Three Plus Two

Country Diary: About dinner

Weather: Cloudy and damp after a hard rain overnight.  42 degrees at 8:30 and I don't think the temperature is going to budge too much over the course of the day.

At the feeder: We're late in getting our feeders set up this year, but Katydid managed to clean and fill most of them a few days ago.  We finally hung a collapsible feeder that holds 5 lbs of sunflower seeds.  The birds love it.  Right now I can count at least 6 goldfinches clinging just to the sides I can see.  A downy woodpecker flew away a few seconds ago, and yesterday we had a female cardinal.  The chickadees have also been out in force, 5 or 6 at a time, and our tufted titmice are back as well.  We need to get our suet feeders set up for the woodpeckers now.

In the garden:  In spite of it being November, we are still eating from the garden a little.  Well, brussels sprouts actually.

Here's what the plants look like "in the field".

And on the stalk.  When we went to the farm store last week, I was pleased to see that our brussel sprouts compared very favorably to theirs.  In fact, ours looked better.  (Ok, shameless bragging, but it was such a hard gardening year that I ought to be allowed to wallow in what few successes there were.)

(A brief feeder update... I need Katydid's binoculars... are those goldfinches or pine siskins out there???)

However, most of the garden is now planted to cover crop.  I think Andy used crimson clover, which stands up to our winters pretty well.  In the summer, the crop of choice is buckwheat, which he mows when it flowers so that it doesn't go to seed and become a weed.  We rotate our beds and try to leave some fallow every year.  After four years of cover cropping, adding compost, and 2 seasons of chickens, the soil has become a lot softer and easier to work.  (Not now, of course.  The ground freezes a little overnight, then thaws every morning so it's always a little muddy.)  The cover crop comes most in handy in the spring time when the snowmelt comes rushing down the hill.  Having a cover crop down instead of exposing bare dirt helps to retain our soil.

 
 An exciting photo of a mat of young crimson clover.  In the spring time, it blooms a vivid crimson.  It can be a little hard to get rid of, but it's not as invasive as, say, rye.

Or mint.  This is my own fault.  In desperation, because bugs and everything else were ruining my squash plants, I set out a chocolate mint plant beside them.  Now the plant itself is nowhere to be found, but I discovered this healthy specimen about 10 feet away in a different bed.

In the pantry:

• 2 pie pumpkins, which I will try to bake this weekend for pumpkin pie
• half an already baked pumpkin, which I will turn into pumpkin custard tonight (technically this is in the refrigerator)
• 6 Delicata squash
• All the Walla Walla onions have started to sprout.  They're not keepers.  The Cippolini onions are fine, though.
• A 5 gallon bucket of potatoes 3/4 full, mostly Yukon Gold, which we're eating through. 
• a half-bushel box of sweet potatoes from the farm store

 
  This is how I bake pumpkin and winter squash: with butter and maple syrup.  The butter and maple syrup form the stickiest candy ever on the bottom of the pan.  So it's important to spoon that up while it's still so hot that you burn your tongue on the spoon as you lean over the stove. Not that I would ever do such a thing, of course.

In the coop:

There are a lot fewer chickens in the coop these days.

But the ones in my freezer make really, really good chicken soup.

Using heritage breed chickens for meat was kind of a toss-up.  On the one hand, they were all small, the biggest not quite 5 lbs, and they took a long time just to get to that weight.  On the other hand, the taste is so much better even than the Cornish x Rock broilers raised on pasture.  The meat is firmer (probably because our chickens were free-range, not raised in chicken tractors, and breeds that were not bred to sit by the feeder and eat), the dark meat darker, and just in general, more flavorful.  But because it took so long to get them to butchering weight (such as it was), I'm not sure it was economical, and it was a lot of work.  

If you're keeping track at home, we used White Rocks and Delawares.  The Delawares were, in general, nicer than the White Rocks, which even Katydid looked forward to eating.

The turkeys turned out a little better in the weight department -- or at least the Naragansetts did.  They were butchered at the beginning of the week and are currently all jammed into the freezer ( all 6 of them.)  Everyone is a little sad that the turkeys are gone, I think, which was not the case with the meat chickens.  The Naragansett tom dressed out at 17 lbs, so he will be our Thanksgiving turkey.  Will we raise turkeys again?  I don't know.  The learning curve is pretty steep with turkeys.  They break your heart the way they die as poults, then they get interesting and curious personalities and the thought of eating them does not make you happy, and if you really want to pasture them, you have to clip their wings or they will fly 20 feet up in the trees at night or disappear with the wild turkeys.  But heritage turkeys are so much more beautiful and impressive than the typical Broad-Breasted White.  So -- I don't know.  I think we are going to take an animal breather next summer and just worry about the 23 laying hens we've got right now.

None of which are really laying at this point, however.  The old hens are moulting and should probably be turned into stewing hens, but they have all been named.  (Don't name your chickens.)  The new hens are not laying yet, or are laying in some incredibly out of the way spot I haven't discovered yet.  I've been buying "free-range" eggs to make up the difference, but their idea of "free-range" and my idea of "free-range" are obviously different:

 
  The orange yolks taste better, too, if you've never eaten an orange-yolked egg and you're wondering.

