Sugaring -

I usually start sugaring at the beginning of March. So, I'm getting things ready now. I'm pulling together the storage cans for the sap, the boiler, getting new propane tanks, and making sure all of our taps and bags are ready. I really can't wait. I think I have everything except a hydrometer, which I will have to order now to have in time. We borrowed one last year.

The Collective

Collective work makes sense in a time when money is tight. We started a growing and buying collective a while back and have enjoyed the savings, while also enjoying a broader group of new friendships.

Our growing collective includes 6 families who grow a large garden (120x60') of root cellar vegetables. We also grow meat chickens at our place, and members of the other families come and help process them and then pay us for the expenses for each chicken they take. We grew 4 hogs that we jointly owned with the group the first year, and another family grew 4 last year for us all to share. The families are great fun and easy going, and it has gone really well sharing the work and then reaping the joint benefits.

We came up with the root cellar garden idea so that we could all plant together in the beginnning of the summer and harvest together a couple days at the end, and so that we could store the food for year round enjoyment. We didn't think we'd get folks to show up daily to harvest beans, lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers - so grew carrots, onions and potatoes instead.

The growing collective has pot luck dinners, which each family takes turns hosting. Some of us raise bees and we extract the honey together. We're planning on building an outdoor brick oven this summer together, to be taught my a famous local stone mason. Then, we'll get together weekly to boot the thing up to bake bread together.

You'd think we were a group of old hippies. But, we're not. We're high school teachers, doctors, lobbyists, booksellers, businessmen and retired business leaders, career volunteers, and Sunday school teachers. We think that work isn't really work if you are hanging out with people that make you laugh hard.

The other part of our collective work involves 15 families. We buy local, organic, and other foods together in bulk and share the savings. We split the weekly purchases on Saturday mornings and have a great time being together and swapping recipes and stories of our families and food. I do the ordering and paperwork and my kitchen is usually littered with empty boxes and bits of parsley and carrot greens by 1pm on Saturday afternoon. We get the most delicious foods at a great discount to what you'd pay in the grocery store - and the people are really nice.

Super Bowl Menu?

We have lots of pork roasts in the freezer from getting hogs through our collective. I usually cook one in the crock pot and them pull it apart and cook it with some homemade barbecue sauce. Tonight I serve the barbecued pulled pork on kaiser rolls with a shredded vegetable cole slaw. Here are the recipes.

Mary's pulled pork sandwich recipe

arm or shoulder roast of pork cooked for several hours in a crock pot with some water, onion, and garlic, removed, and pulled apart with bone and fat trimmed out

1 chopped onion
3 minced garlic cloves
1 tsp. cumin
1/4 tsp. cayenne
2 c. of ketchup
1/3 c. brown sugar
1/3 c. malt vinegar
1/3 c. packed brown sugar
3T worcestershire sauce
3T soy sauce

I saute the onion and garlic and then throw in the cumin and cayenne and let simmer until onion is tender. Then I add all the other ingredients, along with the shredded pork and cook until it is combined and heated through. I serve on kaiser rolls.


Shredded vegetable cole slaw

1/2 savoy cabbage
1 red bell pepper
8 thin carrots, peeled
2 small beets, peeled
1 c light mayo
1 tsp. celery seed
1 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp fresh ground pepper

I shred each vegetable using the shredding wheel of my food processor. I toss the shredded veggies with the light mayo, celery seed, salt and pepper. Don't over mix or everything will be pink from the beets.


(c) Bosky Dell Farm and Mary Schwartz

Gracie wanted bagels today - and she's been sick. So I made bagels. My favorite thing is making foods that you always buy and never make...like cheese, bagels, and your own jam. I'm searching for a good saltine recipe!


Bagels
· 4 cups of all-purpose flour
· 1 ½ tsp salt
· 2 ½ tsp instant yeast
· 4 1/2 tsp sugar
· ¼ cup of vegetable oil
· 2 large eggs
· 2 cups boiling water
· 1 egg + 1 T water whisked together to brush bagel tops
· Cornmeal

1. Mixing and kneading - Put the flour, salt, yeast, and 1 ½ tsp of the sugar together into the bowl of the food processor. Add 1 cup of water and 1/4 c. vegetable oil. Add the eggs and process to form a dough ball, and allow to ride around in the processor for 2 minutes until the ball is firm. If dough doesn't roll around inside the processing bowl, add more flour. Allow dough to rise for one hour.

