Category — on the farm

I think this is what it means when people talk about “community.” In the past, I’ve studied and even written about community in the educational context: “community based organizations,” “community-school collaboration” etc., but I feel now like I never really understood what it could mean to be in a vibrant, healthy, active community where a weekend in August means non-stop music and free food at the Island Village Barter Fair, Sunday mornings mean brunch and yoga at Sweet Earth Farm or coffee at Credence and Andreas, and there are so many potlucks you’re always afraid you’ll run out of enough quinoa to cover them all.

I guess that’s a lovely small town for you.

And not just a small town, but a town that seems to attract a certain kind of individual who cares about his neighbor more than the average Joe.

I guess some folks come to the island to retire and hide out and lay low, but it seems like most people, especially the young ones, are looking to carve out a niche in a place that’s different from your run-of-the-mill city. A place where you can go see your lamb being slaughtered, where you can work-trade a jar of jam for a haircut, where you know your server in a restaurant and the cashier at the supermarket and the teller at the bank, and so on.

I’ve only been here 6 months, but I already feel the island creeping under my skin. It’s a beautiful place, but it’s not just that. It’s also that there’s this overwhelming sense of connectedness and support and enthusiasm for each other that is like a super contagious mega-virus, the tropical kind that you think you’ve kicked, but that comes back to haunt you 10 years down the road.

I heard a story on NPR today about Flint, Michigan considering a physical downsizing of the city as a means to lowering costs and improving services to a core of city-dwellers. Interestingly, the story offered a community garden as an example of the potential benefits of this sort of plan, the idea being that as residential buildings were consolidated, it would leave more land for parks, gardens, and other shared community spaces.

I know this touches on many different issues: sprawl, infrastructure costs, homeowners’ rights — but I’m most interested in how this sort of change will actually affect interactions between people, everyday.

How do you experience community? In your family, in your neighborhood, through an organization or club?

Tonight Pritha and I are giving a presentation at the San Juan Island Library: an intro to Community Supported Agriculture and a farm-fresh cooking demo.

We’ve got a powerpoint.

But don’t worry, it’s mostly pictures like this:

If that’s not enough excitement for you, click here to download all the slides. They really are spartan, though! Our notes are where the substance’s at.

None of that nonsense of slides dripping with words so small they can’t be seen. We’re trying to keep it simple and charm people with our enthusiasm for small farms and chard and community love.

After we do a little indoctrination on the wonderfulness of community-supported agriculture, we’ll try to further ingratiate ourselves by appealing to the audience’s stomach.

Pritha’s making a simple summer squash soup, and I’m going to do poached eggs on kale and tomatoes, and green beans in thyme and butter. I devoured my test run on the eggs as I started this post — just a little tomato splashed on my screen as I shoveled from plate to mouth.

It’s been such a very long time since I’ve done anything like this. I was over in the tackroom at Heritage Farm last night where Pritha works, both of us huddled over my little black macbook, walking through our “talking points” and feeling like we were in college again.

This morning before we headed out for the Friday harvest, I blanched the green beans and chopped the garlic and started to put together my bag of supplies:

• knife? CHECK
• cutting board? CHECK
• veggies? CHECK
• utensils, plates, napkins? CHECK

and so on and so on.

I love that it was so easy to make this happen — all it took was an email exchange with the lovely library’s programs coordinator, Adrienne. She even offered to pay for the supplies for the class. Only on this island!

Or maybe not? I should try to do this again when I return to Orange County. I feel like they would cite health code and tell me the fire marshall wouldn’t allow an electric burner. Am I too cynical?

With all these foodalicious sustainabodacious, socially aware thoughts crowding my brain it feels good to force the thoughts into action and do something, not matter how small.

What kind of little actions have you taken lately on something you care about? Change a lightbulb? Plant a tomato? I’d love to know.

I’m applying for graduate programs in food & sustainability for 2010 and it is hard.

