Posts from — May 2009

Today I sing an ode to carrots:

Carrots, fresh from the ground, unearthed with a broad shoulder behind a broadfork, gently laid into a handcart for washing.

Too-small carrots, overwintered under a blanket of hay, suspended until spring, when green shoots break and thick orange spears grow thicker and deeper into the ground.

Extra early carrots, bred to grow faster and taste sweeter, grown from seeds with an organic seal, $25 for 10,000.

Here on the farm, we grow Napoli carrots, a favorite of the veritable Eliot Coleman. It is one of the only crops we seed directly into the bed in rows 4” apart, furrowed with the handle of a hoe. I sit on a planting board, making rows, placing each of 6,000+ seeds in the rows one-half inch apart, and covering the row back up with potting soil from my 5 gallon bucket. By the end, the bed is handsomely striped with the promise of carrots to come.

Top: Carrot seeds are covered with an organic pellet to make them easier to sow. We sow by hand in straight rows, using a planting board to distribute weight as we sit on the freshly dug beds
Bottom (L to R): Baby carrots, a few days after germination; carrots a couple of weeks old; carrots ready for thinning

The carrots can be planted in the late summer, where some will mature and be stored in the ground for use throughout the winter, and some might be struck by winter and wait in arrested development until spring when they revive themselves from wintery torpor and start growing again. They can also be planted in spring, to grow and mature in the early spring and late summer.

When the tiny greens mature into something carrot-like, we thin the rows and leave a carrot every 2” to give them space to stretch out and grow straight. The tiny carrots are shorter than a pinky with the girth of a toothpick.

According to John Jeavons, the king of the biointensive method, and one of our gurus here on the farm, carrots can produce 400 lbs per 100 sq ft. I don’t know what our general record is, but I think we’re a little below this target — if you figure 1800 carrots per bed, each at 2.75 oz, that’s around 310 lbs.

When I first harvested carrots, the thing I noticed was the smell. Carrots smell intensely carroty and sweet straight from the ground. Even in the first thinning, when they are barely recognizeable… even this small, they smell like themselves. Some might be interested in “improving” food to suit a particular fancy, but it seems like there’s something elemental and lovely about a carrot fully realized as itself.

I read this article the other day that suggested that the recession might provide an opportunity for folks to pursue personal dreams that they might otherwise put on hold. The author makes a clear distinction between things that we’re kinda interested in, and

“real creative urges, those we are meant to express, [which] don’t go away. If ignored, they bother us, affect our health, fester and eventually turn us into the living dead.”

Is this true? Do we all get these urges? I didn’t think so. I know very few people that have these undeniable passions. I’ve always tended to think that this pervasive, and not-necessarily-so-helpful sentiment — that most people have a passion that they just need to follow to be happy — that has always bothered me and made me feel like I’m missing something, like I’m incomplete and inferior.

But now I am a month deep into this farming thing and I love it. I love being outside and being so, so tired at the end of the day; I love the smell of soil, and the way the knees of my jeans get caked in dirt. Plus, it excites me to think of eventually handling the business side of things, handling my own operation, searching out a market, getting into value-added food production, making business decisions, constantly improving and innovating…

I’ve had some rough days here on the island. I haven’t found too many kindred spirits; there’s a closed-mindedness about certain things and a religious zealotry to the love-of-small-towns and cerain ways of life that makes me feel uncomfortable and unwilling to open up to people, but that said, farming itself — the work — is probably the closest I’ve been to this “real creative urge.”

But am I a fickle lover? How long will my passion last? Summer will be hot. I will sweat and get weird tans and 40 hours a week of work when the sun is shining and the swimming holes beckon is going to be tough.

For now, though, I am going to quash my pessimistic tendencies and see if these seeds I’m planting germinate into something good.

I tried okonomiyaki for the first time at a random Japanese restaurant in Sihanoukville, Cambodia. A friend told me about these “amazing cabbage thingys” I just had to try. In general, I think “amazing” and “cabbage” generally fit together like Rachael Leigh Cook and Freddie Prinze Jr. in She’s All That – unlikely, but oh so good when it happens. And happen, it did.

