Tomato Slavery (Canning for my Soul)

Ever since I first moved to this farm, one of my main motivations for raising animals and putting in a garden has been to try and eat more ethically. I think this is a common concern - most of us care about the ethics of what we put in our mouths and most of us make some sort of effort to source our food with ethical concerns in mind.

For some of us, our paramount concern might be animal welfare, and our concern might lead us to vegetarianism, or to sourcing ethically raised meat. Some of us eat all organic, not just for our own health, but for the planet's health. Most of us try to avoid eating endangered species, and look for sustainably harvested seafood. Recently, many people have become concerned with the carbon footprint of their diet and look for locally produced food that isn't trucked or flown thousands of miles from the point of production.

These are ALL laudable goals, and what I am about to post is in no way meant to suggest that anybody ought to abandon their priorities for mine. We all do what we can to behave ethically - I hope - and I firmly believe it is impossible to refrain from all evil in all our actions.

That said - consider this quote:

"Since 1997, the Justice Department has prosecuted seven cases of slavery in the Florida agricultural industry — four involving tomato harvesters — freeing more than 1,000 men and women. The stories are a catalogue of horrors: abductions, pistol whippings, confinement at gunpoint, debt bondage and starvation wages." 
(for the rest of the article, see here)

Did you catch that? Here in these United States, in the past couple of decades, there have been cases of SLAVERY so egregious that they have been prosecuted as such by the Justice Department. Not "Wage Theft;" not "exploitation," but SLAVERY. For those of you who won't follow the link, the article details the commonplace practices of imprisonment, of people being forced to work at gunpoint, of hostage taking and threatening the families of those who try to escape. For the each of the seven cases that were prosecuted, there were (and are) literally thousands of cases that are never documented.

Following are two more links. I especially recommend the first. It was originally published in Gourmet Magazine in 2009, and it was the first time that the problem of widespread slavery in our agricultural system got serious mainstream press. It is the article that opened my eyes to the scale of the problem.

http://www.gourmet.com/magazine/2000s/2009/03/politics-of-the-plate-the-price-of-tomatoes.html

http://www.thenation.com/article/trouble-tomato-slave-labor/

More recently, there has been news coming out about conditions on tomato farms in Baja California in Mexico. Nearly all of our winter tomatoes in the US come from either Florida or Baja. The large plantations in Baja are not owned by US companies, but they are contracted to large US companies and those companies have moral responsibility for the conditions, which are, again, tantamount to slavery.

This past winter and spring, farmworkers on these plantations have begun to protest the practices and conditions - enforced confinement behind barbed wire and electric fencing; forcing workers to purchase all of their food and water from the company store, which charges exorbitant prices and puts the workers into debt-slavery; lack of running water or plumbing; and as retaliation for protesting, beatings and starvation.

The LA Times ran an expose on the situation, which you can read here:

http://www.latimes.com/world/mexico-americas/la-fg-baja-farmworkers-20150509-story.html

Aside from labor practices (what a tame and euphemistic phrase), our current system abuses farmworkers by poisoning their bodies with pesticides which they must apply to the fields, often with inadequate or nonexistent protection. The wells from which they must drink are tainted. Their children are subject to birth defects and chronic illnesses as a result of exposure to dangerous agricultural chemicals (see: http://afop.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/Annual_Publication_FINAL_English1.pdf)


In short, I have come to a decision. This decision is going to cost me a lot of time and effort. I have decided that I can no longer purchase tomatoes from Mexico or Florida. I realize that it is impossible for me to entirely wash my hands of my participation in our evil (yes, I said evil) agricultural system. Just as I cannot utterly refrain from the evils of the systems which produce my clothing, electronics, or transportation needs, I cannot keep 100% "clean" in my food choices either. It's simply not possible. But I can make a few choices that make me feel better, even if they do not do much to dismantle the systems themselves. This is one of those cases where the only effective action is collective action, yet I can only take individual action.

