The Kitchen Garden Company

Scapes come in many forms. They are the flowering stem of hardneck garlic and in the case of the photo–shallots. Their window of availability is now: end of May through mid-June. They are the by-product of the farmer’s desire to have his garlic bulb. By cutting the scape off the energy goes to the garlic head, or bulb, instead of the flower.
Once thrown away, a new awareness has come about that they are delicious to eat, easy to prepare and profitable for anyone who grows garlic. However, every year CSA subscribers find themselves with more scapes than they know what to do with or how to cook. There are very few recipes for them on the web, and most of those are the same.

Have a listen to Gastrocast #60 for some alternative ways to cook this wonderful vegetable with its slight crunch and mild hint of garlic sweetness. Of course the podcast is free, but you have to listen to me rant about the cost of fuel, what it will do to our food scene, and why now–more than ever–we must buy from local and sustainable sources.

Technorati Tags: sustainabiltiy, rising fuel costs, podchef, gastrocast, scapes

Popularity: 10% [?]

My Pancetta and Guanciale are finally done! Seven days in dry cure and two weeks hanging in the salty spring breeze by the bay–I can’t wait to begin cooking with them. These went into the curing cupboard the day the Chorizo came out.

When I took these out I put a Wiltshire Cured Ham in to air-dry for a few days before I smoke it.  Right now though it is pouring rain which is great for the gardens, but has dampened the spirit around here a bit. The chickens aren’t liking it at all. Least of all because no one is outside weeding and throwing them all the bug-filled juicy clumps of weeds.

Technorati Tags: pancetta, guanciale, cured meat, pork, salumi, home processed meat

Popularity: 11% [?]

When I was 13 or so, about the age my oldest daughter is now, I took a job on a local farm. Where I grew up we were surrounded by farms and orchards, but our 2 acres wasn’t adjacent to any farms itself. For one reason or another the farm I was employed at for the season was a 30 minute bike ride away.

Myself and three others worked for a family who raised all sorts of vegetables. We arrived before 7 and worked until the heat of the day stopped us–around 12:30 or one and if it cooled off, sometimes later.

I don’t remember how large the farm was, and really didn’t have much to do with planting, just harvesting. It seems to me there were corn fields not close to the farm that we had to drive to. At some point it must have been a dairy farm because there was a milking shed, but I don’t remember livestock, just a portion of the barn turned into a market for customers to drive up to and buy freshly picked produce. Sometimes we pickers were there to help with sales. I remember the farmer, his wife and little children–probably 5 and 7–treated us like we were family. We could eat whatever we picked–if we wanted to–and when it was raining hard, or if we arrived early and the farmer wasn’t ready we could wait in the sparse utility room in the farmhouse.

There was a pond somewhere on the farm, or adjacent to it because often while picking we would mitch off and go for a swim. I remember a huge bees nest we couldn’t help aggitating each time we passed. We could do this because we weren’t paid by the hour, but by the bushel and by mid morning we knew how much of what we needed to pick and what was needed first. Each day we would pick a variety of crops. Berries, Tomatoes, Eggplants, and 6 or seven kinds of peppers–sweet, hot, bell.

Somewhere between the beestings, the prickly spines on the eggplants or tricking a new picker by placing one sweet pepper on a bushel of hot ones, picking it, biting in to it and telling the boy to have one they were good. . . . I was infected. Infected with the sweet smell of soil, the herby vegatative smell of the garden in the heat of summer, the taste of produce unlike any I had had before: ripe, crunchy, heady with flavor. And the hot summer exhaustion of hard work, stolen moments in a dusty barn, and the livestock and wildlife around a small farm.

I had tried my hand at gardening on my own before. Although both my parents were children from large farming families we did not live on a farm and they grew flowers, not food. I sated my love for fresh vegetables and the bliss of well laid out garden beds by stealing vegetables from the garden the next door neighbor carved out of the woods on their back acre. At dusk in the summer I would creep from the green canopy and make my raid and wander the paths in the gloaming light, selecting whatever looked good to eat fresh and raw. Then came my summer of bushel after bushel of all sorts of vegetable. Who needed to pack a lunch, there was so much to graze on.

I only worked one summer for the farmer. Don’t remember what I did after that. I can remember almost every detail of the farm, what was grown, how to get there and what we did each day, but I can’t remember the times after that. Somehow all this has lain dormant until today, a cold spring day with wierd weather. I’ve been outside wishing for the same heat in the garden beds as in the Polytunnel. Wishing more were ready to harvest. Wishing I had enough land, produce, customers to have a team of kids shuttling around the place with old wooden bushel baskets, mitching off to go for a swim in the bay, and learning how sweet life can be when your connected to the land and the source of what we eat.

