Livestock Conservancy Conference

Last weekend I attended the Livestock Conservancy's national conference in Austin, TX. Like all of their conferences, the food was amazing! Members donated a variety of delicious pastured meats from heritage animals. Then the lucky chef gets to use that meat in all sorts of creative ways for a breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The meats included Gulf Coast sheep, Red Poll beef, and Large Black pork.

Although food plays a starring role in the conference, the real reason that everyone attends is to learn and network. I presented a half-day workshop on Friday morning about creating value-added products with heritage livestock, and it was a lot of fun. The point of the session was not to tell people how to do things (like spin yarn) but simply to give them an idea of things that could be done and what type of investment would have to be made in terms of learning and and financing. I met some very interesting people at all stages of the farming journey, from those still in the planning stages to those who've been raising livestock for many years. Saturday, I presented a one-hour talk on goats as the centerpiece of a diversified homestead, which includes information on how to actually make things like soap and cheese.

When I wasn't speaking, I attended sessions. During most hours, I was wishing I could be in two places at once! My favorite was a session on silvopasturing pigs -- or, raising pigs in the woods. The speakers were Marc and Lydia Mousseau of Atlanta. If I had met them anywhere else, and they had asked me to guess whether they were pig farmers or the owners of a design firm, I would have totally chosen the latter. However, the correct answer is "both!" I could totally relate to them because they were city slickers like I was 12 years ago!

It was two years ago that Marc became enamored by Ossabaw Island hogs and started talking about raising them on their land outside of Atlanta. Of course, his family thought he was nuts. (Sound familiar?) But as he continued talking about them and even came up with a business plan, they began to realize that he was serious.

Marc talked about the job of building a barn and erecting fencing for the pigs, as well as his agreement with an Atlanta chef who buys all of the pork that is currently being produced. I laughed more than once at his stories, and I filed away a couple of interesting tidbits of information. (1) He buried his fencing eight inches deep to keep the pigs from escaping, (2) If you say "Ossabaw" to Siri, she thinks you're saying "Awesome Bob," so of course, Marc had to name one of his boars "Awesome Bob!" and (3) Ossabaw Island hogs kill and eat coyotes! But they don't eat the tail.

Although Austin was unseasonably cold with temperatures in the 50s, Illinois was much worse! I arrived home to temperatures in the teens, and we had a dusting of snow on Monday evening. Winter seems to be arriving much earlier than normal, and I am definitely not looking forward to it.

Farm to fork dinner

Last night, Mike, Jane, and I went to Joliet Junior College's annual fall scholarship dinner for the culinary department. In previous years it was an international buffet, but this year it was a farm-to-fork dinner, which of course, got yours truly really excited. I'm always excited about the culinary department scholarship dinners -- students have won the national culinary championship multiple times -- but add locally grown food to the menu, and it's a really big cause for excitement. I love knowing that future chefs are learning about the advantages of using local, in-season foods.

The event was held outside the cafeteria at the college. While the second-year culinary students were in charge of cooking, the first-year students were the servers for the evening. As everyone mingled during the arrival time, the first course was served by students walking around with platters of appetizers, such as smoked heirloom tomato bruschetta on freshly baked ciabatta and miniature house-made sausage sandwich with honey mustard sauce. To drink, we had cranberry cyser, which was a hard cider-mead hybrid from Wild Blossom Meadery and Winery in nearby Chicago. Unfortunately, I was too busy enjoying the food to remember to take any pictures. (You'll find that was a recurring problem through the evening!)

We were seated for the second course, which was a variety of entirely house-made charcuterie, salumi, and fresh cheeses. I find it really exciting that culinary schools are teaching their students how to make all of these things! Although the cheeses were all fresh varieties (as opposed to aged styles), I'm hoping the trend continues and a cheese cave will be a standard fixture at all culinary schools of the future.

Caesar salad

The third course was a choice of four salads, as well as a variety of breads, butters, pickled vegetables, and relishes. And I finally came out of my food-crazed daze long enough to snap a couple of pictures. The "Caesar salad" was not your fast-food garden variety -- of course! -- as it included early fall kale and endive, in addition to the traditional romaine. I have to admit I never would have considered using kale in a Caesar salad, but it was honestly one of my favorite parts of the meal, and I am looking forward to copying the medley in my own kitchen.

Grilled vegetable "slaw"

Everyone had a choice of four entrees, and since it was served family style, we could take a little of each, if we wanted. (or a lot!) Since I only eat meat that we grow ourselves or was grown by farmers we know, I decided to pass on the pork and beef entree, even though it came from a local farm. The chicken was an organic Bell and Evans chicken, and because the chef's description sounded divine, I gave it a try. I only had one bite, which was when it occurred to me that it was a Cornish cross. Although the sauce was delicious, the chicken itself didn't taste like much. So alas, I can say I've finally tried a commercially grown organic chicken, and I can see why so many people rave about how heritage chicken tastes like chicken. Heritage chicken definitely tastes better.

And then there was dessert. At this point, most everyone was entering a food-induced coma, so no one made a dash for the dessert tables when it was announced that we'd be going inside for the final course. There were eight choices, so I carefully surveyed the options before choosing three. My favorite was the salted caramel ice cream with spicy apples and toffee. The pumpkin cheesecake came in a close second place. I also had sweet corn ice cream, which would have been deemed excellent had it not been for the stiff competition.