We eat a lot of tomatoes. After onions, I think tomatoes are probably the single most important vegetable ingredient in my pantry. They go into at least a third of the meals I cook at home. I will continue to buy tomatoes when I can verify that they were produced locally. And I will continue to accept tomatoes from the Gleaner's pantry, no matter where they come from. That is because - similarly to buying secondhand goods - my using those tomatoes does not materially benefit the producers. Exactly zero of my dollars are going to the growers if I collect the tomatoes after they have already been thrown away.

But if I want tomatoes in the months of November through March, I am going to have to preserve them myself. That means I am going to spend a large number of hot August afternoons washing, blanching, peeling, dicing, and canning tomatoes. If I can get my hands on small Roma tomatoes, I can freeze them whole, which is the easiest way of preserving tomatoes. But no matter what, my tomatoes are going to be more expensive from here on out - expensive in terms of time, certainly, and maybe money too, if if we factor in electricity and canning jars.

But what price, after all, a clean conscience? Moderately clean. at least. Moderately.

We're Having Authenticity For Dinner (Tepache)

tepache in the garage

We are having a pretty simple supper tonight: pan fried trout, baked potatoes, and braised red cabbage. It smells wonderful in my kitchen right now (even though I haven't fried the trout yet) and I thought I'd put up the recipe for the red cabbage. But when I started to compose it in my mind, I realized that this recipe - and those for the other components of dinner -is actually very involved, and interesting, if I describe it correctly.

It's apple season. I love apples, and I love apple season, but we still, after seven years here, do not have our own apples. I have a beautiful old cider press and every year I go in search of apples to feed it. Two weeks ago, a lovely older couple from church told me they would be happy - nay, grateful - if I would go to their house and pick apples from their six trees. Every year the apples fall all over the yard and they are getting rather elderly and stiff to be picking them all up. My sister and I went together and picked something like three bushels of apples, and spent a few minutes picking up windfalls as a thank-you.

Then I pressed cider with a neighbor, who also brought a few bushels of apples. Fresh cider is wonderful, and we drank as much as we could as fast as we could, but even so, there was a three gallon carboy leftover that fermented gently in the garage. A week after the pressing, the cider in the carboy was fizzy and delicious, lightly alcoholic (probably one-and-a-half percent, so weak that I let the children drink it), and beautiful over ice on a warm September afternoon. Now, two weeks after that, it is edging into apple cider vinegar territory.

It isn't quite vinegar yet. But neither is it cider anymore; what I have now is a couple gallons of tepache. Unless you are Mexican, and a rural Mexican at that, you probably don't know what tepache is. Tepache, along with pulque, is a quintessential rural Mexican beverage served at festivals and rodeos and birthday parties back in the hill country, and out of clay jugs on market days in small towns. It can be made from apples, or peaches, or plums, or various Mexican fruits that don't grow around here, such as ciruelas and tunas. Basically, it is a weak fruit beer. It's impossible to get drunk on tepache, but if you quaff enough of it on a hot Mexican day while watching a parade, you can get a small but pleasant buzz. The tepache in my garage is fairly far over onto the vinegar side of the spectrum. It's still tasty, but I wouldn't want to drink a pint of it. There is still a gallon and half of it, however, and I have to do something with it, fairly quickly.

Today was a gorgeous day, sunny and warm. The garden has been neglected lately, and it was past time to get out there and pick what was left to pick, dig the potatoes (which was a chore, since the plants died back ages ago and the weeds grew over), and do general cleanup. There's not a whole lot left, but I picked a quart of cherry tomatoes and dug a few pounds of potatoes. There are six red cabbage and I picked two, leaving the other four in the ground for later. I ate the last of the overbearing golden raspberries as I worked. The hubbard squashes, which did not do well, have died back already and I brought in the two small blue squash. My chiles dried on the plants ion the greenhouse and I picked them all as well. I am by no means done putting the garden to bed, but at least I made some progress.

Carrying in my potatoes and cabbage, the outlines of dinner came to me. Several weeks ago, my daughter Hope's best friend came over to spend the night, bearing a dozen beautiful little trout she had caught with her grandfather, already cleaned and frozen. I took the trout out to defrost and sliced the potatoes to roast in a shallow pan with olive oil and salt.  I wanted to give the cabbage a German/Eastern European treatment, braised with bacon and spices. I looked up a few recipes, and all of them called for apple cider vinegar. Well, of course I have some apple cider vinegar in the house, but I thought tepache would serve beautifully.

