A Few Loose Ends

Happy New Year, everyone!  My conscience has been nagging at me to follow up with results from several things I've written about over the last year or so.  I'm not good about getting around to posting about things I say that I will.  So I figure I'll clear my backlog with the first post of the year and then I can get back to semi-regular posting.

Leek seedlings
Last spring I tried a somewhat fiddly method of starting leek seedlings, with the aim of encouraging them to grow long and tall before they were transplanted out.  The idea was that a long seedling, transplanted deeply, wouldn't need hilling to make the plant develop a nice long white section, which is the best part of the leek.  Well, it worked and it didn't.  The seedlings indeed grew long and tall.  I duly transplanted them with just a couple inches of their full length showing above the ground, and then ignored them for the whole growing season.  Disappointingly, when I dug up a few this fall, they had very minimal white parts.  It seemed to me as though the plant turned anything planted below the soil line into root.  So this was a bust.  Hilling seems to be required to grow beautifully long white leeks.  I'm still looking for the best way to do this in my long narrow garden rows. 

Tomato trellising
Remember my enthusiasm to try a new tomato growing technique that I learned about at last year's PASA conference?  I've got results.  The trellising system worked fairly well as the plants grew tall.  It took some diligence to keep up with pruning extra branches and clipping the remaining ones to the wires.  The problem came when the plants started setting fruit and bulking them up.  I had all my trellises in short rows, which meant that only two 7' stakes were holding up three tomato plants each.   Gradually the weight of the plants pulled the stakes in towards each other, making all the wires sag.  This could be only minimally remedied by adjusting the wires at the stakes.  Next year I plan to grow my tomatoes in longer rows, with stakes every ten feet or so.  Since all but the end stakes will be supporting plants to either side, the growing weight of the plants should exert equal pulling in both directions, so that the stakes remain upright.  I may try angling the stakes outward at either end of the rows to give them more resistance.  The sagging wasn't a disaster, but it looked kinda shabby and cut down on airflow around the plants, which might have been a very bad thing in a blight year.

Burdock
I've become a fan of burdock, aka gobo, for its delicious flavor and its soil amending properties.  When I wrote about them more than a year ago, there was some question in the comment section as to whether or not the parts of the taproot left in the ground would regrow in the spring and form a new plant.  The results this spring were negative - in the sense that I saw no plants emerge above ground where we'd dug out the roots.  This is a positive as far as I'm concerned though, because it means we can have our soil amendment and eat it too.  Those portions of root that are too deep to dig out rot in place, adding organic content to the subsoil and greatly improving our clay soil in the process. So burdock is not forever once you plant it, provided you harvest the root.  Those roots we didn't harvest definitely came roaring back this spring, ready to set seed.  And this is not a plant whose seed I want to save for myself, thank you very much.  It took more than one severe cutting down to the ground to encourage the plants to call it quits.  Burdock produces a fair bit of biomass in the second year, and the greens are marginally of interest to the chickens.

Acorns sprouting and different oak species
This one is owing for quite a while.  In fall of 2010, I aggressively gleaned acorns from oaks in parks and off my own property to use as feed supplement for my laying hens.  I went for a certain oak species that produced beautiful, large, meaty acorns, and I managed to gather some 60 pounds of them.  Unfortunately, it was mostly wasted effort.  The acorns that looked so big and worthy to me did not pass muster with the hens. They pecked rather half-heartedly at them after I crushed them by hand.  It was my mistake.  Since they obviously enjoyed the taste of the small, poorly looking acorns produced by the oak tree at our property line, I assumed that the acorns that look so much better to my eye would please them just the same.  Not so.  There are more than five hundred species of oak in the world.  And there's enormous variation in the tannin content of the seed of different sorts of oak tree, and even between individual trees of the same species.   Tannins give a bitter flavor to foods.  These compounds can be leached out of acorns well enough to make them palatable to humans, but that's not a process I'm willing to go through for the chickens' sake.  Some acorns are naturally "sweeter" than others, and obviously the oak on the edge of our property produces tasty ones.  So I've gone back to only collecting these rather sad looking acorns, which the hens do appreciate.  My advice is to definitely run a test on any acorn available to you before you go to the trouble of collecting more than a handful.  See if your livestock will eat the acorns from any given tree, and don't rely on appearance as an indicator of feed quality.

