In the garden: June 25

Joining in with SouleMama for a tour of what is growing and thriving and green:

You will notice that I just discovered an app that lets me
write on photos!

The garden this year is still small, but its growing food (and flowers)!  It is a nice change, this year, to actually be home this year - instead of away at Yoga School - through the heart of the summer.  Wildfire smoke notwithstanding.

Fireweed, calendula, and baby sunflowers

You can't see it in this photo, but there's parsley here, just about ready for a trimming that will be the first harvest from the garden!

This is what I'm probably most excited about!  I planted a couple dozen strawberry plants last year, and was so good about pinching off all the flowers, so that the plant's energy could go into root growth.  And it worked!  16 of them came back this year, and a couple are sending out runners.  Many had an abundance of delicate white flowers, and are now showing promise of a handful of fruit!

My dear friends over at Maple&Me gave me starts of a Siberian tomato from local heirloom seed folks at Pingo Farms. 
I planted these two out in the garden, and the rest in pots on the upstairs (sunny! warm(er)!) porch:

We shall see, but so far, the garden planted tomatoes seem happier and more robust and vigorous.  Which totally disproves my hypothesis that they would be happier in containers on the porch.  Isn't science fun??  The real test, of course will be in another year or three when we get the greenhouse built!


P.S.  All photos were taken at 10 pm last night.  Three cheers for the Solstice sunlight that penetrates through the thickest smoke!

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??

Homestead Eating: Dandelion Cookies!!

I suppose that for the most part, dandelion season is done.  most of the sunny-yellow-flowers-producing plants in my yard are now clouds of delicately ephemeral and amazingly tenacious parachuted seeds.

but its never too late to brag, right?

Dandelion cookies = delicious

they're even better with milk

Step 1: find dandelions that do not grow by exhaust-emitting-monsters frequented roadways nor are ever treated with pesticides and the like.  plant poison = people poison

Step 2: gather a bunch of dandelion flower heads.

Step 3: chop off the green bits, so that you have a half cup (or more!! I like more!) of fluffy yellow and white petals and petal-fuzz

Step 3: mix together the following:

really soft butter (and oil to make up the difference) - 1/2 cup

raw honey - 1/2 cup

2 eggs

1tspoon vanilla

1 cup flour (I used white)

1 cup rolled oats

your dandelion petals

Step 4: drop by spoonfulls onto a cookie sheet and cook in oven at 375 degrees for about 10 minutes

Step 5: Eat!

CSA Cooking: Tabouleh

Tabouleh is esssentially a peasant food from the middle east.  We got extra parsley in our share this week, and we have the addition of most of my mother's share (some was given to friends!) while she is out of town, and I chose oregano and a mint for our respective herb choices.  Plus a bunch of baby bunching onion scallions gave us this: 

I was going to dry the herbs for winter use.  I really really was.  I took them to the dehydrator and I just couldn't do it.  They smelled so good!

So instead I made a Tabouleh variation.

First, boil/cook bulghur (a form of cracked wheat, essentially).  Leaving it a little chewy is best.  I used twice the water to the dry bulghur, and it was too much water.  It basically cooks like rice, but quicker.

Chop all of your herbs and onions.  The 'real' recipes for this that I have seen call for a couple tablespoons of parsley and a teaspoon of mint with chopped onion and tomato.  Well, I didn't have tomato, but I did have baby onions with long scallions.  And really, this dish ought to be all about the herbs!  I love traditional peasant foods because they are so easy to make variations: they were born out of whatever happened to be available, and so they are very forgiving :-)

So I added oregano, and used up ALL the parsley!

Toss it together in bowl with the (cooled) cooked bulghur, and pour on generous amounts of good olive oil and lemon juice.  Stir it some more so that its all stirred together and coated in juices and yummy.  Salt and pepper if you wish (I do!).

Its good immediately or the next day.  Like tonight when I get home after teaching class...

Dried Summer Sunshine

Wild rose, chiming bells, red clover, fireweed

I made midwinter herb mixes for friend and fellow yoga instructors at my studio last week.  At one point I'd intended to gift them as Solstice presents, but then life – in the form of a snowstorm, a truck, and a bone-broken sister – got in the way.  It is a good gift, too, though for the starting of the new year.

I made a few mixes: a headache tea with red clover (useful for thinning the blood and relieving stress), chamomile (to calm and sooth), and mint (to clear space and stimulate the stomach meridian.  Mint is good for digestion, yes?  And the stomach meridian is responsible for digesting, not only food, but anything that comes in through the sense doors – including thoughts).

LadyTime tea was made with red raspberry leaves (a uterine tonic), wild arctic chamomile (soothing again), and wild violets (which contain some female hormones and are lovely to balance one's mood.)