Except for the spices, everything we are eating tonight came from either our own garden or a neighbor. Everything is local to within a few miles. Everything was procured with our own labor and knowledge, or our friend's labor and knowledge, and grown in our own dirt.

Once, years ago, when I wrote a post about the importance of being able to produce my own food, my brother told me he didn't see the difference between producing your own food with your own labor, or using your labor to make money and buy your food. It was kind of an "if you have to ask, you'll never know" moment, but I just thought of an analogy he might get. What's the difference between writing a piano concerto yourself and playing it on a piano yourself, or paying somebody to write and preform a concerto for you?

Braised Red Cabbage

1 medium or two small heads red cabbage, from your garden. 

1 large red onion, ditto

1/2 pound bacon, preferably from your own pig

1 pint homemade tepache

1 tsp caraway seeds

1 tsp black mustard seeds

6 allspice berries

1 tsp black peppercorns, crushed

1/2 tsp salt

In a medium saucepan, fry chopped bacon over medium heat to render fat. Saute sliced onion and sliced red cabbage. When vegetables are beginning to soften, add spices and fry for a few minutes more. Add tepache and bring to a fast simmer. Cover and cook until cabbage is very tender, about 30 minutes. Salt and pepper to taste. 

You Can Please Some of the People Some of the Time (Post-Apocalyptic Dinner Party)

Yesterday was Sunday, and a very nice Sunday indeed. High haze did not materially interfere with bright sunlight and non-chilly temperatures. If the sky was not completely blue, neither was it spitting precipitation. It was shirtsleeves weather, and not a bad day to have a few friends over for an outdoor meal.

The friends I invited are FOAFs (friends of a friend), who have recently moved to town and been put in touch with me through a very old mutual friend. They are a perfectly lovely couple, unconventional in many of the same ways as we are ourselves, and they have two handsome boys, both on the autism spectrum, one more so than the other.

Their boys have specific dietary needs, which include no gluten and no cow dairy products (goat dairy is okay, hallelujah!). When I was planning dinner, I thought my sister's family was coming, and they have even more severe dietary restrictions. Besides being laxly kosher (no pork or shellfish), my sister is vegetarian entirely, and her son (my nephew) has a severe peanut and cashew allergy.

So, to be on the safe side I had to plan a gluten free, cow-dairy free, peanut and cashew free vegetarian dinner party. Actually, it's a little more nuanced than that. My sister doesn't care if there's meat on the table as long as it is wholly separate from other dishes. Ditto shellfish - but pork is right out. If pork is being served in any way, shape or form, they won't come. I think. I could be wrong about all this - it's just what I've informally gathered over the last several years. Also, please be advised that a gluten free meal is not as simple as avoiding wheat. Many other grains, like oats, for example, are LOW gluten but not NO GLUTEN.

I would be remiss not to mention my own prejudices, which are towards local, seasonal foods, and especially towards anything produced on the farm.

Early Sunday morning found me meditatively doing dishes and trying to imagine what I might serve. Every time I thought I had come up with something interesting, one or another of the proscribed items would rear its ugly head and laugh at me "Hahahahaha, you can't serve pasta primavera that has GLUTEN," or "Wrong, asshole, quinoa with caramelized onions is okay, but forget about the ceviche, that's totally NON-KOSHER!!!" What about pad thai (rice noodles) and chicken in peanut sauce.... oh never mind.

Finally I had a brain-wave. Indian food! I could serve basmati rice (non-gluten) and lentil dal (ditto), plus lamb and spinach curry, utilizing spinach from the garden. I'd make whole wheat tortillas (gluten) as well as corn tortillas (non-gluten). For dessert I'd break out the ice cream maker and whip up a batch of goat-yogurt coconut sorbet. Non-meat eaters could still get a complete meal with rice, lentils, and corn tortillas. No gluten is in evidence anywhere as long as whole wheat tortillas are avoided. No pork (Indians are non-pig-eaters) or shellfish.

