Winter garden

Thought I'd check in with an update of sorts.
It has frozen completely several times here now. The garden is mostly empty and planted with a cover crop of legumes for green manure in the spring. Only the blackened, drooping tomato vines have not been pulled and the few winter crops.

We harvested the last mature cauliflower (see photo), as they do not do well in the rain. There are still abundant broccoli, swiss chard, kale, parsley and overwintering carrots.
We find we cannot grow lettuce until early spring, even in a greenhouse. I make sprouts in mid-winter for sandwich greens.

But we did just pick peppers, both hot and sweet, from the upper greenhouse. The lower greenhouse, with more sensitive squash, melons, and cucumbers died a month ago. The cellar is full of peppers (they keep a long time in baskets), apples and, soon, potatoes from Ferndale.

The pantry is stocked with canned and dried goods, the freezer with meat and berries and pesto. There is still a lug of tomatoes, picked green, ripening.

We are very fortunate here in our benevolent temperate climate.

What the challenge has been...

When I started on this culinary journey I admit I thought it would be simple. After all, I have devoted most of my adult life here in Humboldt County living as close to the land as possible.

We came to the area as part of the 1960's Back-to-the-land movement and have worked toward a self-suppporting, sustainable lifestyle ever since. From the time our children were small and we raised dairy goats, rabbits, sheep and pigs, as well as the gardens, orchard and poultry we still have, we have gone from producing about 85% of our own food to about 70%. Given this advantage and all the fine food available in the large agricultural, multi-climate bio-region the Challenge allowed, it looked like an easy task. Nonetheless, there were many distinct changes we had to make.

September is a month of abundance in the garden, lots of food and lots of variety. Usually we eat Asian style stir fry with rice several times a week. But now we had no ginger root, no soy sauce, white pepper, fish sauce, peanut oil or other Asian seasoning. And no curries.

In fact, the greatest challenge of all was the lack of salt, pepper, spices (cumin especially!) and flavorings (vanilla), followed by butter (too lazy to make), flour, and other whole grains. I now know why people were ready to risk sailing off the edge of the earth looking for a shorter route to the Spice Islands!

Even with my salt "exception" I was reluctant to use it. I added no salt to food after cooking and, in fact, only used salt at all about 4 or 5 times the entire month. I experimented using only herbs and various homemade blends and condiments for seasoning. But no Spike, no pepper... this really was a challenge. I discovered that in our locale we have the ingredients to mainly eat Mediterranean cuisine. Some Mexican, but cumin was definitely lacking.

It would be wonderful if we had a local chicken producer. We ate our one meat bird (the rest perished en route from the hatchery) in August, not knowing we were going to take the challenge. A month without chicken is - well, different. We ended up eating much more beef than usual and, due to the Asian Stir-fry issue, less vegetarian meals as well!

On the other hand, we made many discoveries. From great local wine, meats, condiments, restaurants and new producers. Find this information is in my earlier posts.
We discovered that waitresses at restaurants, and sometimes the cooks, do not know where their food comes from, even if it IS local. It would be interesting to find out how much of the food trucked in is actually from farms in our bio region.

While I was glad to be a "Loophole Localvore", with the leeway to eat both locally harvested and locally produced foods, I found myself feeling guilty using foods with non-local ingredients. We ate less bread, less tortillas as the month wore on.

Now, back to "normal", we find we still eat mostly local food. Last night was stuffed bell peppers and cucumber salad, with only the butter, salt, and pepper being non-local ingredients.

I am probably going to continue to make sour cream and mayonnaise, newly inspired by how easy and delicious they are. We will definitely be more aware of who local producers are and which restaurants serve their fare as well.

All in all, there is a wealth of wonderful food available within our garden, our county and our seven county bio-region. We are truly blessed with abundance here.

Last Day

Hard to believe September has come to an end. Indeed, it is a frosty morning. Down to 30 degrees last night, so far it does not look as though it killed anything.

As I will be in town tomorrow we are shipping orders today. I start with a breakfast of left over leftover chili (that recipe really made a lot!) with egg and cheese. Melon and cider to round it out. Book group tonight, I will see what local fare the gals bring. I am taking a bottle of Briceland "Champagne" to celebrate.

A busy day - no lunch. Grazed a bit on apples (they are close enough - we will be borrowing a neighbor's cider press this weekend), peppers, tomatoes.

Only food harvest work was picking dinner ingredients and adding some trays of tomatoes to the dehydrator.