So recently, when I was thinking about what to do with some of the communal cabbage that’s been sitting in a plastic bag in our fridge, I naturally thought of this. However, most recipes for authentic okonomiyaki are pretty complicated and include lots of hard-to-get-on-an-island things like shredded Yamaimo (a mountain yam), bonito flakes, tenkasu (tempura flakes) and dashi. Finally, I stumbled on this recipe on 101 cookbooks and was inspired to try something nice and simple.

I think it’s especially cool that these pancakes are made from almost all farm ingredients.

Japanese Cabbage Pancakes with Sweet & Tangy Sauce (Okonomiyaki)
Makes 3 pancakes

pancakes:
1.5 cups cabbage
1 cup leeks
1/4 cup carrots, grated
1/2 cup white rice flour
2 eggs
2 tbsp water salt and pepper to taste
oil to fry

sauce:
1/2 Cup Worcestershire sauce
1/4 Cup Ketchup
2 Tbsp Soy sauce
1/4 Cup Brown sugar
1 Tbsp Mustard powder
Pepper to taste

To make the sauce, combine worchestershire sauce, ketchup, and soy sauce in a small saucepan until simmering. Add brown sugar and mustard powder and stir until dissolved. Cook for 5-10 minutes until reduced by 1/3 or until you get the yummy thick consistency of teriyaki or barbeque sauce. Resist the urge to take a spoonful and let your sauce cool while you start your pancakes.

Finely shred cabbage. If using carrots, peel, then grate on a large-size cheese grater. Cut green tops and bottom roots of leeks and cut remaining white section down the center. Wash well to get rid of any grit that might be stuck way down in there. Slice the washed leeks into half-moons. Mix cabbage, leeks, and carrots together in a bowl.

Add rice flour, salt and pepper and mix well. In a separate bowl, beat eggs and water together. Pour the egg over the veggies and stir well to coat. The mixture will not seem batter like — it will be more like veggies coated in flour. This is okay — I promise it will come together in the pan.

Heat 1-2 tbsp of oil in a large pan over medium-high heat. When hot, scoop 1/3 of the mixture into the center of the pan. Use your spoon or fork to flatten out batter. I find it helpful to have another utensil in hand to shape the outside of the pancake as I press down, as the veggies tend to want to fall apart. Fry for 2-3 minutes on one side, then flip with a large spatula. Fry another 2-3 minutes and remove from pan.

Serve while piping hot, drizzled with sauce.

I’m making a lot of my own food these days: things I would never have thought to make from scratch before; things I always bought at the market without a second thought. But since I’m living on a farm and my entire life is about nothing but food, since it’s really freakin’ fun to make this stuff, and since I have the appetite and the intense daily exercise to justify the caloric ramifications of my experiments, I’ve decided not to pull any punches.

Then there’s the fact that on my farm apprentice salary, it makes economic sense to make some things myself — good bread’s an example (a loaf at the local bakery could be $4, I can make a loaf of sourdough with my starter for less than $0.25 — flour, water, salt); yogurt’s another, and you know what’s a great accompaniment to yogurt? You guessed it… the icon of the liberal, hippie, sustainability-loving organic farmer, oh-so-crunchy, oh-so-loveable, granola.

Ginger Snap Granola is my personal favorite store-bought brand. Made by Golden Temple, it usually hides out in bulk food bins of natural food stores or cool supermarkets. At our market in Friday Harbor, it runs around $4.60 a pound. Not cheap when you’re a granola hound like me. And just what are you getting for $4.60?

INGREDIENTS: Rolled Oats, Organic Evaporated Cane Juice, Expeller Pressed Canola Oil, Crisp Rice (Milled Rice, Evaporated Cane Juice, Salt, Barley Malt Syrup), Honey, Cornstarch, Organic Ginger Root, Sea Salt, Organic Cinnamon Bark, Epazote Leaf, Organic Cardamom Seed, Organic Fennel Seed, Organic Fenugreek Seed, and Organic Nutmeg.