I fulfilled my need to show off farm products by making paneer, a fresh Indian cheese, and serving it with my home grown radishes and salad greens as an appetizer. I did remember, mid-preparation, to call my friend and ask if her children could tolerate mild spices (My mother never had to deal with all this: a generation ago, people with dietary restrictions kept them to themselves out of politeness, or made excuses as to why they couldn't make it to the party. Ahh, the olden days!).

The meal was pretty much a hit, although as it turned out, the curry was a little too spicy for a few of the invited guests. I am so inured to chile that I have a hard time toning it down enough for non-chile eaters. As we were sitting around the table scarfing up Indian food, the conversation turned to books we were currently reading, and thence to the inherent instability of industrial food production (I told you; this couple is similarly unconventional - in fact, they were survivalist types long before it ever occurred to me to wonder about a future seriously divergent from the past). Not to bore you with the particulars, but we discussed greenhouse design and fruit tree cultivation; peak oil and home electricity production. As the discussion progressed to the modern homesteading movement and the lost art of food preservation, I looked at the food on the table and realized how much of it either was or could be produced on the farm.

The lamb could be goat instead. All the vegetables could be home-grown (or were). The dairy products and the eggs in the ice cream were home-grown. The sugar in the dessert could be replaces with honey from the hives. Even the beverage was iced mint tea made with mint from the garden. Really, the only part of the meal that couldn't feasibly be produced on the homestead were the starches: it's too wet for wheat here, and we don't have the acreage. Rice, of course, can't be grown anywhere within 300 miles of here (though with global warming, all bets are off). In the theoretical future, I would have to replace bread and rice with potatoes. And coconut and exotic spices of course would still have to be bought from afar.

But even with those caveats, I was struck by what a decent meal we could provide with 100% home grown stuff. Green salad, radishes, fresh cheese, meat and garden vegetables, sweets. All of this was produced with minimal inputs; mainly hay and grain for the goats.

"Well," I said, "if this is a sample of post-apocalyptic cuisine, bring it on!"

The curry I made was based on a recipe my Dad taught me, which he learned from a Pakistani roommate of his at the University of Washington, circa 1966. Here is my Dad's recipe as he taught it to me, with my modifications in parenthesis:

For six to eight people:

2 pounds stew meat (beef, lamb, or goat!)

2 medium yellow onions, chopped

2-4 cloves garlic, minced

1 green bell pepper or 2-3 jalapenos, depending on taste

1 tablespoon curry powder (these days there are so many choices: I use madras or kashmiri)

1/2 teaspoon allspice, ground

1/2 teaspoon cinnamon, ground

1/4 teaspoon cayenne, or to taste

2 oz tomato paste

2 large cans spinach (that's Dad talking: I say 1 pound fresh spinach, with any mixture you like of greens such as mustard, collard, kale, turnip, etc)

Method:

In a very large saucepan, heat 2 tablespoons canola oil. Add meat, onions, garlic, and peppers, and brown, stirring with a wooden spoon. When meat begins to brown nicely, add spices. Cook 30 seconds, turning, then add tomato paste. Cook, stirring, a minute or two. Add two cups water. Bring to a boil. Add canned spinach (If using fresh greens, use this method: Wash, chop, and steam greens until tender, adding tough greens such as kale or collards first and tender greens such as spinach last. When all greens are cooked, rinse in cold water in a colander and then squeeze out excess water before adding to curry pot.). Salt and pepper to taste. Let simmer slowly at least 45 minutes while you cook rice or potatoes and heat wheat tortillas. Ladle curry into shallow bowls over rice and top with fresh homemade paneer.

In actual practice, I have used many different vegetables, from cauliflower to peas. But Greens are the best. Enjoy!

Aimee's Excellent Snacks

first cheese of the year - chevre.

I didn't really cook at all today - we all just snacked a little here and there all day long. For the first time this year, the preponderance of said snacks were all products of the farm.

Early snack - frozen blueberries with creamy goat-yogurt and honey (honey is not yet a farm-product, but it is from one of my neighbor's farms. Next year, I hope, we will be using our own honey.). To make this snack extra-decadent, I like to drizzle a little tiny bit of thick cream on top, from a local raw-milk dairy. This cream is unbelievable - if you've never had fresh raw cream, you won't believe your mouth. It has no resemblance whatsoever to grocery store cream. I just don't know how to describe it, so I'll leave it at that.

