My New Stove!

Yay! I'm so pleased! It's obviously not hooked up yet—hopefully it will be by October. We still need to build a hearth, pipe it, and possibly plumb it as well, as it has a rear water reservoir for heating water.



Isn't it pretty? Makes my farmhouse kitchen feel complete, and I can't wait to cook on it this fall and winter.

Artisan Bread Baking

For my birthday, my mother-in-law gave me some cash, which I quickly disposed of by signing up for two artisan bread baking classes offered through our Rural Heritage museum. Our instructor, Bill Theriault, a historian and founder of the Peter Burr Living History Farm, has been baking artisan bread for many years. That's my friend Joan standing next to him in the photo to the left.

The first class I took was a beginners class that covered the basics of sourdough starters, kneading, shaping, proofing, and baking. By the end of that class, we'd all baked at least one loaf of bread and tasted all the others, and had some to take home to our families in addition to our very own bag of established starter.

For the past month, I've been diligently practicing my basic artisan bread skills at home, trying to figure out how to integrate them into my world. Baking artisan bread is about a 24 hour process from start to finish, and while it's not all that labor intensive, it can be tricky to remember to do all the steps at the right time and to figure out how to fit it into one's already-busy day.

The process begins with pulling the starter out of the fridge the morning before baking and feeding it, though I'm baking often enough that I'm just leaving my starter on the counter. First, discard any "hooch" (the alcohol waste-product from yeast feeding) on top and the very top layer, which probably has some dead yeasties. Then feed it with about a pound of flour and a pound of water. About 12 hours later, or before you go to bed, reserve half the starter to store in the fridge, and feed the remaining starter enough flour/ water mixture for the recipes you'll be using the next day.

Kneading takes about 20 minutes, the 1st rise with a natural leaven will take approximately 3 hours at temps between 70-85°, and the "proofing," or second rise will take approximately another 3 hours. The bread itself bakes for around 45 minutes, and then it will need to cool an hour before cutting. Quite drawn-out a process, eh?

For Christmas, I got these gorgeous willow proofing baskets along with a stoneware cloche in each shape—a boule and a batard. The cloche is absolutely essential for reproducing at home the thick, chewy crust that defines artisan bread... short of putting in your own masonry oven, which of course I'd love to do, but doubt that's happening any time soon. The floured proofing baskets are what create the beautiful pattern on the bread, along with the slashing, which can take any shape the artisan baker chooses. Some folks have made their own cloches by using terra cotta planters, a great, low-cost solution, but at such high heats, I was concerned about any lead or additives that might be in these off-the-shelf buys and decided to invest in good, food-grade stoneware. Breadtopia is a great source for both materials and tutorials—loads of information there.

I just took the advanced class this Saturday, and it was wonderful. We made several flavored loaves as well as several different kinds of recipes, including bread pudding, savory french toast, stuffed dinner and dessert rolls, and English muffins. We experimented with many toppings and fillings and ingredients, creating lots of variations on a theme to expand upon at home.

Knowing my family's likes and dislikes, I left the chocolate breads to others and jumped all over the savory breads and English muffins. I made a delicious savory French toast from a 3 pepper bread, as well as a raisin spice artisan loaf, and raisin spice English muffins. I made a double batch of raisin spice dough, enough for a 2 lb. loaf and at least 8 muffins. Here I am rolling out the mini-boules to create the muffins after the first rise; the bread boule is already resting after its first shaping. By the time I was done the muffins, the bread loaf was ready for its second shaping before placing in the proofing basket.

Here I am taking my finished loaf out of the oven. The raisin spice recipe was amazing, though I'll be adding walnuts to mine because we love nuts. Jim was wild about the 3 pepper dinner rolls stuffed with roasted peppers, which I knew he would be. For any chocolate lovers out there, we had one loaf made with ghirardelli cocoa substituted for 1/3 of the flour in the recipe, making for a stunningly black loaf of bread with an intense chocolate flavor reminiscent of a black forest cake when topped with cherry preserves and a dash of powdered sugar. We also made cranberry chocolate dessert rolls; a pecan, cinnamon, carrot bread; 3 pepper bread; and a 3 pepper bread pudding stuffed with sausage and caramelized onions.