And then I made a few variations of flower facial steams using combinations of chamomile, wild arctic rose (similar to the beach roses of the east coast, but growing inland), fireweed, chiming bell, bachelor's buttons, calendula, white clover, yarrow and red clover. 

I also made a Clear Complexion facial steam with horsetail (apparently amazing for the skin in a steam, this is the first year I've harvested it), coltsfoot (a staple in a Renaissance lady's beauty regimen – you know, along with belladonna and lead.  The only difference being that coltsfoot is good for you, and worked to make skin more healthy instead of less), plaintain (for its anti microbial and healing and drawing-out properties), calendula (for healing), yarrow (good for oily skin and blemishes, also healing), and arctic chamomile (for the soothing). 

Facial steams are a practice that every year I intend to cultivate regularly, and every year (so far) I only cultivate occasionally.  Here in the oh-so-dry and oh-so-cold northern Interior, facial steams can be tonic for the whole system, breathing in and basking in warm wet air is like a mini sauna for the soul. 

All the herbs I used were ones that I either grew or collected (with the exception of augmenting my sparse chamomile stash with a bit from the health food store – note to self, remember to harvest chamomile BEFORE it gets too cold to do so).  It is such a joy and gift to be able to share a little dried summer sunshine with those around me as we wait for the sun to ever so slowly return to us.  Today marked 4 hours and 19 minutes between sunrise and sunset.

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.

Homestead Eating : Salmon

Duck eggs make the smoothest, softest, silkiest quiche imaginable.  It is like holding melted velvet in your mouth. 

A year and a half ago, we traveled to Italy for a dear friend's wedding: in our travelling we ended up in Cinque Terre, in a restaurant above a cove.  It had tiny tables and kitschy wall art - but amazing local wine and fresh fresh fish.  Darlin'Man had a dish that was sliced potatoes under a filet of fish, drizzled in olive oil with tomatoes and capers and olives and herbs and things.  All wrapped in parchment paper and utterly delicious.  I've made a few versions of it since.  My latest plan was to take the mediteranean idea and run with it a bit, using salt preserved lemons.  I've run across a number of recipes using salt preserved lemons in greek and morrocan style fare recently as well; so I bought organic lemons (since you're eating the rind) and packed a quart jar with lemons and lemon juice and lots of salt.  They are supposed to ferment. When I opened the jar to use some - having waited many weeks - I was greeted with a thick colony of mold.  The fungal spores were happy.  My lactobicilli living in lemons?  Not so much.  It broke my heart a little, as it so closely mimicked the outcome of my post-harvest attempt at saurkraut, and an attempt at wine a few years ago.  So, I took out a head of red cabbage and made a new jewel-colored batch of saurkraut.  The brine looks good so far; hopefully this will be my fermented redemption...

Meanwhile,  I had a whole salmon (thawed) sitting on my counter and no brined lemons.  I filleted the salmon with my ulu - best knife ever - and did surprisingly credibly.  I usually have the Woodsman do my filleting.  I peeled the zest off of a(nother) lemon, and went with that instead.  Potatoes lining a baking dish, filets on it, zest and oregano and thyme and basil, all drizzeled over with garlic olive oil.  Baked.
Meanwhile, I simmered the freezer burnt bits of the salmon for the husky pup.  Keep in mind that this is salmon from the summer before last summer.  I'm really quite amazed at the overall lack of freezer burning.  And because I'm not that great of a filet-er (and I hate the thought of wasting wild salmon, however little), I cleaned the fish carcass, scraping bits of good meat off the ribs and spine with my fingers.  These I saved and set aside in a bowl... for quiche.

I mixed up a vinagrette.  I am out of balsamic vinegar - a staple on the shelf by my stove.  I had a moment of almost panicked disbelief.  When I say balsamic is a staple, I mean I use it damn near every day. But, as is the way of most crises, it led me to rely on my own resourcefulness.  I realized that I actually had a jar of nasturtium vinegar I made last summer, sitting nearly unused on the pantry shelf.  Let me tell you, olive oil and nasturtium vinegar vinegrette is delightful - a hint of spicy summer flavor from the flower infusion adds a quality entirely different from, and just as good as, a good balsamic.

Between the four of us, of course we ate all the salmon.  I had some kale and some carmelized onions in the fridge, so what else was I to do with the scraped off salmon bits the next night but make a quiche?  As the french might say "mais, naturallement!"  I had stopped by the local meat shop, Homegrown (which also sells a variety of other locally produced food and artisanal items), after yoga a few days before.  I was hoping to pick up some eggs, as I would rather support the local egg sellers - regardless of whether the feed they use is organic or not! - than pay the same price (food prices are ridiculous here in the interior) for 'organic free range' at the grocery store.  I felt like I'd hit the jack pot when I was able to snag the last carton of eggs.  It wasn't till I brought it up to the counter and noticed that the top of the commercial carton wasn't actually fitting over the eggs that I realized they were actually duck eggs.  Even better!  I've heard great things about duck eggs, especially for baking.  And I can now say that they live up to every expectation that every glowing blog post or book chapter ever created in my over-active gastronomic imagination.  They are really good.  Maybe not so good that I'll plan on introducing ducks to our land that lacks any open water...  but certainly so that I'll go out of my way to barter for or to buy them!

