The Days are Dark Indeed - It's time for more Soup

I hope that no one thinks the title of this post means that I find soup dreary. Just the opposite! A nice pot of soup brightens the darkest winter evening, which is why this is my third Dark Days post featuring soup.

Plus, this is an especially exciting soup because it features one of the beans grown by my friend Marty Heller. You may remember him from the post I wrote about his beans back in early December.

I used two cups of his lovely peregion beans.

Do you think beans can be serene? These look serene to me.

Last time I made a bean soup for the blog I used (and photographed) a quick soak method on the hutterite soup beans my husband and I grew. This time I did a long soak. A long soak is so easy. All it requires is a minuscule amount of thinking ahead. (I know, sometimes thinking ahead is actually very hard.)

A long soak is simply an overnight soaking of your beans. If you want to make a bean soup tomorrow, cover some beans with water and pop them in the refrigerator while you're making dinner tonight.

Here is what will happen:

2 cups beans + 3 cups water.
This is what they look like going in.



A few hours later I decided the soup also needed wheat berries.

Into the fridge they went. 1 cup wheat berries + about 2 cups water.

 Notice the beans have already plumped a bit.





This is about 24 hours after the first picture. The beans are huge!
The wheat berries aren't too much bigger, but they've obviously done something.
Look how golden their water is. Time to make soup!



I started the soup by caramelizing some onions (grown on our very own farm) with garlic, thyme, bay leaf, salt, and pepper. To the onion I added the wheat berries and beans, both of which had been drained, and about two quarts of turkey stock made from turkeys we raised. Once I had that boiling, I added three sliced carrots, grown by our neighbors the Peterson's. Thanks Peterson's! The soup simmered for about an hour, and it was done. That's it. The long soak made it that simple.



I inherited the Navy spoons from my grandparents, who uh...borrowed them
when my grandpa was on a submarine in WWII.



In the interest of full disclosure, I have to say that the wheat berries are not in any way local. I am using them for the Dark Days Challenge anyway for two reasons. First, it would be silly (and not at all sustainable) to buy new wheat berries just to fit the challenge. Second, I have tracked down a local source for them which I will use once I have finished the wheat berries I have on hand.

I also have to say that I loved the wheat berry and bean combination in this soup. It was something I had never tried before and I found that I really enjoyed the nutty pop of the wheat along side the creamy beans. Just look how lovely they were together.

I was amazed by how well the peregions held their color.
These beans are beautiful and delicious.

Shepherd's Pie

Shepherd's pie is not a staple at my house. I knew what the components should be - a lovely lamb stew and mashed potatoes. Those things are staples in my house so I was able to put them together without consulting any sort of recipe. My ingredients and methods are below if you would like a consultation.


The finished dish. I could not have asked for a better winter meal.
The brown flecks are potato peel. I like peely mashed potato, proceed
as you prefer.

However, while the potatoes were boiling and my family was getting hungrier, my husband asked me how long it would have to bake. That I did not know (you can tell I always plan ahead in the kitchen), so I waded into the trusty internet to retrieve an answer. I found, to my surprise, a roaring debate about the proper components for a shepherd's pie. Mostly it was a lamb vs. beef issue. There is also a lot of contention about cheese.

It's all semantics and personal taste; things not worth actually arguing over. Nevertheless, I feel compelled to weigh in. My thought is: of course shepherd's pie is made with lamb. It's called shepherd's pie. Shepherds are people who raise sheep. Therefore their pie is likely to contain lamb. Right?

Debate on about the cheese though. I didn't use any (apparently this is the English way that purists tout) but I am sure it would be delicious with some grated Parmesan or cheddar on top (we Americans do like to cover everything with cheese).

Authentic or not, it was very good. I think this will become a staple at out house. Also, it was local. We raised the lamb, and the turkey in the stock. The potatoes came from nearby in Wisconsin, the carrots from our neighbor, and the dairy was all from the U.P. I even managed to use up some garden kohlrabi that I had lost in the freezer two years ago. Winter vegetables you have on hand, such as rutabaga, parsnips or celeriac, can be substituted for the carrots and kohlrabi.

Shepherd's Pie

Stew Ingredients:

1. Two teaspoons olive oil
2. One pound lamb, cut into one inch pieces
3. Salt and pepper
4. Two cloves garlic, minced or pressed
5. 4 or 5 whole allspice berries, ground (or about an 1/8 tsp ground allspice)
6. One cup stock (I used turkey, any good meat stock will do)
7. Three carrots, sliced into half to one inch pieces
8. Two kohlrabi, cut into one and a half inch chunks
9.  One tablespoon whole wheat flour



The stew, ready for a topping of mashed potatoes. Don't worry if the lamb
isn't quite tender at this point. It will finish cooking in the oven.



