First harvest

First basket of goodies brought in from the garden! Parsley and calendula. 

I'll be making tabbouleh tomorrow. It is one of my favorite summertime foods : fresh herbs, flavorful from the sun (parsley is called for in any recipe you'll find. I sometimes like to mix it up with whatever is growing/comes in the CSA share: mints, thyme, oregano, etc), chewy bulgur, the pungency of onions (scallions work too!), a ripe tomato if you have it, all tied together with generous amounts of a good olive oil and bright lemon juice. It keeps well for days in the fridge and is a simple, easy, quick meal fix. 

The calendula will be dried and stores for making salve. I've got a baby coming whose bottom needs to be protected from any possible incidence of diaper rash with the family diaper rash salve recipe that hasn't been made probably since my younger sister was potty trained. She's now a PhD student so, you know, it's been a while! 

The lettuce doubled it's size overnight it seems and could bear with a trimming for a salad bowlful tomorrow. 

Cutting Calendula.

I believe I counted 96 calendula seedlings planted this summer?  A couple of them are still blooming, under two snows, in the garden.  Many of them are valiantly surviving the cold in their pots on the porch steps.  I was afraid I would loose them all at the first sign of frost.  I didn’t'.

Most of the ones from the garden I pulled up last week, and out of time, let sit on the kitchen counter – a giant pile of plants.  Between the freeze and the undignified heap they sat in for a few days, I lost a bunch of the leaves...  but I still managed to dry a quart Ziploc bagful from them.  I grow calendula for the flowers, because they are beautiful and because they are healing.  Bonus: they attract aphids away from other things you are growing.  But I also harvest the leaves.  They're edible, did you know?  Calendula is the classic "potherb."  My leaves though, are dried and sent with instructions on poulticing and plastering to my father – he with the varicose veins the size of golf balls in his legs.  They're good for that, the leaves.  I hope he actually uses them.

I think I must have a love affiare going on with my herbs.  Affaires are mutual things, you see.  I love them.  And I think that efficacious herbs, the healing ones, must have a truly deep love for humanity.  They could have evolved in so many other ways.  The amount of phyto-chemicals and trace nutrients and good energy that healing herbs put into their herbal parts is astounding.  When you think that all of that energy could have evolved to have been directed towards something else... or towards the same plant parts, without creating the effective herbal medicines...  There is so much love right there.  Calendula has been giving me flowers ALL SUMMER LONG.  Now she gives me her leaves.  And in exchange, I save her seeds.  I've got some collected already, from seedheads accidentally collected before their time.  From some recent seed heads, fully mature.  The seed head its self will appear dried and ready to harvest long before it really is.  It is not until the vital energy has withdrawn from the stem, leaving it brittle and brown, rather than strong and lush and green, that the seeds have absorbed all the procreative energy they can hold. 

I'm leaving the seed heads on the plant, on the porch, out in the cold, even after harvesting another giant basket of leaves.  I want to see if next years plants will remember the cold.  Will they grow more fiercely in the early season?  More vibrantly?  Be even less susceptible to frost in the fall?  How does evolution happen anyway?  There is an intelligence in seeds.  In plants.  I feel we all too often vastly underrate that intelligence.  If I contemplate the possibility that our human DNA carries with it some load of karma from our ancestors, why should I not entertain the possibility that the prana (life force) at work in seeds can remember the cold, and tell next year's plant to prepare for it?  How else do we get cold-hardy varietals??

CSA Cooking: one bunch of fresh basil

I arrived at the CSA pickup today after work to the welcome realization that this week's share included fresh basil.  Also new baby turnips and a giant napa cabbage.  I took up my bunch of basil, rubber banded around the stem – the rubber band providing pressure to bruise the stem, breaking just enough cell walls to release the aromatics of basil without compromising its structure.  The lady behind me walked around me to continue down the line of vegetable offerings while I stood there with my nose buried in the basil like it was a bouquet offering from my beloved. 

The sense of smell is so powerful, scent carries sense beyond the smell itself.  Campfire smoke, the smell of rain on dry earth, cookies baking, the unique scent of a loved one.  Each carries with it and evokes its own matrix of memory.

A noseful of fresh basil is long summer afternoons, is summer time gloamings below a spreading maple.  It is the most richly velvety satisfying taste sense mouthfeel in the world.  It is the transcendence of a sunripe still warm heirloom tomato, eaten in careful bites, each bite slathered in pesto.  It is the promise of summer sun shining green on a winter plate.  It is fresh and pungent, bright and deep.  Dried basil is a beautiful underpinning for almost any sauté, stew or soup.  Cooked basil adds piquancy to thai and Italian dishes alike.  But fresh basil is simply sublime.

