Posts filed under 'cooking'
Gratitudes
After this week’s pick-up, we will have just three more pick ups for 2009! It is hard to believe; like this summer, the fall season is just flying by. And although not much needs to happen in that time in the fields, we do have to finalize and bring together all the details for 2010 in just a few weeks. The planning happens, in many ways, all season long as we respond to the way things unfold, always looking for ways to improve our service and find the things that work best for our farm, its land and its folks. We are already so excited for next year, and are happy to be bringing this year to an end with abundance and a feeling of success with small but measurable growth!
And since this is Thanksgiving week, here is a list of some more of the things we are thankful for, in addition to the above, that we will fill our gratitude tree with this week:
*Our family, our togetherness, letting the world rush by without us.
*So much laughter…our house is the funny house.
*Fresh paint
*Good books and great music
*Ever improving soil and more wiggly worms.
*Baby goats and farm fresh eggs.
*Friends, past and present, that make life so rich.
*A bustling market stand and busy Farmer’s market.
*Heater-Allen Brewing
*The best CSA members ever!!!
Happy Thanksgiving! Thank you all so much for being a part of this adventure with us!
Add comment November 24, 2009
Staying Healthy
I spent most of this week on the farm tending to fevers and sore heads, throats, and tummies. As terrible as that sounds, the farmer was better by day 3, the kids each after 1 or 2 days. We made lots of chicken soup from Kookoolan Farms’ birds with lots of veggies to make a rich, healthy, and healing broth. We sipped tea with some of the elderberry syrup we made at summer’s end for just such occasions, and we took hot baths and rested. In the end, we were happy that it was over quickly and that it wasn’t too bad.
We tend to look to food for our vitamins and minerals and medicines, and I feel blessed to be able to continue to eat fresh, nutritious vegetables through the fall and winter, times when our bodies are called on to fight off the colds and flus that come during this time of year. All growing vegetables and fruits begin to lose nutritive value once they have been picked, and they also will not reach their maximum nutritive value if they are picked under ripe to make it through shipping and handling to stores far and wide. And although each season offers its own set of repeating foods, we hope that with your CSA share you notice a rainbow of colors, from dark leafy greens to bright orange carrots and squash, with red, cream, purple, and white roots. All of these provide a well balanced supply of various vitamins and minerals and antioxidants. There are, no doubt, always many pieces to the pictures of our health, and colds and flus are hard to avoid, but I hope that you are staying well and enjoying the bit of natural medicine the healthy and tasty produce we share together provides!
Add comment October 27, 2009
A hard frost!
The farm frosted hard this morning! This may be the last week of veggie harvests that teeter in the space between eating seasons. The very last peppers, the very last summer squash…although the tomatoes are always picked to ripen in storage just so we can spread out the season of everyone’s favorite summer fruit, and we may just get another eggplant harvest next week because the plants rebounded quite unscathed from this morning’s layer of frosty white. Other signs of change abound. Waking at 5:30 this morning to help a wee one get a drink of water, I was struck by how much it felt like the middle of the night. It was dark, the bright moon set for the night, and no sight of the rising sun. I just couldn’t imagine staying awake, the feeling that it was still night was too strong, even though this was the hour we did wake on Tuesdays not long ago, sky light blue, ready to begin the harvests for the day.
In many ways, everything around us is telling us to slow down. The days are shorter, the sky telling us to sleep more, work less. The crops that needed us to tend to them day in and day out, to harvest, harvest, harvest their mad rush at setting as much fruit as possible while the heat lasts, the weeds competing with our plantings in a summer long race to win, all done for the year. The frost itself calling to us to take the time to start the fire and warm the kettle again, because no harvesting could be done until the leaves thawed. The farmer’s market ends this week too, and in a flash, our summer routine is gone for another year. Slowly, slowly we inch towards winter.
So alongside your summer squash this week we have the first of the season’s winter squash! And everything that has been touched by this morning’s frost (and our two softer frosts before this) has been infused with the sweetness of the season. This is the best time to eat fresh food, the sweetest and fullest of all. We were caught off guard this morning, the first really cold fingers of the season, but harvesting food for all of you through the fall is one of our favorite things to do. Unlike in the warmer months, food becomes such a treasure, a source of warmth itself, as we head into colder weather. If you are at all busy bees like we are in the summer, the true savoring starts now, when nature beckons us to slow down and sip some soup!
Add comment October 6, 2009
Savoring the seasons
We here at the farm are enjoying the lovely warm weather this September has brought with it. There is no denying that some mornings and evenings have been cooler, but that feels refreshing even when we know it sends a different signal to the vegetables than the warmer nights of July and August do. As much as we really want our pastures to green up, especially before the goat buck comes to visit our ladies next month, we would be thrilled with a warm, warm, warm September and October.
We love seeing such lush growth going on in the fields for our winter crops, so different than when we plant them out in the spring and they go at it much slower while they wait for temperatures to warm. We can’t help but remember the stark contrast between main season harvesting and winter harvesting, how things we normally harvest from again and again and they just keep growing and growing are doing nothing of the sort come mid- December. Everything just sits until the next big change in the fields is flowering brassicas and the start of rapini harvesting begins in early spring. We are feeling some trepidation, but an equal amount of confidence.