 

 

Bountiful Brussel Sprouts

 Our winter has started early here.  Snow is in the forecast for tonight and tomorrow, and varying combinations of illness, rain, and wind have kept us inside much of the past few weeks.  Yesterday wasn't a great day, weather-wise, but it wasn't raining and we didn't have a wind chill, so out we went.  It was the first time I'd had a chance to walk through the garden in at least 2 (or more) weeks.  We picked the last of the fall raspberries, noted that there were still cherry tomatoes on the vine (albeit squishy ones, destined for the turkeys), took a look at the kale (doing nicely in this cold weather), and had a walk through the brussel sprouts.  Prior to the first frost, the brussel sprouts didn't look like much.  This is the first year we've grown brussel sprouts, and we've had such lackluster performance in the garden this year that we weren't expecting a lot.

You can imagine my surprise when I found that all of the brussel sprout plants looked healthy, robust, and quite full.  And by all of them, I mean all 20 of them.

Andy and I like brussel sprouts, but the kids aren't too enthused.  (But then the kids aren't too enthused about many vegetables.)  Andy likes them best sauteed in garlic butter.  I must confess, however, that when I realized I had approximately 20 dinners worth of brussel sprouts I was a little daunted.  Who decided to plant all these brussel sprouts anyway?

Oh, yeah.  That would be me. 

I was the one who loaded all those plants onto the cart at the farm -- banking on my past experience that you ought to plant more than you think you'll need because there is always some sort of garden disaster skulking around.  I remember that Andy asked me, "What are all those?" And I said, "Brussel sprouts," and he said, "O-kaaay," and I said, "Well, the very first year we were here, I tried to grow brussel sprouts twice and they didn't work.  So I'm getting a bunch this year."

Well. 

In any case, when I came in from our walk yesterday, I immediately pulled Carla Emery's Encyclopedia of Country Living off the shelf and looked up brussel sprouts.  Carla Emery says that you can harvest brussel sprouts through snow, probably "until January". Apparently, you can freeze them, but "most people" just leave them in the garden.  The stalks will (supposedly) grow new sprouts, so that each stalk can produce "as much as 100 sprouts!"

Quick calculations indicate that 20 plants -- theoretically -- could produce as many as 2000 actual sprouts. 

That's a lot of brussel sprouts.

I'm not sure what I would do with 2000 brussel sprouts.  So I guess I'm not that upset that when I asked Andy to bring me some brussel sprouts for dinner, he cut the whole stalk instead.

Country Diary Daybook: First Frost, First Day of Fall

I began this post on Monday, so I guess this is now a Days Book, isn't it?

FOR TODAY... Monday, September 20

 

Outside My Window... Crisp, sunny blue autumn sky, 42 degrees at 9 AM.  The maples are starting to really come into their color, with big patches of crimson, scarlet, and orange among the green.  We had our first frost yesterday morning.  I was awake at 4 AM and watched the temps dip: 37 to 36 to 35.  When the sun rose, the field across the street glittered yellow-under-white with a light frost.  (Wednesday morning: waking up to a light rain.)

 

 

In bloom: Goldenrod, New England aster, frost aster.  I like the pale lavender of the frost aster more than the bright purple of the New England asters, which remind me of a Crayola color.  The field is yellow and purple and while beautiful, sometimes reminds me of a high school football team.

 

(I had the camera on landscape setting, and I really don't think it does justice to the purple. Also, sorry about the smudge.)

 

(by Katydid)

 

 

In the garden: We picked ahead of the frost on Saturday: a few pounds of beans; whatever remaining tomatoes that hadn't gotten hit by blight or picked over by the bantams; some okra; a pound or so of peppers.  Now we switch to fall crops: leeks, kale, cabbage, brussel sprouts.

 

(Cilantro I need to freeze)

 

In the barnyard: We're trying to find a processor to "do" our meat chickens.  But the processor we've heard about doesn't answer the phone.

 

I am thinking... that I wish this cold would go away so we could enjoy the weather!

 

I am thankful for... antibiotics.  Chipmunk is feeling much better now.  He's slept through the night for the past 2 nights.

 

From the learning rooms... Fossils, most likely.  The little boys have already been outside this morning, pounding on rocks with hammers.  They went out in the pajamas and bare feet, because they're still expecting it to be summer.  It didn't take long for them to realize it had gotten cold.

 

 

From the kitchen...  Last night I made these toffee bars that Jen recommended. YUM.  They're awesome.  And easy. I also made pesto with a bunch of basil we picked ahead of the frost.  I'd never had pesto before.  It was yummy, too.  But very green.  The boys tried it -- and liked it -- reluctantly.  After they made all sorts of unflattering comparisons as to what they thought it looked liked.  Boys.

 

Monday: Ratatouille to use up eggplant, peppers, zuchini, tomatoes.

Tuesday: Roast chicken? (Nope, salmon patties)

Just discovered yesterday that Weds, Fri, and Sat. are Ember Days.  Not sure what we'll be eating, really...

 

I am wearing... Pajamas again. (I know, it's 9 AM, but we're still getting over this cold.)