A note too about storing the acorns you do collect.  Do not keep them in plastic bags or buckets, even if left open and uncovered.  The acorns give off enough moisture so that the ones on the bottom will start to sprout in just a week or two.  A canvas or burlap bag will breathe enough to prevent this, as will baskets made of wire or natural fibers.


If there's something else I promised to report back on and have forgotten about, please remind me.  I'll do my best to follow up!

A Good Gleaning Haul

Yesterday while running an errand I noticed that the Bartlett pear tree around the corner from our home was hanging heavy with fruit.  The owners of this property have put up a "free pears" sign on their lawn about half the years since we've been living here, but it hasn't been consistent.  Well...I wanted those pears, and I wanted them before they all fell to the ground.  Pears are best picked off the tree before they ripen.  Many times the ones that fall naturally develop hard crystal-like formations in their flesh, which aren't very pleasant to eat.

We purchased a long-handled fruit picker basket last year to help us pick the high fruit from our own apple tree.  It's a handy thing that extends our reach by about 9' (2.7 m).  So we put it in the car along with a bushel basket (I was feeling optimistic) and went to ask after the pears.  The property is just far enough away from ours that I don't consider these people neighbors, exactly.  Our area is sort of rural, and sort of suburban; "around the corner" can be a fair distance in these parts.  As is so often the case, when we asked politely the owner of the property was delighted to let us take the pears.  He said he didn't like to see them go to waste, but that he and his wife don't use them.  I mentioned that I'd collected pears from his tree a few times in previous years when he'd put the sign up, and thought perhaps he just hadn't gotten round to putting one up this year.  He said that was exactly the case and emphasized repeatedly that we were welcome to come back any time for the fruit.

We cleaned the tree of almost all the fruit that was still on the branch.  There were a few that even our long-handled picker couldn't reach, but not many.  As a courtesy we picked up all the fruit on the ground too.  Most of these had obvious damage on them, some from a lawn mower.  I'll send them on with our early drop apples to my farming friend who raises hogs.  The appearance of the pears makes it obvious that they haven't been sprayed with anything, so I'm sure she'll feel comfortable giving them to her animals.  The fruit we kept for ourselves came nearly to the top of our bushel basket.

I mentioned that pears are best picked before they ripen on the branch.  It turns out that pears are rather tricky to bring to what humans consider a nice state for eating.  They need to be picked before maturity and then chilled.  The chilling time depends on the variety, but fortunately the Bartlett only requires a couple of days.  So these will be in our refrigerator for a little while and then I'll spread them back out to ripen up on cardboard in the front room.  That way I can keep an eye on each one and no fruit gets crushed by the weight of fruit above. It's certainly a lot of fruit.  I don't mind though.  In fact, getting this much fruit free for the picking was a great mood booster.  I've been frustrated with several things that are happening or not happening around the homestead lately.  Free pears go a long way towards cheering me up.  And this is a nice time of year to make jam and do the hot work of canning.  Temperatures are definitely dropping off.  I put aside a small amount of elderberry juice last month and stashed it in our freezer.  I know what a surreal and gorgeous color even a little bit of juice makes when I combine it with a pale fruit like pears.  So when the pears ripen up, I'll make more elderberry-pear jam.  Needless to say, when it's done some will go to our benefactors around the corner.

I'm also planning to revisit an amazingly yummy cake recipe I found over at 101 Cookbooks.  Heidi's salt-kissed buttermilk cake recipe is easily adapted to many different seasonal fruits.  I tried it once with pears from the farmer's market and simply could. not. stop. eating. it.  The nice thing about that is that for a cake, this one is surprisingly non-naughty: only half a cup of sugar and 4 tablespoons of butter.  Buttermilk does the rest in terms of adding flavor and body to a very light-textured cake.  I switched from Heidi's raspberry and lemon zest flavorings to sliced pear, minced crystallized ginger and almond extract.  The salty-sweet topping for the fruit made the flavors really pop.  This one went directly into my printed out recipe binder.

