Thanksgiving

Around here, Thanksgiving is occasion for a week long celebration. Kim began the preparations for the feast on Sunday, and continued right up until noon on Thursday. The feast lasted most of the day, course after course of the most amazing food. Leftovers and recovery last at least three days afterwards. I guess we have a lot to be thankful for, and it just takes a lot of eating to celebrate it all.

Looking out over the fields, we can see a lot of work yet to be done: garlic and herbs to mulch, waterways to seed down, fencerow trees to turn into firewood, fences to replace. And on the farm at large, we still have a barn to repair, toolshed and shop to organize, hayfields and apples and grapes and so much more to plant. Still, we have come a long ways since we landed here in July of 1999.

When we moved onto the farm, the house was “unlivable”. We installed new windows, fixed the pipes, replaced the faucets, insulated the attic (“living” here all the while). We built greenhouses and harvested our first crop in March. The next year we built another greenhouse, and began farming in earnest; a two acre garden grew rapidly to a five acre farm. We built a walk-in cooler, and then a packing shed. We moved the potting shed out of the basement (our first year, we carried each flat of seeds down to the greenhouse and set it in the paths between the crops). Another greenhouse and more acres turned our little venture into something quite large. We cleaned out the granary and the barn, hauling away dumpster after dumpster of farming detritus, and turned the granary into a tool shed.

Each year, we have tried to do something to improve the farm, rather than just the farming operation. Transplanters and tractors are relatively temporary compared to the land. Some of the projects have been small, like removing old fences that are sinking into the land. Others have been quite large, like seeding the land across the creek to hardwood forest in 2004, and revamping the farm’s entire infrastructure in 2006. Just before Thanksgiving, an earthmoving crew built a water diversion above one of our lower fields and installed drainage tile to quickly remove any water that does gather there. They also repaired the driveway, which had become almost impassable following August’s rains (the neighbors tell us it’s need fixing for more than twenty years.)

Truly, we have much to be thankful for. A beautiful and productive piece of land. A wonderful family. Wonderful, appreciative customers. Good neighbors. The chance to spend the little time we have on this Earth to be living here and working the land. Thank you.

In Kim's Kitchen

If any vegetable shows an ability to stand up to and benefit from hard freeze after hard freeze, it would have to be kale. For the last harvest of the year, we pick the Frosted Kale Tops, which have a fantastically rich and sweet flavor that turns the concept of cooking greens on its head. Kim even got an ice cream headache munching on frozen leaves this week in the upper fields!

One of our favorite potato varieties – and Chris used to maintain a collection of more than fifty varieties at Deep Springs College – Rose Gold Potatoes have a delicious yellow flesh held together by tender red skin. Like the crop of Yukon Golds this year, we planted the Rose Golds late to avoid pests and disease, but the heavy rains of August kept us from hilling them and we’ve got a lot of green bits, which should be cut off and discarded.

This week’s onions are just pretty basic Yellow Onions. Nothing too exciting. But the Rocambole Garlic, with its large cloves that peel with such ease, is worth getting excited about. Store them both dry (most important), cool (pretty important), and dark (if you can).

This Thanksgiving follow-up uses a variety of good winter vegetables:

Turkey Soup with Mint

Cooked chicken could be used instead of turkey.
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 onions chopped (about 2 cups)
8 cups turkey stock or chicken stock
1/4 cup white rice (not cooked)
4-6 carrots, sliced (to make 1 cup)
2 tablespoons chopped ginger
1 1/2 cups diced cooked turkey or chicken
3 tablespoons lemon juice
2 teaspoons hot pepper flakes
1-2 tablespoons finely shredded mint leaves
salt and fresh ground pepper

Heat a large pot over a low flame. Add olive oil and onions, and lightly sweat the onions, about 7 minutes. Add stock, carrots, and rice. Bring to a boil, reduce the heat, and cover. Simmer for 10 minutes then add the ginger, turkey, lemon juice, and hot pepper flakes. Continue to simmer until rice is cooked and vegetables are tender. Salt and pepper to taste and add mint. Serve.

Beets, which evolved from wild beets in northern Europe, have a natural tolerance to cool weather; and like most crops that tolerate the cold, beets taste better the colder it gets. We’ve got some pretty big beets in the mix this year. Poor seed germination meant that the beets actually had too much room to grow! Even the big beets have been nice, tender, and sweet.

Beetific Chocolate-Nut Torte

From The Essential Root Vegetable Cookbook, Stone and Stone, 1991.