 

I am creating... Well, I wrote down some notes for a story, but I'm not sure about getting from A (writing down notes) to B (actually writing the story).  In typical Angela fashion, a page of notes will probably turn into a novel anyway. I also managed to draw in my sketchbook a little over the weekend -- trying to figure out shading and shadows.  Not doing so well either, but taking a deep breath and reminding myself that it will probably take me longer to figure out if I'm only working 5 minutes a day.  (Still, 5 minutes a day would be a great victory!)

 

 

I am going... to really work on laundry this week.  With all the sickness of last week, we are behind.   I think I am also going to sit down with myself and get a better handle on my time. 

 

I am reading... Crow Planet, by Linda Lynn Haupt.  I'm not enjoying this as much as I had hoped.  I like it when she writes about crows, but... there's something about the rest that is not grabbing me, and I'm not sure why. (Just finished it and am still not sure what didn't grab me about the book.  Can't put my finger on it.  Now I'm on to Fruitless Fall by Rowan Jacobsen.)

 

Also, thanks to Amy, I have subscribed to a bunch of people's shared items via google reader and thereby discovered many new blogs. :-) 

 

I am hoping... this stupid cold will end soon.  

 

I am hearing... Well, it's afternoon now and what I'm hearing is John Deere Action on TV, the sound of the dryer, Katydid coughing, Chipmunk playing with cars, and the occasional snore from Farmerboy who fell asleep on the floor.  Everyone's still recovering.  (And on Wednesday morning, everyone is sleeping late and it's quiet except for the tapping of my keys. I guess all the dirt everyone covered themselves in yesterday helped them sleep?)

 

 

Around the house...  What doesn't need to be done? I have to get a handle on the laundry first. (Working on this, bit by bit.)

 

One of my favorite things...  reading picture books that unexpectedly contain one of my boys' unconventional nicknames and watching their eyes light up.  (The book is Rattletrap Car and the name is "Jakie", without giving anything away ;-)

 

 

 

A Few Plans For The Rest Of The Week... Well, seeing as how it's now the "rest of the week"... I'm still trying to get a better handle on my own time, but improving... we have a doctor's appointment to get to, the library, and Katydid and Gareth are both going to volunteer along with Andy at his company's annual 5K for charity this weekend.  This will also be the fourth of the past 5 weeks that Andy will be out of town.  Next week will make it 5 of 6. Still just trying to keep my head above water. 

 

 

Country Diary: Pick a Peck of Peppers

Weather: upper 70's today, cloudy, off and on showers which prevented me from picking beans today...I picked cucumbers (most notably) in the rain.  Chipmunk, who was out in the garden with Andy and me at the time, was not amused.  This surprised me, because he will cheerfully dunk his head in a mud puddle.  All last week it felt like summer with highs in the 80's.  We even had to use fans.  But this week it looks like temps will slump into the 60's, with overnight lows dipping into the 40's.  Fall, I guess.

In bloom: Well, my rosebush is still going, which is hard for me to believe.  It likes the chickens.  Otherwise, the field is full of goldenrod, black-eyed susans (Pip calls them "black-eyes"), and the first asters.

Photo by Katydid

In the Barnyard: It's been a while since I posted a Country Diary.  About a week and a half ago, we lost two of our turkeys to what we think must have been raccoons.  (Only raccoons tear off the head and leave most of the meat untouched.)  So Andy spent one very long Sunday converting the the frame of a larger chicken coop he'd been working on into a turkey coop.  It looks a lot like an aviary.

But Andy says not to give Katydid ideas.

The poor turkeys... they are really not meant to be cooped up like this.  What we've discovered is that heritage turkeys are excellent flyers and, unlike chickens, they don't particularly care if they make it home to roost or not.  When we let them out of the coop to forage on grass, they will fly up about twenty feet into the tree behind the woodpile on the right.  I guess raccoons can't get them there, but still.  Another worry we have is that there has been a wild turkey hen hanging around with her poults since we put the turkeys out.  The other day I looked out the window to see the wild hen having a bit of an alteraction with our Bourbon Red hen, who might have been trying to tag along. 

The wild hen is becoming increasingly less afraid of us, though.  The boys and I came upon her and the poults in the garden a couple of days ago and were able to come quite close before they all flew away.

The turkeys do have interesting personalities, though, and if you ignore the bald heads, the rest is beautiful and graceful.

Our Naragansett tom...

Blue Slate hen in the left background and Bourbon Red hen in foreground...

Close-up of one of the Blue Slates...

In the Garden:

It's not a banner year.  There's very little to freeze or can, and the blackberry bush seems bent on ripening only a pint of berries at a time.  I put away 2 qt. of beans and 2 1/2 qts of squash last week, and that was the first all season.  I had to use farm stand tomatoes to make freezer salsa with my peppers.

Of which there have been quite a few.  The peppers have actually surprised me this year.  Usually our pepper production is not good.

The tomatoes are such a disappointment that I'm not even going to show you a picture.  They started out beautiful and lush.  And then -- late blight struck.  It's epidemic in the Northeast this year.  I couldn't even go into the garden for days.  Some of our tomatoes seem to be pulling through okay, but most aren't.  I can't can the green tomatoes (as pickles or whatever) because canning potentially diseased produce doesn't sound smart to me.  If you pick the tomatoes green and leave them in the windowsill to ripen, most rot anyway.