It’s hard for your average smartie-pants and in nearly a year of operating outside of your traditional “get-it-done,” information heavy, fast-paced, analytical work environment, I’ve definitely lost some of my so-called edge. My brain was never a knife — more like an awesome antique grinder that chews up various pieces of meat and adds some spices and leaves it to age until it’s spicy and delicious and totally new — but now the grinder’s dull and I’m feeling like I may never get back into any sort of game or groove.

I’m trying to juggle work here on the farm with packing up to go and setting up appointments with professors. And as if that wasn’t enough, I feel like I have to go into these meetings with my future life already laid out in my mind’s eye and my mind’s eye has pinkeye or perhaps is permanently nearsighted and there’s no lasiks doctor to be found.

So instead of impressing the hell out of professors with my intense focus and passion for just one thing, I’ll have to settle for telling the professors the truth. The less sexy, and quite complicated truth that I’m not sure what I want to do, but I do know that it has to do with figuring out the role that social enterprise and social responsibility and business innovation plays in creating a more sustainable food system and using what I learn to do something.

Does that mean I want to open a french-fry truck that grows its own potatoes on the roof and uses excess fry grease as biofuel? Maybe.

Or perhaps I’d like to work as a program manager for someone like these guys. Or do research and teach and consult on the side for small food start-ups. Who the heck knows? If I’m honest, not me. At least not yet.

What I have realized is that I do know some things about food and sustainability and business and I need to start sharing what I do know with others instead of just piling up knowledge in my brain without really processing, organizing and using it for something.

This puts me in mind of a story I heard once (or maybe it was a dream?) about a hermit who holed himself up in a shack for years and years and years and read and read and read exhaustively, refusing to talk to anyone or engage with the world until he had figured out the meaning of life and secrets of the universe. Eventually, when he was old and wizened and barely able to stand, he emerged from his shack in the middle of the desolate woods, pronouncing triumphantly that he had solved the secrets of the universe. Then, if I recall correctly, he fell down and died.

Let me not be that hermit.

I’ve been cleaning potatoes for days now. It hasn’t been nonstop; there’s been planting and bed prep and flats and the harvest to break up the day, but I’ve been going strong, at least a few hours each afternoon, sitting at the potting table in the barn with a few trays of Yukon Golds and the radio on to the CBC and a small scrap of burlap.

Wipe, wipe, wipe the potato with the scrap of brown cloth against my leg; two potatoes in the sack, and I switch to holding the potato in my left hand and polishing with my right. A couple more shiny yellow potatoes ready for winter storage, and I’m already restless again. I shift to hold the burlap in my right hand and rub the potato against the cloth with my left. Is burlap the same as a hairshirt, I wonder aimlessly? (Apparently not — hairshirts are made from the hair of a goat — Obvi!)

The radio announcer’s talking about Chungking Mansions and I wonder how many potatoes they use for the samosas in their curry houses and who in heavens name cleans them all.

But, duh, I know the answer, whoever grows all those potatoes totally has a barrel washer or some other kind of industrial machine and obviously isn’t communing with the potatoes like I am.

The orange-brown dust falls off onto the floor, onto my Keen boots, and sometimes into clouds in front of me until I have to get up and walk across to the big open barn door and take a breath and walk back. Switch position, potato in the right, then in the left. Until I fill a 20 lb bag, and another and another.

There are a lot of potatoes.

So it isn’t that weird that I started daydreaming about all the lovely things I could make with potatoes. Not that weird right?

Obviously mashed potatoes, and potato latkes a la Martha by way of Matt, and those delicious potato rolls that Jaime’s parents make on Thanksgiving. One night I actually made tortilla espanola, like the kind I ate in Madrid as an exchange student, only it wasn’t as delicious without chunks of manchego alongside… And then last week, Rachael of Fuji Mama told me about Rouxbe and I saw the gnocchi recipe with Yukon Gold potatoes and I knew it was my destiny to make them.

