Homestead Eating: Moose and Veggies

Saturday night for dinner, we had Rosemary and red wine moose with rice and veggies.  Early in the day, the Darlin'Man cut off a piece of moose meat from the hindquarter we have in the freezer.  I let it thaw on the counter in a marinade of olive oil, red wine, garlic, rosemary, and salt and pepper.  I sauteed it in cast iron, till the larger peice was rare in the center and smaller was medium rare.  If you ever get a chance to cook your own moose, try it rare even if you usually like your meat more well done.  It really serves the moose well!
I braised a mix of onions, carrots and turnips from Calypso's CSA in some chicken stock and served it over brown rice.  

Bear Creek Winery Black Currant Wine

We had it with a very nice bottle of Alaskan wine.  A few months ago, I bought this bottle to save for a nice meal (disclaimer* I did not receive any incentive from Bear Creek!).  I had planned on breaking it out the next time I got pork chops from Homegrown, and I do think this light red sweet wine would complement pork better than it did the heavier flavors of the moose.  But it was lovely!

Homestead Eating: Lox!

I made Lox last week!  After we got back from Chitina (post up-coming on that whole experience, I promise!) last week, I made the lox and then let it sit in the fridge and cure while we went down to Girdwood for one of my best friend's wedding.  When we got back, it was cured and ready to eat, so Tuesday night we had lox for dinner along with boiled new potatoes and cabbage cooked with butter (both from Calypso's CSA).  I served it with some sour cream and with chopped green onions from the front porch.  So the only part of this meal that wasn't local was the salt and pepper, the sugar used in curing, and the sour cream! 

Gravlax

To make the lox I followed the directions and recipes from Juniper Moon Farm, found here.  I'll let you look at their photos of the process, as their food photography is much more beautiful than mine generally yet manages to be.  I used both dill and fennel from the CSA. 

Darlin'Man cuts Lox

Next time I make lox, for there will be next time for sure!  I'm going to try curing it for only the three days that is recomended.  It wound up being a little on the salty side, and I have heard that the saltiness increases the longer you let it cure...

Dinner!

Serve, and then enjoy with dear ones, eaten mindfully in the presence of fire.

Dinner is served!

I got some cream cheese, so tomorrow I'll be bringing lox and bagels for lunch!

Homestead Eating: Woodland-made sauce

"Carrot Pancake" with lingonberry sauce,
 sour cream, and gruit ale.

I hope and intend that this is only the first of many versions of 'woodland-made' sauce that you will see and I will eat.  Lingonberries, though better known as a Scandinavian specialty, are as common in the woods on this this side of sub-artic circumpolar north as they are over there.  I hear tell you can find them in the northeast (Vermont and such places) though I've no personal knowledge of that.  Every autumn, I gather quarts and quarts of lingonberries.  I generally make a lingonberry sauce at Thanksgiving and look forward to when it entirely replaces ocean spray tm on the table. I am much more regular about, and invested in, this harvest than that of the blueberries that the typical Alaskan is known for.  (Living uphill now from great blueberry flats may see that personal trend change.)
Also growing in the woodlands I gather these ruby berries in are such plants as labrador tea and spruce and birch trees.  There are others of course, but these tend to be prolific and perhaps more importantly, to figure intimately into the profile of this 'woodland-made' sauce.  The last time I was heating up a lingonberry sauce (coincidentally for this same meal on a different day - its a fave), I was not as assiduous as usual in picking out the stray leaves of labrador tea and spruce needles that had wound up frozen with the berries.  The next day I was eating the left over berries (with a spoon, out of the pot; that's how much I adore these tart ruby baubles) - and I noticed little pockets of intense flavor where spruce or labrador tea had mingled with the berry flavor.  It was unexpected and took me aback, but on second thought I rather liked it.
So this time, in preparing the sauce, I intentionally left the leaves and needles in and let the sauce simmer for longer than usual in an attempt to infuse.  It sorta worked.  I'm looking forward to trying again and actually ADDING some of both flavorings, picked in the woods on purpose.  I mean, the flavor was a leeetle bit there, but certainly not enough to hold its own in the meal.  To further the whole woodland sauce concept, I sweetened the sauce with a splash of birch syrup instead of the spoonful of sugar I usually use.