Mashed Potato Ingredients:

1. 2 pounds of potatoes (four to six potatoes), each cut into 6 to 8 pieces
2. Butter
3. Milk
4. Salt

Preheat the oven to 400 F

• In a pot large enough to hold all of the stew ingredients, heat the olive oil over medium/high heat.
• Add the lamb, salt and pepper (to taste), garlic, and allspice.
• Stir and turn occasionally until the lamb is browned on all sides.
• Add the stock, vegetables, and flour to the pan, stir well.
• Allow the stock to come to a boil, turn the heat to simmer, cover the pot.
• Place the potatoes in a pot, cover with water, and bring to a boil.
• Boil until the potatoes are very tender, about 10 or 15 minutes, drain, and return the potatoes to the pot.
• Mash the potatoes with a potato masher, adding milk, butter, and salt to taste.
• Spoon the stew into a deep nine inch pie plate, leaving most of the liquid behind in the pot.
• Spread the mashed potatoes evenly over the stew.
• Bake at 400 degrees for 30 minutes.
• While the pie is baking, simmer the remaining stew liquid, uncovered, to make a gravy. Add a bit of cornstarch if it needs some help to thicken up. Serve this gravy with the shepherd's pie.



This was all I could rescue for lunch the next day.



Fast and Local

A lot has happened since my last post. It has been kind of a crazy, non-stop week. A few of the highlights include:

Slaughtering five turkeys that hadn't quite made it up to size at thanksgiving time.

Grinding said turkey meat with our new kitchenaid grinder attachment (best Christmas present ever!).

Negotiating with my boss to go down to part time at the day job - and getting a pretty hefty raise out of the deal. I'm one step closer to the goal of full time farming.

Then Saturday I wrapped the week up with a day long grocery shopping trip to the "big city" of Houghton. That is how we small towners roll. We don't run to the store. We have huge grocery shopping marathons once or twice a month, braving white out conditions (seriously) to stock up on toilet paper and organic potatoes.

So, when I got home Saturday I was tired and a little bristled that my husband hadn't made dinner. Clearly it was an omelet night. My first thought was cheese, but all the cheese had been eaten in my absence. So I poked in the fridge and came out with seven eggs from Byler Family Farms in Pelkie, Michigan, butter from Jilbert Dairy in Marquette, Michigan and two jars containing remnants of the ginger scallion sauce I made last fall.

I had the omelet almost done before I even realized I could use it for a Dark Days post. The picture shows it just after folding but before the flip - a few minutes before it was fully cooked.

Since deciding to participate in Dark Days, I have been paying more attention to how many of our meals come from completely local sources. I've been pleasantly surprised by how often it turns out that those quick "grab whatever is on hand and make something tasty" types of meals turn out to be 100% local. I think that means we are doing something seriously right.

We finished off the meal with some homemade applesauce made with apples grown in our front yard.

Lamb, Eggplant, and Becoming a Real Farmer

A lot of farmers, the kind with 100's of acres of a single crop each year or thousands of beef cattle, don't consider us CSA farmers to be "real farmers". While I don't agree with them, I can totally understand where they are coming from.

CSA farmers are different from other types of farmers. We fill a different role for our customers, we have a totally different business model, and even the daily work we do can be dissimilar from that of other farmers. I usually describe CSA farming as tending a giant garden. 600 acres of soybeans can hardly be described as a garden. Many of us are new to farming, and we often start out with unrealistic ideas of what we can accomplish. Also, unfortunately, many CSA farmers seem to place a higher value on the the CSA model of farming and forget how much we can learn from other farmers.

All that being said however, we are real farmers. We grow nourishing food for our communities, tend our land lovingly, and plan our lives around the needs of our animals and crops.

But even real farmers face challenges. Though those with thousands of beef cattle probably faced and overcame the particular challenge I am going to mention here long before I had to.

I find it difficult to raise animals for food. It isn't a huge surprise. I grew up in a suburb of Detroit. I was very removed from the sources of my food. As a teenager I was a vegetarian and even went vegan for a year or so because it was the thing to do among the crowd I hung out with. I had some issues eating meat.

When I was twenty I went to culinary school and the first class I took was butchery. I was afraid I wouldn't be able to handle it but instead found that it helped connect me to the idea that it is natural for humans to rely on animals for food.