The class was invaluable because we talked about when to add different ingredients, which ingredients are yeast-inhibitors and how to deal with those, how to troubleshoot different problems, etc. The English muffins were amazingly easy to make, as was really just about everything else, but just having the chance to play around with all the recipes with an experienced someone along for the ride was really helpful. Bill's a terrific mentor, and the best part about all this is that come Spring, we'll hopefully have community baking days in the new brick oven he's helped build at the museum! Because I've been a part of the classes, I'll have dibs on baking my dough when it's fired. I'm very excited!

Dark Days Eat Local Challenge: Week 4

Once again, I'll be updating this post throughout the week rather than creating separate posts.

My beautiful zero mile meal Monday night, otherwise known as "Where's the Beef?"

Butternut squash soup: roast butternut squash with onion, garlic, chives, rosemary and thyme, pureed with homegrown chicken stock and a dash of nutmeg. Herb foccacia bread, and a delicious three lettuce salad with green and red salad bowl lettuces and thai oakleaf lettuce, oxheart heirloom carrots, second year green onions, and Brandywine heirloom tomatoes. Tasty and filling...unless of course, you happen to be my husband. Hence the dinner's name.

So, here's the meal we actually ate, which ended up including small twin fillets from a few miles up the road. Delicious, no doubt, but they definitely bumped my beautiful zero mile meal up to the 15 mile category. But, if I'm perfectly honest, I'll fess up to that lovely little swirl of sour cream in the soup that already knocked me out on a technicality.


Tuesday night: zero mile

Chicken stuffed with herbs and roasted with carrots and green onion. Roasted baby acorn and butternut squash stuffed with sauteed green zebra, Brandywine, Amish paste, and San Marzano tomatoes, green pepper, delicate spring garlic greens, minced garlic cloves, onions, basil, and parsley. Two-green salad with tomatoes, onion, and a balsamic vinaigrette, and a braided loaf of French bread with sesame seeds, dipped in olive oil, garlic, and basil. Everything from Touch the Earth Farm but the olive oil, balsamic vinegar, salt, and pepper.



Wednesday Night: 25 mile taco salad

Wednesday night for dinner I made tortillas, which disappear almost as quickly as I can make them. Having spent two years out in Albuquerque, we grew accustomed to light, tasty tortillas, which East coast tortillas resemble in name only. So, I learned to make my own, and I really need to start doubling the recipe because the kids eat them so fast. For this salad I fried my tortillas, topped them with rice, local ground beef, green chili brought by friends from New Mexico, cheddar cheese from our local dairy, and vegetables and herbs from our garden. So simple, so tasty!


Thursday Night: 25 mile meal

"Nothing goes better with cabbage than cabbage." So says a character in Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which I always think of as I use Tuesday's roast chicken for a meal of chicken soup later in the week—two meals for the price of one. The weather has finally cooled enough to relish soups and salads as meals that feed body and soul. The chicken soup is entirely homegrown, from chicken to stock to herbs, and Jim made drop noodles to add, which were quite tasty. We had salad from veggies grown here on the farm, topped with our very own goat cheese that I made the night before. What bumps us up to 25 mile are the grilled cheese sandwiches on homemade bread, made with cheddar cheese from our creamery.

Dark Days Eat Local Challenge: Week 3

This week was a blur, with a visit from my in-laws, a Halloween party on Tuesday, and Halloween on Wednesday, so I have to beg, borrow, and steal my zero mile meals from breakfasts this week.

Here's a photo of a mostly zero mile meal but for the baby swiss, which was store bought. We enjoyed a caramelized onion and herb frittata, baked with grated baby swiss cheese and our own bread, eggs, onion, herbs, and garlic. It's paired with a delicious salad of black seeded simpson and red salad bowl lettuces, onion, and a balsamic vinaigrette.


Although it would seem that I was slacking on the zero mile front this week, I was busy preparing for a Halloween Harvest Farm Day we hosted for our homeschool group. I made mini pumpkin muffins from our own Little Pam pie pumpkins, carrot cupcakes from our own red core chantenay and oxheart heirloom carrots, and our very own deviled eggs. The pumpkin muffins were delicious, but would be very much improved with nuts, which I'd left out to keep them available for those with nut allergies. The deviled eggs go without saying, and I'm embarrassed to admit how many I ate! Of course we also had the requisite homemade chocolate chip cookies and brownies.