I have to tell you, it's heartbreaking.

Here's what our late August harvest looks like, sans tomatoes:

That's what I picked in the rain today, along with a bunch of okra Andy picked last night.  Apparently we had forgotten about the okra patch for a few days.  Those long purple things are eggplants.

A funny curlicue one using my garden journal as background...

A comparison of cucumbers... Marketmore slicer on top, Homemade Pickles on the bottom.  Homemade Pickles is a producer.  Even in a wet, mostly cool summer, it will give me more cucumbers than any other variety.  I sliced up the pile of cucumbers I picked this morning for refrigerator sweet pickles.

And some homemade salsa, using all home-grown ingredients except for the lime juice. 

Now I just have to figure out what to do with all the rest of those peppers and that giant striped zucchini!

Country Diary: July Garden

I was going to name this post "Tomato Madness," but then I thought, well, there are other things going on in the garden, too.  So instead I went with the boring "July Garden".

Weather: 75 ish and the sun has come out again after a few brief rain showers.  I believe it has rained almost every single day this month -- at least a few sprinkles.  We have spent more than a few soccer games huddling in sweatshirts.  I made Italian sausage and onions Friday night.  It was raining again, as usual -- a steady cold rain -- and as Andy sat down he said, "Boy, this is a good dinner to warm you up..."  And I finished for him, "... on a cold July night."

In Bloom:

Black-eyed Susans at the edge of the comfrey bed...

Katydid's miniature wildflower meadow...

A closer-up view of Katydid's flowers...

The roses, which are a bit past their prime.  The old growth is already spent, and now only the new growth is blooming.  I'm not deadheading the flowers because I want to try to collect rosehips in the fall. 

The milkweed smells wonderful and has been buzzing with bees all week.  I haven't seen any monarch caterpillars, but...

Katydid found this Mourning Cloak caterpillar on the driveway and brought it inside to see if she could watch it form a chrysalis and turn into a butterfly.  We see a lot of Tiger Swallowtails around here, but we've never seen a Mourning Cloak, so it should be interesting.  The caterpillars feed on birch and wild roses, so it's strange we've never seen one before (as we have both in abundance).  Katydid has been taking pictures every day to chronicle the caterpillar's progress.  She reports that it has formed a complete chrysalis already.

Another insect related to blooms...

The milkweed beetle.

In the Barnyard:

Turkeys.

Actually, they're in the orchard with the elderberries.  The elderberries were teeming with Japanese beetles, and the turkeys love to eat Japanese beetles, so it seemed like a good match.  We have them enclosed with electric poultry netting, which does absolutely nothing to stop them from getting out.  Heritage turkeys are exceptional flyers.  And they don't seem to care about getting shocked by the netting either, which I find strange.  Their favorite place to go after they get out of the netting is the chicken coop, where they eat the chickens' food, then fly up to the roof to roost.  They have good personalities, though.  They're very inquisitive and people-friendly.  The Bourbon Reds and Blue Slates are not very smart.  The Naragansetts (the ones that look like wild turkeys) seem to be far hardier and more intelligent as well. Oddly, of the 8 turkeys that survived out of our original 15, only one is a tom.  He's the big Naragansett with the red neck.  I like the turkeys far better than the meat chickens, who will not only peck but bite you when you try to change their food and water.  (We ordered a straight run of White Rock and Delewares for meat birds, so I'm talking about the young cockerels here... Katydid has actually already decided which one she wants to eat first, which is something.)

In the Garden:

This is why I wanted to call this post "Tomato Madness":

We thought these tomato plants were going to die.  The night after we planted them, we had a light frost here and there.  Some of their leaves curled up and turned yellow and black.  Andy went out and bought more tomatoes to replace most of these, which looked pretty bad. Now they have formed their own tomato jungle.  These are not the only tomato plants I have.  In fact, this is just half of one bed.  I have another bed this size full of more jungley tomato plants.

I am really scratching my head about this.  Usually in a cold, rainy year, the tomatoes do not do well.  The plants don't blossom, the blossoms don't set, and the tomatoes take forever to ripen.  Or, they are ruined by slugs.

Can you see all the tomatoes in there?  They're pulling the branches so close to the ground the branches are developing roots.  (All those little hairs on a tomato plant have the potential to turn into roots, which is why when you plant tomatoes, you're supposed to stick them in the ground right up to the bottom of the first set of true leaves.)  It's been raining so much (or we've been at soccer so much) that we haven't had time to attend to the garden.  So now we have super-sprawly tomatoes and weeds run wild among the eggplants and cabbages.  Anyway, these are Early Girls (I think), a hybrid variety, but even my heirlooms (Brandywine, Striped German... and oh, I can't remember the others) are doing well for the most part.  I had to toss a big half-ripe Striped German to the chickens this morning because of slug-damage and rot (which made me gnash my teeth a bit) but most of the tomatoes don't look that bad, even though they're growing so close to the ground.

I did pick this one before it could get any worse, though:

First tomato.  Not pretty, but my expectations have been low in the garden this year.  Deer ate every.single.pea plant. Rabbits ate all (all) my lettuce and spinach.  Something is decimating the brussel sprouts. The squash and cucumber seeds rotted in the ground it was so cold and wet in June.  And crows stole all our corn twice.