But raising them myself does add a whole new dimension to things. Sheep, and even roosters, have personalities. They don't want to die any more than anything else does. And, for most of their lives, I don't want them to die either. What is especially embarrassing about it is that it's harder for me to eat cute animals.
I was sad back in September on sheep slaughtering day. Really sad. I was thinking that maybe deep down I am not a real farmer.

Then I ate some. And it was seriously good. We raised two sheep last summer and, not only did they help us clear out some unwanted plants and fertilize our fields while they were alive, they helped us fill our freezer with flavourful, tender, healthy meat.

So, while I'm torn by some aspects of it, I love being a real farmer. But I will still be sad on sheep slaughtering day 2011 - though maybe not really sad.

And of course, the meat our sheep provided us is the perfect thing to cook during the dark days challenge. So, here it is, a dark days dinner featuring lamb we raised, eggplant we grew and pickled, and kale given to us by a neighbor that we dried for the winter.



From sheep, to lamb, to cast iron pan.



Eggplant, pickled according to the method in
The Joy of Pickling.



Kale, dried in our electric dehydrator.


There is no recipe to share because unless you have pickled eggplant on hand you really can't duplicate the dish. I sauteed about a pound of cubed lamb in some of the oil from the pickled eggplant, then allowed it to simmer until it was tender, adding a bit of eggplant and a cup of crumbled kale to the meat towards the end of the cooking time. We ate it with some entirely non-local rice because my lack of planning left me without a local starch option and this dinner needed a starch.

Holiday Hiatus

I thought that I might have a bit of time to sneak in some blog work the over the holidays, but, as those of you following the blog may have noticed, I haven't.

I have had time to do some other wonderful things though. Like celebrate Christmas with my husband and daughter, hang out with my husband's family over at my brother-in-law's house, take my daughter on her for her first sled ride, and eat a lot of yummy food (including buckwheat pancakes). Some of the food was even local.

She likes the piano too,
but man that's a good box!



Taking time to focus on
the new toys.





Partying at the bowling alley with Grandma!

 With all the fun, I haven't had the chance to make any completely local meals for the dark days challenge since my cabbage soup (unless you want to read a post about scrambled eggs - local eggs and local butter, what could be better?) but I have been fitting in a few dark days side dishes here and there as I experiment with some new things at home and help out with the cooking at the in-law's.

The list is short, but here are my recent local food creations:

Roast squash (sweet dumpling and honey bear from Seeds and Spores in Marquette) filled with homemade lemon cheese (Made with milk from Kolpack's farm in Ontonagon)

Sweet and sour cabbage (Made with cabbage from a neighbor's garden and honey from Algomah Acres in Greenland)
Cabbage with sweet pickled beets and cauliflower (Made with cabbage from a neighbor's garden, beets and cauliflower we grew and pickled)
Roast brussels sprouts (From a neighbor's garden)



The squash were roasted plain, then filled
with a simple homemade cheese and baked again.



I did get to introduce several family members to the simple art of roasting brussles sprouts with olive oil, salt, and pepper until they just begin to brown. They loved them! Some were already brussels sprout fans, but I managed to convert my sister-in-law from a person repulsed by all things brussels sprouty to an appreciator of the roasted sprouts. Score one for the tiny cabbages!

The cabbage was stir fried with honey, dried jalapeno from
our garden,and non-local lemon juice (leftover from
cheese making), salt, and pepper.

Cabbage Soup with Bacon and Caraway

A soup for every other Dark Days meal sounds about right to me. As I mentioned in my first Dark Days post, I do like to make soup.


Cabbage, bacon, and caraway soup before its final simmer.
The orange bits are rutabaga.

And why not? Soups are satisfying, simple to make, endlessly variable, and lend themselves well to my locally available ingredients.

This was, sadly, another almost local soup. I like to give soups quick flavor by starting with bacon, or sometimes sausage. There used to be a wider selection of local bacon and sausage at my co-op than there has been the last couple times I've shopped for them. This last time I had four options, bacon from Wisconsin that would have fit my broadest definition of local (we are very very close to Wisconsin) but had nitrites, non-local nitrite free bacon from far away, bison sausage from I know not where, and some apple chicken sausage from California. In the past I have been able to find bacon and/or sausage sourced within 50 - 100 miles of me.

I had to go with the nitrite free bacon option. I cannot say whether or not nitrites and nitrates are a food safety issue, but they give me migraines so I avoid them.