I stuck my nose in that bouquet of basil and I knew just what I was making for dinner.  I had to go by the grocery store anyway for milk and trashbags I'd neglected to replenish the last time, as well as (always!) for cereal.  And so I stalked the vegetable section, noticing myself first bypassing it joyfully.  In winter I spend most of my grocery shop in the vegetable section, but in summer my table overflows with so fresh so local greens I rarely buy anything except for a special occasion.  This qualified.  I found the tomatoes, and settled upon a plastic clamshell (I know! I know! The unsustainable plastic waste! But really, there are times when bruised tomoatoes or pink-pretending-to-be-red tomatoes just won't do) of on-the-vine beautiful little round red tomatoes.  I brought them home.

I boiled water, salted it, and added pasta.  I poured a bunch of olive oil into a cast iron skillet.  This is not the time for sparing use of olive oil, testing to see how little you can get away with to coat your greens.  This is a time for covering the bottom of a large pan in an eighth inch or more of oil.  So much that you pause for a moment, thinking you've poured too much, it’s a waste, it'll ruin the dish.  It isn't, it won't.  I chopped a large clove of garlic and set it to simmering in the oil.  Washed the tomatoes, finely chopped the basil (stems and all – I certainly was not going to was any of the aromatics) and set it aside.  Then I quartered the tomatoes, placing them in the oil, where they sizzled and threw drops of hot oil out of the pan when their inner juices came in contact.  As all the tomatoes found their way in the skillet, they settled down and began to mull in the oil.  The goal for the tomatoes is the point where they start to go soft, are warm through, the skin just beginning to peel off the edges of the slices. Salt and pepper. About half way there, I added a handful of pine nuts (the last of the bag that has been in my freezer and then in my fridge for probably a few years now, I use them sparingly, but adore them when I do).  As the tomatoes warm and sweat, the juices mix with the oil to creat a light, beautiful, flavor not-quite-sauce.  Fortuitously, my pasta and tomatoes were ready at the same moment.  This is the sort of confluence that I don't plan anymore, I just intuit.  Below my brains understanding of cooking time, in minutes or the distance from a simmer to a boil, my heart knows the rhythm of the kitchen and I find myself puttering around until just the moment when, like today, the tomatoes ought to begin for them to finish at the same moment as the pasta.  If you don't have this pulse yet, not to worry.  One or the other can always be taken off the heat.  I scooped the pasta into the skillet, letting each scoop drain of excess water as it hung in the hair above the pot.  Then turned off the heat and mixed the pasta with the tomatoes, pine nuts, and the lovely sauciness in the pan.  The last step is to mix in the chopped basil, letting the warmth of the pasta begin to wilt it, releasing its oils to our tastebuds, but retaining that fresh beautiful incomparable flavor. 

Served under a scattering of parmesean cheese with chianti on the porch in the rain clean air, there was no time to take a picture.

Homestead Eating: From The Freezer

I spend my summers trying to harvest (from garden or woods or seasonal grocery store offerings) and preserve more food than I did the year before.  But invariably I end up with only one quart of frozen purple cauliflower, or fewer blueberries than would be necessary to have a blueberry pie every week.  I so easily trip over into a scarcity based poverty mindset.  I get fixed into the idea that we can only have such things as pie from frozen wild blueberries or canned peaches on really really special occasions.  This then leads two thing: firstly, I end up with years-old bags of lingonberries in the freezer and secondly, I rarely eat local food in the winter.  These things together make me feel like a failure of a homesteader.  I get trapped in a mind swirl of "real homesteaders eat all winter long on food they preserved in the summer.  I never make a meal like that, therefore I'm still an imposter homesteader."

Well, I looked through the odds and ends of leftover CSA produce that I'd managed to preserve over the course of the summer and stash in the freezer.  Combined with the berries and the salmon and the caribou, there was actually a lot of food there! So in the last couple of weeks I've been making a conscious effort to allow myself to actually use and EAT this bounty! 

Last night, we had a ground caribou (from the freezer) and sweet potato saute over pasta.

The night before that, we had Chitina Salmon steaks (from the freezer) with Calypso CSA broccoli (from the freezer) and quinoa.  I also made a wild Blueberry (from the freezer) crisp that was the perfect balance between not-quite-tart intensity and sweet.

