

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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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(No, not that kind of Roundup.)

New things:

• First day at the farmers’ market! We sold 7 $4 pints of plums. The booth fee was $12.50. So, not bajillionaires, but about in line with what we expected. And it was really good to have our first market experience be pretty low-key. Slow ramp-up is good.
  

  First day at market!

• Braiding garlic: fun! Pretty!
• Cleaning fish: fresh sardines!
• Cooking sardines. My verdict: yum! Garth’s verdict: eh.
• I took my sewing machine apart to try to fix it. I didn’t break it further and it was cool to see its guts, but I also didn’t manage to fix it. Oh well, I have heard about someone who fixes Singer Featherweights for cheap, so maybe I’ll have fancy market aprons for us by next week.
• Bulk delivery of chicken feed. 57 bags is a lot! I found folks on Craigslist to share the order with us to get the total under 50 so we could save some money on delivery costs. It worked out pretty well (though it looks like they forgot to load 2 bags of oats for someone from Auburn, which sucks) and I figure we’ll be doing it again.

Not-new things that also happened this weekend:

• Made some butter from Fresh Breeze whipping cream, saving the buttermilk for frying chicken and/or making biscuits later this week. I froze one batch of butter into 1-tablespoon pats so I can bake with them more easily in the future. I got 30 tbsp from 2 pints of cream.
• Tilling continues at Johnson Farm (the Old New farm) as we prepare the ground for some fall crops and lots and lots of cover crop. The soil is compacted and dry and dusty so we are hoping that a good cover crop, chosen specifically to break up the pan, combined with lots of compost next spring, will really help it get going. The tomatoes and squash in the ground up there are doing pretty well despite the non-ideal soil.
• It’s OMG HOT here. I’m so grateful for our ceiling fan.
• I’m giving in and ordering some prescription sunglasses. My stylish hat alone just isn’t cutting it.
• We might have a few squash and cucumbers for sale next week, too. Or, I might just keep them and eat them.
• I didn’t get enough sleep. That one is *definitely* never new. I’m going to start going to bed now.

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