her able hands

I agree with Angelina’s statement that urban homesteading is a movement. A growing and necessary movement—and an excellent way to say screw you to the ridiculous, unsustainable systems our country has put in place to feed and give “comfort” to its citizens. It has become my chosen form of political activism.

I also hear the truth in Angelina’s statement that she doesn’t want or need a farm. Part of me still longs for that possibility, but reality intrudes, thank goodness. I briefly explored that option three years ago when we lived on a piece of land that was certainly large enough to make a small farm and a tiny living. I researched forming a CSA but found that my customer base would have been too far away and not interested in making the trek out to the country to help. Consequently my prices would have had to be a lot higher so I could hire warm bodies to keep up with the work. Those higher prices made it a lot less interesting to that same customer base.

I went the farmer’s market route and while it was an amazing experience that I have sorely missed these two summers since, it wasn’t the most effective way for one person to make a living. I know that time and trial and error would have improved my model, but I also know that I would have hit a ceiling on how much I could earn because I’m only one person. When I did the math at the end of that season of dabbling, I had made about $900 profit, but that worked out to be about 1.80 an hour.

Now I’m trying to apply what I learned out on the “farm” to my life here in the city (rural city, but still city). I know that I (mostly) don’t want to be a farmer. But I also know that I want to grow a lot of my own food and continue to form connections with the other dedicated growers in my community. It’s a slow process because I work full-time outside of the home. One of my biggest complaints about what it takes to collect such a nice paycheck every two weeks is the fact that I have to spend more hours than necessary chained to my desk in a cubicle.

In terms of efficiency, I could get my job done in 3 days most weeks, four during super rush times. That is, if I could just focus on the work and not get sucked into the constant stream of interruption that is endemic in the corporate office culture. I’m trying to not get bitter about the productivity I could have enjoyed at home during those wasted hours at work. About the tomatoes that never made it into canning jars. All in good time, I tell myself, all the while looking back over my shoulder at the looming shadow of change building on the horizon.

I’ll try to drop my jealousy when I see photos of other bloggers’ stocked freezers and pantries this fall and keep my eye on the prize of progress. There’s always next year. Or, at least, I hope there is…

Saturday’s market boomed with activity, such a great thing to see. I should have brought the camera—the light was perfect—long, slanting shadows and a golden hue made all the deeper by the piles and crates of pumpkins and winter squash. Such a boon to our small city to have this market growing exponentially each summer. The fact that I walked away from the second to last market day with this haul is just amazing.

My haul:

2 eggplant
1/2 peck paste tomatoes
2 heads lettuce
1 bag mesclun greens
1 bag mustard spinach
1 large bunch collards
1 large bunch curly kale
1 quart green beans
1 pint edamame
1 pint habaneros
3 sweet yellow peppers
3 yellow crookneck summer squash
onions
2 small loaves of bread from Rafael
1 pint maple syrup
1 pint maple BBQ sauce
1 pie pumpkin
1 bag Black Arkansas Apples
1 giant cabbage
1 quart yams
1 giant frosted pumpkin cookie for Lila
1 big bunch of flowers with purple dahlias for Cheril
and finally…
one pint of raspberries—the last raspberries of the season!

We had dinner at Cheril & Greg’s last night, and I cranked in the kitchen from noon until six. I brought the bulk of dinner because Cheril’s been at a yoga training for the past two days, and also because I felt like cooking for my people, dangit.

I made a big salad of just greens that I tossed some Matt’s Wild Cherry tomatoes into before dressing with a sweet balsamic vinaigrette.

One of the eggplants and a lone zucchini got dredged in flour, egg and breadcrumbs, then fried golden, layered in a casserole with mozzarella and asiago cheese, and the sauce I made of eggplant, onion, garlic, tomato and herbs. End of the season Veggie Parmesan. Without the parm, but still yum.

I also tried the scrumptious looking recipe from Smitten Kitchen, for butternut squash and caramelized onion galette and I must say, it was heavenly.

Finally, I did up a 12 x 9 inch pan with an apple, blueberry, raspberry cobbler. Time to buy new baking powder…the biscuit dough didn’t rise at all. Yuck.