So tonight, I made a date with Pritha and we found a ricer, of all things, in the stash of Heritage Farm cooking treasures and we riced those potatoes and fluffed in the flour and kneaded in the eggs gently and made gnocchi.

We didn’t wait the 5 hours to let them rest before boiling because we had to catch the 9:15 showing of Julie and Julia (both of whom probably would have been appalled by the shortcut), but the little potato pillows still came out lovely and soft and melty. We made one version, swimming in sage butter with fresh sage on top and another with Pritha’s fresh pesto. Temporary intern Jesse made a salad with our huge Brandywine tomato and some farm greens. I was happy.

No photos tonight. If I could send you wafts of sage butter, I would!

I hate the ferry this morning. It’s nothing against the boat really, but just the way the rigid, unsympathetic inflexibility of the schedule seems to mock me — makes me feel secure in a plan, and then pulls out of the harbor with a naughty smirk just before I arrive to board.

Really, this morning’s ferry debacle was all on me, but that’s the rub with the ferry — sometimes the system actually foils you, and sometimes it just makes your personal inadequacies really really obvious.

Like it was not my fault the time Jim and Jacqueline came to visit for Jaime’s birthday and arrived more than an hour in advance of the next ferry and were told they could not wait in line until 6 o’clock. Then at 6 o’clock, when they pulled round to get in line, they were told “no, not time yet” by a harried ferry worker on a stress-induced power trip. And by the time Jim had made another round with the car, there were no spaces left and he had to wait for the 10:55 pm ferry. Totally lame.

But today was way lame-r. Sean arrived yesterday with my car, which he drove all the way from LA to the farm. We planned to send him off this morning on the early ferry so he could catch a shuttle to Ferndale to meet up with an aunt and then get to the Bellingham airport in time for his afternoon flight.

I checked the schedule: 6:10 am.

So we both roused ourselves in the dark foggy morning, I fixed him some fig bread and blackberries and fake mocha drink; like the good Navy boy he is, out he came at seconds to 5:50.

We headed out and arrived in town at 6:00 am just in time to see the 6:00 am ferry pulling out of the dock — literally 10 feet away. I was tempted to tell Sean to jump, but he was a sonar technician and not a Seal, so I figured maybe it wasn’t in his MO.

I hadn’t checked the schedule and neither had he and somehow I had gotten it wrong. All I could say was “oh my god, F@#&!, I’m so so sorry” and watch as the ferry continued on its journey.

I’m generally pretty on top of things like schedules, but somehow, today of all days, when I was supposed to get my friend to the ferry on time, somehow TODAY I let things slip and the unforgiving ferry made me pay.

GR!

Last Sunday, I came back from a visit to the Bullocks’ Homestead on Orcas Island in the afternoon, tired, dirty, ridiculously happy, and ready to collapse in a heap on my little blue sofa with some iced tea and The Taste of Place, which I had started on the ferry. But then Lucy came and roused me and told me she had been invited over to Rob’s to pick figs.

Rob is a fellow farmer, known for his pasture-raised meats which he sells at the farmer’s market along with his buddy Guard Sundstrom. Their Meat Wagon is always busy with folks looking for fresh, local, humanely-raised ridiculously tasty meat. Both Rob and Guard are members of the Island Grown Farmer’s Cooperative which is a group of farmers who banded together to design and launch a mobile slaughtering unit that allows for local processing of beef, lambs, and pigs. This unit was the first of its kind in the US and since then groups of farmers’ around the country have come to these folks for help replicating the model in their own communities.

But Rob isn’t just a lamb man, he’s a true farmer and, dare-I-say, homesteader.

In addition to his animals, Rob takes care of a lovely orchard, and a garden on an adjacent property. He started out 30 years ago in a little trailer; he built a lovely yurt, then a beautiful home where his older son now lives with his wife and children.