See the corn plants here and there? (If you squint?)  We planted that whole space to corn.  The only corn that actually managed to escape the crows are two rows on the right, which happened to be under netting.

I'm not feeling very charitable toward the crows lately.  They run the hawks off, but I don't think that makes up for stealing the corn.

A few more garden pictures (because I like to look back from year to year to compare):

This is the first year we've grown cabbages, and they're doing well in this wet, cool weather.

My few remaining squash plants are starting to bear.

The peppers are not doing too badly.

The onions are getting rather large.  They like the steady supply of water.

The blackberry bush is still my favorite.  It's loaded with fruit and will need to be wrapped with bird netting before too long.

Harvest this week:

2 yellow squash, one sweet pepper, a handful of purple and yellow beans (not pictured),  1 zucchini, 1 cippolini onion that Chipmunk stepped on and knocked out of the ground, 5 giant Walla Walla onions (not pictured), 10 Yukon Gold potatoes, 5 stalks of rhubarb, roughly a half-pint of raspberries, eaten off the bushes, 1 cherry tomato, and 1 nearly ripe Early Girl tomato.

I made a strawberry-rhubarb crumble that everyone pronounced one of the top 10 best desserts ever... and a 3 bean salad (with squash and zucchini added) that I am going to have to eat all of myself. (Ahem.)

And now I had better go tie up some more out-of-control tomato plants. Before it starts raining again.

Emergency preparedness: working on the pantry

Last week, when I wasn't thinking or writing or reading about educational philosophy, I did a fair amount of reading and thinking about groceries.  Actually, since I plan on making emergency preparedness a focus of our year, this does actually relate to homeschooling. :-)  Periodically it hits me that we live in area where winter storms might knock out the power for long periods of time (as happened to many people we knew during last winter's ice storm).  It also hits me that I have a bunch of little kids.  How would we be able to get them out in a fire? (This thought kept me up nights when the twins were infants and Farmerboy was only 2.)  What if something happened to me?  Would my kids know what to do?

So we're going to work on this throughout the year.  (I'm putting it in the curriculum I submit to the school district as health.)  Gareth and Katydid are both working on the Boy Scout First Aid merit badge right now (Gareth will be able to actually earn the badge; Katydid is doing the same work for the Pilgrims of the Holy Family badge) and I am working on rebuilding our pantry.

When we decided to eat mostly local, the number of meals using canned goods we bought from the store went way down and we had very little canned food in our pantry.  The freezer was full of meat, vegetables, and fruit, but the pantry was not.  It's far easier for me to freeze our produce than to can it. There's a problem with having most of your food frozen, though.  What if the power goes out to the freezer?   And sometimes (like last week) we ran into tough weeks where there wasn't a whole lot that was easy to make (or that didn't require defrosting, as in a five pound chicken or a four pound roast), and of course we fell back on what American families often seem to fall back on. McDonald's. 

As it happened, we also loaded Quicken this week and were able to see just how much falling back on McDonald's in a bad month (or two) was costing us. Yikes! And then there was this conversation at 4real on the cost of meals per serving, which has given me a new hobby. ;-) The challenge is, of course, in using high quality local in-season ingredients in an economical way. In thirty minutes or less, since Chipmunk still refuses to sleep anywhere but on me.

Anyway, this week I bought extra emergency rations to start rebuilding our stock of just-in-case canned goods -- primarily so we'd have something to eat if we all got sick or if I got sick or if we'd been running hither and yon all day.  After this, the plan is to keep stocking up a little at a time, taking advantage of sales, etc.

(You know, some people think about how the world will be beautified or inspired by what they blog, but I must confess that I just think things like, "Hey! My cupboard's full of food again! I think I'll take some pictures! LOL)

So here are my "the cupboard's full of food again" pictures, which I hope you'll tolerate... I am working on a couple of homeschooling posts, so if you come here primarily for those, just click away and come back later :-).

This is the cupboard I use for canned goods.  You can see that it's not very big.  Our house was built in the 1950's by a doctor with five children -- girls.  Apparently large families in the 1950's only stored food in their bomb shelters.  Actually, I'm not really joking; the doctor did put a bomb shelter in the basement of this house, along with his practice, and this bomb shelter (totally wasted on a house outside tornado country) is lined with wonderful can-size shelves.  In contrast, the kitchen has a skinny little pantry with an almost uselessly deep cupboard on top.  I don't like storing too much in the basement, because a)I forget about it down there and b) it's damp, and I don't want the cans to rust. I'm sure it was all much nicer when it was first built.

Anyway, I restocked some of our "emergency" food, which in our case means soup, canned fruit, and creamed corn. (And spaghetti sauce, since I usually make and freeze my own.  But I used up the two emergency jars right before I took this picture.)  Everything else I use in regular cooking: canned beans, various tomato products, canned salmon, coconut oil, molasses, and (you can't see it) enchilada and barbecue sauce.  I'll continue restocking a little more every week, since this is obviously not enough to keep a family of 8 going for any length of time. I cleared off a shelf in another cabinet so I can expand.