We watched the Indians/Red Sox game 6 and sipped wine after dinner. Chris and Lila both fell asleep on the couch. I enjoyed the quiet, sitting in the dark with my dear friends…their doggies groaning in pleasure from their respective spots of repose. Life is good.

Technorati Tags: eat local, homemade, recipes, farmers’ market, farm, urban homesteading, garden

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I forgot to post this recipe! I’m not sure where it comes from, but it’s one my sister wrot e out on a recipe card for me while I was visiting her a couple of years ago. It’s my favorite thing to do with apples, now.

These babies came out of the oven and the entire neighborhood smelled like warm cinnamon and apples.

Apple Crostate
Makes 6 individual

Dough:
3 cups flour
1 tsp. salt
1 cup chilled, unsalted butter cut into small pieces
2 eggs lightly beaaten
1/2 cup sour cream.

Combine the flour & salt, work in the butter with a pastry knife until it just forms crumbs (I used the food processor because I had just finished using it to make the dough for the wonderful, blunderful Chard Tart). Combine the sour cream and eggs in a separate bowl, then add to the flour mixture (not in the food processor) and mix until just combined. Then knead until it just comes together. Form into 6 flat, round cakes. Wrap and refrigerate for at least 30 minutes.

Filling:
6 large apples (Cortland, Rome Beauty, — I used Opalescent, a local heirloom variety.) peeled and sliced thin
3/4 cup sugar
1 1/2 tsp cinnamon

Preheat oven to 375*
Form tarts to liking– roll out on a lightly floured board, into thin circles about 9″ across. I floured the board with a 50/50 whole wheat and white mix, so the dough picked up luscious flakes of wheat.

Pile 1/6th of the apples onto one side, fold the dough over, fold the edges up and press down to seal. Repeat five more yummy times.

Move them to the ungreased baking sheet as you go.

Bake for 40-45 minutes, until crust is golden brown.

Cut one up into small pieces to appease the kids in the neighborhood who have now gathered around the picnic table.

Eat one yourself in place of dinner. Pick up and eat every little amazing flake of sweet and salty dough that has fallen on your shirt and lap. Lick the plate. Trust me.

Technorati Tags: recipes, apples, apple crostate, flaky dough, sour cream dough, autumn cooking

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This is a fairly straightforward recipe, but there’s one important step and that’s the step I skipped. When you roll out the dough, you’re going for a nice, even 15 inch circle. Easy enough, right? Except the recipe says to roll it out in between two sheets of wax paper so you can then lift it onto the baking pan without it tearing to ribbons. Well, I didn’t do that. Not only did I not do that, I also then piled my wet ingredients right on top of the thin dough, right there on my cutting board.

Then I folded the edges up, working counter-clockwise around the tart, until I had a neat little tarty package to pop in the oven.

Except, whoops! How am I going to move this nice neat tart onto the baking sheet? Hmmmm, braniac?

After some pulling and turning and dumping out of ingredients all over the place, I did manage to shift it onto the pan without tearing it asunder, though now it looked like a wrinkled old ball sac filled with chard. Sorry, but it’s true. And I kind of like it better. It’s even more rustic in appearance, with more texture than usual.

It was bittersweet making this recipe as it used up most of the rest of my chard. My fall plantings of greens have officially become the local buffet for another group of rabbits, so I won’t have any greens at Thanksgiving direct from the yard. Thank goodness Hilgert’s will have kale and collards.

So, on to the recipe!

Chard Tart
serves 4-6

Pastry
1 1/3 cups all-purpose flour
1/8 teaspoon salt, preferably kosher
1 1/2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
4 tablespoons unsalted butter
In a food processor, combine the flour, salt, oil, and butter, and process briefly. Drizzle in 1/3 cup cold water and process briefly. Test to see if the dough sticks together. If not, gradually add more water, a tablespoon at a time. Remove the dough from the processor, knead it a few times on a lightly floured surface, and form it into a ball. Flatten it a bit, wrap it in wax paper, and refrigerate for 1 hour or as long as 6 to 8 hours.