My husband is shocked that I don't count gleaned fruit as part of our harvest tally.  I explained that my project is to demonstrate how much food can be produced by perfect nobodies on an average residential lot in our area.  Since we didn't grow it ourselves and it didn't come from our property, I don't see that we should get "credit" for it as part of our harvest.  I'd certainly count any weeds we foraged off our own property for consumption, but gleaning elsewhere is another thing entirely.  Still, gleaning what we can is part and parcel of our overall drive for frugality, and I hate to see food go to waste.  So I see his point.  Maybe from now on I'll keep a separate gleaning tally for things we gather off-property.  It could be an interesting adjunct figure to go with our harvest tally.

Any good gleaning going on in your neck of the woods?

Acorns as Chicken Feed, Revisited

Last fall I gathered acorns from a single oak that straddles our property line and used them as a feed supplement for my hens over the winter months.  This year I made it a formal goal to be a bit more ambitious about gleaning acorns.  So far this year I've collected over 65 pounds of them, and they're still coming down in my area.  I do think of them as booster fuel for hens during the coldest and harshest months of the year, so most of what I've gathered has been put up in buckets where they will, I hope, escape the notice of rodents who would love to help themselves to this caloric feast.  But I've also been feeding the less prime acorns to the hens as they come in, so I thought it would be a good time to post about some points that have come up for me as I've been gathering them and using them for feed.

First off, I've become rather selective about which acorns I pick up and bring home.  I gleaned a little factoid from the coverage of the recent recall of factory farmed eggs.  Namely that salmonella is carried by rodents, which can introduce the disease to previously healthy poultry flocks.  Squirrels are rodents, are abundant in my region, and show a famous interest in acorns.  Many of the nuts I find bear evidence of nibbling by squirrels.  I do not gather these acorns.  Some acorns have broken shells that may or may not be due to squirrel nibbling.  They may have taken the damage when they fell on a hard surface.  I err on the safe side and don't risk collecting such acorns.

Another type of damage common to acorns is a shell that has split along its grain.  This is clearly not caused by rodents, but it still presents a problem.  Acorn nutmeats are very high in fat, and they will turn rancid fairly quickly once exposed to air.  So acorns with split shells are not candidates for storage.  I do bring home a number of acorns with reasonably small splits in the shell and feed them to the hens very quickly.  It's a way of using up what I can, even if they can't be kept for storage.

The last type of damage that causes me to reject an acorn at collection is a small hole that indicates a weevil has penetrated the shell and is currently feasting on the nutmeat.  If you see two holes (rare when the nuts have just fallen) the weevil has been and gone.  Now these nuts too could be collected for the hens if I were willing to segregate the ones with such holes.  Laying hens, after all, will just as happily eat weevils as they will acorns.  But if the infested acorns are stored with the pristine ones, the weevils will eat their way from one acorn to the next, and there is a net caloric loss with each step up the food chain.  So it's either segregate, or don't collect.  Mostly I opt not to collect those acorns.

Last year I used a small burlap bag to crush the acorns.  Each day I placed a couple handfuls in the bag and crushed them on a flat rock by using a 5-pound hand sledge.  The problem with that setup was that the burlap didn't hold up.  Fairly quickly I found that a glancing blow from the hand sledge could propel an acorn straight through the fabric.  This year I've upgraded to a denim bag crafted from a tattered pair of my father's jeans.  I just cut one of the legs off and sewed up the cut edge with some sturdy hand stitching.  So far it looks as though the denim is going to answer nicely.