Also on tap this week was picking and processing our green tomatoes, as we had our first killing frost Sunday night. That evening, I harvested the last of our basil, zucchini, peppers, and tomatoes in time to preserve them all. I washed
and froze the basil, put the zucchini in the fridge, and processed an entire bushel of green tomatoes and a half bushel of peppers over the week, resulting in 14 pints of green tomato salsa, 13 pints of pickled green tomatoes using Ed's recipe over at The Slow Cook, and 7 pints of green tomato chutney, seen coming to a boil above. My one regret was that our onion crop did so poorly in this year's drought that I didn't get to use all homegrown ingredients in my salsa and pickles. But there's always next year, and next year, we'll have hard irrigation lines in the market garden.

Dark Days Eat Local Challenge: Week 2

I'll be updating this post throughout the week, rather than posting separately on our different meals. Week one was a short, quick week, so it featured only one meal. I'll try to be better about posting (and taking photos of!) different meals in the subsequent weeks.

Zero Mile Meals:

Breakfasts are nearly always zero mile meals, often featuring homemade toast, grape or strawberry jam, and our own free-range eggs, which are, in my opinion, the most perfect food ever—filled with flavor and a built in sauce, just doesn't get any better than that!





Rosemary and garlic roast pork tenderloin, roasted butternut squash stuffed with garlic zucchini hash, roasted sweet olive tomatoes with garlic and green pepper, homemade ciabatta bread, and a side salad with oakleaf and red salad bowl lettuces, gold nugget tomatoes, red onion and carrot. I brined the tenderloin for about 2 hours before cooking, and it was superb! We had some spring garlic coming up because it's been so warm, so I chopped that up and used it in the rub for the pork. Mmmmm. Everything you see here was produced on farm except for the olive oil, balsamic vinegar, flour, salt and pepper.




25 Mile Meals:

On this particular morning, I enjoyed a breakfast burrito on a homemade tortilla stuffed with eggs, salt-cured bacon, and sauteed green onion and green zebra tomato—all zero mile. What bumped this into the 25 mile category was the local cheddar cheese from Trickling Springs Creamery because I'm all about the cheese.



Roast beef with gravy, roasted carrots and onions, kale sauteed in olive oil and garlic, sliced Brandywine tomato, and homemade ciabatta bread. All the produce came from our farm. Yes, we're still getting tomatoes at the end of October! Crazy weather. I'll be picking a bunch of the green ones this week to save in the root cellar.



Again, a zero mile meal but for the meatballs, which bumped us up to a 15 mile meal and are totally worth it. I eat way too many of these when I make them, and of course, having bought half a cow, we have lots of ground beef in the freezer! This meal featured homemade ciabatta bread and angel hair pasta, with a slow-simmered sauce made from San Marzano tomatoes, garlic, thyme, parsley, rosemary, and oregano all grown here on the farm, in addition to a salad of mixed baby greens with a balsamic vinaigrette. The greens included tatsoi, broccoli raab, kale, speckled bibb, oakleaf, and black seeded simpson lettuces.

Spaghetti and Meatballs

Apparently, I can take even the simplest meal and turn it into a production. This spaghetti and meatball dinner took two days to make—from harvesting the
San Marzano sauce tomatoes, to simmering and reducing them for 24 hours, to making the pasta and the meatballs, to getting it to the table. Boy was it delicious, though, and well worth the wait. Let's hear it for slow food! With any luck, I'll get one more tomato harvest from this unseasonably warm weather, and we'll be set for the winter with tomato paste.

Little did I know, the pasta machine I got for my birthday actually does have a motor—in the form of a little boy named Sam who had a total blast turning the crank for me. Thank goodness I didn't spend that small fortune for the KitchenAid pasta attachment! Sam and I made angel hair pasta yesterday, and it was amazingly delicate. I'm so psyched to be able to make our own pasta! Sam even ran out to collect eggs so that we would have room temperature eggs for making the dough. The kids took one look at the raviolisimo attachment and couldn't wait to try making stuffed raviolis. Looks like I'll be making some goat cheese in the next week or so to give that a try.

The hardest part of the process was kneading the dough, which took about 10 or 15 minutes. We used 2 cups of all-purpose flour, since I didn't have any semolina in the house, and 2 large eggs. That made enough pasta for one dinner for our family of five. The kids enjoyed it, though as with anything, it will take some getting used to as they shift from the store-bought pasta they've always known. I'm hoping to make and dry some basil fettucini today while the basil's still fresh—the sundried tomato pasta I can make any time.