Lunchtime snack - radishes with homemade chevre. I thinned the radishes today and brought in all the little ones to munch on. Also today I made the first "real" cheese of the year. I have made paneer a couple of times, but that doesn't involve rennet and culture, so it isn't quite the same. Today's chevre is very nice, smooth and spreadable and just a little bit tangy. The French eat radishes with butter, and that's a good way to eat them, but not as good as with fresh homemade chevre.

the mint patch - spearmint

Evening snack - tabouli with fresh mint. The mint has come back with a vengeance. Now I have three kinds of mint; spearmint, peppermint, and grapefruit mint. As mint tends to do, it is pretty much taking over the herb garden. I don't care - I love mint. I use about three cups of finely minced mint to one cup of tabouli, and a few tablespoons of olive oil, the juice of two fat lemons, and plenty of fresh ground black pepper. I'd throw in any veggies I had on hand, if I had any. Beets are nice, it makes the tabouli shocking pink.

Really feels like spring when we can start eating like this.

Now What?

My damn free-range, organic, pasture raised, heritage breed, locally raised turkey doesn't fit in any of my stock pots. I'm trying to brine it overnight, not just for better flavor, but because I don't have room in the fridge. The turkey is spending the night in the shed, legs sticking out and all. I covered it with plastic wrap, and that's just going to have to work.

Brine recipe:

Put two gallons fresh cold water in your largest stock pot. Separately, on the stove, boil a quart of water with a cup of sea salt, a half cup (or so) of brown sugar, a few cloves, allspice berries, garlic cloves, sage leaves, bay leaves, and a teaspoon or so of fennel seeds and mustard seeds and black peppercorns. Stir to dissolve salt and sugar. Add to large stockpot along with a couple of dozen ice cubes.

Add ridiculously expensive turkey. Curse when you realize it won't fit. Manipulate turkey through several full revolutions and bring to a stop breast down. Cover with plastic wrap. Mutter "if they don't like it they can go take a flying fuck" and pour yourself some chardonnay. Put stock pot and turkey out in the shed and close the door to protect from coyotes.

Proceed with pumpkin pie. These came out gorgeous. I feel so sorry for the no-dairy/no-gluten people. They have to eat tofutti with blueberries for dessert.

P.S. I love the trade network. The turkey-people have Nubian goats and want to breed them this year. I brought a photo of Storm Cloud, our insanely pretty spotted buckling with me to pick up the turkey, and they say they will happily trade us turkey for his stud fee. YAY!

Local Eating, Year Two

Those of you who have followed along on this crazy venture since the start will remember that I set a goal for myself and my family of sourcing 50% of our eat-at-home food from within the county. Well, it's been a full year, and so I'd like to report on our (moderate) success and set some new goals for the coming year.

First, I'll just be blunt and say we didn't do it. Probably not even very close. There are many foods that my family simply won't give up, and cereal, rice, pasta, and bananas are among them. Coffee, chocolate, and  orange juice. Really, I didn't try very hard to source foods that we eat all the time but which I'm pretty sure aren't grown in the county, like wheat, dry beans, and so forth. I just assumed they weren't available, period. However, I've just finished reading "Plenty," a book about a couple of fairly extreme fanatics who ate 99% locally (defined as produced within 100 miles) for a year, based in Vancouver B.C., which is only a few miles from me. They found wheat, eventually, and all sorts of products one would not expect. They put a lot of effort into it. I'm frankly not prepared to put that much time into sourcing ingredients, but I guess I can up it to a couple of hours. I guess I can ask at the Co-op. "Hey, is anybody growing lentils around here?" That's not too hard, is it? 