2. Shaping and second rise - Cut the dough into eighteen equal pieces and roll each piece between your palms to form a six inch long, ¾ inch thick log. Form a circle and seal the ends with water. Let the bagels rise for another 20 minutes with a damp towel on top.

3. Get oven and pan ready - Preheat your oven to 450°F. Lightly grease a cookie sheet and dust with cornmeal.

4. Boil bagels - Boil 2 quarts of water and 1T of sugar in a pot. Boil the bagels in batches for 3 minutes and turn them once. Place on baking pan and brush with a mixture of one egg whisked with 1T water.

5. Bake for 15 minutes, until brown.

Scones on a snowy day

Today I made some scones. The kids are home - one sick, and one due to the snow day, and I thought they'd enjoy something hot and homemade. Here is the recipe that I always use - it has some variations based on what I have in the pantry.


Basic Scone Recipe

3 cups flour
1/2 c sugar
1 T baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
3/4 cup of butter cut up and 1 cup buttermilk; or 3/4 cup of butter and 1 cup heavy cream; 1/2 cup butter and 1 cup heavy cream and 1 egg

Combine the dry ingredients in a food processor and pulse a few times. Add the butter and process until the mixture looks like cornmeal, then add liquid and pulse until just combined. The secret to good scones is cold butter and undermixing to avoid toughness. Divide into two balls and flatten out into 2 wheels, 3/4 inch thick. Cut each circle into 6 wedges and bake at 400 F for 15 minutes.

Variations :

• Cherry-Almond Scones - 1 tsp vanilla extract, 1tsp almond extract, ½ c almond slices, 1 c. dried cherries
• Blueberry and Sour Cream Scones - 1/2c dried blueberries, 1/2 c sour cream substituted for 1/2 of the buttermilk or heavy cream
• Apple - Walnut Scones - 1/2 c dried apple pieces, 1/2 c walnut pieces, 1 tsp vanilla
• Cranberry Orange Scones - 2/3 c dried cranberries, 2 tsp grated orange zest
• Lemon Ginger Scones - 2/3 c grated ginger, ¼ tsp grated lemon peel
• Lower Fat Raspberry Scones- substitute ¾ c raspberries for ½ butter

tonight's birthday dinner

We're having minestrone and a big salad tonight. I made a lemon glazed buttermilk cake for dessert - because it is Bernie's birthday! Happy birthday, Bernie!

It's also my Mom's birthday - so happy birthday to you too, Mom. Sorry we can't be there tonight!

Minestrone - Saute a mixture of cut up onion, garlic, red pepper, celery, carrots, chopped red tomato, baby spinach, and mushrooms. Then add a couple cans of rinsed cannellini beans, throwing in a few quarts of chicken broth and cut up chicken. I spice it up with white pepper, lots of salt, oregano, basil, thyme, and paprika. I love grated parmesan on top, and serve it with cheese herb bread.

The cake was a King Arthur mix - I hope it is good!

I made Chinese food tonight. Chicken with tangerine sauce and broccoli with oyster sauce. It was really good and fast too.

community

Today I'm making chicken soup for an elderly couple who are neighbors. In the winter especially I stop seeing folks and get caught up in my own work and taking care of the family and farm. I was thinking about this couple and asked around about them and was told that due to a fall and recovery from a broken hip, Mrs. P. had lost a lot of weight and they were becoming shut-ins. So, I thought I better start being a good neighbor and make a visit.

It is too easy for me to get caught up in my own path, and put blinders on to my neighbors' problems. I'm a shy person and am by nature inclined to keeping to myself (except the extraordinary contradiction of lobbying, the radio commentary thing and the blog - go figure). Getting involved with people and their problems is hard for me, so I avoid it. But, we live in Vermont in a small village and we're here because there is still a sense of community. Well, what's community if you don't reach out to individuals in it? I'm going to try to do better.

tomatoes

This summer, I'm planting peppers and tomatoes in pots on my back patio and in my flower garden. I've never had luck with tomatoes in my back vegetable garden for various reasons. Too much rain last year caused blight, few tomatoes caused by not enough watering the year before that, and before that...blossom end rot caused by uneven watering.