As for the meal as a whole it is (mostly) out of "Sundays at Moosewood," Moosewood Restaurant's ethnic cookbook.  It is definately a favorite kitchen tool and inspiration of mine, as evidenced by the way it beginning to fall apart and the number of bookmarks and notes stuck into it.  It has sections on the ethnic/regional food of various areas : Morroco,  Northern Britain, India, Japan, Southeast US, Northeast US, Hebrew, Bulgarian or Yugoslav, etc etc.  One of my recent favorites is the section on Finland.  I don't know why the idea didn't strike me earlier in my life here in Alaska, but it makes so much sense to look to Scandinavian cultures for traditional food-ways that are compatible with life here in the far north: the climate, the growing season, some of the wild species, the need for winter storage, etc are all so very similar.  It only makes sense their food would resonate here too.  This is an adaptation of traditional carrot pancakes that I gather are usually prepared more like latkes.  Here they're baked in cast iron.  I don't follow the recipe anymore, I've made it so many times, and such things are relative... but I'll tell you how I do it.  For a precise recipe to follow, I cannot recommend "Sundays at Moosewood" enough!

Saute a diced onion in oil or fat (I like to use bacon grease when I have it) in a cast iron pan.
Shred about 5 carrots into a bowl.
Crumble a half cup or more of bread crumbs into the bowl.  If you don't have dried stale bread, dice a slice of whole wheat or sourdough bread.
In another bowl whisk together 5ish eggs and some milk.  Maybe almost a cup?
Whisk in thyme and nutmeg (1/2 -1 teaspoon ish?) and salt and pepper to taste.
Whisk in a half cup of flour.  I use whole wheat.  You could use rye or white or buckwheat.

Mix thoroughly the bread crumbs, carrots and onions in the first bowl.  Then add the egg mixture and toss or mix till thoroughly coated.  Scoop it all back into the cast iron pan (it should be all greasy from sauteing the onions), and bake at 350 ish for about half an hour.  When its done, it'll be a little puffy and golden on the top.  If you take it out too soon and its still goopy when you cut into it, just put it back in for a bit.  I sometimes overcook it, which just means there's a too-brown crust on the cast iron that is sometimes a pain to scrub out, but that the dog likes to eat.

Serve with lingonberry sauce and cultured sour cream (yoghurt would probably be good too).  The eggs and the sour cream are enough protein, but if you really want a winter-warmer style meal, it would be good with bacon, divine with sausage, and would hold up to left over roast or chicken. Wine, beer, and water are all good accompaniments.   Tea too, I'd imagine. Or apple juice.  I look forward to a lifetime of serving this meal to my family on a regular basis, I anticipate it being a weekly meal that my kids will know intimately.  Its healthy (and lingonberries are Vitamin C powerhouses!), easy, quick, AND best of all, can be made almost entirely from ingredients that I anticipate making or growing on this here homestead of ours.  Carrots and onions? Yessirree! They store well for winter too!  Bacon grease or butter? you bet!  Egss. Milk.  Bread.  Granted the wheat flour for both the pancake and the bread will likely be from off-homestead.   And there's always spices.  I will always import spices.

Sugaring Part 2: Syrup

Darlin'Man brings in sap.
Note the yoke.  It is amazing.

We have one quart and one pint of birch syrup sitting in the fridge.  It is so sweet and so so good.

We boiled it down in the crock pot, and on stove top pans.  Both work.  The crockpot requires less supervision but takes longer.  

Next spring, we hope to have a cinderblock woodstove built in the yard with a ginormous pot or two for the boiling.  

And if one of us ever learns to weld, we've got a great idea from the man who runs the brewing supply store.  Weld stainless steel into a giant 100s of gallon vat, paint it in heat absorbent black paint, and set it up basically like a still, so it'll evaporate out the water by the (direct) power of the sun.

Syruping

The Woodsman brings in sap.

more boiling.

Slightly singed syrup. 
Please note the alliteration!

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!

Sugaring : part 1

Sunday, the Darlin'Man put in 19 taps, bought used at Alaska Feed.  There is a section of birch forest at one end of our property that wants to be a pasture.  We need a few cords of wood for this winter, and the next.  And the next.  Beautiful, that.  How needs intersect and mirror eachother.  Create abundance. 
So we decided that we'd tap the trees, harvest the gift of their lifeblood before chopping down and harvesting the gift of their bodies for fuel.  This serves a two-fold purpose:  we get sap to sugar down, and it also keeps the wood drier.  Apparently Russian peasants decimated huge swathes of birch forest across northern Eurasia by over-zealously tapping the trees, taking more sap than the tree could spare.  We are trying to do just this, intentionally.  This way, there'll be less moisture needing to be cured out of the firewood.  So some trees have two taps, and one even has three.