Mm… well, mostly oats and rice and some cool spices thrown in for good measure.

Inspired by Alton and Mark, I decided to make my own delicious gingery granola and calculate the rough price per pound. I started my adventure out in the bulk foods section, skipping the granola and heading straight for nuts and seeds. I ignored pricier items (dried cherries at $16/lb, walnuts at $13/lb) and went for value (pumpkin seeds at $4.28/lb, raw almonds at $4.88/lb.) You could easily (and economically) engineer your way into granola ecstasy by mixing and matching your own favorites.

Not only is homemade granola healthier, cheaper and more fun, but look, it’s prettier too!

In the end, I made a mix with lots more excitement and nutritional value than my old go-to (flax seed=omega-3, raisins & cranberries add fruity goodness, seeds add protein, etc…) and all for only $2.97 per pound, or more than 30% less than the cost of the store stuff.

The finished product, ready for scarfing tomorrow

Jess’s Extra Gingery Granola
makes about 28 oz or 1.75 lb of delicious golden granola

3 cups oats (12 oz) — $0.75
1 cup pumpkin seeds, or your favorite seeds (4 oz) — $0.98
1 cup raw almonds, or your favorite nuts (4 oz) — $1.27
1/4 cup flax seeds, optional — you can substitute wheat germ, sesame seeds, or just leave this out (2 oz) — $0.26 1/4 cup crystallized ginger (2 oz) — $0.45
1 tsp ground ginger — $0.05
1/4 cup brown sugar, optional if you like your granola a little sweet — $0.02
dash of salt

1/2 cup honey or maple syrup, or a combination of the two, yum! — $0.20
2 tbsp veggie oil — $0.02

1/2 cup raisins, or your favorite dried fruit (3 oz) — $0.45
1/2 cup cranberries, or your other favorite dried fruit (3 oz) — $1.00

= $5.20 for 1.75 lb
= $2.97 per lb

Preheat oven to 300 degrees.

Chop up your nuts and crystallized ginger to desired size. I prefer to buy whole raw nuts & raw seeds because it seems like they’re cheaper and you can cut them down however you like to eat them.

In a big bowl, mix up your oats, nuts, seeds, ginger, salt, and brown sugar so that everything is evenly distributed. Pour honey or syrup over the top and the oil and stir well to combine. Make sure everything’s nice and coated and sticky. Distribute the granola in a big baking tray (or two little ones). It’s better to use trays with sides to make it easier to stir every once in a while.

Bake for one hour, stirring every 15 minutes or so. The browner you can get your granola without burning it, the crunchier and yummier it will be.

Remove the granola from the oven and pour from pan onto parchment paper to cool. When cool, mix in a large bowl with dried fruit. Eat your yummy granola over yogurt, ice cream, with milk, bake it into a granola bar, or just eat it by the handful from the bag.

There are two changes I might try in this recipe: add some additional spices for kick — take a page from the Ginger Snap book and add some nutmeg, fenugreek, cinnamon, cardamom, and maybe try a batch with cornstarch to see if it makes the granola more “clustered” like the Ginger Snap instead of distributed like the batch I made.

I’ve been wanting to bake bagels for a couple of years now, but never got round to it for one reason or another. Since I have myself a professional on hand, I figured now was a better time than ever. On top of that, this Slate article seemed to suggest that making bagels yourself makes sense financially, nutritionally, and for your mouth. I’m not sure Jennifer Reese calculated in the $7 jar of organic barley malt syrup & $13 bag of local organic Fairhaven Flour when she made bagels for $0.23 each, and she definitely didn’t use Nancy Silverton’s recipe if she made her bagels in 3 hours, start-to-finish, but even so, I found the article to be validation for my bagel-making dreams.

My crying convinced Lucy it was worth it even though we’d have to knead the dough by hand for upwards of an hour.