Filling
8 large Swiss chard leaves, stems removed, thinly sliced
Salt, preferably kosher
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 leek, white part only, washed and thinly sliced (I skipped the leek, but added a few baby shallots).
1 medium yellow onion, chopped
1 medium potato (or 1 large red), boiled until tender, peeled and cubed (I used 4 fingerling potatoes from the garden with skins on).
2 tablespoons chopped flat-leaf parsley
1 cup crumbled feta cheese
1/3 cup cubed Fontina cheese
Salt, preferably kosher
Freshly ground black pepper
2 large eggs, lightly beaten
4 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
2 tablespoons freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese (I used thick shaved Romano).
Preheat the oven to 375F. Place the Swiss chard in a colander, sprinkle with 1 1/2 teaspoons salt, and set the colander aside over a bowl for 30 minutes.

In a small saucepan, heat the 2T olive oil over medium heat. Add leek and onion stirring until softened, about 5 minutes. Transfer to a large bowl. Add the chard to the bowl, along with potato, parsley, feta, Fontina, salt and pepper, eggs, and 2T of the extra-virgin olive oil. Mix well.

Lightly flour a sheet of wax paper, and place the dough on it. Flour the dough lightly and cover with a piece of wax paper. Roll the dough out to form a 15-inch circle. Remove the top piece of wax paper. Invert the dough round onto an oiled baking sheet and remove the other piece of wax paper.

Spread the filling on the dough, leaving a 1 1/2-inch border all around. Fold the border over the filling, overlapping itself slightly every 2 inches or so. Brush the dough with 1 tablespoon of the extra-virgin olive oil. Sprinkle filling with the Parmigiano-Reggiano, and drizzle with the remaining 1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil. Bake for 30 minutes, or until the crust and filling are lightly browned. Slice, and serve hot or at room temperature.

All this dish needs is a bright salad and a glass of chilled Rose to make it a perfect meal. But it’s also quite scrumptious eaten while standing over the hot pan.

Technorati Tags: recipes, chard, chard tart, feta cheese, eat local, locavore, garden, kitchen garden

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I haven’t eaten a single local peach this summer.

I’m just saying.

Geeze-oh-man, the weather alarmists are way off base for our zip-pity-do-dah the past two days. It’s been hot, muggy, still (except for yesterday when a stiff breeze blew over my 7′ tall patch of Matt’s Wild Cherry and Yellow Pear tomatoes). Usually when we get a forecast of 70% chance of thunderstorms, we get some good rainfall. So far we’ve heard some nice, slow rumbly thunder, but nary a drop of rain for our poor, parched patch of the planet. Ah, well. I should have gone out there and watered this morning, for surely then it would have poured.

Instead, I picked the ripe tomatoes so they wouldn’t split wide open if it did rain, then trudged back inside in the thick, soupy air to do some much-needed, long-overdue deep cleaning. Gawd, my house has gotten gross this summer. After about an hour or so, the kitchen looked much more pleasant to work in, so I wondered what I could make that would quickly destroy the spit shine and settled on Gazpacho.

So how’s about this time I provide y’all with an actual recipe, instead of making you try to mine it from my rambling prose? This is my version, ganked from several other versions and varying wildly depending upon what all the veggies taste like coming out of the garden that season. This year, methinks they’re perfect.

Kelly’s Damn Gorgeous Gazpacho

3 Bell Peppers (1 green, 1 red, 1 orange–okay, the orange was from the grocery store)
2 Slicing Cucumbers–seeded, or 4 or 5 small Pickling Cucumbers, or a combination thereof–yielding about 3 cups cucumber bits
8-10 Plum tomatoes of some sort–seeded–this batch I used mostly San Marzano and two big, ox heart shaped Amish Paste
1 medium onion–red is preferred, but I used yellow and it’s tasting good
1 small hot pepper of your choice
1 small stalk of celery– whole stalk if thin, half if super-fat
4-5 cups tomato juice (depends on how thin you like it, I do 4)
4 large cloves of F R E S H hardneck garlic
1 Tbsp. kosher salt
1 1/2 tsp. cracked pepper
1/2 cup White Wine Vinegar
1/2 cup Extra Virgin Olive Oil
1/4 cup chopped fresh Italian flat leaf parsley
1/4 cup chopped fresh cilantro

So you start off by chopping all of the veggies into 1-inch dice and then, one vegetable at a time, pulsing them in a food processor with a blade until they’re coarse. I don’t think it really matters what order you do this in, but it’s imperative that you start with very ripe tomatoes.