If I put the tomatoes in pots, I can't over-water because the water just seeps out of the pot. If I put them under my nose on the patio, I can't ignore a dry-looking plant. If I have them on our sunny patio, I can make sure they have enough warmth to set fruit early and produce a season full of tomatoes. I can also use our rain barrel to water the plants instead of using the regular town water source, which is becoming very expensive.

This year, our flower garden and the pots around the house will have food growing in it. I'm excited to have a chance to be creative by using decorative pots planted with herbs, edible flowers, hot peppers, and tomatoes. I'll plant green bean and watch the tendrils grow up decorative towers. It will be my kitchen garden/cutting garden/and I hope, beautiful to see from the street. I can't wait.

I love this time of year - the planning is a blast. All the work I need to do to redesign the garden begins here - the digging and sweaty work comes much later!

I am painting our girl Blue today. I fed the cows - including Blue - and took a walk up to the cemetary and now I'm settling in for a long morning painting session. I love to paint, but I don't do it enough. I'm working half time right now - so I have time to do it - and I'm not milking, making cheese, or even baking very much, so I really have time.

Sometimes I forget what is fun. That sounds strange, but at a few times in my life I've found myself with lots of work, and not that much happening that's fun. I love doing things on the farm - but it seems I love even more learning new things than doing old things forever. So, I learned to milk - then I learned to make cheese - I'll work on learning more about that next year.

I've always loved painting, but haven't been doing it that much for the last year or more. I'm doing that again, walking, and knitting too. It makes me feel like I've been wearing a raincoat with rocks in the pockets and just took it off. Whew!

I have to confess my own prejudice that I only became aware of as President Obama stood to take the oath of office yesterday. I am ashamed - so it isn't easy to say this:

President Obama, leader of the free world, is YOUNGER than me. It really bummed me out when they said his age yesterday. He's just a couple of years behind, but it made me feel old. It made me wonder if people our age can really run very large, important things - like my freedom. Well, of course he can - but it makes me feel so old! I've never been older than our president.

planning the garden

If you were trying to raise all your own food in a limited space - and then freeze, dry, can, or just plunk it down in your root cellar for a few months to last the winter - what would you raise? How much variety do our fickle tastes really need? What kinds of herbs and teas would you grow? And what kind can you grow given your local growing season?

I'm thinking that we'll need the following - we're doubling, maybe tripling our growing area, and we could possibly do all this:

protein - edamame, cranberry beans, pinto beans, chickpeas
starches - potatoes, sweet potatoes, corn
green veggies - green beans, lettuces, chard, peas, zucchini, celery, cucumber, spinach, leeks
other color veggies - squashes, pumpkins, red peppers, beets, carrots, onions, garlic, tomatoes, turnips, hot peppers
herbs and teas - cilantro, shiso, chamomile, dill, parsley, thyme, rosemary, oregano, basil, peppermint
fruits - raspberries, grapes, peaches, apples, cherries, pears, strawberries, blueberries, melons
grains - wheat, millet, flax, corn -
sweet things - honey from bees, maple syrup, canned jellies and jams
meats - 25 chickens, 2 hogs, 1 beefer
dairy - butter, half and half, cream, milk, cheeses

The problem is - I have a job and so does Bob. So, we'll probably continue to do the collective garden with our friends and raise the root vegetables in our friends' very large garden with others. We'll raise the chickens here, raising 50 and then share these with the folks who are willing to help process them. We hope the people who raised the hogs will do it again this year.

Raising food with friends has its downside - sometimes people don't come to help, and sometimes others get mad that they show up and others don't. You have to plan it so that these things don't matter so much. Growing anything you can plant in the spring and harvest in the fall is perfect for this type of garden, since it is easier to rally people for two days at each end of the season. If you mulch heavily and do a rain dance occasionally, the garden doesn't need much attention all summer. Not if all goes well...

And maybe we need to drastically scale back on what we like to eat. Does being an omnivore obligate you to eat everything?