Springtime welcomes the light

This table cloth is linen with a gorgeous cross stitched border.

  I found it at Value Village! Can you believe that?

  I think I splurged on it - paying about $5.

There is one hole about the size of a dime in it,

but otherwise its in great condition!

Spring is here.  I know this because the Equinox has passed.  It was expected of course, but somehow not anticipated.  It managed to sneak up on me in total surprise.  No bonfire marked it, mostly due to scheduling.  But also in this weird weird spring where my father in Connecticut has 80 degree days while we have twenty below zero days...  The mid way seasonal balancing shift somehow doesn't feel to be happening.  I notice the sun though.  It is light at home of an evening now.  I hadn't noticed it really and truly until this week - maybe because the last few weeks I havent been getting home till 11 at the earliest, what with the darlin' man's play. 

Anyway, I did quietly celebrate the coming of spring, for myself.  I did a facial steam last night.  It was amazing.  Last summer I gatherered and dried all sorts of herbs, some for medicinal purposes primarily, and some specifically for facials.  I had grand plans of frequent steams, knowing how good they are in the depths of winter.  And you know what?  last night was my second one this year.  But I'm convinced.  This needs to be a regular thing! 

Last summer's wildcrafted herbs on a shelf in my kitchen.

Besides which, facial steams are really one of the easiest things in the world. All you need is a bowl (or pot or pan), herbs (they don't have to be your own wildcrafted either! Herbs out of a tea bag or from the grocery store or healthfood store will do great too!), boiling water, and a towel or cloth to make a tent over your head and the bowl.

The mix of herbs I used was Yarrow, coltsfoot, and pineapple weed (a wild cousin to chamomile, I generally call it chamomile as I don't really like the name pineapple weed).  After mixing it together, on first smell I realized that this is basically the exact same mix I make up for the Darlin' Man for tea when he's getting sick, or for myself if I've gotten sick.  Preventative herbal medicine is something I'm on top of for him, but I rarely do it for myself until I'm down and out cant get out of bed sick.  Hmmm.  Maybe that's another thing I should work on!

Medicinally, I use Yarrow for colds and fevers.  Coltsfoot is good for coughs and lung congestion and asthma - its frequently smoked for lung ailments, though I'm not sure I would ever suggest that.  And Chamomile is just wonderful and soothing and a tonic.  Breathing in the steam, I felt the cough that's been starting to tickle my lungs easing up, and my sinuses felt like they were taking the most luxurious bath in the world! 

So why did I use these particular herbs for a facial steam, if they're such great internal medicine?

Well, yarrow is reccomended as a steam for oily and/or blemished skin.

Mine is definately oily.

Chamomile is just lovely and wonderful.

As for coltsfoot, Culpeper* says the "powder of the roots taketh away all spots and blemishes of the skin.  It were well if gentlewomen would keep this root preserved to help their poor neighbors." (qtd in Schofeild, Janice. "Discovering Wild Plants: Alaska, Western Canada, The Northwest." 195-196)



I also baked a pie last night:

Love People.  Cook them tasty food.  (bumpersticker from Penzey's Spices).

A few days ago, I made myself a cherry gallette.  Out of a jar of cherries that I had canned last summer when they were a good price at the store.  I find that I adore pie from home-canned cherries.

But the real triumph was my crust.  My pie crusts have somehow been rather blase of late.  Perfectly functional, but not the amazing flaky goodness they ought to be.  Now, I've been making pie crusts since I was a fairly young girl.  As a teenager, my mother and I would have pie baking contests in apple season ~both using the same recipe for filling and crust~ and my crusts eventually won out.  But the last year or so, they just havent' been there.  I think I was over mixing the butter.  At any rate, the galette crust was divine.  I felt vindicated in my sense of being a superior pie maker.  And this one for the birthday apple pie was good too.

The Darlin' Man has a pick up rehearsal tonight, and it is also the director's birthday, so I made a pie.  I'm quite pleased with the way the overlapping stars on the top crust turned out.  I used a star cookie cutter, and just cut them out of the rolled-out top pie crust, and then overlapped them over the fruit. 

 

Star Pie.

*Culpeper was a 17th century English botanist, herbalist, physician, and astrologer.  His "Herbal" is much quoted and has some good information.  But Gerard, his near- contemporary, is much more reliable, thorough, and holistically applicable.  Culpeper didn't like women much.