I chopped my peppers and onions first and dumped them out into the largest of my glass nesting bowls. Remind me sometime to do a post about my bowls, will ya? I have a lot of bowls and every one of them is special to me in some way.

So now you’re adding the veggies one at a time to the bowl and your kitchen is starting to fill with the fumes from the onions and peppers, and with a sharp, green and cool fragrance from the cucumbers.

I used a mix of one slicing cuke from the farmers’ market and three smallish Boston Pickling cukes from my garden. If they’re organically grown, I leave the skin on, but don’t forget to slice the seeds out, you really don’t want those floating around in the mix.

Next came the tomatoes and then the short stalk of celery. A lot of recipes don’t call for celery, and I’ve tried some that use way too much. I love just a hint of celery flavor, it shouldn’t overpower. The tomato should take center stage.

Now you’ve got a great big bowl of freshness and it’s time to add the remaining ingredients, the most important being the garlic. If you haven’t got any fresh hardneck garlic from a local farmer, well… I’m sorry. I really don’t know what else to say. Except maybe skip the garlic, because the rancid crap they try to sell as garlic at the grocery store just shouldn’t ever be added to any dish you might want to take pride in. It’s disgusting. Sorry to be so blunt and mean, but it’s true.

So while there’s still time, get thee to a farmers’ market and buy up a buttload of hardneck garlic. This bulb is Music, a sweet and delicious variety—super-juicy and garlic-tastic! Mince it up as fine as you can, then fold it into the veggies. Add the olive oil and vinegar, salt and pepper, then the parsley and cilantro.

Last comes the tomato juice. I’ve got to tell you that I’m feeling pretty damned lucky right now. Want to know why? Well, let me tell you. It’s because of the fact that I made a little trip down to the dungeon (a.k.a. basement), and what did I spy right there gathering dust on my dwindling pantry shelf? I found a jar of thin tomato sauce—improperly labeled, because really? It’s tomato juice. My very own tomato juice from my most amazing garden two summers ago.

I got to crack that jar open almost exactly two years to the day—the label read 9/4/05—and swirl it gently into the bowl of vegetables, thus taking it from the level of a loose salad to a cool summery soup.

My fridge is a bit packed right now and I didn’t have enough room for such a big bowl, so I dumped it into a pitcher and the quart jar the juice came out of so it can sit in the cold overnight. You can eat it after a few hours if you don’t have the patience to wait, but it’s much better if you let all of the ingredients mingle and get to know one another overnight. It’s a fuller, sexier soup the next day.

And a fuller sexier soup is just the thing on a hot September day, don’t you think?

Technorati Tags: recipes, gazpacho, tomatoes, eat local, locavore, organic gardening

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I can’t believe OLS is over. I didn’t try half of the recipes I intended to try, but the summer isn’t finished and the produce at the farmers’ market is still abundant, so I’m going to keep this thing going on my own blog for a few more weeks.

I had no idea what I wanted to make last night because my brain is all fogged up with histamines. The goldenrod is in full bloom and my sinuses feel like a big rig has parked right up in there, and the driver is a heavy smoker. That and a new symptom that I’ve never had with seasonal allergies before—my entire body hurts as if I’ve been whacked all over with a rubber stick. Like flu aches. Lila and Tyler are both wonky from allergies too, so we all kind of pooped around all day. Be forewarned, this post is going to meander. My head’s a wreck. I promise eventually to get to the point, and it’s all related, just not particularly well organized.