Winter is flying by. Today it was 27 degrees F too, which almost felt like spring!

I'm thinking about easter eggs and ordering the dyes - and ordering up the chocolates to make our own candy again this year. We'll do pecan, peanut butter, and coconut eggs, and solid chocolate bunnies! I love it.

I'm also knitting more, and reading books at night. I just started Gun Seller by Hugh Laurie - you know - Dr. House. I hope it is good.

I'm waiting for Grace to come home from a trip to NJ with her swim team. They won a relay invitational meet at a college down there. Bob is getting Bernie at basketball practice, which is a nice way for Bob to have to leave work and say g'night to his medical practice. They are understaffed and so he stays late.

I worked hard today cleaning up the house. It felt great to spend a holiday this way.

Today I'm making gumbo. I'm boiling one of our chickens to make broth and will use that meat, shrimp, red peppers, okra, and all kinds of other veggies from our freezer. I love making soup on snowy days like today.

I've been very busy with work since before Thanksgiving. I haven't posted as much with the blog because of that. But life has been marching on - daughter in college has come home and gone back. The kids at home are school work at high school, playing sports, and enjoying friends. I'm still cooking each day.

I'm planning to use the area of the field that the cows really dug up as a new vegetable garden. I liked growing dried beans last year and plan to do that again. Garbanzos, cranberry beans, pinto beans, and edamame too. I'll also plant a bed of asparagus too. Today I'm looking over the seed catalogs to create the plan. I love this!

I'm knitting everyday - and painting a little too. I'm doing a painting of our cow Blue. She's looking in my studio window. Sunshine the cat is looking back at her.

today i spent the entire day working on coop stuff. i love this coop but not when it takes this much time. hopefully the time i'm putting in now will mean less spent later.

i really miss milking the cows. it makes me a little sad, although this morning it was -10 at milking time. instead i go out and feed them and pet their frosty coats for awhile each morning. charlie, the calf from this year, is really getting big. blue appears to be pregnant, but i'm not so sure about the older cow, giddy. bummer if only one or neither of them is going to have a calf this spring - then i'll be missing milking a while lot longer!

i plan to spend some time tomorrow poring over the seed catalogs. you need to start thinking about green things when it is so darn cold.

a lesson from the chicken coop

Let's always make sure that we are not like the ladies in my chicken coop.

My chicken coop is full of hens who strut around, scratching at the ground and worrying themselves. Their voices are nervous and easily erupt into alarm. Half the time they are brainlessly examining the ground and the other half fluffing their feathers. They peck each other often unmercifully.

Sometimes they take turns being the lead hen, squatting under the heat lamp and only getting up to chase a smaller hen who tries to get warm too. The hens are noisy, easily offended, and constantly picking on each other. If they didn't lay an egg once in awhile, they'd all be soup.

Sometimes when we are self confident and empowered, we are okay with helping to empower others. When we respect ourselves, we respect others. Even our perceived enemies can be treated in a civil way. It is amazing that when we lay nice big eggs and lots of them, we don't get pushed aside.

Get out there and lay beautiful eggs today. Don't worry if your neighbor's egg is larger. We're all contributing to the egg basket and doing our best. Let's use our voices to sing like songbirds - maybe not always the same song, but spreading loveliness whereever we land.

Am I not the corniest person ever?

buildings and food coops

This weekend we started talking about possibly using the St. Jerome's Church building to do our food coop. This area has never had a food coop in a regular store and hopefully if we do this in East Dorset, it won't compete with the two health food stores or the large produce place in Manchester.

The buying group now has 20 families and we have many more who are interested in joining. We'd like to buy foods produced in the immediate area and eventually sell it in a store. But in the meantime, we can order the items for delivery on Saturday and gather to split that up each week. We will probably also order native foods from the larger region, and sometimes organic foods from California. Buying any foods in bulk is so much cheaper and easy to do when others will share with you and when it is fresh and local, the food quality is usually much higher.

The goals of the buying group are two fold - support local agriculture and give consumers good food at an affordable price. I hope in the search for a good price, we aren't hurting local agriculture - and in supporting local agriculture, we are providing food at a good price. The two goals are potentially conflicting.

