The Kitchen Garden Company

In this week’s show we make a Winter Salad of Chicken Thighs with a Blood Orange Vinaigrette.

For this and much more check out the show or subscribe to it via RSS.

If you’re looking for detailed cooking classes taught by a knowledgable chef, who’s available to answer questions, this is a great way to find what you want–for FREE!

Technorati Tags: blood oranges, podchef, podcast, cooking show, cooking classes, gastrocast, winter salad

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Over the past week I’ve had a bit of a chance to work on the polytunnel. Now that the seeds have arrived there is more incentive than ever to move the project along.

This past weeks efforts have included adding a baseboard along the outside, beginning to frame in doorways, anchoring the ribs to the baseboard, revising the ridge detail and tilling the ground inside.

In the next week I am hoping to finish the minor details and perhaps next weekend–weather permitting–stretch the visqueen over the whole thing. It is still very windy at the moment and today it is especially cold. Neither condition of which will work for unrolling the covering.

You can read & see more photos here. The full set of photos is here.

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The Great Corned Beef Experiment begins. Not because of approaching St. Patrick’s Day, but because it is winter and corned beef is so good, we’re making our own. It should be ready around the first of March. We’re curing a whole brisket to turn into Corned Beef for the classic Corned Beef and Cabbage and to make a smoked Pastrami. Both these will take place in a future Gastrocast episode.

Stop in an join us to find out how the experiment gets on.

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This past weekend saw the beginning of our first polytunnel. The project will be documented in pictures here, so keep checking back.

As DIY projects go this one is fairly easy to tackle and the materials are simple to come by. I scoured the web for ideas and never quite came up with what I wanted–that is until last night when I found this. Almost the same design as the one I am creating, but smaller.

As I worked on the tunnel I found the materials–pvc water pipe–has some limitations, like the couplings are easy to break and if you’re not going to use glue (we want to be able to take this down and move it possibly with in year) than you’d better use something like Duct Tape to hold the joints together as you assemble things.

Also, site prep is important. We are limited in choice for locations–it is pretty much where we put the thing or no where. However, a flat, level surface would be nice. Short of getting a tractor in and grading the ground–which it is too wet for and the location is a bit tight–we were stuck with a sloped and dippy spot.

After the perimiter was staked out and lined it was really a simple matter of driving in rebar stakes, plonking on pipe and flexing it into the unions.

Be sure to read more about it, and view the photos here.

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Our Kitchen Garden seeds are ordered and on their way.

We order from two catalogs each year to get a selection, and we’ve never had a problem with the seeds. We also like both of the company’s because the seeds they sell work very well in our Maritime Pacific Northwest Climate.

The companies are Territorial Seed Company and Nichols Garden Nursery.

We’ve taken a risk and ordered seeds for three vegetables we have never been able to grow here before–peppers, eggplant and melons. We are hoping the hoop house/poly tunnel will help us out here, in addition to giving us a larger and better crop of tomatoes. We also purchased Brussels Sprout seeds. All of us around here love them, so it seems a waste not to grow our own and hopefully turn others on to the great taste of fresh sprouts. We also like the verticality of them, given the tiny size of our garden patch this year.

The kitchen garden is both about seasonality and maximizing space. There is no reason not to be able to grow decent vegetables in any reasonably sized space–certainly enough for a family of 4 and neighbors.  We tend to splash out a bit more because many of the vegetables and herbs we grow make their way onto the plates of our customers or as barter items for things we can’t grow or produce. This year will not only be about experimentation with the poly-tunnel, but also adding more value to what we do produce by further processing the items.

We’ll keep you informed.

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I’m not going to write much about this here, because cause you can read what I’ve written here.

But if you eat meat, raise animals, have pets, it is in your best interest to inform yourself about the NAIS plan and act. As it stands now, this is a costly system which benefits no one but the ones who are proposing it.

The best safe-gaurd to insure the quality of the food you eat is to 1) grow it yourself, 2)buy locally from farmers you can visit and trust, or 3) learn and understand how food is produced in the US and then act to prevent things from getting any worse, then do numbers 1 and 2. Repeat.

Please listen to the Gastrocast Special Edition on the topic of the NAIS. If the plan goes forward in July of 2006 then farmers will be ruined, food quality will plummet, vital natural diversity supported by farm land will be lost to mega-corporations seeking profit, and our food will be largely imported–much of it is already. It may seem like food will cost less and be safer, but it will cost very much more in the long run, without any significant gains in safety.

Terrorists will not target small, local food sources. It won’t make sense. Help protect local economies and buy local. Let’s learn the lesson of other countries–consolidation of a nations food supply to a handfull of businesses is wrong and doesn’t work. It puts the nation at more, not less, of a risk.

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I wanted to take a minute to write about our pet project. The Kitchen Garden Company is extremely proud to sponsor The Gastrocast Podcast and the Cookbook of recipes from the first 26 or so episodes.