Overall, we had a great time, and I'm hoping they will make this an annual event. I'd definitely attend again. And I've been thinking about the importance of educating chefs (and future chefs) about the value of using locally-grown ingredients, not simply because of the sustainability aspect but also because the food tastes so much better when it's really fresh, as well as the availability of heirloom vegetables and heritage meats from small farmers.

The story of lunch

 by Jane Davis
Antiquity Oaks apprentice

I ate duck a l’orange for lunch the other day. It was delicious.

Friday morning the duck that I ate on Saturday was waddling around its enclosure.

Friday afternoon its head was being chopped off.

That night it was sitting in pieces in the fridge passing through the phases of rigor mortis.

Honestly, when I was watching the duck bleed out I wasn’t entirely sure that I would be able to eat it. It seemed gruesome. This was the duck that I had fed and watered every morning, and in just a second it went from very much alive to hanging headless, spilling it’s precious juices all over the ground. It was a little too real all of a sudden.

This might sound stupid, but I have never really been able connect the meat on my table to the animals it comes from. Think about the language that we use; it’s a cow when it’s alive, and at some point that we are not forced to bear witness to, it becomes beef. Poof, like magic. Nobody has to think about eating the big beautiful beast, because it’s not cow…. it’s beef.

The other day when I sat down in front of my plate I remembered that duck walking around the pen with his friends. I remembered chasing after his living, breathing body, and watching as spasms racked his headless body. To not eat this duck was to know that he had died for one less reason. So I ate consciously.

That duck tasted good because it was pasture raised and just about as fresh as it gets. It tasted good because I knew where it had come from and I had seen it grow and I was eating it deliberately. I was reminded of how much work went into that duck, and I was reminded to slow down and savor it. I was also reminded of how many slices of bacon, how many hamburgers, how many chicken wings, and how many turkeys I have eaten without reminding myself of the animal that made them. Watching that duck go, very literally, from farm to table prodded me to remember that all the meat I eat was once a living, breathing animal (as obvious as it sounds).

Making our own wine

 

For years, I've wanted to start making our own wine, but I was adamant that we start with growing our own grapes. Well, that hasn't exactly happened yet. We've planted grapes a couple of times. Lack of water got them one year. Goats got them another year. And the last time I ordered vines, we just never got around to planting them!

So, a year ago I decided that making our own wine from concentrated grape juice would at least be a step in the right direction. I am not talking about grape juice concentrate from the grocery store. You can actually buy concentrated juice from wine vineyards all over the world. We've made Riesling from Washington State, Cabernet Sauvignon from California, Pinot Grigio from Italy, and more. We've made seven batches of 30 bottles already, and we've started drinking five of the different wines. We bought all of the equipment and ingredients from Midwest Supplies.

One thing I really like about making our wine is that we can reuse bottles. It used to drive me crazy to see perfectly good wine bottles going into the recycling bin. For years, I had even saved some of the prettier bottles with the idea that we could make drinking glasses out of them. Now we can reuse bottles after washing them out. After washing them out, we put them in the dishwasher rack to dry.

Making wine isn't really hard. And it isn't terribly time-consuming until you get to bottling. But you can procrastinate on bottling as long as you need. Our Gewurztraminer and Pinot Noir stayed in the carboy for three or four months because Mike didn't have time to bottle it. So, it got a head start on the aging!

In addition to saving our own wine bottles, we ask friends to save their bottles for us, but you can buy new bottles to get started, if you prefer. Although you can reuse bottles, you need to use new corks. We got this fancy corker to make it very easy to put corks into the bottles.

We couldn't be happier with the results! I was initially skeptical about the quality, because I hate "cheap" wine. I started off buying only wines with lots of 5-star reviews, but I got brave after a few and ordered a wine that had no reviews at all. We wound up loving it! Other than one very reserved response, friends and family have all given our wine two thumbs up, so I think it has about a 95% approval rating. And it winds up costing us only about $2-4 a bottle!

Although I felt like I was wimping out in terms of sustainability by not growing our own grapes, this is a better option than buying individual bottles of wine. One 2.5 gallon container requires a lot less energy to produce than 30 wine bottles.

And when I visited Monticello last year, I learned that Thomas Jefferson and I have something else in common beyond our love of farming. He was never able to grow grapes on Monticello during his lifetime, although he believed that America could someday make wine as good as Europe. In the meantime, however, he bought large casks of wine and bottled it on his farm, rather than buying individual bottles of wine!

If you've ever thought about making your own wine, I really recommend starting with a kit.

I left my heart in Shelburne Falls

Since my first book came out, I've done quite a bit of traveling, and although it's fun, I'm always happy to come home to my little homestead on the prairie. Such was not the case, however, when Mike and I recently attended Jim Wallace's cheesemaking class in Shelburne Falls, MA. I had to remind myself that I had a farm full of animals counting on me to come home and take care of them. Otherwise my visit would have ended with a stop at a real estate office! What's so awesome about Shelburne Falls?

I imagine this is what most of America looked like and felt like 50 or 75 years ago. There isn't a national chain in site in their lovely downtown. The locally owned grocery store has a sign out front that says they support local agriculture. Each of the quaint locally owned restaurants have about a dozen tables, and local foods are on the menu. Towards the end of dinner one night, I asked a question about the lavender-maple glaze on the heritage pork tenderloin at the Blue Rock Restaurant, and the chef came out to tell me how he made it. He sat down, and we chatted about his use of locally grown ingredients. As we were talking, a customer stopped by our table on her way out to compliment the chef on her dinner and give him a kiss on the cheek.

