Spring Salad

Oh yes, it’s salad season. Tender, fresh lettuce leaves, mixed with all kinds of spring veg like snap peas, shelling peas, pea shoots, asparagus, and scallions. Add some salty aged cheese, a chewy whole grain like farro or bulgur, a dressing of lemony garlicky olive oil, and maybe even some grilled salmon or chicken, and you’ve got a great meal. How about a side of focaccia? I mean, what could be better?

Recipe for a spring salad, adapted loosely from Bon Appetit:

1 cup semi-pearled farro, boiled in salted water for 30-ish minutes, drained and cooled

8 cups of lettuce leaves, whatever you’ve got in the garden

2 cups of pea shoots (the tender new leaves and tendrils)

1 cup of sliced snap peas, or shelled peas, or sliced asparagus, or scallions, whatever is fresh from the garden, or a little of everything

Shaved aged parmesan

Dump all of this in a huge bowl.

Make a dressing: Grate a garlic clove or two into a mason jar, then add 1/4 cup-ish each of olive oil and lemon juice, plus some salt and pepper. Put the lid on the jar and shake shake shake.

Toss everything together. Add a protein if you like.

Easy Focaccia: For this, I use the recipe from Alexandra Stafford on her site Alexandra Cooks. I use the yeasted version, and I follow it to the letter. Trust me, it’s foolproof. It also works as a fabulous pizza base and we often use it for this purpose.

You can watch her make the bread on YouTube, below:

Enjoy!

Gratin made with any Green

Tonight, as a side dish to some tender Flat Iron steaks from Butcher Box (marinated in olive oil, soy sauce, balsamic vinegar, dijon mustard, a little coriander and smoked paprika, a couple of smashed garlic cloves, and plenty of pepper) seared in a hot cast iron pan, I made a gratin with fresh cabbage. It was delicious, and it occurred to me that you could use this recipe using any fresh greens from the garden or the CSA box.

It’s not even a recipe, really, more like a guide or a ratio. Take the fresh leaves of some sturdy green (cabbage, kale, chard, spinach, collards), remove the center ribs (feed those to your chickens or your compost pile), and slice the leaves into fat ribbons. You need about six generous cups of sliced greens. Boil a couple inches of water in a large pot (I use a Dutch oven). Add the greens and cook for a few minutes - cabbage needs about six minutes, spinach probably a scant two - until bright green and just wilted. Drain and set aside. Wipe out the pot, and heat it up again on medium. Add a splash of olive oil, then some chopped bacon (or pancetta, or Canadian bacon) and fry until crisp on the edges. Add 2-3 minced cloves of garlic and stir until just fragrant. Then add a cup of heavy cream. Lower the temp and add a cup of grated parmesan (or gruyere, or Swiss, or whatever) and then add back the greens. Cook over low heat until thickened a bit, 5-8 minutes. Add a little salt, a little pepper, and a grate or two of nutmeg. Sprinkle fresh breadcrumbs over the top, as much as you like. Then stick it under the broiler until brown and toasty on the top.

This would also be a fabulous main dish with a fried egg on top (and a runny yolk, natch).

I always have fresh breadcrumbs in the house these days, because I’ve been baking again. I got a book that I absolutely love - Bread, Toast, Crumbs by Alexandra Stafford - and it’s gotten me back into making bread. This isn’t the fancy (and difficult) sourdough that I made for years. This is simple yeasted bread, and it’s super easy. The recipes make two small loaves, generally, so we have enough for several meals. The cookbook is in three sections; the first part is dedicated to breads of all kinds, the second part consists of recipes to use the stale slices of bread, and the third section is full of recipes for the breadcrumbs. We’ve had some excellent things from this cookbook, like white bean gratin with sausage, which is what got me thinking about gratins made with greens.

I’ve been baking the loaves in two clay bread bowls from King Arthur flour company. They’re great.

image credit: King Arthur

We still have a lot of cauliflower yet to ripen in the garden, so soon our dinners will be full of that, I imagine. What are you cooking from your garden?