Gluttony Begins Here... or, Why I Farm

Yes, each year I celebrate my birthday with eggs benedict and mimosas in the morning. The potato dish varies. Some years it's country home fries, others it's latkes. Either way though, my birthday ushers in the kind of cool weather eating that revels in gastronomic glory and packs on the pounds. You see, Jim's birthday comes just a few short weeks after mine, so we're already talking about what he might like to eat for his birthday at my birthday dinner, which this year was comprised of lobster, New York strip steak, and the last delicious strawberries and raspberries of the season with whipped cream and melt-in-your-mouth crumbly shortcake.

Then, of course, the Thanksgiving harvest lingers just a month or so away, followed quickly by Christmas goose and roast potatoes in goose fat, with a New Year's Eve seafood fest on its heals. Then there's Valentine's Day lobster or filet mignon or, most likely, both because that's the kind of people we are, likely complete with two mouth-watering sauces—a roquefort and a burgundy—because I'm all about the sauce.

And so begins my decadent foray into feasting and merry making—with much good food and good wine and great company to wile away the dark winter hours.

Country Cured Hams

Admittedly, I ignored the hams for too long during the cure equalization phase after taking them out of the fridge from the salt cure. We'd put them downstairs in the larder, which is also our well pump room—a cinder block room in the basement that stays a pretty constant cool temperature. The hams had gotten a bit moldy in their paper bags, as they will do with the aging process, just as cheeses do, for instance. This week, I brought them upstairs, scrubbed the mold off and finished with the final rub before hanging them. I mixed together some salt, black pepper, brown sugar and molasses and rubbed all the hams down, and they look pretty dang good. Afterwards, I put them in fresh brown paper bags, sealed them, and wrapped them all in muslin to hang. After aging a few months, the first ham will be ready to soak and cook overnight with my grannie's recipe for cooking a country ham. Then, it's on with ham and cheese buscuits. Mmmmm, nothing better.

Grape Jelly

Sunday evening, I decided to pick over the rest of the grapevines and see what I could do with what was left. I'd already given out a few pounds of grapes to the CSA—nice bunches of the blue Mars slipskin grapes, which performed much better than the Canadice, though the Canadice are sweeter and have a tender skin.

Looking at the vines sporting some black rot and devastated by Japanese beetles, there didn't seem to be all that much there to work with. But by the time I was done harvesting every last bunch, I had a bushel basket full of grapes, which once stripped from their stems and hand selected, yielded more than 16 pounds of grapes. That's about as specific as I can be because my scale maxes out at 16 lbs. and I didn't jump on the bathroom scale to approximate any closer.

Here is the aftermath. I, of course, forgot to take pictures while in the midst of jelly making and CSA delivery day—silly me. Yesterday was pretty much a dawn to dusk work day between the two, and I didn't get to the pickles that I wanted to put up. (That'll be today's project, and I'll be trying the horseradish green trick to keep them crunchy.)


Because both varieties of grape that I used were seedless, I opted not to skin them as so many recipes call for. Instead, I put the whole grapes into my Vitamix and whirred them into a fine pulp, reserving, I hope, so much of the nutrition found in those grape skins. I skimmed much foam off the surface of the boiling liquid, but I didn't let it stand over night to remove any crystals, nor did I strain the liquid; so, we'll see if that affects the product at all. I also choose not to use pectin recipes, so this particular jelly may be a bit thin, but that seems to be the way everyone here prefers it. All told, I made 28 half pint jars of grape jelly. Not bad for a few two year old vines! We may have enough jams/ jellies to get through the winter after all...then again, probably not the way we go through it.

Yogurt and Blackberry Jam

Latte's not giving a whole lot of milk—about a pound a day—but it's enough to make some homemade dairy products after saving the milk for about a week. And, it's enough to make me dream of more. I now have visions of a mini-Jersey dancing in my back pastures.


We've given away about 9 pints of raspberries to CSA members, not leaving a whole lot for me to preserve, though we've certainly eaten our fill fresh. I was able to eek out about 5 1/2 pints of black raspberry jam last week though, and man is it delicious! I moved about 100 raspberry transplants out to the berry garden this spring in the upper pasture, and the lack of rain has killed at least half of them. But some survived, and the black raspberries are doing quite well in large part because they were rooted canes rather than tender young suckers. Next spring, we'll continue to expand the berry bed, which is now so overrun with weeds that it's kinda hard to see. We plan to invest in some kind of black ground cover to suppress the weeds next year.