When Lucy and I arrived at Rob’s place, the two big dogs ran out to greet us, barking madly. No one was home so we poked about behind the house, amidst the chickens and the trees, looking for the fig tree. Being city-folk we weren’t exactly sure what a fig tree looked like, so we stopped off at the walnuts and the pears and the apples before finally we sighted the little bush close by one of the mobile chicken coops.

Right as we started picking, Rob arrived, clean and spiffy from his granddaughter’s birthday party. We picked a basketful of ripe figs, then Rob offered us cling peaches from his trees.

We walked through the orchard, asking about the different pears and plums and apples — Asian pears, Bosc, Red Anjou, Santa Rosa plums and about the history of the place.

Rob told us of wheeling his pregnant wife to the car in a wheelbarrow back in the days before there was a proper driveway to the house. She vowed not to come back until he built a proper house. He built the yurt where he still lives today.

Then he showed us the house that he built back in the early 90s with help from his brothers, one an architect, the other a woodworker. It was a well-conceived house, and very beautiful; white adobe-style walls and huge windows facing out on the orchard and the pond. Inside, the exposed wood beams and gorgeous live-edge counter gave the house a cozy woodsy smell and a warm, friendly feeling. The wood came from trees felled and milled on the property and Rob described the process of forestry management — taking skinny, distressed trees from beside the thicker looking counterparts because their skinniness was indication of slow, dense growth.

Then we went up to the area where his younger son was just laying the foundation for his own home. We toured the sweet outdoor kitchen, composting toilet, and the wooden frame ready and waiting for the concrete truck which would arrive the next morning.

I was inspired, to say the least. My own dad and I have been talking about building a home together. I can’t think of very many things that would be more satisfying.

I ate most of my share of the figs fresh within a day or two — subtle, sweet soft flesh popped into my mouth whole. All that remained was a little pile of stems in the compost bucket below the sink. But then, the remaining fruits started to get a little soft. I didn’t want to eat them all at once, so I looked for a way to turn them into something else to savor.

I wanted to pair the figs with anise — one of our local bakeries makes an amazing yeasted Fig Anise Bread and I’m obsessed with the combination. It’s warm and crunchy and slightly spicy. But I wanted to make a breakfast bread, so I looked around for recipes with fresh figs and fell upon instruction for a Fig Tea Bread by Jenny Colvin of Jenny Bakes. It turned out that the tea in the recipe gave the bread a deep, smoky richness and lovely color and the seeds from the figs distributed through the bread gave a lovely crunch — something like poppy seeds in other breakfast breads. I reduced the other spices and the sugar, so the star anise flavor came to the fore, perfectly complimenting the soft sweetness of the figs.

Figs, raisins, tea, star anise and nutmeg make up the flavor body

I kept the fig chunks pretty big so they’d stay whole in the bread

The figs soak in the tea for just over 10 minutes, then part of the tea is reserved for the bread

Wet ingredients

After the dry ingredients are in, mix in the tea, figs and raisins

The finished loaf is dark brown and almost savory…

Black Tea, Star Anise, Fig Bread
Adapted from Jenny Colvin of Jenny Bakes

1 cup figs, stemmed and coarsely chopped
1 cup Irish Breakfast tea, brewed double strength
1 3/4 cup flour
1 cup golden raisins
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
4 sections star anise, ground
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup sugar
½ cup olive oil
2 eggs

Gently combine figs and tea; let stand 10 min.

In a medium sized bowl, beat sugar, oil and eggs to mix. Sprinkle flour, spices, baking soda and salt on top and mix until just combined.

Drain tea from figs, reserving 1/4 cup of liquid. Gently stir in figs and ¼ cup tea; pour batter into well-greased loaf pan; bake at 350º F for 1 hour, or until toothpick comes out clean.

Cool in pan 10 min., then invert onto a rack. Keeps on the counter in plastic wrap for up to 1 week, or freeze slices in plastic baggies and thaw in the toaster or microwave.