I would also like to can tomatoes this year... if it ever gets warm enough or dries out enough for them to ripen... and if the groundhogs don't get them first.  My garden this year has been one catastrophe after another.  But that's another story.

This is the cabinet next to the canned goods, which I use for pasta and rice (and dried beans).  We had gotten low on spaghetti, which is also an emergency around here.  The blue bags are tortellini --  convenience food, but a lunch staple. Definitely something to rely on when I can't cook, too.

 

The actual "pantry".  I had it organized not too long ago, but it doesn't take long for it to degenerate.  Top shelf is really supposed to be staples like various vinegars and sugar (I keep my flour in the freezer because of bugs), but you can see that a couple of bags of chips-on-sale have crept in, and that the sugar has moved accordingly to the third shelf.  What you can't see in this picture is the 5lb jar of buckwheat honey that's out on the kitchen counter, or the jars of strawberry jam tucked in behind... something... on the 2nd or 3rd shelves.  The Gatorade is also gone by now, even though it was supposed to be for sick emergencies, not for kids to come out drinking after playing soccer in the yard.  We really try hard to avoid all food dyes, BHT, and TBHQ because they affect the behavior of some of our kids.  I don't think Gatorade is on anybody's diet.  There's more juice in the basement, because Wal-Mart was running a sale.

The freezer forms the bulk of our food storage, but I was more excited about actually having food in our cupboards.  We're in that time of year when the garden hasn't really gotten going yet and the supply of meat is dwindling, too.  I think we're pretty much done with the lamb we bought last year, and we've eaten a good chunk out of the side of beef we bought in October.  We have a few chickens left -- in the freezer, I mean.  The bulk of our chicken supply is pecking each other in the brooder right now.  It's the time for inventory: we need more lamb, I can't buy enough pork, we didn't eat very much of the broccoli I froze, I stumbled upon two more bags of squash, we're out of corn, and we're still eating last year's green beans.

I am beginning to refill the freezer in a small way, though:

 

14 quarts in the freezer.  And like I said, I made jam.

 

It turned out pretty well, if the rate at which it's being eaten is any indication.

So... anyone else want to share a peek in the pantry?  If you do, leave me a link in the comments!

Fridge and Pantry Cleanout Challenge

(HT: Christine at Memories of a Catholic Wife and Mother, whose mention of food blogs directed me to some new reading material!)

Discovering Organic and Thrifty couldn't have come at a better time, as I really needed to clean out my fridge and I really need to do a better job of planning meals around what needs to be used up now. I've found that the most difficult thing about eating from our stores (garden produce I've frozen or otherwise perserved; local produce and meat we've bought in bulk; and all the eggs the chickens are laying) is planning.  Planning to use the potatoes before they sprout, using more onions when they start sprouting, using the squash in the pantry before the green beans in the freezer so the squash doesn't go bad, rotating hamburger with lamb with chicken with beef roast so that all the hamburger doesn't get used up right away... not eating the bacon ALL IN ONE MEAL... that kind of thing. So I was happy to find this challenge.

Here are the rules:

1) List "Notable Items in Fridge to Use Up" (feel free to post a pic as well)

2) List "Notable Items in Freezer to Use Up"

3) List "Notable Items in Pantry to Use Up"

4) Either list your menu plan or at least 2-3 meal ideas with which you'll use those items.

5) E-mail me the URL to your post and I will add it in to my post for more "link love" for you. (If you don't have a blog, feel free to leave a comment!!!)

6) Link back to my weekly fridge & pantry cleanout post.

So. Andy was out of town last week when we had the flu AND he had a company retreat to attend on Saturday for 13 or 14 hours.  Sunday the weather was "nice" (i.e., above freezing), so I justified cleaning out the fridge on the grounds that a walk to the compost pile would be nice.  I was really embarrassed at the amount of food that was taken to the compost, but at least it will be put back into the soil and not just thrown away. After I came back from the compost, I resolved to do a better job of using up what I had, starting then. Here are my lists:

Items in Fridge to Use Up:

After I got done cleaning out all the science projects... er, leftovers... I wasn't left with much. Monday has recently become our shopping day, and we were quite low on a few things. But here's what I discovered after I emptied and reorganized the fridge:

• Feta cheese
• EGGS. I have 4.5 dozen in the refrigerator right now. Our girls work hard!
• 4 packages of tortillas (the kids eat cheese quesadillas for lunch quite often, but apparently we had gotten ahead of ourselves a bit.)
• celeriac

 

No, it's not very pretty. I don't imagine that you have any in your fridge. But if you can find it in the fall and winter (its other name is celery root), it's good in soup or stew.  And it keeps practically forever. I've had this celeriac in my refrigerator since November.

• 1 grapefruit

Items in the Freezer to Use:

• 1 turkey carcass and 2 chicken carcasses I saved for stock
• vegetables frozen in the summer: broccoli, green beans, corn, squash. I need to use these before others.

 

Bit of a mess right now, actually. The meat is mostly beef, with a little lamb and pork mixed in. We have about 5 chickens left, I think.

 

The door held mostly fruit, which we are making a dent in now with the Vita Mix.

Items in the Pantry to Use:

• potatoes. Some of them may be past the point of use, though, and might be better off left for planting next month.

