OK, perhaps not the MOST appetizing of food photos, but the point is, that’s how it looked, and it tasted great—more all-local, dead-simple cookery! Here we have my first time with this grass-feed beef honey garlic sausage from a few miles down the road—I could actually taste…honey; unusual and good! Alongside in the cast iron pan, sweet orange pepper (Orange Sun), the very last, slightly green zucchini (Golden Dawn III), and a mess of yellow cooking onion, all from the field. A little imported olive oil, salt and fresh ground black pepper, let braise-simmer for a while—an hour or so, with the zucchini added near the end—and…Bob’s yer uncle! Delicious, nutritious (I’m pretty sure), fun. :)
cooking
Odds-and-ends omelet
Preparing and gazing at food can bring as much enjoyment as growing, sharing and eating it! I’m really not a cook, but with fresh, quality ingredients, whipping up something appetizing is…simple. For our field lunch today, an omelet made from stuff at hand: eggs, cooked chicken with a little store-bought prosciutto, a black tomato (from Raechelle’s home garden), garlic, onions, basil and 4-year-old cheddar cheese. Chopped garlic and onions were sauteed in extra virgin olive oil, then the chicken and prosciutto were added to warm up. Out with the filling, in with eggs, lightly beaten with salt, pepper and a little powdered cayenne pepper. As the omelet started to set, the meat was sprinkled on, and the whole thing topped with thin slices of tomato, grated cheese, and basil. Quick, easy…
…and pretty tasty. Everything except the ham, salt, pepper, cayenne and oil came from the farm, or nearby. We ate in the field… :)
This year’s BBQ
It took a while, but I finally dragged out the classic no-frills barbecue and continued the simpler BBQ approach started last season. This time around, I stumbled onto lump charcoal, which is pure wood carbon, and a step back from additive-rich preformed briquettes (I’m not all that serious about this, I just grabbed a bag and…discovered lump!). And so, on to the basic, quick-lunch-in-the-field experience, with garden veggies plus meat that the local independent butcher declares to be “local” (at least, from around us here in the province of Ontario). Chicken, pork, and several types of pork sausage, plus zucchini, onion, sweet and hot peppers, and cherry tomatoes from the garden. Also tossed rosemary branches right onto the coals for some aromatic smoke—between the breeze and the open grill, it didn’t do much flavoring, but it smelled nice! Cooking time is made easy by putting only one type of meat or veg per skewer—just slide off what you want and combine in your mouth! Simple and…tasty!!
Tiny harvest!
Spent the early morning harvesting a few CSA shares for a Monday drop-off. This is the first week of shares, and they’re still small, mainly greens… There are many tiny farming routines, things you’d probably never do in a bigger operation, that I find extremely relaxing and fun: the final rinsing and putting together of a handful of shares is one of them (it’s not really economical to separately harvest and drop off less than 10 shares or so, this is an…exception). There’s something deeply satisfying about this final post-harvest step, with the veggies together at their finest, the memory of the different quick individual harvests—picking, cutting, pulling—still fresh, that’s…cool! The spinach (above) was quickly dunked in cold well water to rinse off dirt splashed up from recent rain, then allowed to drip dry for a bit on the screen table.
Picked two types of beet greens, Golden Detroit and Scarlet Supreme. The stems are a little long on these—it all depends on the density of the rows, the weather, the harvest timing, leaf size is the luck of the draw since these are really thinnings, they’re not being grown just for the greens. Still young and tender, the baby beets and all can be cooked up, or the leaves used raw in salad (or as a salad!). Really tasty…
And mesclun, of course. This all-lettuce salad mix is a staple crop this year as usual, always on my mind! This cut’s nice and clean! Unrinsed—I let the morning dew dry off a bit on the screen table… More simple pleasures for the simple of mind! ;)
A simple (chicken!) sandwich
Roasted a White Rock chicken last night, today, got a Spicy Cheese Loaf from Fran, the baker beside me at the farmers’ market. (The market day went well, it was the first day of CSA shares: mesclun, spinach, radishes, garlic scapes, beet greens—it’s still early.) The chicken and the bread naturally organized themselves into a late afternoon simple sandwich…
Looking at it before the first bite, I realized that I’ve been thinking about FOOD a lot more recently. Not exactly my own diet, but on a more personal level than as a local veggie grower, probably something to do with the Endless Salad, more communal cooking and eating lately…
Part of the running stream of thought has to do with nutrition, what I know about it, how much I want to and need to explore further. I mean, do I really have any sort of basic IDEA of what to eat, beyond “lots of veggies, little meat, drink lots of water,” vague general guidelines like that? Do I NEED a plan? Should I RESEARCH? Consult with a nutritionist or a naturopathic doctor (I’ve been considering visiting an ND for an initial workup)? Sheesh, more RULES! All that is really clear is that most people around here (a “developed nation”) don’t know much practical stuff about the food they eat, me included.