The big college apartment complex out across the road that runs behind us had some kind of a battle of the bands event outside yesterday. Lots of extremely loud, angry music. I know I’m getting old because dudes…what the everloving hell? I just don’t understand the noise that passes for music with the kids these days. So much angst. Hate. Anger. No melody. No rhythm. How is this considered music? And why did it have to infect such a glorious day yesterday for eight solid hours? Hours that I had planned to spend wandering around outside, peacefully doing small jobs that wouldn’t entail too much lifting or bending over.

I tried working outside, but my heart was beating so fast from the allergies and the grinding metal guitar and screaming. I did manage to pick a large colander of San Marzano tomatoes, which I forgot to photograph and Chris has my camera down at the old house today, so you’ll have to take my word for it. I’ll snap a pic of the slow roasted sauce I intend to make with them today. I also finally dug up the last row of potatoes, German Butterball. Looks like about 20 lbs. Some of those will go into vegetable soup with the Red Russian kale I got at the market, and the carrots I picked.

While I did all of that harvesting, Lila and two of her friends discovered the wood lot for the first time in a year of living here. They marched around from one end to the other—barking out orders—and climbed the wood chip pile to survey the lay of the land. They also tromped through a huge patch of poison ivy. Oh joy. It was close to nap time though, and the two girls began to melt down, so it was time to break up the search party and head inside. Thank Maude.

Lila pissed and moaned for half an hour and I lay on the bed next to her reading Harry Potter and trying to ignore all of the terrible sounds coming at me all at once. Whining. “Music”. Lawn mowers. “Music”. Whining. Eventually she fell asleep and I stayed inside and read for three hours. To hell with everything else.

So by the time I started dinner it was already almost 6:00. I halved two acorn squash (organic from the market) and started them baking in a 350 degree oven. Meanwhile I warmed up the cast iron skillet and dropped in a dollop of Amish butter, some sliced Cippolini onions (market), 3 types of peppers (my Anaheim Chili, and 1 sweet red and 1 sweet green from the market) and sautéed until golden. Added some zucchini (market) and all blue potatoes (mine). I added these to ten eggs (mine), a cup of flour (local), 1 tsp. each of baking powder and baking soda (not local), and chopped fresh basil (mine). Poured the goop into a buttered 9″ square baking dish and baked for 35 minutes at 350.

While I waited for all of that to cook, I sliced up a bunch of tomatoes (Pink Caspian from the market, my Juanne Flammé and Black Krim) and a cuke (market), then tossed those with a little balsamic, salt and pepper (all not local), local goat feta and my basil. Doesn’t it look yummy? I didn’t get the photo until dusk, so it’s a wee dark.

I sat out on the deck browsing through the latest Gardening Jihad Catalog while everything cooked and Lila played on the swing set with two friends. The music, blissfully, had ceased. The air smelled of late summer, loamy and green with a tinge of decay, and a rich, eggy warmth wafting out of the kitchen. Soon the timer dinged…

So over the next month or so, I'd like to try cooking a few things I haven't tried before, but will need to do a bit more sourcing (driving) to accomplish locally:

Leg of lamb (I've never cooked lamb in my life, so this will be a new one. Any advice on cooking one on the grill much appreciated!) If we end up liking the taste of lamb, I have opportunity to buy a good amount to stock the freezer for winter.

Homemade pasta. I can't find my pasta attachment for the KitchenAid anywhere. It's only been used once in, oh, fifteen years. No idea what happened to it.

Stuffed Cabbage using local, grassfed bison.

I'm also going to do a little canning/freezing by doing some U-pick at Hilgerts a local farm that isn’t certified organic, but uses Integrated Pest Management. In the next month or three they have paste tomatoes (sauce & salsa, dammit!), green beans and cooking greens that I want for the freezer, onions, turnips, rutebega, yams, and parsnips for the chilly corner of the basement that I’ll pretend is a root cellar. I will have local foods this winter.

Jeepers. That’s like, right around the corner, isn’t it?

Technorati Tags: one local summer, eat local, locavore, garden, seasonal allergies, pantry, root cellar, harvest, zucchini tart

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