When Mike suggested we check the menu of a pub our second night in town, I assumed they would have the usual pub fare -- factory farm burgers and previously frozen stuff that is tossed in a fryer. The West End Pub had a pleasantly surprising menu with locally raised grassfed beef burgers and chili! They even have locally made liquor and beer. Even though Illinois has plenty of wineries, I don't think I've ever seen Illinois wine in a restaurant here. A few restaurants have sprouted up that make their own beer, but otherwise, the alcohol in our restaurants comes from far away.

While at Jim's house, I had my first ever hard cider and wondered why -- coming from a state that grows apples -- we don't have hard cider available commercially in any of the stores or restaurants that I've been to.

We stayed at the Dancing Bear B&B, whose owners have their own farm and served delicious farm fresh breakfasts! When we arrived, Phil asked if we had any dietary restrictions for breakfast, and I sheepishly said, "Well, if you have meat, you don't have to fix any for us because we only eat locally grown, pasture-raised," and as my voice trailed off, he replied, "Oh, that's the only kind we serve." If we had not needed to be at our class by 9 o'clock, I could have really stuffed myself with the delicious breakfast Phil prepared, which included a to-die-for quiche and fresh baked bread and muffins. And because we were totally captivated by the B&Bs food, we did not have the chance to try Mocha Maya's breakfast, whose sign is pictured at right!

Unfortunately, we hardly got to experience the community at all. Jim said that they have lots of world-famous artists and crafts people living there, including a leather worker and a man who ties flies for fly fishing. The downtown certainly had a great mix of little shops. I personally was very interested in the Vavstuga Weaving School, but when I checked their website, all of their beginner classes for 2013 are already full!

Ever since Superstorm Sandy chased us home in a rental car when our flight was canceled, I've been saying, "I left my heart in Shelburne Falls!" So if you live in the northeast and want a great place to spend the weekend, head over there! And if Mike didn't have tenure at the college, I'd be begging on a daily basis, trying to convince him that we needed to move.

Instead, I've been daydreaming about turning our little village into another Shelburne Falls. It's been dwindling for more than 40 years, so I've been told, but why couldn't it become a weekend destination with quaint B&Bs for people from Chicago and St. Louis? Why couldn't the farmers around here grow organic food to serve in small, locally owned restaurants with chefs who can see their future steaks grazing in the fields? Why couldn't we have world famous artisans whose classes fill up a year in advance? It could happen ... couldn't it?

Rainbow Inca corn

We recently ground up the rainbow inca corn that we grew in the garden. We used some of it for cornbread, which was really delicious, and we used some of it for hominy grits, which was not so great. I think we probably should have soaked it before cooking because it didn't taste quite done, and we cooked it for half an hour. We also ate some as corn on the cob during the summer, and it was delicious fresh.

How does your garden grow?

Ours is growing quite well!

We have tequila sunrise peppers . . .

which are sweet, but every now and then you think it might be a little hot. Definitely different. I love to slice them in ringlets and put them on pizza. Beautiful!

and cayenne peppers . . .

which are hot! Duh! Most of these will be dried, but we do use them fresh while we have them. This is where the bottles of "red pepper" in the spice aisle come from.

and Amana orange tomatoes . . .

which is an heirloom variety that you can't find in any store. They're delicious, especially in tomato soup!


And the tomato plants that look like they're on steroids! (But it's just composted goat manure!)

We even have melons this year!

which is very unusual for Illinois because we have such a short growing season! That's Orangeglo Watermelon on the left, Charantais in the middle, and Banana Melon on the right.

How is your garden doing?

Movie review: Farmageddon

It sounds so absurd that everyone who hears about it assumes there must be more to the story. A family in Ohio is held at gunpoint for hours because they run a natural food buying club. After three raids, a California goat farmer sells all of her goats for fear of losing them. After a year of quarantine, a Vermont dairy loses all of its sheep -- not to a disease or a bear or a common thief, but to the same bully that held the Ohio family at gunpoint and harassed the California farmer -- the U. S. government. No, there were no illegal drugs. There were no illegal guns. There was nothing illicit, yet these law-abiding citizens were treated exactly as if they were producing and selling deadly street drugs to children. What were these people doing that caused SWAT teams to descend upon their farms and point loaded weapons at their children? They were selling raw milk. Yes, raw milk.

Saturday, Mike, Margaret, and I went to Chicago to see the documentary Farmageddon, which is about the government's harassment of farmers who sell raw milk. I had heard most of the stories before, but I always had a few lingering questions in the back of my head, and this movie answered them and gave me lots more information. Throughout the movie we meet farmers who are intelligent, articulate, and educated -- two of them have PhDs -- and we learn over and over again that the FDA and USDA harassed them without cause. No one died. No one even got sick. There were no lab test results indicating that someone might get sick. There was simply a bureaucrat who decided that another small farm needed to be shut down. Since 1970, 88 percent of America's dairy farms have disappeared, and they have been replaced by corporate-owned factory farms.