Halloween Surprises

Happy Halloween to all. It's a bright, clear day in Walnut Creek, and will be a chilly but gorgeous night for the kiddos out trick or treating. We expect our usual horde of trick or treaters tonight; Mom's bringing over a beef stew cooked in a pumpkin, I'm baking fresh bread, one of our kids has rehearsal, the other is possibly either having friends over or going to a friends house - so my main entertainment will be eating good food and looking at the little guys who come to the front door.

Meanwhile, there's been all sorts of interesting things and surprises happening around here. One is the above persimmons - a neighbor had an excess from her trees, so we promptly picked up a bin-full. We wanted to make jam, but it seems that it's not totally safe to water-bath can this particular fruit (acidity is questionable), so there is a dearth of recipes, even if we just want to freeze it after making it. We found one from a middle-eastern woman that seemed promising, but used cornstarch to thicken, and the end result was terrible. That was sad, after Tom put in all the work of making jam. I'm going to try again with some pectin, though persimmons are naturally high in pectin, so maybe I'll skip that addition. We also wanted to make Hoshigaki, but I haven't gotten around to that yet. 

In the garden, I've been struggling with getting the wheat to germinate. In some areas, it's doing incredibly well:

... while in others, it's extremely spotty.

I think it has a lot to do with temperature and water. This is winter wheat, so it needs cooler temps, and last week we were in the 90's for days on end. Plus, drip irrigation can be tricky with germination, so sometimes the seeds rely on me to get them damp, and sometimes I forget or lose track of what I've done and when. So I'm hoping, now that we've cooled down, and the winter rains are on the way (fingers crossed), we'll start to see a thicker stand of wheat. 

"Stand of Wheat." Gosh, if that doesn't sound all Pa Ingalls. Next I might hit you with "the wheat is now tillering," and that will be a secret thrill for me, probably not for you.

Leeks, garlic, shallots, peas, spinach, kale, lettuce, chard, beets, carrots, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, Brussels sprouts: All doing well. Had my first crop of greens today in a frittata for lunch. And just saw my first pea on the vine, though that deer that crashed through ate the tops off most of them. That's ok, they're recovering.

We've also had some fun surprises at the water feature too. A couple of days ago, I was sitting near the bee hive, watching the activity there, when I noticed a new-to-me bird land for a drink. After some research, I determined it was a Hermit Thrush.

image credit: Isabel Cutler

It's an extraordinarily adorable little bird. 

Then, this morning, as I was out brushing egg sacs off the kale (cabbage butterflies; controlling their caterpillars is keeping me busy this year), I heard an interesting new bird call - sharp and short. I quietly skulked around to the water feature and there, in the tree above, was a Northern Flicker (red-shafted western). 

image credit: cdbtx

This bird was not exactly adorable - it was BIG and LOUD and striking!!! Wow! 

Some research tells me that these birds are both common here, though the Hermit Thrush only in winter: We've never seen them in our yard, so having them here now is very exciting! Both eat insects and also some berries.

I did have one surprise this past weekend which was not so great. I opened up the smaller compost bin (the one I call the worm bin because I add worms every couple of years - it's not big enough to get hot enough to break stuff down) to dig out the worm castings to sprinkle on the wheat beds. As I began, a couple of rats leapt out and streaked into the neighbors yard. I thought that was pretty gross, but continued my chore. When I was near the back I uncovered a baby rat nest with three newborns in it. I don't like rats, and I've put out those snapping traps to kill them when their numbers are too great, but it was another thing altogether to disrupt a nest and put babies in danger. I know it doesn't make sense, but I closed up the compost bin and went into the garden and sobbed my heart out. Ugh. 

So, not all surprises are good. I went ahead with my fall cleanup and made a HUGE pile of branches to continue my effort to attract snakes. We need something to take care of the rat population around here and I certainly don't want it to be me, no thank you, I don't want to kill babies of any kind. I guess it's that old adage that if it's out of sight, it's out of mind. 

Anyway. I don't want to leave you with an image of rats, even if it is Halloween, and I don't want you to think I'm an evil baby-rat-killer either. So, the bread just came out of the oven and I'll bribe you with images of that, instead. 