One thing we know for sure is that just like the summer crops in the ground in spring, these plantings are just as mouth watering for the flavors they provide, for the shift in cooking methods and meals on the table. Cold weather broccoli and cauliflower, hearty cabbages, sweet frost kissed roots and cooking greens, special winter salads of crops that just are not feasible to grow in the summer but everyone loves—spinach and arugula—as well as more unusual greens such as chicory and endive! And this year, potatoes for the winter instead of the summer, hooray! Winter squash and leeks and garlic and onions….mmmm! I am really enjoying the last month of summer meals and these lusciuos summer vegetables, but we have a lot of tasty food to look forward to and the wonderful compression of the colder months, where our wide open soul expansion can be wrapped up for the year by the warm hug of hearth and home. The recipes this week are pure summer, and seeing as how that is almost gone (well, true summer is really gone), I thought I should include them as they make perfect use of the last of summer’s fruits. Gazpacho on one of these last warm days, ratatouille a sure sign of September for us, and before the last of the cucumbers are gone, Tzatziki. Well, these are just suggestions, anyways. Whatever you make with this weeks vegetables, savor it and let the flavors of summer shine on your table as brightly as they can before the shift becomes complete, and we are fully into the fall.
Add comment September 15, 2009
Summer love
I am sure that at this moment, we all have one thing taking up residence in our minds, filling in all the spaces between our many other thoughts, unavoidably resurfacing in the front again and again. And what could so ubiquitously bring us together in such grand collective consciousness besides the weather: it is hot! Not just hot, I guess, but HOT…at least hotter than we are used to; and really, hot for most everyone, except for those folks in the desert areas, where HOT, from my recollection, could be closer to 120 degrees than 100. That is the kind of heat that makes you sure your dog is going to die as you travel through. But still, heat is heat, and although I am not worried too much about the animals here, we do have to give them extra attention during these high temperatures. Salt nibbles out of hand for the goats, fresh mud baths for the pigs…the dog, with her furry coat, just digs into the cool ground and lays under the porch.
We, too, are pretty bothered and hot, feeling yet again the affects of poor insulation in an old manufactured home and not a lick of shade to protect the house on the south and west. The icing on the cake of this less than ideal scenario is that the west wall of the house is all windows, of course, so that the house dwellers can enjoy the wonderful view. Add to the pot a scant amount of opening window space and none of them set up for providing cross ventilation, and you have a recipe for an oven of a home. Still, as much as we curse poor house designs, we are never really ones to dwell on the back side of the hill. We aren’t really even all that bothered, just hot.
So, in this vein, I have been stewing a list of all the really great things about this heat, some jewels for us all to remember as we work and play and try to get some sleep in these next few really hot days, and the only somewhat less hot days to come. It is summer after all, and like any other season, it’ll come and go sooner than later. Every minute we have the opportunity to gain a memory to hold onto as things change, constantly change, and move forward, faster than I ever could have imagined as a child.
Top on our list of happy thoughts are that the plants love, love, love this heat. Granted, they were regularly well watered to this point, so that isn’t a consideration or worry for us or them. Instead, they have a lushness, a green, and a vibrancy this week that is just different. Not that they didn’t look beautiful before, and not that plants don’t thrive under our normally less than extreme summer temperatures, but I have a comparison point. After moving here from the hot summers of the Midwest, I haven’t really seen this kind of summertime boom in our garden. Really, it has more to do with the night temperatures than the day, and having this little heat wave, with nights barely dropping below 70 degrees…ooh la la! Plants primarily grow at night, using up the daytime to feed themselves via photosynthesizing. The summer plants love for the heat to remain through the night, and grow they are. This is something we will all benefit from! And although we won’t see it in this week’s harvest, we have harvested the first red tomato, a beautiful striped roma, and surprise of all surprises (for us anyways, since eggplant usually are the last summer crop to ripen for us) a single, gorgeous eggplant. The banana peppers, almost ripe!
Another thing we are thankful for…getting to take the afternoons off! What else can we do really? It is unbearable to continue field work, and unbearable to stay in our home (per the reasons mentioned above). And so we head out with drinking water and sun hats and find a place to get wet! And because it so very hot, we don’t even have to get into the water in that slow and cautious gingerly manner, we can run and jump right in! And when we do, the water, even in the creeks, is warm or cool, not freezing cold! It feels so good, better than any regular mid-temperature summer swimming could. And if
you are young enough or can get away at night, we actually have fit weather for night swimming! To swim on a hot summer’s night with the stars overhead…..lovely!
And as we hope to experience ourselves today, the heat we have here hasn’t left the Oregon coast cool and windy, but nice and warm, warm enough to let that cold ocean water scent your skin with its sweet saltiness even if you’re an adult. The smell of summer’s flowers lingers in this hot air, and maybe if you have a little child she will go out into the tomato patch and when you pick her up, she will smell just like tomatoes so you will squeezer her tight, the smell of a summer garden! And you will crave vegetables even more than you normally do! At least that is us, with scant an appetite
by dinnertime because of this heat, fresh vegetables are the perfect food. Cucumbers, zucchini or white Lebanese squash, cabbages, and steamed beets or blanched green beans all make simple and elegant vegetable salads with not much more than a nice vinegar and a quality olive oil, some fresh herbs, sweet cipollini onions or tasty scallions, and some local walnuts or hazelnuts or delicious artisan cheese for a little bit of protein. And after the 100 degree days simmer down to the mid-90’s, we are back to perfect outdoor grill dining, and nothing tastes like summer more than grilled vegetables!
So, dwell with us, in these joys of summer, heat and all. As I know I write about again and again, our lives are tied to the seasons with such intricately weaved strands that intersect with every little aspect of our lives here on the farm. I was always one for the seasons, they were so distinct where I grew up. By letting ourselves fully submerge into what makes each one unique, by creating and maintaining associations and memories, activities and foods for each one, it makes there coming and going all the more dear, and provides us with the beautifully complimentary pull of sweet and bittersweet,
loving and longing, for each in its own way, to accompany us through the days.
2 comments July 29, 2009