Since this harassment started, farmers have been getting smarter and started connecting over the Internet to share their experiences and advice. Unlike the sheep farmers who naively complied with the USDA's demands a decade ago, thinking that they could work through the system -- only to have the USDA take their sheep and kill them ten days before their hearing in a court of law -- today's farmers are fighting back, taking videos and pictures of the raids and calling friends and customers to serve as witnesses to the raids. Filmmaker Kristin Canty used a lot of this footage in the movie so that we could see exactly what is happening. It is scary and shocking and infuriating.

It is scary to me as a person with milk goats who sells a small amount of milk legally in my state. It is shocking to me as a person who believes that justice will prevail. And it is infuriating to me as a tax-paying citizen that literally millions of dollars has been spent on surveillance of innocent farmers who are merely trying to make a living doing what they love and what they believe in.

No one is saying that all milk should be raw or that pasteurization should be abandoned. They are merely saying that as free people, we should be allowed to choose. As one woman says in the movie, she could have legally smoked cigarettes every day when she pregnant and no one would have tried to stop her, but she can't buy raw milk in her state. Why do some states make raw milk illegal when it is perfectly legal for corporations to sell us edible food-like substances with ingredient lists that read like chemical formulas rather than recipes? They say it is because raw milk can make people sick, but that's like saying the sky is blue. ANY food can make you sick if it is improperly handled, including pasteurized milk. In the last few years, people have died from eating tainted spinach, green onions, peanuts, and most recently, strawberries! And no one was arrested in those cases. The reality is that milk produced in a factory farm needs to be pasteurized, but that's a discussion for another day.

Yours truly (left) with filmmaker Kristin Canty (right)

We attended a special showing of the film at the Gene Siskel Center in Chicago that started with a meet-n-greet prior to the film screening. We were lucky enough to meet Canty and talk to her about why she decided to make the movie. I knew this was her debut film, but the amazing thing is that she had no experience or education in film making. She was "just a mom" of four children, one who had very bad allergies, and when she started buying raw milk, her son's allergies disappeared. When she learned about the harassment of raw milk farmers, she told friends about it, but no one believed her. Everyone said there must be drugs or guns involved or something besides milk. Then she started writing letters to film makers, telling them they should make a movie, but this was when Food, Inc had just come out, and everyone was telling her that the world wasn't ready for another food movie. So, Canty decided to make the film herself because it was a story that had to be told.

In the Q&A after the movie, Canty said that although the movie is in limited release, some key people are seeing it, and it looks like it will be showing on Capitol Hill soon. She also heard through the grapevine that Big Ag is planning to start spending millions to fight the negative images presented about factory farming in movies like Food, Inc and Farmageddon. So this is what it's all about -- money. Rather than improving their practices and their own farms, which would result in a healthier planet, healthier animals, healthier food, and healthier people, they are planning to throw a few million at marketing in an attempt to convince consumers to continue buying their products.

It's all about food

My husband just informed me it's been a week since I blogged, so what have I been doing? Mostly I've been busy with final edits on the book, tweaking sentences, writing captions for photos, and double-checking the bibliography.

We've been getting a ridiculous amount of rain lately, so the yard, pastures, and garden are all soggy. Only about 20 percent of the garden is planted -- sweet potatoes, onions, beans, strawberries, rhubarb, and asparagus. I have 50 heirloom tomato and 60 pepper plants sitting around waiting to be transplanted. It is really not a big deal that they're a bit late getting into the garden because they won't start producing anyway until it gets hot enough, which means early August most years. One year I planted tomatoes at the end of June, and they produced fine. We are still harvesting more than enough lettuce, which was planted last fall in low tunnels. We removed the tunnels in April.

Because I've been so busy, we actually ran out of chevré! I can't remember the last time we had no chevré in the house in May -- maybe 2002? Anyway, I'm making chevré today!

Lately we've been talking about how excited we used to be when we had a single meal that was homegrown, but now almost all of our meals are homegrown, even through the winter. It's a pretty surprising accomplishment for someone who was a vegetarian with a brown thumb nine years ago. Tonight's dinner will be salad, grilled lamb chops, corn on the cob, and ice cream. Last night's dinner was queso blanco with pasta and marinara sauce. Saturday's lunch was quiche. We've actually been having a lot of quiches lately. Today's lunch was an odd one -- corn fritters and smoothies -- because no one thought about cooking until we were all starving, and it was after noon.

We're about to open our last jar of canned pears, and we're running low on frozen raspberries. There are only two packages of frozen green beans left, although we still have a lot of corn in the freezer. The chickens are laying a few dozen eggs a day, and if we milk all the goats, we can get seven gallons of milk a day for making buttermilk, yogurt, and cheese, as well as ice cream and cream soups and other good stuff.

And with the garden, the cycle starts again. As we are running out of fruits and vegetables, it's time to plant and nurture and harvest to put up food to last for the next winter. Why do we keep doing this? As my daughter said this morning, "Once you get used to homegrown, you just can't find anything in the store that tastes as good."

Who can you trust?

A fear and frustration of anyone who does any public speaking or writing is that your words will be taken out of context. It has been on my mind for the past week as I contemplated whether or not to write this post. But I finally decided to do it because this topic is too important to not write about it. What is so important and controversial?