On to the success stories: for seven months of the year, I didn't buy a single gallon of milk, nor an egg, nor any pork product. When I did buy milk, I could buy it from a local farm. I bought only about a third of my usual amount of cheese, because I was making lots of it. Ditto yogurt. I haven't bought beef for a few months now, since whenever it was that we got our quarter-steer. And for pretty much the entire growing season, say, May to the end of October, the majority of our produce needs were met by the trade network. Yes, yes, we ate more kale than we cared to, more beets and more pumpkins, but we ate well. I won't say I didn't buy produce, I had to keep buying onions and garlic, and we never did give up lemons. But I bought a lot of it from the local farmer's market, and some of it we grew ourselves (okay, just radishes, salad greens, herbs, and tomatoes. I never said I was a great gardener.)

I still have several quart sized ziploc bags of frozen local strawberries we picked ourselves back in June, and we ate the last blueberries yesterday (sigh). There are twelve frozen ears of local corn. About a dozen nectarines - well, wait, they weren't truly local, they came from Yakima. And let's not forget, the cabinet which is still stuffed with home canned goods - pickles, jams and cajeta. I'd better start trying to incorporate some of that into our diet or it will still be around come next harvest-time. 

So what can we do better next year? I'd like to expand the trade network. Unfortunately, my garden-lady friend found a new source for eggs while my hens were not laying, so I'll have to trade her something else. Goat's milk yogurt? Chevre? She said she'd be interested in a kid (one of the goat's, not one of mine) but I still don't know if any are on the way. That's going to be the hardest part of next year's local eating - accepting that we have to eat the baby goats. I hope I can do it. I can find a new gardener to trade with, and I'd better! because at the end of January I'm already getting 5 eggs a day, and I have the potential for a dozen a day in a couple of months here. 

The pig will be meat soon, and he and the rest of the steer ought to last us for several months. Meat and dairy products are  a cinch; it's finding more local products, expanding into the realm of dry goods, and finding more appetizing ways to preserve the harvest that will be the challenge. I think I'll set the same goal again: 50%. But this time, I'll take it more seriously.

Local Beef

My neighbors across the street have been raising beef cattle for nearly fifty years. These lovely polled Herefords enjoy unlimited pasture, the freedom to raise their own calves, run and wander at will, and generally live a pretty natural and happy life for a cow, right up until the end. They are completely grass raised and grass finished, never grain fattened or sent to a feedlot. When the time comes, the knackerman comes and collects them right off the field. 

Choosing one of these animals to be our meat for the year (along with our own pork, chicken, and kid) fulfills several goals. I couldn't possibly eat more locally; I've been looking at these cows out my window all year. I get to support two local family owned businesses: my neighbor's, and Keizer meats, the slaughterer and butcher. There is a great feeling of security in having a whole winter's worth of food in the house. I know for a fact that the animal I am going to eat has been humanely raised. And I get to refrain from participation in the feedlot system that is so incredibly detrimental to the environment, as well as being horrifically cruel to the animals involved.

And for those who say "All very well, but isn't it more expensive?", be informed that I am paying $2.25 a pound for my side of beef, which includes plenty of  filet mignon and prime rib as well as hamburger and stew meat. My steer was picked up for slaughter Saturday, and I ought be able to collect it in about two weeks. I can't wait. Every time I look out the window, I practically drool.

Local Food Trade Network Success Story!

All year long, I've been trying to source as much food as possible from within the county. I go to farmer's markets, and search for "locally grown" labels on produce at the supermarket, and of course our farm produces all the eggs and milk products we need. More, in fact. So much more that I instituted the trade system! Since about May, I've been trading our excess eggs for organic produce from local gardeners, and occasionally for such treats as homemade marshmallows (Thanks, Phil!).  I think this has been a good deal for everyone involved, even if there was occasionally more kale in the fridge than any one family could reasonably eat. 

But not until yesterday did the trade system really score a big bonanza. A friend who pressed cider with us last year called to say she had 13 pounds of fresh chantrelles, which she picked herself just the day before. Well much as I love mushrooms, and I do, 13 pounds is a bit much. But we got one brown paper bag full to the top, maybe three pounds, in exchange for a pound of chevre, a dozen eggs, and a package of bacon from our hog. As you can see, they are beautiful! Just setting them on the counter perfumes the whole kitchen with a lovely light, spicy, woodsy scent. I couldn't wait, and had a mushroom breakfast this morning.