A couple of weeks ago I made a Peach-Raspberry pie with Peaches (from the pantry) and Raspberries (from the freezer).  I also made a Cranberry Cake - the recipe courtesy of "Sundays at Moosewood" which was very good, but next time needs to be baked with a tinfoil cover to keep from burning - with wild Lingonberries (from the freezer).  And I made Zucchini-Cornmeal skillet cakes with grated Calypso Zucchini (from the freezer)!  And before that we had a meal of Chitina Salmon fillet (from the freezer!) with sauteed Purple Cauliflower (from the freezer) and Snow Peas (from the freezer). 

Next up:  A quart of bok-choy, more salmon, more berries, more snow peas, moose and caribou.

Not only is it a cheaper way to eat - what with the miniscule grocery bills of the last couple of weeks, it is in alignment with my concept of our little homestead and the life we strive to live on it.  And it is my practice of moving into an abundance mindset.

How do you incorporate local or seasonal eating into your life in the late winter/early spring before anything is sprouting out of the cold cold ground?

Homestead Eating: Honey and Caribou

Last week, I stopped by the local spirit-selling store to pick up a beer to drink with the Heart Stew.  Anyone reading that post the entire way through will know that I chose Stone's Arrogant Bastard.  Well, as I browsing the craft beer section, I found my self suddenly distracted by bottles of artisan hard ciders.  On a total whim I bought a 22 oz. bottle of each of the two varieties.  And decided I would cook a meal with which to drink each of them. 

Crispin ® Natural hard apple cider : Honey Crisp was this evening's beverage of choice.  (I have not in fact, received or been promised anything by Cripsin.  I just really liked the cider, and the meal I made, so I'm writing about it.)  The side of the bottle reads "Naturally fermented using a premium blend of unpasteurized fresh-pressed apple juice, not from concentrate, with no added malt, spirit or grape alcohols.  Experience an earthy, fruity bouquet with an authentic cidery aroma and hints of honey.  A yeasty, full-bodied flavor, creamy mouth-feel with a crisp finish and unusual complexity.  Honey Crisp Artisanal Reserve, unfiltered cloudy hard cider, uses racked apple-wine smoothed with pure organic honey, with no added sugar, colorants, sorbate or benzoate preservatives."  You can see why I was intrigued. 

As I was turning over in my mind what meal would do this cider justice, I happened to be talking about food with my sister.  This is a common subject of conversation between the two of us.  She suggested Honey-glazed caribou.  And my eyes went wide with the brilliance of the thought.  She amazes me from time to time, this sister of mine.  She is a devout vegetarian, but has worked in –and run – commercial kitchens where she not only cooked but also developed recipes for meat dishes.  She comes up with brilliant concepts like the proscuitto wrapped medjool dates of Thanksgiving fame, and makes them.  But she doesn't eat them.  And still the brilliance of what she does with flavors that she only smells constantly amazes me. 

And so dinner tonight was Honey-glazed Caribou with Honey Crisp Hard Cider.  And oh my word.  I'm not entirely sure how long it would have taken me to come up with the idea of cooking caribou with honey, but let me tell you, it would have been far too long.  I didn’t use any other spices or flavorings on the caribou, just cooked it with honey from my mother's bees this summer past (or perhaps the one before?).  And it was beyond words, mellow and savory, sweet and wholesome.  Eaten in the same bite with baked potato in salt and pepper and butter; the sweetness and the salt and the pepper bloomed on the tongue.  That delicious gaminess of the caribou was tempered by the flavor of the honey, and kept if from feeling like dessert.  I served it with cabbage sautéed in butter and baked potatoes.  It would have been an entirely Alaskan food meal if not for the sweet potatoes I also cooked to add color to our plates and diets.  The cider was lovely, dry and crisp.  The honey flavors picked up on each other and made glory on the tastebuds, but I think the caribou would have appreciated something a little deeper flavored, and perhaps not quite as dry.  The Darlin'Man says we ought to try it with mead next time.  I am sure there will be a next time.

THE RECIPE:

Take one frozen caribou roast.  It is frozen because you mistakenly thawed ground caribou earlier in the day.  You are determined to use a roast, however, so set aside the ground meat for use in a day or two.

In a cast iron skillet on low heat, whisk together about 2 tablespoons of really good honey, with a generous splash of olive oil and enough water to about 1/3 fill the skillet.

Set the frozen roast in the skillet and let it begin to thaw as the oven below bakes potaoes. 

Turn on the heat under the skillet far before the roast is fully thawed.  Put a large lid over roast.  Ocassionally check it with a fork and flip it over until it is thawed through, cooked on the outside and bleeds when you stick it.  Remove roast to a cutting board.  Pour pan drippings into dog bowl to mix with kibble.