So, I'm working on a business plan for the whole venture so that church officials and others will help us use the now vacant building. One of my kids was baptized there, all had their first communion, and I taught CCD upstairs in the choir loft. It is a sweet little Catholic church, and I'm told the oldest in Vermont. I hate to see it torn down or made into a private home. I'd love to use it as a community place and even possibly turn it back into a church someday.

The house is clean. The animals are fed. The kids and Bob are at school or work. I'm getting ready for a very special meeting. I love it when everything is moving along in an organized, scheduled way. It makes me feel like I actually have a little control.

Unfortunately, it never lasts. After the meeting I'll find the washer overflowed, or the cat threw up on the rug and the calf is stuck in the round bale feeder, and the cows pooped in the water buckets. The sink or toilet or something will be clogged and chickens will be sliding on the icy driveway, being chased by the dog.

My new definition of "smooth sailing" is successfully getting from one day to the next without crashing - and enduring the big waves with as little sea sickness as possible. Life is complicated and many little things can go wrong. I have to remind myself that even when they do, I have the larger and most important things working right now. I have a healthy, loving family, a good job, a great home and town to live in, and good food to eat. So what if all electronics conspire against me and we chose the most spirited animals to own? Life is good, but often messy.

I am going to take a deep breath now - and enjoy the calm that is now.

I love snow days. We had one today. I love big snowstorms and having the kids around during the day.

With the kids home, I thought I'd cook a little. I boiled one of our chickens from the freezer. I assembled the holy trinity of my version of Cajun cooking - onions, celery, and roasted red peppers. I don't really like green peppers that much and I preserve our summer ripe peppers to use all winter in soups and stews. I roaste the peppers and store them in olive oil in the fridge.

Tonight we are having chicken gumbo, with okra frozen from the summer, onions, garlic, celery, red peppers, carrots, okra, tomatoes, and corn. Much of this is from the pantry, root cellar, freezer, and fridge and came from local sources last summer, or our garden.

I don't have butter - so I'm making roux from our bacon and flour. I'll spice it the gumbo up with cayenne and black pepper, dry mustard, paprika, sage, cumin, bay leaves, thyme, and parsley for good measure.

There are ups and downs of having your teenage children help out on your farm. On the upside - it gives them a sense of accomplishment and responsibility to be part of producing food for the family. On the downside, the gate to the cow field might just be left open, or chicken coop door left ajar. You may come out to find a bewildered calf standing at the kitchen door or a chicken chased into a tree by the neighbor's dog.

Anyone with teenage children can tell you that for a certain period of time the brains of these kids are a little scrambled. Call it hormones if you wish, but it makes kids forget important things sometimes. Whereas some people we know have decided to do all the chores themselves, swearing that it just isn't worth it to ask kids returning from the barn - did you remember to close the gate? close the coop? water the cows? etc., we've taken a different tack. I often ask for help doing the chores, meaning - come outside with me and we'll do them together.

Buckets of water are carried out of our kitchen twice daily to fill the cows' heated water buckets. We don't have a deep water line to the barn, so we get a little exercise twice a day carrying heavy buckets. I've been asking the kids to carry one and I carry the other.

We walk around and feed the cows, check the chickens feed and water, gather eggs, and pet our cows. We chat about school, animals, and life in general. We share funny moments like when I forget my own rule to never put an egg in my pocket and then I forget the egg is in there as I lean over the cow to scratch her ears and crush the egg. I also get a lot of help without it being miserable for our kids or worrisome to me.

As our children are getting older - they are more thoughtful about how they do chores. But I still enjoy doing the work with them. It reminds them that we're all in this together.

I love that there really is a season for everything. Winter here is quieter - and now that the holidays are over, it is time to enjoy the seed catalogs. I take my time but always order by February, otherwise some of the best seeds are gone.

This year I'm trying soy beans because my daughter craves edamame. I'll also order more shiso to use in making hand roll sushi - temaki.

My computer was broken but is working now - but the wireless is still on the fritz. That's meant that I don't sit with the computer on my lap all evening - and instead am working on knitting a new sweater. I also painted a new painting of a cow, a cat, and a chicken. Maybe I'll never fix the wireless!