Made a ratatouille to take. There is a recipe in the Localvore handout, but I used another. I cannot believe I did not make this all along! The perfect harvest season fare - with zukes, onion, eggplant, peppers - a garden medley of the best kind. That, Champagne & a bottle of the Elk Prairie in hand I joined my friends in a chat 'n chew around books about Julia Child.

How apropos!

There was local salad, a chili relleno casserole with local peppers, Orzo salad with local vegetables, homemade pickles, pasta with homemade sauce. It was tough, but I stuck to these and the ratatouille, with the rather large loophole of the other ingredients involved. I did not eat cornbread and several other delectables with only out of area ingredients... but waived mightily on the carrot cake. They could have been local carrots... not!

I stuck to the Elk Prairie - and we never did get around to the champagne.

I'll write a summation of what I learned later in the week. It really has been an interesting journey, with much the same and some new. I was, perhaps, more lax that I should have been, but I know I will be having many more localvore meals every day.

Tweaked Tuesday

The rain did not arrive last night as predicted - but the cold did. 40 degrees this morning. Sun & mixed clouds and a prediction for frost the next couple of nights. Ah well - the seasons do change.

Our young hens have started laying, the occasional small "beginner" egg has been showing up. But today there was a very special one - a blue egg from one of the 2 Auracana hens. Having these young hens starting now will assure us eggs in the winter months when the older hens take a break.

From the get go, this day was full of interruptions. Late to get tea - was lucky to get in a brunch of egg and fried pepper and Loleta cheddar sandwich with cider. Snacked on cherry tomatoes and little sweet peppers.

Frost predicted tonight, and I don't need the weatherman... quite cool all day and in the 40's before 9pm. After work we picked all the soon-to-be-ripening tomatoes, summer squash, good looking zinnias and the rest of the corn. Then we put a hoop and plastic cold frame arrangement over the summer and winter squash and crossed our fingers over the tomatoes.

Lastly, we closed the ends of the greenhouses that house our peppers, basil, eggplant and melons as well a few extra tomatoes. This could be the end of fresh summer vegetable abundance. We will see. And even if... there is chard and winter cole coming on and lots of already harvested food in the house both fresh & preserved.

We were wrapping this up right up until I had to leave for Tai Chi class. The end result was a very late dinner of leftover Localvore Chili con Carne that I had put in the freezer to keep. On the side we had the solar Spanish Rice cooked yesterday and the last of the sweet corn. Cider was the beverage of choice. Slices of honeydew melon for dessert.

I end the day trying to print shipping labels (Grrrr - the USPS website is being uncooperative) and admiring the many vases of zinnias! I may have overdone it, but Zinnias do not handle frost well - and it is only 38 degrees out now.

Tomorrow is the last day of the Challenge. I have been thinking about what has been different, what I have learned. I look forward to writing a summary of the experience. But now, *YAWN*, I must go sleep on it.

28 down, 2 to go

Monday, work day, paperwork, phone and orders.
I start with Brio toast with a thin slice of Loleta cheddar cheese,a fine butter substitute, to accompany my tea.

We want to make the most of this decidedly cooler (some 30 degrees cooler than yesterday!)  but sunny day. Throw some tarps over things, put others away... batten down the hatches for impending change in the weather.

Break time means a Monday brunch. We make omelets filled with chopped crookneck squash, onion, bell pepper, parsley, burger, & Loleta jack cheese. I season mine with our "Thaibasco" sauce. There is cider to drink and honeydew melon on the side.  The honeydew is perfectly ripe - a sign of more to come. We grow these melons in containers in a greenhouse.
 Before going back to work I put together a dish of solar Spanish Rice (see recipe here) while we still have sun. To make it more local based, I leave out the cumin or Mexican seasoning and add some of my ground chilis (sparingly) and chopped cilantro. This way I'll have a ready made rice dish for some busy evening, rain or shine.
While it cooks I go back to work.
Finally done (work & rice both), we get out to harvest, put away, and cover up anything that needs to stay dry. If the change in temperature wasn't enough to remind us of the season we hear a distant clamor... First Geese! The migration is in progress - two large "V's" high in the sky heading SE. Very cool.

Day done. We dine on local line-caught rock cod, cooked in olive oil with my fish seasoning. With it a pile of steamed crookneck squash and sliced beets w/sour cream. We love beets. I will pull up a bunch of them and steam them ( these were steamed yesterday) and put them in the fridge to use on salads or whenever. This dish, usually made with butter and salt & pepper, was just fine with the beets heated in a tiny bit of olive oil and then steamed with about a Tablespoon of water. Just before serving I stirred in the last of our homemade sour cream. A perfectly local dinner. Except for the olive oil all from Humboldt county - again!
I have my evening tea and put the dried pears into jars to seal. We begin to refill the dehydrator with more tomatoes. It is during weather changes that the dehydrator is most valuable. Might be no more placing the trays outside for a while.