Technorati Tags: memories, childhood, farming, farms, produce, vegetabes, farmlife

Popularity: 8% [?]

This week’s Gastrocast is out–the cooking show about “food, cooking and the politics of what we eat”. Apart from talking about things going on with the company, the island, and the garden we cook two Rhubarb dishes–A Rhubarb & Sweet Cicely Fool, and Grilled Pork Chops with Rhubarb Cumberland Sauce. It’s spring turning into summer, it’s food out of the garden and it’s all good.

Technorati Tags: gastrocast, podchef, rhubarb, gardening, culinary podcast, cooking show

Popularity: 21% [?]

Okay gardeners. Now is the time to deal the deals and talk the talk. Haying season is almost here and the best source of free garden soil improvement is up for grabs. Yes, I am talking about last years hay. As farmers clear out their barns of old or broken bales to make room for fresh fodder you have a chance to strike a deal with them to your gardens benefit. Most of the times the farmers will give the stuff away if you haul it.
Why? Because often farmers don’t care enough about utilizing what they have–there’s just so much of it and only so much time. . . . So, get on the list now before things really heat up in a month or so and the haying begins. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you all what use are old bales. Do I?

Old bales are great for making impromptu sheds–just stack um high and find a roof. We used an arrangement like this years ago to house two calves for several months. Likewise, old bales make great mulch–under strawberries, on garden paths, over newly planted seeds, in the compost pile. If you have chickens, and I hope you do, old hay is great in the chicken yard–make sure it hasn’t been damp or moldy. Just lay it in thick and the chickens eat it, forage for bugs in it, and it covers their waste while helping improve the soil. And for dormant garden beds, where the soil needs ammendment, you can’t go wrong in covering with a thick layer of old hay. Don’t worry about your cover crops coming up through it either. It may delay things for up to a week, but once through the hay, any crop will grow like normal.

So get out into the countryside, visit your local farms, get on the old hay list and start building community relationships and quality, organic soil.

Technorati Tags: hay, gardening, local farms, soil improvement

Popularity: 8% [?]

Last week we got a half pig from a local farmer and spent our “spare” time butchering and  turning it into some fantastic ham, roasts, hocks, bacon and sausages. There is no more holistic food experience than taking a once live creature and preparing it for eating and sharing.
The bacons–one section of belly as a traditional dry-cured, unsmoked bacon; another section of belly dressed up as pancetta and the two jowls from the pig’s head as Guanciale: a specialty italian-style bacon–will be ready to come out of the cure tomorrow and get hung in a special wooden drying cabinet we built on the north side of the house to take advantage of the cool bay breezes to dry age for a few weeks.

The sausages–Spanish Chorizo pictured here–were hung to dry for a few days. Because summer is coming on and we don’t have ready access to a smokehouse, the ham is being cured and will probably be frozen for completion at a later date before a celebration worthy of its size and depth of flavor.

You can read more about the adventure here. And have a listen to Gastrocast #56 where I speak about the experience a bit.  If all goes well in the future we shall be expanding our pig skills more and hopefully be bringing our own Kitchen Garden Company reared pork and pork products into the public arena.

Technorati Tags: pork, pigs, butchering, gastrocast, farming, sausages, chorizo

Popularity: 7% [?]

Spring appears to have given away to summer and we are left scrambling to plant everything to take advantage of the hot weather. All the tomatoes, eggplants, chillies and basil have been planted in the polytunnel and the average temperature in there is 85 degrees F.

Outside it has hit 70 degrees F. here today and I have been getting a nice sunburn tilling the final bed of the garden. It’s so hot, I’m afraid it may have done something to the little Mantis Tiller we use to keep the beds nice and fluffy. Too bad because I was almost done with the last bed when it quit.

The lettuce in the polytunnel has held up well and is getting giant. We have hardly had a chance to use a fraction of it, which is okay because if it lasts it will tie in nicely with the greens coming up outside which are sorely behind. A good dose of this hot sun should boost growth everywhere.

The rhubarb is ready for harvest–at least some of it. I am hoping the rest will hang on till the strawberries are ripe, as the bushes are overloaded with blossoms. All of this is reminding me I should head out and pick some radishes. . . .

Technorati Tags: gardening, polytunnel, kitchen garden, growing

Popularity: 20% [?]