The other part is about food quality, and local food. The one thing I’m quite sure of is that it feels way better to eat fresh food that you’ve grown, and to know where the rest comes from and what’s in it, and that wasn’t at all painful to discover. So, I examined this pretty local sandwich. The cheese bread listed the ingredients: flour, water, cheese, sugar, milk, vegetable oil, butter, yeast, dried chili peppers, salt. The chicken was raised here on the farm from two weeks old, fed mainly Purina (Cargill) starter and grower feed (nutritional content in percentages, contact the manufacturer for the actual INGREDIENTS), with some greens from the garden. The lettuce is from the garden. I poured on home-made vinaigrette dressing: extra virgin olive oil from Italy, pink salt from the Himalayas, fresh-ground black pepper, vinegar, Tabasco pepper sauce from…the store. The mayonnaise is from Kraft, it was in the fridge, the bottle says it’s “real.” It’s all ingredients within ingredients… I’m planning to make my own mayo, with eggs from the farm and oil from…Italy. Should I care where the flour in the bread came from? The cheese? The chili peppers? And what about the “vegetable oil,” what’s up with that? Should I make my own cheese and bake my own bread? When do I start looking around for organic chicken feed, how IMPORTANT is that, what’s the priority, how much can I afford to PAY?
I don’t have any neat point to sum up with here, I’m just being a literalist and looking at what I eat. When you start to question your basic eating habits in a very primitive way, they may not hold up to much scrutiny, and that’s unsettling. I’m curious. The story unfolds…
The Endless Salad…
Lunch has turned into a collaborative cooking affair, built around the near-infinite possibilities of the Endless SALAD. Everyone who’s around pitches in: here, Lynn and Melissa chop. We build it from what’s available in the field, plus supplies from the farmers’ market and from the supermarket (with mixed feelings, I’m now buying mostly organic), a variety of raw nuts, and sometimes meat (turkey, chicken, fish, so far). We pick the ingredients, and there can be MANY, by whatever sounds good together. It always works! The salads started last month, when I asked to join Shannon in her vegetarian lunches, and Lynn and Raechelle would fill out the table on the days they were here. This direct connection between growing and cooking and eating and people started last season, with Friday evening dinners after harvest, and the first, occasional all-local-food mini-barbecues, and now it’s become part of everything…
Thinking about it now, this deepening food awareness is happening over what seems like a curiously loooong time, this being Year 6 in the garden. For the first couple of years, I was out in the field alone, spending 10-12 hour days at least six days a week during the main growing season. At the end of the day, I ate TONS of veggies. It was normal to harvest several types of greens for a salad, plus whatever was around for a sauteed side dish, and every three-four days, I’d roast a bunch of root crops. Meat was definitely in there, regular supermarket fare, but almost as a garnish, a small steak or a big pork chop or a chicken breast, on top of a mountain of veggies. I relished dinner every day, partly from the novelty of having grown the better part of my meal, a lot because I has HUNGRY, and mostly, as I remember it, because it simply attracted me: the taste, the super-simple preparation, but also the physical feeling of satisfaction these meals brought. Then, I wasn’t giving much personal thought to nutrition or “local food” or anything like that, it wasn’t a calculated, conscious enjoyment, it seemed simpler, more common sense. During the winters, in between gardens, my old eating habits didn’t change: not much junk food, no instant microwave meals, still, the regular parade of meat-and-starch industrial food type eating, straight from the convenience of the supermarket aisles. It seems a little odd now that this didn’t concern me. Then again, I wasn’t tiny farming to save my health or save the planet, this wasn’t any sort of cause, instead, something I had wandered into, seemingly by chance, that took hold: there was no agenda, only an unfolding path to somewhere cool…hopefully! And then came last year’s people in the field transition. While the garden stayed tiny in size, the intensity increased as really relying on others became a part of it all. Along with that, the food we’re growing has become linked to…daily living, plain and simple, whether it’s sharing meals from the field, or people stocking up on things to take home at the end of the day (not so different from the farmers’ market or CSA, but even more…personal). And this increasingly deeper connection to FOOD, not based on concepts or conscious direction but just on what’s happening, is surprisingly new to me, yet another part of the tiny farm experience, where what should be obvious to us all is revealed in unexpected ways… (Guest photo: Lynn laughing, me tasting, by Raechelle.)
Seasonal salad
The first harvested dish of the year here usually comes from early lettuce, but not usually from lettuce still in plug sheets. With my ambitious early salad greens timing, and the way colder than hoped for weather, transplanting to the greenhouse was delayed by a couple of weeks, and the lettuce seedlings stayed in trays and went crazy. Today, I started thinning them heavily for the move, and ended up with a healthy portion of baby leaf salad! This is a mix of Simpson Elite, Granada, and Two Stars. The colors are still indoors pale, the taste and texture delicate. With a simple olive oil and lemon juice, salt and pepper dressing…delicious! And still a couple more bowls to go…