Merry Mabon (preserving log)

Dressed the altar for Mabon today, a day or two early. I’ll continue to add to it as the season progresses. I bought these Japanese lanterns from a nearby farm stand, but they also had the live plants, and I bought a few and planted them in my garden. Hopefully next year I can harvest some of my own. I also want to add more seasonal plants - I like the red amaranth and yellow tansy at this time of year. 

It was an “on” year for the Italian plum tree. There are still hundreds of plums on it - falling fast - but I think I am done with plums for the year. In addition to eating them fresh until I was sick them, I dehydrated a gallon sized ziploc bag full and made twelve half-pints of plum jam. 

Actually, my mom and I made the jam together and it was really nice. She’s amazing, she doesn’t use pectin and her jam always turns out perfectly. She uses her own system for eyeballing when the sugar syrup is ready - she says it will jell when it looks like “King Farouk on a barstool,” which is to say when there are two side by side drips coming off the spoon instead of only one. 

I also canned six pints of salsa ranchera and six pints of regular tomato sauce, and smoked two sockeye salmon. The main harvest left is the pears, but it wasn’t a very good year for pears and there arent a ton of them, for once. 

New Buck (Breeding Season)

We sold Jupiter, our gorgeous Nubian buck, a few months ago. We have used him for three seasons now and it’s time for some new blood. 

 (see this post for my thoughts on swapping out bucks and for some semi-historical tidbits about ritual sacrificial kingship http://newtofarmlife.blogspot.com/2011/10/king-must-die-goat-breeding-and-divine.html?m=1)

I didn’t really want to buy a new buck because 1) they’re a pain in the tuchus and 2) I’m pretty sure each year of breeding is going to be my last. Finding a suitable buck to rent is often difficult. Luckily, my husband has a client just down that road who owns this handsome specimen. I forget his name, but he’s beautiful. He’s not quite as tall as Jupiter, but he is stocky and strong, and he has the same beautiful brown and white coloring. And check out those horns! 

Best of all, he was available for the old fashioned fee of a kid back. 

Change of (Beverage) Seasons

It’s been a few years since we last broke out the old cider press. This is the same machine my family used to press apples when I was a little kid growing up on a three acre hobby farm in Woodinville (years before the Microsoft campus transformed it from a sleepy, far-out Seattle suburb into software-mogul wonderland). My mom gave it to me when we first moved up here and started planting apple trees. 

Our apple trees have met various terrible fates. Some were eaten by goats, other run over with riding mowers when they were but tiny saplings. We do have one beautiful, well grown apple tree that I planted specifically for the purpose of making hard cider. It’s an antique variety called a golden russet. But it’s a late apple, best after the first frost, and also I don’t drink alcohol anymore, so it’s of minimal use on a warm September day when we feel like making cider. 

Therefore I invited my good neighbor Hilde and her family to make cider with us. They have a large old orchard with several different kinds of apples. We all traipsed out to pick apples, and her sharp-eyed daughter saved us from a fate worse than death by spotting this horrendously huge hornet’s nest hidden in one of the trees.

Carefully avoiding the tree of mayhem, we gathered several large totes full of apples. Hope kept asking “do you think we have enough apples?” and didn’t believe me when I told her we manifestly had more than enough apples. Like I said, it’s been a few years, but I can still do 5 gallon bucket-to-gallon jug conversions in my head. 

It was a lot of work, as cidering always is,,but we all had a great time. Hilde’s kids had never made cider before and they were excited to turn the crank and pass the apples hand to hand and pour the juice through sieves and funnels. 

And we made SO. MUCH. CIDER. As usual, the weak link in the cider-making chain is finding enough jars. We filled up all my half-gallon mason jars, which means it is truly the end of milk season (the goat is almost dry anyway). Luckily Homero rooted around in the recesses of his shop and came up with this 3 gallon skull-shaped beverage dispenser. It doesn’t have a lid, but we just put a plate on top of it and will dispense cider at will for the next few days. 

Operation Trampoline Rescue (From the Blackberries)

My youngest daughter is turning 18 this weekend (I am

brushing right past this fact quickly cause otherwise I’ll cry), and she asked if we could possibly get the trampoline into a usable state before her party. 

The trampoline, a very expensive and fine Rainbow brand trampoline with a 1,000 pound weight rating and zero springs, was the first recreational object we bought when we moved here. The kids have jumped on it pretty much since they were old enough to jump. 