This was a weekend shopping trip so I couldn't speak with any buyers, but I will need to ask my co-op about this change ASAP. If I'm lucky, their past suppliers are still around and I can buy directly from them.

3/4 of a twelve ounce package of bacon, one medium onion, one rutabaga,
two turnips, a tablespoon whole caraway seed, and some dried jalapeno.
I deglazed this pan with a bit of water, added a medium cabbage, chopped,
one pint home canned tomato puree, and water to cover.This simmered
for about a half hour, until the cabbage was tender but not limp.

The rest of the soup, aside from the salt, pepper, and caraway seed, was local. The vegetables, which included cabbage, rutabaga, turnips, onion, canned tomato puree, and dried chile pepper were a collection from four different area gardens (including ours).

"Bacon Bits"

The highlight of the soup was the bacon crumbles I garnished it with. I used about 3/4 of the bacon for the soup itself. The remaining was chopped into bite sized pieces and fried with a generous pinch of whole caraway seed and a half a dried jalapeno pepper minced.

Roast Duck with Chokecherry Barbecue Sauce

Plants. As a botanist, farmer, herbalist, and cook I study, grow, prepare, and consume them. Plants tie my passions together. Why? Some people are just plant people. We know who we are. My path to plant personhood is too long a story to share here. Actually, now that I think about it my plant story is basically my life story. I wonder if that is true of most plant people? I will say that foraging, or gathering wild plants for food, has been an important part of my life for a long time.

This meal, my second for the dark days challenge, (click here if you don't know what I mean by dark days) features the chokecherry. Chokecherries are easily found in the Western U.P. and are foraged, at least casually, by just about everyone who ventures outside around here.

How have I never taken a picture of the chokecherry?
Ah well, here is an old school one from the
USDA-NRCS PLANTS Database
to give you an idea.

The chokecherry, or Prunus virginiana, is an astringent (astringent food = unripe banana) little cherry that grows in racemes on scraggly bush/trees in brushy areas. A lot of folks pick it for jelly when it is ripe in late summer. It does make good jelly. It also makes an excellent barbecue sauce. You can find my chokecherry barbecue sauce recipe below. As a bonus, chokecherry bark makes a very effective cough syrup. It's a great "gateway" herb to convince non-believers of the efficacy of herbal remedies.

Chokecherries can be found in this Dark Day's dinner as barbecue sauce, which I made and canned last summer, and wine. We drank chokecherry honey wine from a vineyard called Threefold Vine Winery in Garden, Michigan, about 200 miles from me. That's a vineyard in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. For real.

 

The duck was one of the Khaki Campbells we raised last season. We also ate sweet potatoes grown by us and Brussels sprouts from a neighbor's garden. I basted the duck with a mixture of half butter (from Jilbert Dairy, about 115 miles from me) and half barbecue sauce. The bird weighed about 3 pounds and I roasted it at 400 degrees for around 35 minutes. When I removed it from the oven I let it rest on a plate and added my vegetables to the pan of duck fat, butter, and barbecue sauce. I turned the oven up to 450, put my pan of sweet potatoes and sprouts back in, and let them roast while the duck rested and my husband did the fancy carving job you see in the photo here.

Everything was good, but the roast vegetables in duck fat were definitely the highlight of the meal. I seriously recommend this method of cooking Brussels sprouts if you have the chance to try it.

I found the wine at a gas station of all places. I was already planning the duck with chokecherry barbecue sauce and I thought it would be fun to try a chokecherry wine with it. A sommelier I am not. It was much sweeter than I expected and didn't work so well with the barbecue sauce. It was surprisingly good with the roasted vegetables though. I liked the wine overall, but I like sweet, fruity, spicy things. It probably isn't something that wine lovers would rave about, but I think that is true of all cherry wines. I am very excited to try more things from Threefold Vine Winery. Especially the wines made from the grapes they grow. There is another winery even closer to me in Houghton that I will be purchasing wines from during the challenge, but they don't grow their own grapes. I still can't believe there is a vineyard in the U.P. Already, I love the things this challenge is helping me discover.

As promised above, here is my recipe for a small batch of chokecherry barbecue sauce. If ever you spend a pleasant afternoon picking three and a half pounds of chokecherries this is the thing to do with them. We like it on chicken as well as duck. I'm sure it's good on pork too, we just don't eat a lot of pork. I use either honey or sugar depending on what I have on hand. This year I used sugar. It's good either way, but I like it a bit better with honey. This recipe makes about three cups of barbecue sauce.