There’s the finished bread based loosely on the recipe from the back of the Gold’s Bread Flour package. I thought I didn’t take a picture, but I guess my crazy food photo fetish is even more deeply ingrained than I realized.

I love the habits that I’ve accumulated since coming to the farm. I hope they stick.

When you work 8 hours a day producing food, you’d think that the rest of the time you’d want to sit back with a bag of puffy Cheetos and forget about the rest, but what has happened to me is quite the opposite. Spending so much time with my hands in the dirt growing veggies somehow just gives me more momentum to get my hands involved in other food producing jobs. It just feels so good to make yogurt or granola, or my very favorite: bread!

I will never be a professional bread baker. I’ll probably never even win a ribbon at the county fair, but I will get to stick my fingers into soft tacky dough and slap a ball of flour and water and yeast on the counter until it’s stretchy and pliable and ready to bake.

I am not scientific with baking. See, for instance, the maelstrom of my last loaf:

Evidence of my lack of bread-baking discipline:

1) that bowl is NOT big enough for what I’m attempting, but who cares?
2) I was too lazy to go get the scale so I used a cup measure… leveling off with a knife? please…
3) My last loaf was too “blah” so I decided to add a random amount of sourdough starter (1/2 cup) and subtract some related amount of flour/water (1/4 cup of each)
4) Windowpane test, shwindowpane test. When I was tired of kneading, the bread was left to rise
5) When I got invited to a party mid-bread-baking, I simply stuck the rising bread in the fridge covered in plastic wrap and picked up the process when I got home the next day.

In the end, I even forgot to take a picture of the finished product. I ate it too fast. Like in a day and a half. By myself. So even if you can’t see it’s golden-brown deliciousness, let that be testament to its goodness (and hopefully not to my lack of standards).

For me, cooking’s a joy. It’s an experiment, an act of creativity and spontaneity. Once it becomes too prescribed or scientific, it loses part of its charm. When I post recipes here, they’re always things that I’ve tried and measured and recorded, but on most days, my kitchen is a crazy alchemist’s lab full of tastes and smells and happy accidents.

Thursday morning, I got up a little after 5, shook off the sleep, ate a bowl of oatmeal, packed my bag, and headed off on my bicycle towards the interisland ferry. On the boat, I fished out my little brown notebook to jot down some questions for the farmer at S & S Homestead where I was headed for a visit.

I met Henning at the county fair. He and Peter (farmer here at Synergy) were part of a panel to discuss approaches to sustainable agriculture in the San Juans. They sat on opposite ends of the panel bench: two professor-turned-farmers well into their 70s, Peter, tall, fair, frail and deliberate and Henning, swarthy and compact and full of passion. Peter talked about economic sustainability and soil’s organic content; Henning discussed harnessing energies of the universe. At one point, Henning makes an aggressive jab at Peter, chiding him for importing chicken feed and potting soil instead of producing it on-site. Peter defends his position: after all, his farm has only been in operation for five years compared to Henning’s thirty-five. Henning tries to make peace and I step in to introduce myself and ask if I can come out for a visit. He’s impressed by my handshake and tells me to give him a call.

So that’s how I find myself gazing out at the blood orange sunrise Thursday morning on the ferry ride over to Lopez. The ferry bumps up against the plastic bumpers of the Lopez dock and I trudge up the hill, mount my bike, and ride the six lovely miles out to S & S Homestead. I arrive at 7:30, the farm is still. I park my bike in a shed with other bikes for company and wander the small perimeter around what seems like the main farmhouse, looking for signs of life. I wander upon the front porch and see a woman who turns out to be Elizabeth who says she’ll get Henning from upstairs.