Back on the computer I find a message in my e mail - Arcata did not make the Top 20 Best Farmer's Markets in the US!! As good as that market is, and as computer savvy as Arcatans are, I really thought they might get out the vote.
Sponsored by  American Farmland Trust , "...committed to protecting the nation's best farm and ranch land and improving the economic viability of agriculture." They held an online contest to find the most liked farmer's markets in 3 size categories.
Maybe next year...

The Last Weekend

Wow, the month is coming to a close. It has been an interesting culinary journey.

After a tea, pear and melon breakfast a leisurely Saturday begins.
We are having a heat wave. 100+ yesterday, definitely today is headed there as well. We watered and did some harvesting earlier and are staying in the cooler house.

I checked the dehydrator and all but 1 tray's worth of the pears are done. We pack these in canning jars and vacuum pack them, using the seal a meal (FoodSaver) jar attachment. This is one of the neater gizmos we have ever bought. I use it to vacuum pack jars of dried fruit, dried tomatoes, almonds, tea, coffee, even bulk vegetable oil. We initially got the machine for packing meat to freeze, but make much more use of it for glass jars of dry goods.
At any rate, I core and slice the remaining pears to dry - leaving only 7 pears to eat. The end of the Bartlett pears! This makes me very happy. Our winter pears won't be ripe for a few more weeks.

Yesterday I baked bread for the first time this month. Ordinarily we bake most of our bread. We have a bread machine - as I am generally lazy to knead and do all the work for only one loaf of bread. Since there has only been the two of us at home we have gotten a bread machine which lets me control the ingredients without doing the work. But we did not go to town last week and what bread we did not eat became chicken food due to dehydration or mold.
At any rate, the bread allows us to have our favorite carnivorous sandwich - a mock Reuben. With Premiere Meats pastrami, Loleta Cheese Monterey Jack, home made mayonnaise, Fred's Horseradish mustard and our home canned sauerkraut (last year's, the new batch is not ready yet) a local delectable deli style lunch. This with the last of the now lightly alcoholic cider and last of the exploded melon.

We have our oldest daughter, 2 granddaughter's, and a friend coming for the weekend and will probably be breaking the Challenge temporarily for dinner. We are attending a spaghetti dinner benefit for the Two Rivers Community Care Group, a wonderful organization which got a write up in Thursdays Times Standard. The importance of supporting Lauri Rose and the other volunteers' efforts in our community trumps the Eat Local Challenge for this one meal.
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(As it turns out, several of the sauces and a side dish of mixed garden vegetables and bowl of cherry tomatoes are completely local.)
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Sunday is a family girl's day on the farm (Dennis stays in the background). We share local food all day, on the plate, in the canner and to take home.
Our daughter brought up another (cold!) gallon of Clendenen's cider, a couple loaves of Brio bread and Humboldt Creamery 1/2 & 1/2 (hooray!), some Loleta Cheddar as well as potatoes and cauliflower from a friend's farm in Ferndale. We packed it all away last night.

We start the day with a Sunday brunch of poached farm fresh eggs (the little girls LOVE getting the eggs) on our home baked bread with grated Loleta cheese. A poor man's Eggs Benedict. On the side we have the cider and the first of our intact melons. A Galia honeydew/muskmelon cross - yum!

Amber brings Lila over to spend the day with her cousins (and get a break) and we big girls can a vegetable medley of onions, garlic, summer squash, peppers, green beans, cabbage, herbs and tomatoes for soup. Vegetable medleys are a handy way to put away small amounts of several varieties of vegies at once. Requiring pressure canning, you process for  the longest time of the individual vegetables included. In this case, summer squash. I always throw in some of my herbed vinegar to bring up the acidity (and flavor) as well.

We snacked on pears, peaches, plums and peppers as well as the leftover rice pudding.
An early dinner so the gang can drive home to the coast - an all-American localvore burger on Brio bread with Loleta Cheese, homemade mayo and catsup, lettuce and tomato from the garden. With corn on the cob and potato salad made with homemade mayo, farm eggs, onion, parsley, homemade sweet pickles and vinegar and apple cider on the side it is the perfect end of the warm weather feast.
We send the girls back home with summer squash and tomatoes as well as jars of vegetables for the pantry.