Silce roast in an attempt at crossgrain into maybe ½ inch slices?  Pour some olive oil into the bottom of the same skillet and lay the caribou slices in the oil.  Put a small dollop of really good honey on the upper face of each slice of roast.  I don't know how much I used, perhaps ½ teaspoon each?  Perhaps a teaspoon. 

Turn on the heat to sear the bottoms of the slices as the honey begins to melt.  Turn the slices over.  In a moment or two, the honey and oil will have become a delicious goo mixing with the caribou juices in the bottom of the pan.  Turn the slices over a few times, shaking the skillet as though you are a chef on a cooking show to coat them in the glaze. 

Remove slices to plates, and replace skillet with glaze over high heat, to reduce.  Pour glaze over meat and serve with honey cider, potatoes, and greens.

The long-overdue Chitina IN PICTURES!

Chitina

Copper River at 5am

I caught a fish!  The Darlin' Man helps me pull it in (with the
ridiculously heavy steel pipe of a pole I was using)

There was a water fall across the way.
The river is full of glacial silt.

Fishin'

Then it got chillier, and I kept fishin'.
I may have fallen asleep in this position.

My Ma on the point just upriver.

Me and the Darlin' Man.

When the sun came out!

Harvest Update

This summer has felt a bit wonky for me.  The weather, the timing, the whole thing.  I know rationally that it is mostly because I was gone for 5 weeks of it.  Missing the month of June wasn't just the shock and weirdness of going from one climate to another 4000 miles away, and then back again, missing out on the gradual and dramatic shifts of light and plant growth.  It wasn't just missing the roses and the irises.  It was also, albeit a conscious one, a choice to skip out on my usual early- summer activites.  The hauling garden dirt and top soil, planting, weeding, watering, harvesting.  Add that to a realization that my job is not truly serving my highest purpose, is draining my energy, and causing me to occasionally shut down and be unavailable for my loved ones; and the subsequent so-far-unsuccessful job search and really its no surprise my summer feels a bit wonky.  That and there's already frost in low lying areas in Fairbanks.  And one of the birch on my drive home has started sporting a golden bough...  I'm not quite ready to welcome fall, just yet....

But even with all of that, there has been some summer harvest and preserving going on.

I've been wildcrafting like crazy: yarrow, horsetail, plaintain, clover, and coltsfoot are all drying in my kitchen.  I've been drying continuous batches of (feral) red raspberry leaves in my mother's dehydrator I borrowed last year and have yet to return. ahem.  The calendula I grew from seed is far more prolific, flower wise, than the starts I've gotten from Calypso in the past.   So I've got lots of calendula being dried.  Bachelor buttons too.  Did you know they taste like nutmeg?  I have plans for teas and medicines and facial steams all winter!

Note to self: Next year, do lots of starting from seed!

A massive amount of canned nectarines and peaches await pies this winter, along with the cherries from an earlier post (I got nine quarts, by the way.  So that comes out to more like a $3 quart, which means it is half as expensive - and so much better - than buying canned peaches at the store.  Did you know Fairbanks has food prices comprable to Manhattan?). 

I've eaten so many and many raspberries off the feral canes all over the yard.  There's a quart or two in the freezer.  Next year, the raspberries will be re-tamed and cultivated in their own patch.

I went berry picking near my house, and got a few quarts that are in the freezer awaiting pies.  Can you tell I"m a fan of pies?  Our picking spot is all picked out by now (unfortunately other people know of it!) but there's a few later-fruiting spots that hopefully we'll get to too.

As far as updates go:  That birch gruit ale we bottled?  Turns out I'm real good at making vinegar.  Fortunately I have a friend who likes to drink vinegar for health purposes.  More power to him!  I know what he's getting this year for Yule.
The saurkraut I tried again?  Turns out I'm real good at making mold be really happy. 
The only thing I've been sucessfull with fermenting this season is Kefir.  But it is awesome.

When basil is only minutes old..,

My basil this year is actually growing, if not thriving as it might were it in a green house or a hoop house...  I harvested my first handful of lush fragrant leaves today, and bought heirloom tomatoes at Farmer's Market specially for this meal. 

My tomatoes are still small and green, but there are those up here who heat green houses with woodstoves, stoking the fire every few hours, in order to grow early tomatoes and cukes and summer squash.  We have the light to grow abundantly long before we have the temperature of air or soil.

I chopped the tomatoes and my basil, toasted pine nuts, added fresh ground pepper and salt, drizzled olive oil, tossed it together with al dente pasta, and grated imported italian Parmasean (you know, the kind that comes from Parma).  Enjoyed with a glass of red wine after a stressful encounter; perfect.