First, a bit about what a podcast is. A podcast is a, generally, free downloadable audio or video show which is very much like radio. The difference is that, while many radio shows are podcasting, anybody can produce a podcast for very little cost. Furthermore podcasts reach an global audience instead of a geographically limited one, like radio. There are podcasts available for just about anything you might be interested in.

There are two ways of listening to a podcast. You can click on a link to the sound file on the show’s website. Or, you can subscribe to the show and have it delivered automatically to your computer at anytime of the day or night. This subscription takes place via an RSS feed which you subscribe to through an podcatching client such as iTunes, or Juice. Once the file is on your computer you can listen to it there, or load it onto your mp3 player and take it anywhere.

Some of our current favorite podcasts are The Wiggily Wigglers–a gardening podcast, Librivox Audio Books, and Eat Feed among many others.

The Gastrocast is a show “about food, cooking and the politics of what we eat.” Each week the show tackles a broad range of subjects and cooking techniques. Generally the first half of the show is news, life and culinary information. There are two recurring segments: the cheese board, which introduces cheeses and cheese care, and the ingredient of the week discussing unusual or seasonal food items, or ingredients being used in the shows cooking segment. Following this there is a cooking segment dedicated to bringing some new or interesting dishes into your kitchen. Everything in the cooking program is explained and fully photographed.

One of the best parts of the whole experience, we feel, is that you can contact Chef Neal Foley, aka The Podchef, via email or through the show notes’ comments on the blog. A great many questions, comments and suggestions have been left and this feedback has helped to improve the show and create a mini “community”, albeit an international one, around the Gastrocast.

Because of the number of requests for the recipes on the show to be written down we decided to produce a cookbook. Each recipe from among the first 26 episodes of the show is presented with full color photographs, tips, hints and clear, easy to follow text. The resulting 208 page book, which was written and photographed by Chef Neal and produced by The Kitchen Garden Company is hopefully the first of many such projects.
The cookbook is available as a free PDF download from the podcast blog-site, but for those wanting a hardcopy we’ve produced a full-color, paperback cookbook. I encourage those who are interested to check either of these options out.

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The sad state of gardens in winter is no reason to abandon them completely. It may be wet and mucky out, or they may be covered in snow–a blessing we rarely have here in the Pacific Northwest–but that is no reason to abandon the source of some of the best tasting vegetables you can get: your own garden.

It has been so wet here lately. I went out to the lower garden to check the few remaining cabbages which had survived the frosts and one mild snow we did have and I had to wade across the garden’s mud. Out of twenty or so neglected cabbages I was able to salvage 6–three Savoy and three Red. Beautiful and large and still perfect in January despite wind, rain and freeze. I wish we had some pigs because the remaining cabbages would be a treat for them. Instead I’ll have to tromp back down there and gather up the last few cracked and slimy heads for the chickens. They’ll make short work of things.

Today, if it is not raining to much, and as there isn’t much going on, I think I must go out and turn the compost piles. I’ve got more coffee grounds to add and it seems like they need to be rotated. I’m no compost authority but we do end up with some nice stuff for our efforts and it sure beats throwing everything away.

The Chickens get most of our kitchen waste. Meat scraps and bones go to the ever waiting dog. But without the compost pile where would we throw the onion tops and bottoms, the grapefruit skins and all the other stuff the dog or chickens won’t or shouldn’t eat? A compost pile is also a great way to get rid of those shreaded tax reciepts and extra cardboard that piles up occasionally.

After the compost is turned I’d better turn my hand to the greens which are springing up in the mild winter weather we’re having. I’d planted some lettuces and Kale in September as an experiment to see when–in the Spring–they would come up, if at all. Well it’s the beginning of January and they’re getting to be two inches tall. There is also quite a bunch of Mizuna springing up which needs to be protected until it is large enough to use in a salad or stir-fry.
I think I’ll use the wire hoops I made last spring to help hold row cover and netting over the strawberries and young cabbages. If the wind doesn’t batter the plastic to bits I think they could be okay. If it becomes too much of a problem I’ll have to come up with something better. Someday I hope to have a Glass Blower make some of these Bell Cloches for me:

They would provide the necessary warmth and protection to start or finish crops in winter or spring. There are similar products available made from plastic but I don’t believe they are as durable or friendly as ones made from glass.

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Things are slowly getting up to speed and I hope everything will be switched over by the end of the week. There are just a few more things to get worked out with Wordpress before we can fully close off the old site. Until then it is still active as well.

Meanwhile winter wears on and the weather wears thin. I am hoping to be able to pick up the materials to begin building our hoop-house soon. Be sure to check back.

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Gastrocast #40Originally uploaded by podchef.

A test blog using a recent Gastrocast flickr photo.

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