Anyone remember back in 2007 when Tyson started advertising antibiotic-free chicken? Did you notice how those ads disappeared? That's because Tyson was lying, and they got called on the carpet by Perdue and then consumers. Like many advertisers, Tyson was splitting hairs with their advertising claim because their chickens were being fed medication on a daily basis -- just like Perdue and other commercial chickens -- but technically the drug is an ionophore, not an antibiotic. Although Tyson admitted no wrongdoing, they quietly settled the lawsuit with Perdue in 2008. The consumer lawsuits were ultimately lumped into a class-action suit, which was settled last year. I'm sorry to say that if you bought Tyson chicken from 2007 to 2009 thinking it was drug-free, the time has passed for you to get your coupons and cash. So, why am I telling you this?

Because it's just another painful example of how corporate America will say anything to get us to fork over our hard-earned cash for their products. And they'll do anything to increase their profits, because that is the only thing they care about. But, as they are quick to point out, it's not their fault because legally corporations only answer to their stock holders, and they are responsible for turning as big a profit as possible.

Food giant Dean Foods, which has gobbled up dozens of smaller dairy companies, has been caught conveniently avoiding the truth and stretching the truth. When Dean bought Silk Soy products, they quietly stopped using organic soybeans without changing the labels, other than to omit the word "organic," and it was months before consumers noticed that they had been duped. In their organic dairies, they've been caught buying conventionally raised, drug-fed heifers as future milkers, even though it's prohibited by organic standards. And now they're fortifying their "organic" milk with DHA Omega-3, which is synthetic and illegal under the organic standards. And what really fries my bacon with this story is that if they kept their cows on a grass-fed diet, their milk would be naturally high in omega-3s.

And it goes beyond organics. Does anyone remember the McDonald's class action lawsuit in the 1990s when McD said they were now frying their french fries in vegetable oil rather than lard. Vegetarians started eating the fries before learning that the new "secret ingredient" in the fries was tallow, which is beef fat. We were vegetarians at the time and starting eating the fries. The only thing I've purchased from McDonald's in at least ten years was a cup of coffee a few years ago when I was desperate to find a WiFi connection, and a sign outside a McD's boasted WiFi, so I figured I could buy a cup of coffee and check my email. Wrong! After I bought the coffee, I asked how to get connected, and I was told I'd have to pay for it. Want to guess when I'll set foot in a McD's again?

And it goes beyond food. When we moved into our house six years ago, all of the appliances were brand new except for the dryer, which we bought in 1993. As of today, all of the appliances have been replaced -- some twice -- except for the stove and the 1993 dryer. And in the last two years, the cost of a refrigerator has gone up $400 -- yes, the exact same refrigerator that only lasted 20 months!

I am so fed up with Big Biz, I could rant all day with one story after another. And although I don't have an answer about what to do with appliances, I do have answers for food. We can't rely on labels, government inspectors, or lawyers and lawsuits to protect us from anything, whether it is ingredients we would prefer to avoid or deadly pathogens. We have to take responsibility and do what we can. Madison Avenue has done a splendid job convincing us that our time is too valuable to be spent gardening or cooking. We should relax in front of the television (so they can convince us to buy more stuff that we don't need). Of course, we can't all grow everything, but farmer's markets are becoming more popular, making it easier than ever to know your farmer.

Yes, a person could lie to you about how they grow their crops, but in my experience most of them adamantly believe that they're doing what needs to be done, and rather than lie to you, they'll try to convince you that you don't really need organic spinach or pork. And if you're a savvy shopper, it is easy to spot the fakers. A couple of years ago, I asked at a farmer's market stand if they sprayed their vegetables, and rather than answering my question, the man said, "Pesticides kill bees," and gave me an explanation that would mean no one could use pesticides. I just walked away, feeling insulted and thinking that I should have started questioning him. But if you frequent a farmer's market, you can get to know the people and learn who you can trust.

I've been thinking about writing this post for a long time, but the last thing I want is for people to take away the idea that it's hopeless, and you should just keep buying the cheapest food possible, because you don't really know if organic is organic or not. I want this post (and the blog and my book) to motivate and empower you -- to help you believe that you really can take control of your food choices. You don't have to be a master gardener. I'm not. You don't even need a yard. When we lived in the Chicago burbs, we rented a community garden plot. According to the National Gardening Association, 5% of those who garden -- two million people -- have a garden at a friend's house. And it doesn't take a ton of time. The average amount of time spent gardening every week is less than five hours, which is not even an hour a day -- far less than most people spend watching television.

But if you have a legitimate reason for not gardening or shopping at farmer's market, you can at least start cooking something from scratch. I started baking bread 23 years ago, back when I was drinking two liters of soda a day. Little things add up, and if you keep adding little things, at some point you might find yourself on 32 acres in the middle of nowhere growing the majority of your own food organically.

And if anyone has ideas on how we can get back to appliances that last twenty years, please share!

More than 6,000 pounds of food in 2010!

Now, when people ask me how much food we produce, I can tell them -- more than 6,000 pounds in 2010. I've never been able to answer that question in the past, so a year ago I told the family that we had to start weighing and writing down everything we picked, collected, butchered, and milked.