  

(We have to figure out a better way of storing potatoes. Digging up the ones in the middle our bottom of the pails is almost impossible.)

• sweet potatoes

The sweet potatoes are actually in pretty good shape... which was surprising to me, because I haven't checked them in a while. But we need to eat them.  Next to the sweet potatoes are onions, which -- as you can see -- are sprouting.  Our storage conditions aren't ideal and/or we didn't cure the onions enough last summer.  I can't use all of them up, so I might try planting a bunch of them next month -- just like the potatoes.

Menu Ideas:

Since I did my clean out on Sunday, I've already used some of this stuff. I made turkey stock with the turkey bones, some onions, and 2 of the celeriac on Sunday.  For dinner Sunday, we had Mustard and Black Pepper Braised Beef Shanks (seriously adapted from a recipe in the Williams Sonoma catalog) with baked sweet potatoes. (Farmerboy ate 3.)  Monday was spaghetti, with extra spaghetti sauce to freeze. Tuesday was Turkey Divan, using up some leftover frozen turkey plus the meat that came off the bones when I made stock -- and some of the broccoli from the freezer.

Meals for the rest of the week,..

Wednesday: busy day, so... frozen shrimp, salad, tropical fruit

Thursday: quiche or a puff pancake... something that uses up A LOT of eggs. Fruit on the side. Peas with quiche.

Friday: Black bean tortilla casserole, corn, fruit.

Saturday: I'd like to try to recreate a sweet potato -bacon soup I saw at our local farm store, grilled cheese sandwiches.  I'll use some of the turkey stock.

Sunday: Braised beef tips, mashed potatoes, green beans, fruit.

Hopefully taking stock of fridge and freezer won't be so much of a challenge next week!

 

Summer seems a long way off

 

Proof summer once existed.

Around the House Thanksgiving Notes

Yesterday it was 65 degrees.  And we were under a tornado watch.  We ran around frantically all afternoon, stacking firewood by the house and cleaning up the yard.  Today it is 30-something-really-cold-feels-like-you-wouldn't-want-to-be-outside-windy degrees and it is supposed to snow most of the week.  And into next week.  (Hi, Grandma and Grandpa!  Aren't you excited about coming to visit?)

Since I'm having a hard time getting going today, and I certainly can't be counted on to actually organize my thoughts in any way that makes sense, I thought I would just set down some random, house-related tidbits today as we get ready for Thanksgiving.... and try to stay warm.

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I'm making chicken stock today.  If you had told me a few years ago that I would totally give up canned broth I would have laughed.  Our resolution to eat locally this year has gone better in some months and worse in others, but overall we are eating much more locally than ever before.  The one thing we have gone totally local on is meat.  I don't buy any meat from large chain stores anymore.  On the one hand, it takes a little more effort and time to work with what you've got in your freezer as opposed to heading out to the store to buy exactly what the easy recipe calls for (I know no chickens entirely composed of drumsticks, for instance).  On the other hand... I've generally always got something to make for dinner.

Anyway, it turns out that chicken stock is pretty easy.  All the chickens I buy are whole chickens, so usually I roast them in the oven.  After dinner, I take the rest of the meat off the bones to use in casseroles, etc. during the week, and I stick the carcass in the freezer.  I use two carcasses to make stock.  I fill a big stockpot up about 2/3 with water, then throw in whatever vegetables I happen to have around -- carrots, celery, onions, and kale today -- and the chicken bones. I season it with salt and pepper. I skim off any gunk that rises to the surface, but I find that with the roasted chicken carcasses I don't have to skim as much as if I use a whole, uncooked chicken.   Then I simmer it for a few hours.  When it's done, I let it cool for a little while, until I can strain it without splashing myself with boiling stock.  I usually try to put it in the refrigerator for a while so it's easier to skim off the fat.  Then I pack it in freezer containers and freeze it until I need it.  (I know that some people use ice cube trays for this, but I'm usually making recipes in large quantities anyway.  So freezing the broth in pints and quarts is not a big deal.) 

I find that paying an arm and a leg for local, humanely raised chicken encourages frugal practices such as making my own stock. ;-)  Next year we've decided to raise our own meat chickens (although we're too chicken *cough* to do the slaughtering ourselves and will probably take them to a local meat packer). 

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I'm also baking pumpkins today.  Back in July, it appeared that we were not going to get pumpkins due to cucumber beetles.  But somehow we ended up with 6 pie pumpkins.  We've been storing them on the front porch, but I don't want them to freeze solid.  Before I cook them, I mean -- once they've been baked, I'll scoop the flesh out of the shell, pack it into freezer containers, and freeze it.  Some I'm not going to freeze because I'm going to make pumpkin bread this week and freeze that, or at least as much of it as I can rescue from the starving hordes who inhabit my house.  The last time I made pumpkin bread I think I used this recipe, but I tripled it.  You'll notice that it calls for three cups of sugar.  I did not use nine cups of sugar for my pumpkin bread.  Instead I used 4 cups (total, while tripling the other ingredients) and the 5 or 6ish cups of pumpkin that I had.  I also used yogurt in place of the oil.  And it was so yummy I told my kids (and the other kids to whom I fed it) that it was cake.  (Tripling the recipe resulted in two 13x9 pans, by the way.)