Chokecherry Barbecue Sauce

• 3 1/2 pounds chokecherries
• 3/4 cup water
• 1 tsp black mustard seed
• 25 peppercorns
• 2 whole cloves
• 1 small onion, finely minced
• 1/2 cup raw sugar or honey
• 1/4 teaspoon fish sauce
• 1 teaspoon red wine vinegar
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 tablespoon blackstrap molasses

1. Place the chokecherries and water over medium low heat in a large, heavy bottomed pot.
2. Simmer until they have burst.
3. Push the chokecherries through a strainer to make a thick pulp. You should end up with about two and a half cups of pulp.
4. Return the pulp to a small heavy bottomed pan over medium low heat.
5. Lightly crush the mustard seed, peppercorns, and cloves, tie them in a spice bag, and add the bag to the pulp.
6. Stir the remaining ingredients into the pulp.
7. Allow the pulp to barely simmer for about an hour.
8. Remove the spice bag and puree the barbecue sauce with an immersion blender if you would like it to be very smooth. Leave it as is if you don't mind little chunks of onion.
9. This can be refrigerated for about two months, but it keeps longer canned.
10. Can half pints in a boiling water bath for ten minutes.

Defining SOLE and Making Soup

Some things are more difficult than others. Making soup is easy. I love it, do it almost weekly, and feel pretty darn good about it. Deciding whether or not I can consider my soup sustainable, organic, local, and ethical (the objectives of the dark days challenge) is a bit more difficult.

I actually made this particular soup last Wednesday, day one of the dark days challenge. I had planned for my first dark days dinner to be freshly killed duck glazed with chokecherry barbecue sauce paired with a local chokecherry wine (that ended up being the second meal, a post will come) but I had an awful cold on Wednesday and I didn't want to eat glazed duck. I wanted soup. I decided to wait until I felt better to make my dark days debut meal. I started to plan the soup.

I was already writing about our friend Marty and all the beans I had purchased in preparation for the dark days, so I had given myself a taste for beans. Our porch has a bag of lovely carrots our neighbor grew, so I had the requisite root vegetables. I have some dried sage hanging around that I harvested from the hoop house a few month back and dried in the fridge (a frost free refrigerator is a great way to dry small quantities of herbs by the way), so I had some herbs to accompany my beans. The soup would be simple, but tasty, and hey - the ingredients I had come up with would satisfy the dark days challenge after all. I could make my first dark days challenge meal on the first day of the challenge and still satisfy my "sick bed" cravings. 

Except...the stock and meat that I was planning to use came from leftover Thanksgiving turkey my husband had set simmering on the stove earlier in the day. Leftover turkey my mom bought downstate. It may have been local to her, she wasn't really clear on that, but I don't think so. She did try to get a local one, bless her, but I think she ended up with a nice, possibly organic, bird shipped in from parts unknown. It was a tasty one though.

I was left in a quandary. There was no question as to whether I would make the soup. I would, did, and we enjoyed it thoroughly. But, should I post it for dark days? I really want to take this challenge seriously. I want to consider the source of my food before it goes on my table, find the most local and sustainable options, and share my finds with other interested folks. The truth is though, I have given a lot of thought to the meat that I eat already. Non-local meat, especially poultry, is something of a rarity in my house these days. Other than the occasional ground beef purchase made when we are returning home late and hungry and need something substantial we can cook up fast, our meat is either raised (or sometimes hunted) by ourselves or by a farm about 10 miles away. The turkey was kind of an anomaly.

My mom always makes turkey soup after Thanksgiving, but my parents are getting ready to move so she wouldn't be able to. She gave me the carcass because she knew I would do it justice, though my soup didn't feature the rice and frozen mixed vegetables she favors. 

I had to make a decision about the challenge, how to define my parameters, and whether or not to post my soup.

The word sustainable is what finally made me decide that this soup, while not entirely local and probably not entirely organic, fits the challenge just fine. Using every last piece of turkey while it was still good was the most sustainable thing I could do in the situation. People, including me, waste a surprising amount of food, and, as a food producer, it makes me sad.

I know that this issue (and unforeseen others) is going to come up again in the challenge. I will need to decide whether to use items I already have (for example, 20 pounds of wheat berries grown in Montana) or purchase new items just for the challenge. As you can tell from my decision about the soup, I am leaning towards using the resources I have before buying new. Using the things on hand to nourish my self and family feels like the right thing to do, but maybe I am just taking the easy way out? I  would love to know how other participants plan to deal with this dilemma if it comes up for them. Please let me know in the comments if you have any thoughts on the subject.