A few things are not on the list. We completely forgot to weigh a few things -- like carrots. Sometimes we would pick and eat something so small that it didn't seem worth weighing -- like green onions. Then after picking and eating about 30 green onions, I realized that we really should have been weighing them. They would have added up. And even though there are more than 50 pounds of corn in our freezer, we didn't feel right adding it to the list because it was a gift from a neighbor. We did spend about five hours, however, shucking, blanching, cutting, and bagging it before putting it into the freezer. And some things really have me scratching my head -- like eggs. If 40 layers only laid 277 dozen, that's only about 83 eggs per chicken, so either our chickens are terrible layers, or they hid a bunch of them, or we didn't count a lot of them!

The list only includes food grown for human consumption. We did not count milk that was fed to goat kids, barn cats, and pigs. Nor did we count hay, acorns, hickory nuts, overgrown squash, and rotten tomatoes that were fed to animals.

Chocolate ice cream with caramel sauce on meringue

One thing not reflected in this list is what we did with all that milk. We made almost all of our own dairy products, including queso blanco, cheddar, gouda, feta, parmesan, mozzarella, ricotta, brie, gjetost, cajeta, yogurt, buttermilk, dulce de leche, ice cream, and chevre.

Although I am proud of everything we did, I'm also disappointed that we dropped the ball on some things, like the okra and tomatoes. We should have -- could have -- harvested a lot more, but we didn't get it harvested at the peak of ripeness, which is disappointing. It seems ridiculous that sometimes the hardest part of gardening is harvesting. Although we enjoyed fried okra a few times over the summer, we never got any breaded and frozen for winter use. We also never got the shitake mushroom spawns into logs, so the shitake project is delayed.

As much as I'd love to have some fried okra right now, as well as some shitake mushrooms, I know we should just pat ourselves on the back and promise to try harder this year.

Collecting maple sap

Apples 48.5 pounds
Blackberries 3.75 pounds
Cherries 6.5 pounds
Chicken 43 pounds
Cucumbers 19.8 pounds
Eggs  415.5 pounds (277 doz.)
Green beans 34.8 pounds
Lamb and mutton 207 pounds
Lettuce 8.75 pounds
Maple syrup 31.5 pounds (10.5 quarts)
Milk 2,755 pounds (366 gallons)
Mulberries 2.4 pounds
Mushrooms 3.725 pounds
Mustard greens 8.5 pounds
Okra 8 pounds
Onions 22 pounds
Peaches 2.75 pounds

Jalapeño peppers

Pears 79 pounds
Peppers 38 pounds
Pork 1,662 pounds
Potatoes 75 pounds
Raspberries 15.9 pounds
Sprouts 4.25 pounds
Squash 77 pounds
Tomatoes 165 pounds
Turkeys 306 pounds
Turnips 3.5 pounds
Turnip greens 1.1 pound

Buying local meat

As buying local becomes more popular, some people are starting to look for local meat, but one thing often gets in the way. They need to buy a whole or half pig or beef, and they don't like frozen meat, because they think it is inferior to fresh. In fact, one year, when we decided to process our turkeys early than usual, several regular customers said they didn't want one because it would have to be frozen.

When meat is properly wrapped and frozen, there is no difference in quality or taste. The main reason I prefer getting our meat custom processed is because they have the equipment to properly wrap and freeze it. When we have our meat done professionally, it will last in the freezer a loooong time! We found some two-year-old pork in our freezer one time, and it tasted fine. If we butcher and freeze meat, it only lasts about a month before it gets freezer burn, and then it's blech!

I suspect that this bias against frozen meat developed a long time ago when they didn't do such a good job of wrapping and freezing, and it just gets passed on from generation to generation. Also, marketers in this country know that people view fresh as higher quality, so the cheapest quality meat is sold frozen because it will last longer (and can be sold more cheaply), and the better quality is sold fresh, which perpetuates the myth that fresh tastes better. There is a lot that goes into the taste of meat, and most of it goes back to the way the animals were raised and what they were fed, as well as the breed and age of the animal. It always makes me smile when people have turkey at our house in the middle of summer and "just know it's fresh because it tastes so good!" We only butcher turkeys in November -- the Saturday before Thanksgiving, so everyone can have their fresh turkeys. 

Lockers who do custom processing of beef, pork, etc., (versus poultry) typically give you the meat frozen, and this is a good thing. If you stack 150 pounds of meat in a home freezer, it's going to take forever to freeze. The quality of a commercial freezer is a lot better than a home freezer, so the meat is frozen quickly and thoroughly. It's in wire trays, so there is air circulation around the meat. The meat is so solidly frozen that it doesn't even begin to defrost on the drive home, which for me is half an hour. If you tap it on the counter, it sounds like a hammer.

Our poultry processor gives us the meat chilled, rather than frozen, but it's a one-day process. We drop off chickens or turkeys in the morning and pick up packages of meat in the afternoon. I've heard that freezing meat the day it's butchered can make it tough, so we always wait about three days before freezing it. Freezing birds in our freezer is a fairly even process, because the birds are not flat, so air can circulate around them -- rather than flat packages of steaks and roasts, which would just be a giant cube of meat that would take forever to freeze in a home freezer.

I suspect that some people do not want to buy frozen meat because they don't know how old it is. However, when you buy meat directly from the farmer, you know how old it is. The animal will not be delivered to the locker for processing until it is sold, because it can't be frozen until it is cut up and packaged, and they need your directions before doing that.