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Getting some stuff out of the freezer is going to be necessary, too, though.  When we bought the freezer, the salesperson tried to talk us out of it because it was so big.  At that point, I was merely pregnant with twins; we really had no clue what life in a large family would be like yet.  But am I ever glad that Andy didn't listen to that salesperson.  Our freezer is so stuffed right now that we had to make room in the small freezer upstairs (the one attached to the refrigerator).  If I wasn't feeling so lazy, I would go downstairs and take a picture of it.  We've got a side of beef (and that cow must have been huge), 8 chickens, about maybe a little less than half a lamb, and most of the corn, green beans, peaches, squash, and berries we froze this past summer.  (To clear out some of the squash, I'm going to make yellow squash muffins.  My kids prefer squash muffins to blackberry muffins; go figure.  They are really good, though. )

I think we are going to have to put a turkey in there for a couple of days.  This is a new experience for us: going to a farm to buy a fresh turkey.  We're supposed to pick it up Monday, but I'm not sure... will fresh turkey keep in the refrigerator until Thursday? 

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Katydid and I picked up some yarn at Wal-Mart yesterday with the idea in mind that we would make a yarn wreath for Thanksgiving.  Yarn wreaths are probably one of the only real crafts I can make.  A mom came to my fifth grade classroom at Christmastime and showed us how.  As you might imagine, they are really easy.  I made one for Gareth when he was five or six... at that time he could count the wraps, but he didn't have enough fine motor control to actually do the wrapping.  I have no idea where that wreath ended up, though; we moved, and so it could be anywhere.  I keep trying to do another one with the kids -- or get the kids to do one themselves -- butI never seem to be able to sit down and do it. 

I also keep telling myself, this is the year I will learn to crochet, this is the year I will learn to knit, and we've seen how that goes.  But maybe this year...

 

September Plans

I did say that we were going to pick corn and beans this week, didn't I?  Well, there's no corn in this picture because Andy picked a bushel and a half of it and froze most of it (4.5 qts worth) Sunday night, but there are three pounds of beans, almost all of them from Gareth's Three Sister's Garden.

This is what I started with the morning of Labor Day: if you can't count the zucchini, there are ten of them. ;-) On Sunday I'd sat down and written out a housecleaning schedule for our September break, but I made one glaring omission: the garden.  So instead of cleaning out the laundry room yesterday, as I had written down on my list, I worked on food all day.

Out of what you see here (plus a few assorted other ingredients, some of which we also grew), I made:

• Ratatouille -- all 3 eggplant, 4 zucchini, 2 green peppers (locally raised, but not mine) from the refrigerator, garlic (locally raised), 5 smallish tomatoes (mix of red and yellow), basil and parsley.  I used the recipe from Preserving the Harvest (linked in my sidebar) and meant to freeze most of it.  But Andy and I ended up eating some of it for lunch, and Katydid tried it and liked it, and so I put a couple of pints in the refrigerator for lunches this week, and only froze a pint.  I was surprised that Andy liked it so much, since he is not a big fan of tomatoes or zucchini, but this one gets a big thumbs up.  It's really, really good.  (Although I think my Italian zucchini variety had something to do with it!  It seems sweeter than your usual hybrid.)
• Zucchini Bread -- Out of 6 zucchini, I made 1 giant loaf and 1 13x9 pan of chocolate chip zucchini bread, and 1 medium-size oval baker and 1 9x9 pan of regular zucchini bread.  I ran out of oil, so I substituted vanilla yogurt.  Happily, it's better this way!  We've scarfed down almost 3/4 of the oval baker today.  Farmerboy ate zucchini bread for breakfast and lunch.  I put the rest of the bread in the freezer.
• Yellow Squash Muffins -- Sounds bizarre, I know, but all 27 muffins are GONE as of lunchtime today.  A friend of mine, who is in the same boat as far as squash goes, sent me this link.  I didn't have any applesauce, so I used the whole cup of melted butter, and I added about a teaspoon or so of cinnamon.  The recipe says it makes 18 muffins, but I guess my squash must have stretched it somewhat. 

I didn't get around to freezing the beans.  (Gareth requested that I not attempt making Dilly Beans with his beans.  Have I mentioned that there are at least 20 qts of beans in our freezer already?)  That's for today.  And today we did get around to the next room of the house on my housework list: the kitchen.  I've decided to take advantage of "many hands making light work" and get everyone to focus on ONE room of the house every day, just to get done some of the stuff that isn't done on a regular basis.  This morning I gave the little boys soapy rags and set them to wiping stuff, Gareth moved the island, cleaned under it, and mopped the floor, and Katydid and Pop cleaned out the pantry while I sorted food, cleaned a bunch of clutter off one of the counters, and attempted to make the toaster oven less of a fire hazard. 

There's still a lot more to do, though, and since I am feeling better (and thanks to everyone who commented on my breathing post :-), I probably ought to go do it.  While I have no illusions about getting everything on my list done, even a quarter or half the list would be progress.  Progress feels good.

So, until September 22, I'll probably be working quite a bit around here, offline.  If I seem a little scarce, that's why.