Our running tally so far:
Sunday: 8 gallons
Monday: 12 gallons
Tuesday 12 gallons
Today?

Come to find out, it takes 80-100 gallons of sap for a gallon of syrup, compared to a mere 40 gallons of sap from the maple trees I grew up with in Maine.
I did boil down a couple pot-fuls and got about a cup of syrup.  I wasn't too careful though, and it scorched, turning dark brown.  You can taste the hint of burn, but it is intensely sweet goodness.
I found on HeyWhat'sForDinnerMom's blog, that she had the brilliant idea of evaporating down the sap into syrup with a crockpot.  So wer're trying that.  The stovetop method took WAY too much propane, it was worth it just to try and to see, but is certainly in no way sustainable.  The brilliance of the crockpot method (for me) is that, due to my magic house the energy to run the crockpot during the day while we're gone is literally falling out of the sky.  We'll see how that experiment turns out.


We've got plans laid, in various stages of completion, for birch wine and a couple of birch and birch based ales.  I'll tell you all about it.

We're also drinking sap.  Alot.
Since Sunday, I think I must have drunk a gallon of sap.  Birch sap is suppoed to be an amazing spring tonic, full of micro-nutrients and minerals that are just what the body needs after a long winter.  It tastes like faintly sweet water, and feels so good and so healthful to my body.  It is a constant intention of mine to drink more water, and these past few days I have succeeded in doing so.  It really does make a difference in how my body feels, and how it functions.  


Birch Sap Resources:

HeyWhat'sForDinnerMom  (She's also linked at PunkDomestics)

Taste of the Wild :Recipes!

FrontierFreedom

and The Birch Boy

A gatuitous foodie post

Some pretty pictures of food from, oh, a month ago?  That I meant to post.  And haven't yet.  I'm working on two for-real posts, and you'll see them when I finally finish them.  :)

kitchen window

Flaky biscuits from the Tassajara Bread Book. 
These are the biscuits I grew up on, and (almost) the only ones I ever make.

Salad: mixed greens, mandarins, and halibut with vinagrette.
The Halibut is from Darlin'Man's fishing last summer, I
made it, marinated in citrus and paprika, with rice and asparagus
one night.  Leftovers for salad the next.

Confession of an Alaskan in March

I bought $13 worth of green beans last night.

They're shipped from Mexico - thousands of miles away.  They are not organic.  And they were $2.69/lb.
They must represent dozens of gallons of petroleum prducts.
And right now, I'm ok with that.

They look good!  Even in the summer I can rarely find green beans that are not shriveled, or brown-splotched, or tough looking.  And for the majority of the year I avoid buying outlandishly priced non-local vegetables.  But there's something about March, when the negative two degree weather feels that much colder because its started to be light until 8pm, when the piles of snow and hardpack on roads and driveways is depressing because you're beginning to dream of hoes and seeds.  There's something about March that makes me buy 5 pounds of glorious green beans, and plan a meal around them.  Darlin' Man loves green beans.  I'll buy pork chops from Homegrown, and make herbed potatoes.  So two out of three main ingredients in tomorrow's dinner will be local. 

I aspire, and am working towards, a table that bears primarily food I've grown or bought and bartered from other Alaskans.  I admire William Street Farmhouse for taking on the challenge of eating only Alaskan.  Eating local is important to me, it is fun, and tasty and rewarding.  But there are times in March when I'm glad for the big bag of fresh green beans sitting in my refrigerator. 

a walk in the woods

I came home with about two quarts of lingonberries, a bunch of yarrow, and a decent amount of coltsfoot.

Labor day, I took the day off.  I decided to not expect anything of myself.  So instead of unpacking or cleaning or helping darling man stack the cords of wood he was splitting, I slept in, drank coffee and read a yoga magazine, then drank more coffee and made a big ol' pot of borscht (beets and carrots and potatoes and turnips and cabbage and dill and parsley in chicken stock - all but the potatoes were local!).  Then I left the soup to simmer while I wandered in the woods.  I took Misha, my camera, and my big gathering basket.  When I got back, 3 hours later, I ate late raspberries off the brambles in the yard and made biscuits to have with said -amazing- soup.