But it hasn’t been used much in recent years, and the blackberries did what blackberries do to inert items left in one place for too long - they ate it. Not entirely, no. In fact they were mostly confined to the underneath part of the trampoline where we couldn’t mow. But over the years the vines got very tough, thick, and woody, and made it impossible to jump on the trampoline at the risk of doing your self a major injury. Actually, I guess the risk of major injury is kind of intrinsic to trampolines, but y’all know what I mean. 

The trampoline is too heavy to pick up and move. Only the occasional 80 mph wind gusts we get up here can do that. As proof against just that, several years ago we pounded some fence stakes into the ground and chained the trampoline down, so it’s EXTRA immovable. And of course it was also lassoed and tied to the earth by innumerable blackberry vines. Moving the trampoline to mow underneath it wasn’t an option. 

Papa to the rescue. I suggested using  the forklift to lift one side of it but he said the forklift needs to be on concrete or it will just tip over or sink into the ground. But he said the tow truck would work. And it did. Once he used the truck to pry the trampoline up on an angle, it was pretty easy to hold it up there. 

The Stihl has a branch-cutter attachment, so homero basically used a chainsaw on a stick to cut all the gnarly canes underneath while Paloma and her boyfriend held the trampoline up. Then Paloma went underneath with a rake and pulled out the cut vines, and I gathered them up with gloves on and put them in the wheelbarrow and hauled them over to the compost. 

It was about an hour’s work for four people. Some of the vines had grown through the net and had to be carefully cut from both sides and extricated, but we got it done. The trampoline is back in action.

King Kong Squash

This gorgeous, enormous Blue Hubbard squash was given to me by a neighbor. I don’t know for sure if she grew it herself but she’s quite a gardener so it’s entirely possible. Blue Hubbards are an heirloom variety winter squash with excellent keeping qualities, fine dry orange flesh, and which grow to impressive size. This one weighs 43 pounds. 

I’m staying home sick from work today, so I decided it was as good a day as any to deal with the giant squash. Their shells are so hard I had to have Homero cut it up with an axe. It occurs to me that this blog is full of pictures of Homero dealing with various large and unusual comestible items. Like the 25 pound Ling Cod. Cow heads. I should make a post of all those photos. 

My plan is to bake it, purée it, and make a bunch of pies, some soup, and….. I guess freeze the rest of the purée for later. It’s not recommended to home-can winter squash, even in a pressure canner. Something about the purée being too thick to heat evenly. But it freezes very well, and quart sized blocks of frozen purée can be used to make soup, pie and quick breads into the future. 

I’m also saving some seeds to plant later this spring. Blue Hubbards are an open pollinated heirloom variety, which means they will produce fruit similar to the parent plant, not like the more common hybrids that will produce fruit unlike, and usually inferior to, the parent plant. 

I love this photo of me and the squash. Look how happy I am! I can lift 43 pounds of food over my head!! 

Rosca de Reyes (King Cake)

I made this lovely Rosca de Reyes cake today, which is January 6th - also known as Epiphany and the Three Kings day. 

Mexicans celebrate three kings day with a Rosca de Reyes, or a King Cake. It’s a sweet egg-and-butter enriched bread studded with dried fruit, nuts, and sugar paste. Sometimes it’s stuffed with marzipan. And somewhere inside it, there’s a little statue of the baby Jesus. Or a baby anyway. The tradition goes that whoever gets the baby Jesus in his or her slice of King Cake has to make tamales for the next feast on the calendar, which is Candelmas - February second. 

(For a post about Candelmas/Imbolc, click here http://newtofarmlife.blogspot.com/2014/02/imbolc-repost.html?m=1) 

Like many other catholic feast days, Epiphany has some Pagan antecedents. The tradition of a King Cake goes way back in pre-Christian Europe. Instead of a baby Jesus, a dried broad bean would be baked into the cake and the person who found it was crowned King for a day. 

This is an example of a topsy-turvy festival, when a peasant can be a king and vice versa. The Bean King would be the focus of the celebration and the center of attention. He could behave however he wanted for the night - get super drunk, grope the girls - without repercussions. Such festivals upset the social order and let people blow off steam, flouting the norms which they have to live by the rest of the year. 

But in the REALLY way back days, in some bronze-age planting societies across Eurasia, the bean-king was no laughing matter. Instead of being king for a night, he was made the sacred king for a year, during which he was given the best of everything and revered by everyone. But when the next year’s planting time came around, he would be killed and his blood poured on the fields to ritually fertilize them. 

There is no bean in my cake, nor is there a tiny baby Jesus statue. Oddly enough, I don’t actually own such a thing. For the decorations, I used strips of my homemade fruit leather, and thin slices of dehydrated pears colored with green food coloring. Tonight we will enjoy it with hot chocolate and nobody will be King.