A note on oak trees - Quercus is a big family, or more properly speaking, a genus.  (Isn't Quercus just about the best word, ever?)  I'm not going to tell you than I can tell any of the 600+ oak species apart by name, because I can't.  What I can say is that the size, shape, quality, and drop time of acorns varies considerably from one species of oak to another.  Acorns started falling here in August, and there are still oaks dropping their bounty now in October.  It pays to look around and keep looking.  If you don't find acorns of good quality from one particular type of oak, you may well find them from another type a few weeks on.

Storage was a problem last year.  Mice are quite happy to help themselves to any sort of seed or nut kept in our garage over the winter months.  I've taken steps to prevent this this year and recommend you think about how to keep any acorns you collect away from rodents, particularly in light of the risk they might transmit salmonella to your poultry.

I did a little poking around to find out what the value of my acorn gleaning might be in terms of feed for the hens. I have no clue what they do or don't contribute in terms of nutrients.  But the average laying hen needs - at an absolute maximum - 350 calories per day to maintain optimum laying rate.  Presumably this is for hens who live in Siberia and lay jumbo sized eggs.  Even so, let's say my hens need that many calories in winter.  After all, they don't get any supplemental heat, only shelter from the wind.  The other factoid I turned up is that acorns have 1700 calories per pound.  Now I don't know if that figure is just for the extracted nutmeats, or what.  Clearly the acorn cap and shell contribute nothing to the hens' diet.  So let's say that of the 65 pounds of acorns I've gathered so far, we have to eliminate a whopping 25% of that weight to account for the unusable portion. That leaves about 49 pounds worth of acorn nutmeats, which have an astonishing 82,875 calories.  Divide that by the maximum caloric needs of my four-hen flock (1400 calories per day for all four of them) and speaking very conservatively we're looking at a two-month supply of feed from gleaned acorns.

Now, as mentioned, it's not at all clear that acorns alone would give the hens what they need in terms of vitamins and minerals.  But I did lay in a supply of comfrey, dried from our own production earlier in the year, and I know that's a highly nutritious feed for poultry.  Between these two "free" feeds, plus our kitchen scraps, some recycled eggshell for calcium, and whatever mystical stuff chickens find in deep litter bedding, I would bet they're pretty well on their way to a complete laying hen diet.  I plan to use the acorns only as supplemental feed in combination with the locally grown and milled organic grains they normally get.  But it's clear to me that if it were absolutely necessary, we could probably get the hens through the winter with aggressive acorn gleaning (provided of course that the oak trees didn't take another gap year as they did in 2008).  If that were the case, we almost certainly wouldn't light the hens to maintain their winter laying quota, so their caloric needs would go down, which would make the acorns stretch even further.  And that's without even touching on hickory nut gleaning.

Aside from musing about strategies for maintaining my mini-flock in a worst case scenario, I see this as a social justice issue.  We in the industrialized countries "go to the table" ahead of citizens in the developing world.  We eat first, because we can afford to.  Not only can we pay more for the most basic foodstuffs, such as grains, but we choose to eat animal products which are produced at the cost of a huge amount of grain - further driving up global market prices for these commodities. And after we've eaten our fill of grain-intensive meat or dairy or eggs, we then feed our pets with meat produced in an identical fashion.  Thus we consume first, and consume more than the poor.  My flock and my pets are no exception to this reality.  Though they are pastured on our lawn, and we supplement what feed we buy with all sorts of food that would otherwise be wasted, our hens nonetheless eat grain that could have gone to the world market and contributed to lower prices for grain.  My hens compete with impoverished families and hungry children, and they win by virtue of the money I have at my disposal.

So whatever I can do to come up with free food  for my hens not only saves me money and makes my homestead less dependent on a fragile distribution system, it also brings a little more balance to the relationship between rich and poor countries.  That's a real motivation.  Gleaning acorns is fun for a while.  But when it gets a little boring, or my back starts to ache, I push on just a little longer with the acorn hunt.  Because I believe that actions - even small, imperfect, insufficient actions - have consequences.  Even if I never see the results, I know that gleaning this food is the right thing to do.