(raspberries)

Its amazing, once a husky pup realizes that we're going on a walk, or a hike, or some variant thereof where her person accompanies her on foot in a direction; she becomes this amazingly warm and responsive companion as opposed to the crazed, run off at the drop of a hat, won't come back to calls for hours husky that she frequently is. 
Guess we need more time in the woods :-)

We set off along the overgrown 4 wheeler trail, but then headed off across a rise in the birch forest that surrounds us.  We discovered 5 neighbors I didn't know we had, one of whom had scary handpainted "no tresspassing without a warrant, all violators assume responsibility for injury and death.  Bad dog on premisis" signs on the path and what looked like a thousand gallon propane tank.  I guess all kinds get called to the woods 30 miles outside of town :-)
The other neighbors looked much nicer, but were not at home.

This is crampbark.  Also known as high bush cranberry.  Turns this lovely crimson in the fall and lights up the under-canopy of the forest.  I didn't see much in the areas I was hiking around in, maybe higher up the hill :-)

Good mixed with willow bark for cramps (the bark), and the berries are good eating, and for jellies, and sauces.

husky puppy in the woodlands

Bunchberries

-high in pectin, fruit of the dogwood -

Meese!

I walked on paths and off of them, waded through neck high dried grass, and sunk my feet into deep soft muskeg.  I discovered that on our hill, coltsfoot grows not in the deep soft muskeg like it did at the cabin, but in the crunchy lichen-full muskeg.  I think I saw bear skat. I saw patches of tufty cottongrass that mirrored the sky. I saw two moose cross the road, and the cars stop for them.  We came towards home along the road picking the yarrow growing on the sunny well drained shoulders, and then cut back through the woods to home, where a man had finished splitting and stacking all of the birch and welcomed us with open arms.  Misha saw him as we came into our clearing and wriggle bounded up to him with joyful greetings.

home again, home again!

plums and cherries...

My good friend Stephka has been stealing fruit.  Rescuing more like.

The Georgeson Botanical Gardens is a wonderful place.  But their goal is not to feed people, per se.  And they have fences around the apples plot and the beehive because people were messing with it.  And they just lost a lot of funding.  So my friend has been going and shaking down the little golden plums off of the plum tree, and picking the little translucent cherries -they look like currants (which also grow up here).  She shared a bowl of them with me at work the other day.  I should have taken a picture.  It was so pretty, with the bright red cherries scattered over the yellow plums in the white stoneware bowl. 

Yep, plums grow in Fairbanks.  Who'd a thunk>? And with an established tree or two, one should be able to have enough for jams and conserves and prunes and tartes and things.  They're just a little smaller, about the size of quarters.

Guess who's tracking down and planting plum saplings come spring?

Chokecherries, red raspberries, wild blueberries, golden raspberries, wild lingonberries, high bush cranberries, red currants, black currants, bunchberries, apples in tents or on crabapple stock, and now plums and cherries...  who says fruit can't grow in the north? 

Roast Chicken

Last night I made the first real dinner we've eaten on the homestead. 

We had roasted chicken and root vegetables with a salad.
I had leftover stale storebought rosemary bread I cut up for a stuffing, and I drank wine instead of the beer from the brewery on our way home; but other than that, everything except the garlic, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, the sugar for the brine, and the salt and peper was local.

The chicken was from Homegrown Market, who got it from a local farmer.  The vegetables were alaska grown potatoes (from the store) and Calypso beets, onions, turnips, orange carrots and purple carrots from the CSA.  The salt rub on the chicken had oregano, thyme, savory, and parsley from my front porch herb pots.  The salad was mixed greens and snap peas and radishes and cucumber from the CSA and nasturshims off the front porch. 

Oh, it was so good!

No pictures, which is a shame, but the camera-habit has been misplaced somewhere amongst the bags from Lowes, and the piles of books and pictures waiting for shelves to be built to be placed upon...  when I uncover that habit, I'll pick it back up and wear it :-)
In an etymological sense, the word habit is pretty interesting: it didn't come into usage as "being in the habit of doing something" until the mid 1600's.  Before that it was the article of clothing -you know, like nuns wear.  And it is inter-related with the ideas of possessing and living - to inhabit, for example.
Kinda cool to think about one's daily habits as actions that we wear or that we live in...