I’m calling this a recipe in progress because Lucy didn’t like the “crumb” on the bagel and pronounced it “not-chewy” and “not-bagely” so we’re going to try again until we reach perfection. Perhaps my sourdough starter needs some time to grow? Or maybe our kneading wasn’t quite vigorous enough… Caveat: everyone else who tried them, including one ex-professional-baker, said they were really really good, and especially bagely bagels… but I admire Lucy’s pursuit of excellence and will follow her to achieve the peak of bageldom.

Here are the delicious results of our efforts:

Measuring ingredients on our postal scale

Kneading our hearts out

Shaped dough, nice and puffy the next morning

Into the boiling vat (H20 + baking soda for alkalinity)

Sesame, poppy seed, garlic & salt. Yum.

And the finished product, a tad overbaked, fresh from the oven

Jacqueline and Jim posing on the peak of Mt. Finlayson to “prove” they were here!

On Sunday, Jacqueline and Jim came to visit me at the farm. It was my first time giving a tour to visitors and it was fun! It made me want to coerce more friends and family to come out here to visit. It’s impossible not to feel pride when showing off the beds I’ve cultivated, the little plants I’ve planted, the seeds that are germinating. I think Jacqueline got some ideas for planting this summer — we did a little tasting of the tatsoi (relative of bok choy, which we use in salad mix) and she was impressed.

After fresh bagels and the farm tour, we set off to hike around and search out some of the local flora. Jacqueline’s botanist background helped the identification:

Fairy Slipper Orchid

Chocolate Lily

The cool looking red & green groundcover is broad-leaved sedum, a native succulent

Corn Lily

Pacific Madrone

Maybe a Sitka Spruce?

Common Camass

From the summit of Mt. Finlayson

After summiting all 290 ft of the “mountain,” we headed back to the car and down to town to find food. Delicious crab enchiladas, and then time for the ferry. All-in-all, a glorious Sunday.

This year, my lovely mum made a commitment to only buy secondhand clothes (special exceptions for underwear and other “intimates”)… Before I left for the farm, mum and I went on a crazy thrifting spree, hitting up 3 or 4 huge warehouses in one day, and getting bags of goods — jeans, work shirts, cute coats, shoes, and more.

So when I went to the Friday Harbor thrift house this weekend with Lucy, I couldn’t help but think of her. People on the island are probably bigger than my 100lb mom, so she might not have had any luck except in the kids section, but I still felt a wave of nostalgia and missing as I clicked my way through the plastic hangers on the racks.

Apparently, the rich San Juaners who summer on the island tend to leave behind all kinds of awesome goods. Lucy scored some ridiculous boots a few weeks ago, listed at something around $300 retail. Ridiculous. We’ve heard September is the ideal month for shopping because that’s when all the summer folks head off and make their annual drops. Needless to say, we will be back at the thrift store (likely before September) again.

I’m most excited about my new sick kicks. — two pairs for a total of $6.50

A little taste of what I’m doing in the garden…

35 - gallons of weeds (seven 5-gallon buckets) pulled from the spinach beds in one greenhouse

23 - pounds of spinach harvested from only two 100 sq ft beds

10 - inches lengthwise of one of the very big spinach leaves

38 - number of twisty-ties holding up the pea trellis net

160 - pea plants transplanted on Thursday

21 - gallons of compost tea applied to strapping young plants

5 - seconds it should take water to sink in and for your dirt to lose its glossiness when a bed is “well-watered”

Meet Esther, a lovely expecting cow from Heritage Farm and raw milk dairy…

Meet unidentified Cambodian cow eating garbage on the road on the way to work…

Food is different here than back in Cambodes.

This is what it’s like to ride home to the farm hot-cheeked and smiling, eyes-closed, sprawled on a barley pillow in the covered bed of a pickup truck next to a guitar, a box of tools, a sandbag, and dirty potluck plates at 11pm after a May Day party where you acted the part of “the ladder” in an impromptu play put on by two little girls with freckles and short bangs respectively, who called themselves Brazil from China and something clever you can’t remember, soon after which you left for a delicious gingery drink and hot water for tea poured mistakenly into your drinking glass at a magical gem of a restaurant tucked away in what seemed like an abandoned parking lot.