The other thing that pushed me towards posting this dinner was the beans. They were the star of the soup. I used some of the hutterites we grew. Hutterite soup beans are on the Slow Food Ark of Taste list, a catalog of food items Slow Food considers both delicious and endangered. This was my first opportunity to taste them, and I agree, hutterites are delicious. They are extremely soft and buttery with excellent white bean flavor. They were also really easy to grow and high yielding. I can't imagine why they would be endangered, perhaps there just isn't enough people out there growing heirloom beans. We got our seed from Fedco if you are interested in growing some yourself.

As the stars, the beans deserved special treatment. If you are intimidated by dry beans, don't be. Their treatment takes a little time and planning, but not that much, and the actual cooking of them is as simple as boiling water.

On the left is a series of pictures showing the beans through all the steps it takes to get them ready for cooking. Step one, pick over the dry beans and wash them, as you would any fresh vegetable. Step two, place them in a pan, cover with water, bring the water to a boil. Use about two cups water for every cup of beans. The beans will get wrinkly as the water heats up. Step three, cover the pan and remove it from the heat. This picture shows the beans through a glass lid, all saggy skinned in their steamy bath. Step four, soak the beans for at least an hour, or until you are ready to use them. the last picture shows the beans after about five hours of soaking.

That's it. All I did was boil water and the beans are ready to use in my soup.

Hutterite Bean Soup with Turkey and Sage

What you see below looks like a recipe, but it isn't really. It's more a description of some soup I made. This is simply how I cook day to day. I bring foods I have together to make something (hopefully) good. Often, that something is soup. If you want to do something similar chicken would be good in place of the turkey. Hopefully you have used up your Thanksgiving turkey by now.

• 1 1/2 cups dry hutterite soup beans, prepared as above
• 3 cups turkey stock and/or bean soaking liquid
• 1 teaspoon (or more, depending on the strength of your sage) dried sage, crumbled
• freshly ground pepper
• two medium carrots, sliced into coins
• 1 1/2 cups shredded cooked turkey (mine had been roasted, and simmered as the stock cooked)
• a handful of dried chard, or other greens, fresh is fine too, or leave them out.

1. Combine the beans, stock, sage and pepper. You could also add onions, salt, and other seasonings. My stock was extra flavorful because the turkey still had stuffing in it when it was put to simmer. I didn't need to add salt, onions, or much in the way of seasoning to my soup.

2. Simmer, covered, for 45 minutes.



3. Add carrots and simmer for an additional 15 minutes.

4. Add turkey, simmer for about 10 more minutes or until the turkey is hot and the beans are very tender.

5. Remove from the heat and stir in your chosen greens. I almost always finish soup with greens.

The finished soup (I like them thick). It served 2 adults and one toddler,
with leftovers for one lunch the next day.

The Magical Fruit

I have the bean problem figured out.

If you have been following the blog you know that I am participating in Urban Hennery's Dark Days Challenge (see the cute logo in the upper right corner?) and that I have plenty of meat, dairy and a fair amount of vegetables to get me through my season of locally sourced meals. You may also remember that I am on the look out for local grains and legumes, as all I have in that category is a jar of hutterite soup beans we grew in a test plot this year.

Our Hutterite Soup Beans. This is about half of what we harvested from our 15 foot
plot. The rest are soaking as I type this, getting ready to be made into soup.

Enter an old farming friend, Marty Heller, who's been trying his hand at heirloom bean growing in Traverse City.

I know, I know, at 380 miles away Traverse City is not exactly local to Ontonagon, but, for several reasons, I think that these beans fit into the spirit of the challenge. To start with, the challenge is pretty flexible and past participants have considered their whole state to be local to them, so I'm not really doing anything against a rule, though, overall, my goal is food grown within 150 miles of my home. Next, our trip to get the beans was a 40 mile detour along our Thanksgiving travel route, and the grower was an old friend of ours. So, while the beans grew 380 miles from our home, they grew only 40 miles from our lives (if that makes any sense). Finally, Marty grew the beans on land he rented from the Leelanau Conservancy. The Conservancy wants the land, part of the DeYoung Farm, to be maintained as active agricultural land. They hope to start a farmer in residency program to allow individuals who have experience farming (training, internships, and the like) a place to learn about farm management and, hopefully, build some capital so that they can start their own farms. It would be a sort of farm incubator program.