Using What the Land Provides

When I was at university I took a number of anthropology courses. I liked cultural anthropology best, because each culture has a different way of looking at the world, understanding people, and moving through life. I found this utterly fascinating, and real cultures were far more interesting to me than science fiction or fantasy fiction. One thing that I learned in case study after case study is that people who live in technologically limited cultures have a vastly superior knowledge of the natural environment they live in, compared to those in "modern" societies. They know every plant and animal in their area, what useful function it serves, and when and how it grows.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. We have a number of trees along and mostly just beyond our back fence line. We don't do much (yet) with that area because it's pretty shady, and farthest from the house. But I noticed last week that the oak was beginning to drop its acorns. There's also a smaller tree that I had never bothered to identify growing halfway in the shade of that oak tree. I have noticed over the three winters we've lived through on this property that that tree retains its leaves, still green, until long after the other trees have shown their colors and dropped their leaves.

This year I'm seeing both of these trees in a new light. I'm just chagrined to think it took me this long. The smaller tree has thick clusters of dark berries all over it, and oval-round leaves with the tiniest serration along the edges. With the help of a tree field guide, I identified it as a European buckthorn. The berries aren't very tasty; they're at least as astringent as they are sweet. But they're not poisonous, and the chickens will eat them if I throw in a handful of them, especially when mixed with the nearly identical looking Eastern black nightshade berries.

The acorns likewise I have taken an interest in. Here is free food literally falling out of the tree. I am, admittedly, lukewarm on the idea of eating acorns myself. The processing for palatability is rather involved; reports I've heard on taste are rather unenthusiastic; and then there's the fact that most acorns contain weevils. But there is no denying the nutritional and caloric value of these nuts. The hens' culture, unlike my own, has no objection to consuming weevils. I know that acorns were a staple crop for American Indian tribes in California, to such an extent that there was a system of laws governing who had rights to gather acorns from which trees. I've also seen the pata negra pigs grazing on acorns in southern Spain, where a ham is graded higher the more acorns contributed to the pig's diet.

A post by Sharon the other day got me to thinking again about the sustainability of even my tiny backyard laying flock. I buy organic locally milled feed for the girls, from a mill that re-uses the woven plastic feed bags, and I use less than a pound of this feed each day. But it constitutes the majority of their diet. If I couldn't make the drive to buy this feed, could I maintain even a few layers? I can't stockpile large quantities of the feed as it will go rancid within months unless the temperatures outside are near freezing. My township does not permit free-ranging birds, which severely limits the girls' ability to forage and find their own food. We're a two-person family, which also limits how much we'll generate each day in the way of kitchen scraps, particularly in the winter when we eat foods I canned during the summer. Right now the answer to the question of how we would feed the chickens without easy transportation seems to be: I have no idea. But I've felt compelled to at least start exploring this question lately. What do we have on hand on our little patch of property that we could use to feed the hens without purchased feed? The answers must lie in getting to know my land better than I do right now, and/or possibly getting the zoning laws that forbid free-range poultry changed.

About one-third of my acorn haul thus far, drying on window screens, with the implement of destruction,...erm, I mean, cracking.

I laid a tarp out under a portion of the oak tree and have begun collecting acorns every other day or so. The windy fall weather, a couple of salvaged window screens, and the black surface of our driveway have helped me dry them for storage. Apparently acorns can provide up to 50% of a hen's daily feed. I need only find the motivation to crack open the nuts to feed our girls. I can't do it all in one session as the acorn meats will turn rancid rather quickly once exposed to air. So it'll be a semi-weekly chore, at least.

I've written at the co-op about the weeds that my chickens will eat during the growing season, and here recently about feeding them ripe eastern black nightshade berries. Feeding the hens during the summer months would be fairly easy. They eat so many weeds, and the Japanese beetles are abundant, not to mention zucchini. Even fall wouldn't be too difficult with the apples coming in, and acorns in most years, not to mention the seeds from the pumpkins and winter squashes. But winter and early spring would be real challenges. I could plant more sunflowers and be more careful to save the seed for the lean months. But my intuition is that I would still come up short.