Chantrelle Breakfast Burrito:

Heat up a large cast iron skillet with just a tiny smear of olive oil, almost dry. Roughly chop a big handful of fresh, clean chantrelles and dry-fry over pretty high heat. They will give off a lot of moisture. Just keep turning them while this moisture boils off. When they are starting to look a little dryer, maybe ten minutes, add a tablespoon or so of finely minced onion, salt and pepper. In a separate pan, melt a tablespoon of butter over medium low heat. Add two lightly beaten eggs. If you have some you gathered the same morning, so much the better. When eggs begin to set around the edges, add mushrooms and a tablespoon or so of grated asiago or pecorino romano cheese and some finely chopped parsley. There is a high mushroom to egg ratio here; the eggs and cheese are sort of a binder to hold a bunch of chantrelles together.Do not overcook! Eggs should be soft. Right on the burner or in a dry skillet, heat a flour tortilla until browned in spots, about 15 seconds each side. Put tortilla on plate and eggs on tortilla!

Swoon.

Bounty

This is a small fraction of the week's bounty. The blueberries and cherry tomatoes were picked today; blueberries from a farm up the road, tomatoes from my tiny excuse for a garden. The squash and the beets came from my eggs-for-veggies trade network, and the grape leaves were harvested from a neighbor's property. In addition, this week I've gathered, directly or via trade, two bunches of black kale, two bunches of swiss chard, a bunch of collards, a couple pounds of green beans, three red onions, a mess of snap peas, and a pie's worth of blackberries.

Then of course, there's the four dozen eggs (three traded, one kept) and the two pounds of goat cheese I made this week. Another batch of cheese is in the oven, jelling. 

Rowan has a friend staying with us for the week, and I've put her to work milking the goats and feeding chickens, picking berries and helping me make cheese. Her mom asked me to show her "the icky side" of animal husbandry, but I haven't made her muck out the barn. I want her to enjoy her stay, and get some work out of her at the same time.

gotta go, children calling

Wither All the Eggs?

A couple of weeks ago, I was complaining about eggs piling up in my fridge faster than I could sell them. I actually took a few dozen to the local food bank (where they said they couldn't accept fertile eggs. Go figure.). Now all of a sudden, production has taken a nosedive. It may be because of all the uproar with the new chickens; perhaps everyone still needs time to chill out and settle back into routine. Or maybe it's molting season. Some of the chickens are looking rather raggedy and patchy. All I know is it's seriously annoying; more and more chickens, fewer and fewer eggs. Today I found only five. That strikes me as a ridiculous number. After all, there are sixteen hens out there right now, not counting the new mamas, the setting hens, or the pullets. 

And I have such good trade going! My Garden connection is loading me down with so many greens I have to distribute them among friends and family. Today I traded two dozen eggs for six gallon sized ziploc freezer bags stuffed full of kale, collards, arugula, rainbow chard, and romaine lettuce. And when I got home, I saw that my other regular trader had come by to pick up his eggs (and a few little extras like cajeta and rhubarb sauce) and left me: Two beautiful loaves of homemade bread, a large packet of mixed herbs, and a grocery bag stuffed with rainbow chard. I'm not complaining, but my husband will start to soon if I keep serving him kale. 

Garden Lady will keep giving me greens even if I run out of eggs: she gardens for the love of it and her goal is to get them eaten, however she can. But Bread Man needs eggs for his fabulous baked goods! Maybe he needs some quality jam to put on all that bread.

It's raining eggs!

It's probably a good thing that most of my hens are elderly. If they were all in their prime egg-laying years, I'd be getting twenty eggs a day instead of a more manageable ten to twelve. Well, slightly more manageable. 

Most of the people in my family don't even like eggs. I was never a big egg eater, as a child I was more grossed out than anything else by a plateful of eggs, done any way you please. I only liked hard boiled eggs, and only then for their puzzle-like appeal: can you get the white off in one piece and keep the yolk perfectly round? I usually could. Then I'd throw away the white and lick the yolk until my mother said "go wash your face, you're a filthy mess." My own kids do the opposite; they eat the white and leave the yolks lying around to get eaten by the dogs (if I'm lucky) or to roll off the table and get stepped on (if I'm not.) Even today, I prefer my eggs hidden inside of something, like creme brulee or a chocolate cake. 