Hope you have a fun holiday!

'C' is for Chicken Coop, Catching Critters, and Concurrent Cooking

If you've been reading my posts for any length of time, you know how enamored I have been with using sand in the hen house. Not the coop itself, and not the run - both of those are dirt, with many feet of wood chips, sawdust, and leaves as a thick litter layer. This allows all the waste from the chickens to compost naturally; it's a great mix of carbon and nitrogen. But the hen house is a different matter. The chickens lay eggs up there, in their nesting boxes, which have a deep layer of timothy hay. But they also roost up there at night. And while they are roosting, they are shitting. 

I used to line the floor up there with straw; I would let the poop build up until Saturday, and then take all that straw out and replace it. It was a fine system, and the hay was a great boon to our compost piles, but I really didn't like the chickens walking through all that mess whenever they were in the hen house. It also drew flies. It also smelled pretty bad by Saturday.

So then I switched to sand, and this worked great for years. I bought a long-handled scooper, and every morning, I would scoop out the solid wastes and add them to our compost pile. No more mess, no more smell, very little trouble with flies, and a perfect solution, I thought. But after several years of this, the amount of sand in our compost, and therefore in our vegetable beds, has grown considerably. It's only a little every day, but it sure has added up. And the more I study soil composition in my soil management class, the clearer it became that I would need to come up with a different solution.

Enter rice hulls. A waste product from California's huge rice harvests. And as you can see, you can even get organic hulls. The permaculture group from my college uses these to improve soil structure, and home gardeners can use them in place of perlite in potting mixes. I started to wonder if I could use them as a replacement for the sand.

So I ordered a 50 lb bag from Peaceful Valley Farm Supply in nearby Grass Valley. The hulls aren't as cheap as sand (a 50 lb bag of play sand is about $6.50 from my local Ace Hardware; the hulls were $35, and the shipping wasn't cheap either), but they are extremely compressed in the bag, and you're getting a lot of product for the money - probably at least six months worth of product, and I've been buying a bag of sand once a month. It sort of equals out, price-wise. 

Ecologically, the rice hulls are far superior. First of all it's a product that we're taking out of the waste stream. Secondly it improves soil structure, as it can break down fairly quickly into humus, and meanwhile provide pockets for aeration and soil biology (and as you know, sand takes thousands of years to break down). And thirdly it provides a carbon source to offset the nitrogen of chicken waste.

Plus, there is the issue of sand-harvesting and the environmental costs of that.

The chickens don't seem to mind the change. The material is lighter than sand, but since I have it in an enclosed space, it doesn't blow around. There's very little dust. It doesn't clump as well as sand, and it takes a bit more shaking of the scooper to separate the solid materials out, but that's a mild complaint. I feel good about this new system.

While I'm home today studying, I'm working on several concurrent cooking projects. I'm baking bread, which feels good. Over the summer we seem to eat less of it, and it's often too hot to justify turning on the oven so high for so long. But with our significantly cooler nights, my thoughts turn to beans and toast. So today I'll make the toast and tomorrow I'll make the beans. 

And what goes best with freshly baked bread? Soup, of course! So dinner tonight will be Italian Wedding Soup (which is basically, for me, chicken stock with meatballs and greens, and a dusting of shaved parmesan). Luckily, I had a chicken carcass, a shoulder blade bone from a pork roast, and a parmesan rind sitting in the freezer waiting for a broth-making day. 

And when I checked the piano for ripe tomatoes this morning, there were six pounds to contend with (if you don't know, I bring the tomatoes in just after they 'break,' or blush into color, so that the squirrels don't get them, and they ripen on our piano). I have not yet made tomato paste, so that is another all-day project that I began early this morning along with the broth and the bread. I chop up the tomatoes, add a few red peppers, and simmer them for an hour with some garlic and salt. Then I run them through the food mill, and continue simmering (or put in the oven on a low temperature) for several more hours until they reach the desired thickness. I think I will freeze this paste in quarter-pint jars rather than can it.

the beginning of paste...