Then there's always the unsavory option of maggot feeding the chooks. Intellectually, I see the value in this, and I'm a little annoyed at my own squeamish reaction. I'm pretty sure the woman who regularly asks for a dozen eggs from me would completely freak if I were to use this method of feeding and she knew about it. I recognize that this is free, natural food, with very low risk of disease to the livestock if handled carefully, and that it would actually cut down on the local fly population. Still, I find it a little difficult. If things got bad enough, I would have to consider it. I just wonder how much roadkill there would be if gasoline became too scarce for me to make the drive to pick up the feed. I suppose confiscating any rodents killed by the cat would supply some material. But then, the cat would need to eat as well...

So how about you? What do you produce or use for animal feed that's close to hand? I'd be particularly interested in hearing how some of you use the limited resources of a small residential property. What other uses do you find for the things your patch of earth provides?

Other People’s Fruit

Today I have another guest post from my husband, who, as you will see, is slowly (but surely) being infected with the gardening/homesteading virus. Here's what he's been up to lately.

I was tracking down where heavy rain run-off goes when it leaves our property. What I found was a mini-river in my next door neighbor’s back yard. As I walked downstream I also discovered ripe mulberries in my neighbor’s tree. Here was mature fruit that if left un-harvested would merely become dinner for the local birds. Mulberries are often planted near other more desirable fruits as the birds go after the mulberries first.

So I began harvesting the unwanted berries thinking they would be tasty treats for our three chickens. After spending time harvesting around two pints of berries I began thinking far more selfishly. Why relinquish them to birds that go bonkers for flavorless wild strawberries when mulberries would make a nice treat for humans? So I gathered some wild strawberries, gave a strawberry thrill to our hens, and took the mulberries inside for cleaning.


I was interested in making some jam or even thick syrup. Confession time: On a recent business trip I met a friend at an IHOP just before flying out. It was a convenient location for the both of us; certainly not a culinary pinnacle. But in their defense they do serve tea in teapots. So they get props for that. But the point is that they offer a high-fructose, artificially flavored (courtesy of our flavor chemist industry), berry-ish syrup. I wanted home-made pancakes with real berry syrup. And now, presented with the opportunity, I pulled out the pectin and began something I have never done before…make jam from berries.

I love this type of cooking where there is ambiguity and winging-it is the order of the day. So I read the directions on the pectin packet then embarked on some exploratory cooking. Berries have no natural pectin unlike other fruits. So adding is necessary to get it to gel. I more or less used the recommended amount of sugar and, on the advice of my wife, added lemon juice. The lemon juice really brought out the fruit flavor and added the brightness of citrus.

The instructions for my quick method indicated that after adding the pectin a period of 24 hours was needed for proper setting. I was only prepared to wait about 8 hours until breakfast rolled around. The result was less jam than thick syrup on its way to jam. This was perfect for pancakes. Mulberries tend to have less flavor than other berries. But the jam syrup on pancakes was well received by all.


At the 24 hour mark the jam syrup had not set any more than at the 8 hour mark. But I had achieved something I’d never done. Delayed gratification of stuffing ripe berries straight into my mouth, turning it into jam syrup and scratching the pancake itch with someone else’s unwanted fruit. It was a satisfying feeling.

So now I keep an eye out for unappreciated fruit that could become my treasure. All this for nothing more than some enjoyable harvesting and cooking. I’ve already found another stand of mulberries on their way to ripeness. Perhaps this time I’ll get full-on jam with a bit more pectin. Other people’s fruit…hurrah!

Kate again: I really like the flavor profile of this gleaned treat. It's sort of spicy and dark, with hints of cinnamon and fig. A nice thing to have on hand when a sweet craving strikes. My husband's other guest post can be found here: Homemade Sled Report.