Only Homero is an unabashed egg lover. He'd eat three or four eggs every day if I'd give them to him. I want him to live past fifty, however, so I don't. This situation leaves me with a serious egg surplus. Of course I put out a sign "Eggs, $2.50" on my kid's chalkboard out by the mailbox. But I think the days when people would stop at a stranger's house to buy farm products are over, at least if you don't have a professionally made sign. Once Hope, Paloma, and I set out a folding table and some chairs and sat out there for almost two hours with several dozen eggs in front of us, but nobody stopped. Hope was devastated. "Mom, can we make a stop sign? Please? Then they'll HAVE to stop." 

Then I tried Craigslist. Ah, Craigslist, where would I be without you? I posted an ad asking gardeners to trade their excess produce for my excess eggs. I did have some response, and now I have two or three people who come by regularly to take a couple of dozen eggs and leave either a few bucks or some of their extra produce. One of them is a baker and last time he left me homemade marshmallows, which were a revelation. But for the most part, my bartering simply means that now I have too much spinach and kale as well as too many eggs. Oh well, at least I'm helping to create a truly local food network and furthering my goal of eating locally, right?

What to do with too many eggs/too many greens:

Challah bread (6 egg yolks, two egg whites)

Ice cream base (three to six egg yolks, no whites)

chiles rellenos (four to six eggs, yolks and whites)

angel food cake (to use up the extra whites)

Quiche of all kinds, but especially the kind with spinach/chard/collards/kale in it

(four to six eggs, 1 pound mixed greens)

Saag (no eggs, as many greens as you got, spinach, mustard, collard, kale, chard, beet/turnip...etc)

And if the eggs are totally on top of you.....and you feel up to a challenge....

Pastel de tres leches (16 eggs, yolk and whites)

self-sufficiency, one pint jar at a time

This past New Year's one of my resolutions (let's not go into all of them....no, no gym membership yet) was to eat more locally. Specifically, I wanted to source 50% of the food we eat at home from within the county. Obviously, we aren't getting local bananas or oranges, or rice, or even wheat. But I can get local - extremely local, within 10 miles local - milk, cheese, seafood, and meat, and of course my family's pork is local to within yards. I haven't bought an egg in six months, at least, and I haven't bought milk or yogurt in a month. I expected to be able to obtain most of our non-tropical produce locally, and to do a lot of preserving. Getting over my fear of canning is high on my to-do list. By the end of summer, I want to have a closet full of canned goods and a freezer full of frozen ones, all local and delicious.

So, when I saw a post on Craigslist the other day (craigslist is my little problem, I check the farm and garden section at least six times a day) and saw that a local lady was selling as much rhubarb as you can stuff into a five gallon bucket for $12. Must have overdone it a little on the rhubarb a few years back. I love rhubarb, and always buy some as soon as it is available in the spring, but it's crazy expensive this year, about $3.50 a pound, which works out to more than a buck a stalk. That's just silly. You'd need to spend $10 to make a pie. So of course I grabbed a bucket and hopped in the car.

Turns out, an awful lot of rhubarb can be stuffed into a five gallon bucket. More than you probably think. I had to buy a whole new set of jelly jars and call my sister. We made 26 cups of rhubarb sauce, not counting what we ate along the way and fed to the children, stirred into yogurt. After we'd canned half of it, we added lime zest and grated ginger to the rest and made lime-ginger-rhubarb sauce. I think many of my relatives can expect a pretty pink surprise in their christmas stocking!

Then, since we didn't have enough red stains on our clothing yet, we decided to take the kids to a U-pick strawberry farm nearby. I never would have guessed that three inexperienced adults and four children under the age of five can pick over 30 pounds of strawberries in under an hour. I'm currently taking a break from processing fresh strawberries for freezing. My children are bright red to the elbows and ears and have stomped at least six strawberries into the carpet. But I'm happy; I'm keeping my resolution. I will have strawberries in November.