And as for the critters, well. It has been a banner year for yellow jackets. I don't mind a few buzzing around, but when they arrive in hordes (and yes I do mean hordes), it's time to thin the herd. We've been hanging these traps (the only ones that seem to work) and replacing them every week, and each week every trap is completely full of dead wasps, and we don't even seem to be making a dent. They are hassling the chickens, the honeybees, the cat, and us. They are EVERYWHERE. It's a real problem. 

There must be a nest nearby, but it's not on our property, so there's nothing I can do about it.

Speaking of which, if you ever run into my dad, ask him how well a bee-suit works when digging up a yellow jacket nest.

Begin the Baguette

CAUTION:

This blog post contains bread porn. It my not be suitable for hungry viewers. 

A particularly nice crumb on last week's loaf

I've gotten pretty good at making homemade boules, with my sourdough starter and three kinds of organic whole grain from a local farm. I buy the grain six pounds at a time, and find that about a pound of grain makes two loaves (in other words, my grain order is good for six baking days, or twelve loaves, just about). I have begun to feel so confident about these boules that I've started changing up some things; for instance, I eliminated the cold retardation in the refrigerator, and started to bake the loaves the same day I mixed the dough. Then I decided to add different ingredients, like raisins, cinnamon, and a little sugar to one loaf each baking day. We enjoy that a lot, as the raisin toast is especially good for breakfasts, while the plain sourdough loaves are good with soup at dinner or for packed lunches. 

a raisin loaf

But Kate has stopped eating the bread. I think part of it is the shape - I cut each boule (about 12-14" width) in half, then make slices from each half - and the slices are somewhat thick, as it's hard to get a nice thin cut. Kate likes sourdough baguette when it's store-bought, but of course that's white flour, not whole-grain like mine, and I'm sure that informs her decision too. Still, I wondered if Kate would eat my bread if it was in a baguette rather than a boule? She's 14, I'm not fooling her or anything, but I'd so much prefer she eat my fresh, whole-grain bread, then white bread (albeit delicious local white baguette) from the store. I decided to try my hand at it.

Baguette isn't easy, as anyone has tried to make it knows. There are two glaring problems that a home baker needs to address right away: 1) Steam, and 2) Cooking implement.

Most commercial ovens have a steam feature which helps make the crackling crust and moist interior that we're used to. I get around that, when I make boules, by baking them in cast iron dutch ovens with the lid on for the first part of its bake. As baguettes wouldn't fit in a dutch oven (natch), I'd have to find another way to create steam. I decided to put a large baking dish (like a lasagna pan) full of water on the bottom rack of the oven. I let it heat up while the oven was heating up (I preheat at 475 degrees for a full hour). 

The only baking stone we own is round, for pizza, and its ingenious for that, but it wouldn't do for baguettes. A cookie sheet wouldn't hold enough heat. Then I remembered our cast iron griddle. Made to go on the stovetop, it is long and thin. I decided that would do.

I didn't alter my recipe in any way, I simply shaped the loaves differently, and let them sit awhile on the counter before baking.

That's rice flour I'm using for the shaping and dusting, and a cheesecloth for covering them while they rest.

The loaves didn't quite fit on the cast iron griddle, and I found myself scrunching them a little to get them on there, kind of like an accordion. It gave the loaves an unfortunate pleated look at finish, so I'll have to make four smaller loaves next time, thinner and shorter, and do two bakes. 

I also didn't know how long to bake them; I bake boules at 475 covered for 25 minutes, and uncovered for a further 20 (although I bake the raisin loaves for five minutes less). I decided to put these in for 25 minutes and check them. At that time I decided to add another five minutes. 

And I think they look nice. I haven't cut into them yet, as they need to cool for quite a long time before slicing, but there is a nice hollow sound when I knock the bottoms, and they smell amazing of course.

They might be slightly underdone, but for a first try, I'm pleased. I think they next batch, smaller and thinner, will be much more appealing. As always, bread takes many, many tries before it begins to look right. So I'll have to practice much more until I hit on a method I prefer. Do any of you home bakers have a method that you have found works well?

Now, the true test: We'll see if Kate eats these tonight with our fish and fennel stew. :)