Farm incubator programs are an awesome local food promoting idea that I wanted to encourage in my tiny way by mentioning the Leelanau Land Conservancy's goal in the blog. If any of you know of similar programs I would love to hear about them.

Marty, who grew up in a farming family and has been involved in the operation of two CSAs, told us a little about his experience growing beans on the Conservancy's land. He grew over fifteen varieties on about two acres, didn't have the opportunity for as much weed control as he would have liked (this is pretty much a given for chemical free farmers), hand pulled the plants at harvest time, and threshed the beans using a 1940's Allis Chalmers All Crop 60 Combine. We were able to see much of the yield when we visited. He was storing them in burlap sacks in his garage that he allowed me to paw through so I could select my beans. I didn't think to ask what his overall yield was, though we did have a nice talk about beans, weed pressure, and the variable success we have each had growing dry beans under different conditions.

Marty's baby bean plants at the DeYoung Farm.
Photo courtesy of Marty Heller.

For example, our experience at Wintergreen Farm has taught us that those hutterite soup beans I mentioned love black plastic mulch and king of the early beans hate being planted in our fields, no matter what we do for them. Marty found similar discrepancies with the varieties he grew. I guess that means bean farming, like all farming, is an endlessly interesting process of trial and error.

Even with weed pressure, Marty ended up with a spectacular bean harvest. Enough for a 13 variety bean tasting event that I very much wish I could have been a part of. I guess I'll have to be content cooking and tasting the six pounds of beans we bought from him and the hutterites we grew.

Three of the four varieties I got from Marty.
From left to right these are Low's Champion, Coco Rubico, and Peregion.
Photos courtesy of Marty Heller.

It's going to be a magical winter...

Thinking Hard about the Dark Days

The upcoming Dark Days Challenge is heavy on my mind. In a good way. Winter is clearly upon us here in the north, the gardens are asleep, and I am trying to figure out exactly what my definition of local is.

Last night's snowfall on the office woodpile.
When you live in the U.P. you have an office woodpile. 

I really thought this would be easy. I'm a CSA farmer. I am local food, right? But there is so much more to it than that.

I live in a small community that is still very agricultural, so in many ways I am at an advantage. The local foods I have are varied and readily available. I have meat in the form of chicken, duck, turkey, and lamb my husband and I raised, beef from a nearby farm, and fish that we catch or purchase from a local market. I have a fair amount of fruits and vegetables canned, frozen or dried, some root vegetables in storage, and two good co-ops that will be sources for other local winter produce. I wish I had more stocked up in this category, but being beginning farmers means that we often sell the produce that we would like to can for ourselves and end up buying from bigger local farmers in the winter. It is getting better every year though. What I have put up is a mix of our produce and produce from other local growers. I also have eggs, from our chickens and other local farms. I have a milk share from the same farm that we get beef from, which is less than ten miles from our place. I can also get cheese and butter (and milk if we need more than our share provides) from a regional dairy that is located about 100 miles from us.

Sounds good, right? I thought I was pretty much set, until a tiny whispered question crept into my brain.

What am I going to do about grains and pulses?

You know, the staples of my diet. The quart jar of hutterite soup beans from our little dry bean test plot is not going to last through the winter.

Hmm...I am looking forward to a serious learning curve.

I'll leave you with that until after Thanksgiving. I'm planning a lovely holiday with the things I am most grateful for. My family and good food.

I hope you all find yourselves doing something equally wonderful.

Homemade Condiments: Preparation for the Dark Days Ahead

If you are a CSA member, there are a few things that I would like you to know about your farmers.

1. They are busy.
2. They love ugly vegetables, leftovers, and the leavings that get pulled out of the field at season's end.
3. They appreciate you a lot.



A bit of what we shared with our members this season. Thank you
CSA members of the world.


At least those things are true of me and my husband.

I think that most people understand that growing vegetables is a lot of hard labor. It is, of course, labor that we love or we wouldn't be doing it, but it cuts into our time for doing other stuff. Like eating and sleeping. And canning.

Canning is what I am actually getting at here. I make some preserves to sell at the market, but I don't have time to can much to put on my shelves during the growing season. Most of our produce goes to the shares, the market, or our dinner, and most of my energy goes to growing said produce, working my day job (yes, I still have one), and loving our one year old daughter.

So, when fall comes along and other people are sitting back admiring their well stocked pantries, I start to fill mine. The CSA season is over, the fields are getting cleaned out, and I have time to can stuff (and love my daughter) almost to my heart's content.