When you buy a whole or half pig or beef, you call the locker and tell them exactly what you want -- how many pounds of ground, any patties or sausage, how many roasts, and what cuts of steak you want. If, for example, you don't want pork chops, they'll just add that to your ground or they can cut it up as stew meat. If you don't want something -- like tongue -- just tell them that you don't want it. Although we don't eat tongue, our dogs do, so we get it for them. We get everything -- we even ask the butcher for the bones, so we can give them to the dogs. Raw bones can be digested and don't cause the problems that cooked bones do, such as perforating the stomach. They can also smoke bacon and hams.

If you are accustomed to buying meat in one pound packages, the idea of having 150 pounds of pork could be daunting, but it is not as much as it sounds like. That will fit in two or three picnic coolers, so you would only need a small deep freezer. At only 25 to 50 pounds, a lamb will fit in most refrigerator freezers.

Once you get a freezer full of meat, you get kind of spoiled, because it is really convenient. The other nice thing about buying directly from a farmer is that you can go to the farm and see how the animals live, and you can ask about things that are important to you, like drug use and feeding practices. So, if you know a small farmer who sells whole pork, beef, goat, or lamb, give it a try. If you don't know anyone, check out Local Harvest or Market Maker to find a farm near you. And be sure to contact them sooner rather than later, because many sell out months in advance. All of our 2010 pigs were reserved in March, and they were not processed until November, so it may also require some planning ahead.

Volunteer squash

I know what you're thinking -- provided that you are aware that squash cross-pollinate -- How can you have volunteers of something that cross-pollinates? Well, the fun part is that you never know exactly what you're going to get. It's like Christmas. We had one volunteer that looked a lot like a spaghetti squash. It was a little sweeter than spaghetti squash, and it wasn't quite as stringy, but it was delicious, and we enjoyed every bite. This is the first year that I decided to eat the volunteer squash that grew next to a compost pile. It seems silly that we never did it before. This one looks like a cross between an acorn squash and something. Aren't they beautiful!

If you're new to gardening and wondering what I'm talking about -- well, you can't save squash seeds and expect to get the same squash again if you grew more than one variety. You'll get some odd cross between the two. Not everything in the garden will cross pollinate, but squash is one that will. So, if you want to save seeds from your squash, you can only grow one variety, or you can put them in isolation tents and hand pollinate, which I'm not going to do.

Thanks to Katherine for the photos!

Canning crunch time

Wonder why you haven't heard much from me lately? We're madly rushing to get everything canned before the first frost, which usually occurs around October 15 here in central Illinois, but we were seriously concerned with the predicted overnight lows for the last couple nights. The basil was severely damaged by the frost, as well as a few pepper plants, but otherwise everything still looks good. The fall lettuce is beautiful. It looks like the garden is safe now, at least for a week or two, so we can relax briefly.

Last weekend, we were canning all day Saturday. We canned seven quarts of hot Hungarian peppers, six pints of jalapeño jelly, two quarts and one pint of jalapeño peppers, and three half-pints of habañero hot sauce. We use the Hungarian peppers whenever a recipe calls for canned chilies, and we use jalapeños on most of our Mexican food.

Jalapeño peppers

Friday, we canned six pints of apple preserves. We still have a long way to go to get all the apples saved, but at least we finished most of the peppers.  

Photos by Katherine

Garden review: Dakota black popcorn

 
We love popcorn as a snack, and we don't feel guilty eating it, because it's all natural. This year, we finally decided to try growing our own, and we are certainly happy we did! I chose Dakota black popcorn from the Baker Creek catalog.

The ears are only about four to six inches long, so they cute to use as decoration, but the best thing is that they pop up beautifully. We've only popped one year so far, and all but one kernel popped. The taste was outstanding. This one definitely gets five stars, and we'll be growing it again.

Thanks to Katherine for the photos!

Baking bread

A week from today, I'll be in Pennsylvania at the Mother Earth News Fair, and baking bread is one of the things I'll be talking about. I've been baking bread for more than twenty years. Mike and I started in Orlando when our oldest was a baby. Back then we did it all by hand. After my second was born, I got a bread machine. And a couple years ago, I bought a Kitchen Aid stand mixer with a dough hook. Although I've done it a variety of ways, the fact is that I keep doing it year after year. So, it recently occurred to me that I might not be able to identify with my audience members very well. I am thinking that quite a few of them don't bake bread, which is why they're attending my session.

So, I need your help! Why don't you bake bread? Or, why don't you bake bread more often? Do you not have enough time, or is there something intimidating about baking bread? Have you had any bad experiences? Put your questions in the comment section, and I promise that as I'm preparing my material for the conference, I'll answer your questions on the blog. And if you do bake bread regularly (or semi-regularly), what got you started, and what keeps you going?

Canning pizza sauce

We took forty-four pounds of tomatoes from the garden . . .

and turned them into eight pints of pizza sauce!

One pint of this sauce, which is very thick, will make four pizzas, so the eight pints will last us about four months. We make homemade pizza every Friday night to eat while watching a movie. I hope we have enough tomatoes left in the garden to make more, because I'd love to have this sauce available to us for the whole year. The only possible snafu is that we need to have about 45 pounds of tomatoes ripen on the same day. I'm not sure that will happen again this year.