Henning was part of the consulting team that helped Peter and Susan when they were starting up Synergy Farm five years ago. Susan’s eyes sparkle when she talks about the elegance of Henning’s farm systems: the self-sufficiency, the focus on soil-building, and the incorporation of animals. Manure from the animals fertilizes the pasture and makes beautiful compost for the garden. Damaged fruit feeds the pigs and old cabbage leaves are a treat for Lovejoy the milk cow. The farm family: Henning, Elizabeth, Elizabeth’s mother, and seven young folks eat from the farm’s bounty and return their waste to the soil by way of a composting toilet. Each element of the farm is part of a system and the grand orchestrator of it all are the farmers who have had years of experience and mistakes to hone their craft.

That morning, after breakfast, I go with one intern, Colleen, for the morning milking, then head out with everyone to pick the season’s first crop of cider apples for pressing. It’s an inefficient process, but incredibly enjoyable: five of us pick apples into 5 gallon buckets and munch on Yellow Transparents under the orchard canopy while Henning and his towheaded grand-nephew from Stuttgart set up the press.

Yellow transparents, ready for pressing

Intern Colleen, teacher Heather, and nephew Sebastian operating the press

Nearly full barrel is ready for shifting below the press

Four 5-gallon buckets of apples made 2.5 gallons of cider and lots of extra pulp for pigs

We cut the apples into chunks and feed them into the trough while someone turns the black wheel to grind the chunks into pulp which falls into the net-lined barrel below. Once the barrel’s full, we shift the barrel back on the platform to position it under the screwpress, we place a wooden lid on the top of the pulp, and use a stick to turn the wheel to push the press down and down till the golden liquid pours out the bottom and into our metal bowls.

When we’re finished, we’re left with a bunch of seeds and skin and pulp to feed to the pigs.

The farm is run by the biodynamic method, developed by Rudolph Steiner in the 1920s in response to falling fertility in the soils in Germany. Despite the fact that he’s heralded as a poster-child of the method in the islands, Henning tells me that he didn’t know anything about biodynamics until 20 years into his farming adventure when a neighbor came around asking for certain animal parts to make special biodynamic soil preparations.

The view of the orchard from next to the pond

I’m still a novice in terms of my understanding of biodynamics, but three things strike me in particular as different from the biointensive approach we use here on Synergy: one, an appreciation for mystery and an underlying spiritual component; two: the importance of integrating animals into the system; three: the focus on nurturing the farmer and the farm family and the de-emphasis of financial profit. Most every process on the farm seems to be designed to maximize the health and happiness of the farm’s main inhabitants.

Once we’re finished washing down the press, we head towards the farm kitchen to rinse off bowls and transfer the cider to jars for storing. On one wall, shelves of preserved food: chicken broth, pickles, jams, preserves, tomato sauce: a bounty of food to sustain the farm family through the winter season.

On the kitchen table, a gorgeous huge crock of sauerkraut slowly fermenting.

The view from the 6am ferry

Yesterday was a whirlwind day: Went on a farm field trip to check out a farm on another island, biked about 18 miles to and from the ferry landings, and when I finally got back to my watertower, sweaty and exhilarated, it was just in time to hitch a ride with Farmers Peter and Susan to a meeting about drafing new farm intern policy for the state.

After the meeting (sobering, but hopeful!) I piled in the car with the Heritage folks and we headed down to the Alehouse where there’s Thursday night SINGALONG! So we all got beers and threw decency to the wind and belted out the na-na-na-na verse of “Hey Jude” till our throats were hoarse.

And THEN I came home and checked my email and realized that Jaden had posted my recipe for Hainanese Chicken on the Steamy Kitchen blog and it was the perfect topping to finish off a beautiful, beautiful day.

For those of you who don’t know, I’m interning with Jaden over at Steamy Kitchen, learning how to take rockstar food photos and write great recipes, and helping out with research, writing and photos for the ingredients section of her site. My plan is still to go to graduate school and study sustainable food, but it can’t help to have some skillz to spice up those papers and presentations!

So a great big welcome to everyone who’s come over from Steamy Kitchen — I’m so pleased you’ve stumbled upon my humble little blog — it’s lovely to have you.