And we mean end of the warm weather. Although in the 100's today, we hear a cold snap will be here in the next couple of days - time to put out the cold frame over the winter squash and batten down the hatches.

Ah well. So I end this day with a glass of Riverbend Cellars Cabernet downloading tomorrow's orders and updating this blog. And toast to the last few days of the challenge.

Working it through the week

Thursday and Friday - trying to balance work and harvest. It is beginning to feel like over-abundance!

Thursday begins with pears & tea and off to work. Today Dennis makes soap while I ship orders. We have a late lunch of vegie boogaloo with sausage, with fizzy apple cider. Our gift of Clendenen's cider was unrefrigerated the day before we got it, all it takes to accelerate the fermentation process!
I break to water the greenhouses and pick the few peaches in the top of our cling peach tree... A surprise! Hidden in the leaves were a whole basket of lovely ripe peaches! Wahoo!! Fruit that is SO not pears!
We celebrate later with a snack of a peach strawberry smoothie using the yogurt I made and the handful of berries that was in the strawberry bed. Bliss.

Dinner is local tortellini I got at Eureka Co-op. The label does not give the origin, but it is the fresh pasta you see at both co-ops. There was a sign by it saying it was locally made, but I did not write down the producer. At any rate it is delicious with the pesto we made, a cucumber & tomato salad with basil and Tehama olive oil & our homemade red wine vinegar dressing, and a glass of the Elk Prairie Pinot. As a very special treat I heat some peach slices with honey until soft and hot and we drizzle some Humboldt Creamery cream over it for dessert. Now, THAT is delicious.

My last effort of the day is to fill our dehydrator with pear slices to dry. This leaves only a very full single layer in a lug box. The end of the pears is in sight at last.

Friday this time of year is a minimal business and maximum food preservation day. Really, when the harvest season is full on, if I am not putting away food one way or the other every day it will rot, explode into zillions of fruit flies - and I will miss the opportunity.
This Friday is salsa and corn. My favorite canning partners, Amber and Lila are coming over to can this morning.
We start the day with tea and pear and grazing on cherry tomatoes and peppers and some melon (our first this year) from a honeydew that actually exploded open. I guess that one's ripe!
When the girls get here we go out and harvest ingredients for salsa before the day gets too hot. After, I play with Lila while Amber preps to make Zesty Salsa (Blue Book again). After which she and Lila lay down for a nap.
I lunch on a vegie scramble and some melon, then pick the remainder of our 3rd batch of corn (we plant corn to ripen at 65, 75, 85 and 100 days to extend our season). By then the girls are up and had their lunch. Amber resumes the salsa making and Lila and I husk corn.
There are quite a few corn earworms this year and Lila is very excited about this. She took this picture of a green worm all by herself!

Speaking about excited. I am still very excited about the peaches. During this Challenge I have been wanting to make an egg custard - eggs and milk being two great local products and eggs in abundance right now. But the flavoring aspect, sans vanilla, was baffling me. But I can see that peaches could be the perfect sweet-tart note to add, with some sort of base.
Using the Lundberg Rice loophole and some solar cooked rice from the other day I made a peach rice pudding with 1 c. milk, 2 eggs, about 1/3 c. honey beaten together mixed with a few chopped peaches and maybe 3 c. cooked rice. This cooked up lovely in the solar oven.

Salsa done, and after eating some grapes from a friend in Trinity county, Lila and her mom went home.
Time to can the corn...
I wanted a more serious beverage to end a long, busy day, but felt guilty about my gin & tonic last Monday. So as an apertif, while cutting the kernels off the ears of corn, I had a cocktail of a dash of homemade Limoncello and a shot of sour cherry liqueur over ice - with several of the cherries in it.
A friend in Arcata make the Limoncello, a lemon flavored liqueur. I make the cherry. When our sour (pie) cherry tree has been robbed by the birds, leaving too few cherries for pie, I layer the cherries with organic sugar in a glass jar about 2/3 full and fill the jar with vodka. Wait at least 3 months, stirring occasionally, and the cherries turn pale and the liquid rose and the flavor - quite nice. A dessert, really. Not bad over fruit, ice cream or, in this case, ice. Be warned - the vodka soaked cherries are potent!
While the pints of corn were in the pressure canner, Dennis and I dined on grilled local beef steak, corn on the cob, and a salad with lettuce, cabbage, radishes, and steamed beets from the garden. Our condiments included Fred's Horseradish with our home made sour cream and the buttermilk salad dressing. Of course some Elk Prairie Pinot to accompany this. No salt, no pepper and no butter - but all good. And made all the more locally wonderful by our peachy rice pudding dessert!