We used the Seasoned Tomato Sauce recipe from the 1999 Ball Blue Book, which is where I get almost all of my canning recipes, along with the 2005 and 2009 editions. We left out the onions, because we've already used all the onions we grew in the garden this year. Plus, we can just put fresh onions on the pizza if we want them. We also left out the bay leaf and sugar, because I just don't like the idea of either one in pizza sauce. We added fresh basil from our garden. When the sauce was the consistency of juice, we put a little in the blender with a bunch of fresh basil. (How's that for an exact measurement?) We also used our homegrown garlic.

Another change we made from the original recipe was to cook down the sauce to a third the original volume, instead of half, which the recipe called for. The recipe is for an all-purpose spaghetti, lasagna, and pizza sauce, but we don't like runny pizza sauce. That's the great thing about making your own food. You can customize it just the way you like!

Sorry my photos have been so blech lately. I've been using my cell phone to take photos. I need a new camera!

Garden Review: Scalloped Squash

Scalloped Squash

My parents always had a garden when I was growing up. I don't mention this often, because people always assume that if your parents did something, you just soak up their knowledge through osmosis. Nope, doesn't work that way. I wish it did! It would have saved me twenty years of trial and error. But I digress. I'm not going to talk about my gardening woes today. I'm going to talk about scalloped squash. I've seen them in catalogs for years and always assumed it was just another name for patty pan squash, which my parents always had in their garden when I was growing up. My mother would slice it, bread it, and fry it, and I loved it. I've been growing patty pan squash for as long as we've been on Antiquity Oaks, but last winter when looking through the seed catalogs, something inspired me to order some scalloped squash seeds, which I quickly discovered is quite different from patty pan squash.

Patty pan squash are flatter, and they have a much smaller seed cavity. I kept picking the scalloped squash smaller and smaller, but regardless of how young I picked them, they still had a large seed cavity. Larger seed cavity means less flesh for eating. We're still saying that we're going to use the scalloped squash for stuffing, but we haven't done it yet. Unless we discover some really awesome way to cook these little darlings, they won't be in our garden again, regardless of how cute they look. When we don't eat something, it means we don't pick it, which means it just gets over-ripe and eventually gets fed to the chickens. And that just makes me feel guilty. And who needs that?

Garden Review: Chervena Chuska Pepper

This is the first in a series of reviews I'm planning to write on the different varieties of fruits and vegetables we planted in our garden this year.

Every year I like to try a few new varieties of vegetables in the garden, and when I read the Seed Saver description of the Chervena Chuska pepper, I had to try it! We love sweet peppers, and I was especially happy to read that this one grows so well at the Seed Saver farm in Iowa, which is only a few hours west of us. Usually, if it grows there, it will grow here.

We were in for quite a surprise! We love the pepper, even though it does not fit the catalog's description as sweet as candy. We really like it on pizza, and I'm planning to try stuffing it. If we had more than one plant (rabbits ate the rest), I think they would make great canned pimentos.

A pleasant surprise in Milwaukee

When we left the television station last Thursday, my husband decided to take a different route back to the hotel. So, we were driving along in unfamiliar territory when he asked if that was a farmer's market up ahead. I looked intently and suddenly gasped and squealed, "That's Growing Power!" I didn't need to say more. He hit the brakes and took the next right turn, drove around the block and pulled up in front of the urban garden that has now become legendary. We went inside to get information and learned that there is a tour every day at one o'clock, so after calling home to make sure we weren't needed, we decided to do the tour after grabbing lunch.

Deborah meets Will Allen

Our tour was conducted by Amanda, who started at Growing Power in April as an intern and has since moved over to employee status. She took eleven of us through their greenhouses and showed us their livestock. The knowledge of people on the tour varied from one end of the spectrum to the other. One woman asked about the ingredients of the fish pellets that are fed to the tilapia. (I bet she reads Michael Pollan. He's recently started talking about how farm-raised fish are fed corn.) On the other hand, one couple didn't realize that the baby lettuces grow up to be something like romaine. At first I found it sad that they didn't know they were looking at romaine lettuce, but then I realized it is really exciting that Growing Power is educating people about their food, in addition to feeding people with their locally-grown produce.

When we were in the second greenhouse, a very tall man walked in, and poor Amanda lost everyone's attention as a chorus of gasps and greetings filled the air, and we all started shaking hands with the man -- Will Allen, the former pro basketball player who everyone thought was a little weird seventeen years ago when he bought two-and-a-half acres of land in the middle of Milwaukee to start a farm. But people don't think he's crazy now.

Tilapia grow in fish tanks
under the vegetables.

It was a lot of fun to see what could be done in such a small space. They have more than a dozen greenhouses where they grow their vegetables, plus there are bee hives, tilapia, perch, goats, chickens, and mushrooms. Mike and I were looking closely at how the fish live in ponds under the grow beds. The water is pulled up from the fish tanks by a simple sump pump and dumped into the grow beds. At the other end of the bed is a drain, and the water is dumped back into the fish tank. The plants filter the water for the fish, and the fish feed the plants with their waste. It's a great relationship. (Add another thing to the "to do" list on Antiquity Oaks: create aquaponic system to grow tilapia and fresh greens year round.)

Oyster mushrooms grow
in one of the greenhouses.

It was also fun to see a mushroom growing system in real life, since I've been reading about mycology and experimenting with it for the past year. I'm even more excited about growing our own mushrooms now that I've seen it on a larger scale. It makes me feel like we can do it.

If you'd like to know more about Growing Power, you can visit their website. And if you're ever in the Milwaukee area, I highly recommend the tour.