Cold weather goodies we just cleaned out of the garden: parsley, green tomatoes,
and scallions. I'll assume you knew that we didn't grow the ginger.










This year I am particularly excited to get canning because I am going to be participating in Urban Hennery's Dark Days Challenge, which is a challenge to eat local through the winter months (December 1st through April 15th) when finding food produced in your community can be especially tricky. I want to be able to rely on items that I have prepared ahead of time for some of this challenge.

To that end, I have been making condiments.  Condiments have been my favorite thing to can since I started canning. They allow for creativity in flavor combinations, unlike tomato and apple sauces - which we eat but aren't exciting to make, and we eat them - unlike jams and jelly which sometimes sit on the shelf indefinitely. I make a mean crabapple ketchup that my husband and I love on meatloaf (and hotdogs - it's cool if they're local hotdogs from Vollwerth's, right?) and I have been trying to perfect a chokecherry barbecue sauce that I use on chicken for a few years now, but this year I have been branching out.



From smallest to largest: ginger scallion sauce, green tomato relish, chimichurri.

My green tomato relish recipe is still under construction, so I'm not going to post it right now. I mentioned it simply because I made a whole lot of it (along with salsa verde and pickled tomatillos) so you can expect it to turn up frequently during the coming dark days.

My green tomato relish recipe has been posted and can be found here.

I am going to share my ginger scallion sauce and chimichurri recipes though. They're both pretty easy, especially if you employ a food processor, and they are extremely useful condiments worthy of having on hand. Happily, the main ingredient of each also happened to be lingering in the fields when we cleaned things up for the season and survived my neglect while I dealt with the more perishable items.  I'll start with the simplest one first.

Ginger Scallion Sauce

My brother in law introduced me to ginger scallion sauce earlier this summer. He discovered it via Francis Lam's writings on Salon.com. It only has four ingredients so I haven't changed it much from the way Mr. Lam presented it, but I'm still going share how I do it because that is what the internet is for. I do make it with a lot less oil than Francis Lam's version. I just like it better that way.

When I made the batch pictured above my coat was hanging on a hook in the kitchen near where I combined the oil with the ginger and scallions. It has smelled like a Chinese restaurant ever since. To me this is a seriously good thing.

The coat, not yet ginger scallion scented, out and about on Halloween.

This quantity of ingredients makes about two cups of sauce. It is best with rice, vegetables, eggs and fish.

• 12 ounces scallions, white and green sections
• 4 ounces fresh ginger
• 1/2 cup peanut oil
• 1 teaspoon sea salt

1. Chop the scallions and ginger very finely, until they have formed a paste. The only practical way to do this is with a food processor.
2. In the meantime, heat the peanut oil until it is smoking hot.
3. Transfer the ginger and scallions into a high sided, heat proof pot. The pot must be large enough that the hot oil can safely be added to the vegetables in the pot. Allow for boiling oil and splattering.
4. Stir the salt into the ginger and scallions.
5. When the oil is smoking hot, pour it in a steady stream over the vegetables, stirring as you do so. Continue stirring for a moment to incorporate all of the oil.
6. Cover and store in the refrigerator. 

Chimichurri

I just sort of stumbled upon chimichurri. It's origins are in Argentina, someplace I have never been and have no particular connection to. I'm not sure where I first read about it. I do know that when I ran across it I thought the flavor combination sounded heavenly. It is the kind of recipe that everyone makes their own way, so I read as many versions as I could, tried a few out, then combined the best of everything I had found to my liking. Feel free to tweak it as you see fit.

These quantities make a generous quart. It is fine to halve or quarter the recipe. This is great with red meats and sausages or with vegetables. Keep in mind that all of the listed measurements of minced or chopped things are after mincing. I do all of the chopping for this recipe with the food processor.

• 2 cups finely minced parsley
• 1/2 cup dried oregano
• 2 jalapeno peppers, or to taste, minced
• 1 cup finely chopped onion
• 20 cloves of garlic, minced
• 1 teaspoon freshly ground pepper
• 2 teaspoons sea salt
• 4 teaspoons whole cumin, lightly crushed with a rolling pin, mortar and pestle, or something similar
• 2 cups olive oil
• 1/2 cup red wine vinegar

1. Combine all of the ingredients.
2. Stir well to make sure that everything is well mixed.
3. Cover and refrigerate. This is really best once it has sat for at least 24 hours.

Refrigerated, both of these keep for at least a few months, certainly they keep as long as we can keep from eating them all up.