The sweet earthiness of the beets combines magnificently with the chocolate, and the beets keep the torte moist.

1 bunch beets, baked and peeled
4 oz semisweet chocolate
5 large eggs, separated
3/4 cup sugar
1 1/2 cups finely ground almonds
1/3 cup fine, dry bread crumbs
Grated rind of 1 lemon

Preheat the oven to 350. Drain the beets and puree in a food processor. Transfer to a fine sieve and set aside to drain again.

Butter a 9-inch springform pan and line the bottom with a round of wax paper cut to fit. Butter the paper and dust lighlty with flour. Set aside.

Melt chocolate over very low heat and, when partially melted, stir with a rubber spatula until smooth. Remove from heat.

Place the egg yolks and 1/2 cup sugar in the bowl of an electric mixer and beat at high speed until yolks are a pale lemon color and creamy. Set the mixer on low speed, add the nuts, bread crumbs, beets, and lemon rind and mix until well blended.

In another bowl, beat the egg whites with a dash of salt until they hold soft peaks. Gradually add the remaining sugar and beat until the whites hold a shape but are not stiff and dry.

Fold the whites into the chocolate mixture in several additions, mixing only to incorporate. Pour into the prepared pan and bake in the center of the oven for 1 hour, or until the cake pulls away from the sides of the pan.

Cool completely in the pan, then run a sharp knife between the cake and the sides of the pan. Remove the sides of the pan and invert cake onto a plate. Remove the pan bottom and the wax paper, then cover with a serving plate.

Before long-distance vegetable transportation became such a dominant feature of our food system, people counted on crops like the Black Spanish Winter Radish to see them through to spring. The blackest vegetable we’ve ever seen, these taste great sliced thinly and served with a sharp cheddar cheese and a dark beer.

Another staple of the old food system, Purple Top Turnips have a rich, earthy flavor. We especially like the roasted or sautéed alongside carrots and beets.

Butternut Squash actually provides the base for most commercial pumpkin pie filling; the distinction between squashes and pumpkins is more semantic than botanical, with “pumpkin” having once been used to denote squash meant for animal feed. Before the days of mechanical grain harvest, pumpkins provide a great way to efficiently harvest and store protein in the form of pumpkin seeds; interestingly, pumpkin and squash seeds also have strong anti-parasitic properties.

Butternut Squash puree with Orange and Ginger

1 butternut squash, cut in half lengthwise, seeded
3 tablespoons butter
1 tablespoon frozen orange juice, thawed
1 tablespoon honey
1 tablespoon minced ginger
1 teaspoon orange zest
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground allspice

Preheat oven to 375. Spray large baking sheet with nonstick spray. Place squash, cut side down, on the baking sheet. Bake until squash is tender, about 45 Minutes. Cool. Scoop out squash and place in food processor, and puree until smooth. Transfer squash puree to bowl. Combine butter, orange juice, honey, ginger, and orange peel in a heavy small saucepan. Boil until mixture is reduced to 1/4 cup, stir mixture into squash puree. Mix in spices, and season with salt and pepper.

Brussels sprouts were first planted in America by Thomas Jefferson (as were so many other vegetables). Almost all of the Brussels sprouts sold in the U.S. today are grown on a short stretch of California coast where they are never touched by the frost which makes them into the sweet and tender morsels in your box. We like them steamed whole and served simply with a pat of butter; cutting an X in the bottom of each sprout will make them cook faster, but it’s really not necessary. The easiest way to ruin Brussels sprouts: overcooking. Cook them just until tender.

Farm Happenings

We had a busy two weeks of bulldozer activity here as the crew from Christopher’s Construction rolled in with an excavator, bulldozer, earthmover, and maintainer. They installed a water diversion structure at the bottom of the asparagus field and above our bottom land to keep any overland water flow from flowing into our highly-productive lower fields. The excavator dug five hundred feet of trench in that same field, where we installed drainage tile – perforated plastic pipe that will carry water out of the soil.

Christopher’s also revamped the driveway, which had washed so severely during the August rains that it was barely passable, and then only with much swerving and dodging of potholes and gullies. Since August, we’ve lost two mufflers and the brake lines on two different vehicles from daily use and abuse on the driveway. A new culvert combined with some reshaping to make driving onto the farm into a whole new experience (and one that should make the UPS and FedEx drivers much happier).

Chris’ dad, fresh from a trek in Nepal, came to visit from Colorado bearing prayer wheels and yak bells. The short trip provided a good excuse for some downtime over the long weekend.