What I'm Doing with Free Pears These Days

I had a request for the recipe for the pear upside down cake I made a little while ago. We've been doing well with the gleaning during pear season, so I thought I'd share the few things we've done with them. I'm not making any claims that this is particularly healthy fare, nor that these are good strategies for long term storage, but this is what we've done with them.



For the pear upside down cake I began with this recipe, but modified in several ways. Here's what I ended up doing:

Pear Upside Down Cake

For the topping
1/3 cup firmly packed brown sugar
2/3 cup sugar
1/2 cup unsalted butter
2 cups pears, sliced in 1/2" thick pieces
1/3 cup orange juice

For the cake
1 1/2 cups all purpose flour
6 Tbsp cake flour
6 Tbsp of hazelnut meal (you can make your own from about 2 oz of whole hazelnuts)
3/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 cups of sugar
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter at room temperature
8 oz. whipped cream cheese
4 large eggs
3/4 teaspoon vanilla extract


Method
Start by making the topping. Put the brown sugar and butter together in a saucepan and melt over medium heat until the sugar dissolves and the mixture is bubbly, this should take several minutes. While the mixture melts, peel the pears and slice them into a bowl with the orange juice, tossing them occasionally so that they don't discolor too badly. Pour the mixture into a 10" cast iron skillet, or a nonstick cake pan with 2 inch high sides. Arrange pear slices very tightly in a single layer on top of the caramel mixture. Pour the orange juice over the slices.

Preheat oven to 325 degrees F. Whisk the flours, hazelnut meal, baking powder, and salt in a large mixing bowl. In a separate bowl, use an electric mixer to beat the sugar, butter, and cream cheese together until light. Add eggs one at a time, beating after each addition. Beat in the vanilla. Add dry ingredients in 2 additions, beating well after each addition. Pour cake batter over caramel and pear slices in pan.

Bake cake until tester inserted into the center comes out clean, about 1 hour to 1 hour 15 minutes. Cool cake in pan on a rack for 15 minutes. Turn cake out onto a platter with a rim, as the juices will run. Serve warm or at room temperature. We made two cakes simultaneously, and froze one. Nothing beats a warm upside down cake, but the texture of the frozen one wasn't much different from the fresh one on its second day.



Stewed Pears in Sour Milk Blini

I had also frozen a few dozen blini made from some salvaged sour milk a while back. I fished these out of the freezer and used them for some impromptu breakfast decadence. Here are some recipes.

Sour Milk Blini

1 cup soured milk or buttermilk
2 large eggs
1 cup plus 2 Tbsp. all purpose flour
3/4 tsp. baking powder
pinch of salt
oil for cooking

With a whisk, combine all ingredients in mixing bowl until well blended. The mixture should be considerably thinner than standard American pancake batter. Heat a small amount of oil in a well seasoned skillet over medium heat and pour in 1/4 cup of the batter. Tilt the pan slightly to spread out the batter. It should spread to a diameter of about 5" and form a blin no more than 1/4" thick. Adjust the batter with flour or a little water to reach the desired results. Cook each blin until the top side loses its wet sheen, then flip it over for just a few seconds to cook the top side. Remove to a platter and hold until serving or until cooled. The blini can be wrapped in plastic wrap and frozen.


Stewed Pears

Put 1/4 cup orange juice and 1/4 cup water in a small sauce pan. Peel and slice your pears into the liquid. If you pears are not very sweet, add a small amount of sugar if desired. Bring the liquid to a simmer, cover the pan, and reduce the heat to the lowest setting. Let the fruit stew for 3-5 minutes, depending on the texture of the fruit.


Maple Cream Cheese Sauce
I stole this recipe straight out of Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian. He meant for it to accompany pumpkin waffles, but it's good with plenty of other things too.

Mix equal parts by volume of maple syrup and cream cheese until a thin sauce is formed. Beware: this is a diabetic coma in the making. You don't need very much of it, though if you're like me, you'll want much more than is healthy.

To assemble the Stewed Pear Blini, just combine all the above ingredients. Lay the blini out, and arrange the stewed pears in a line running through the center of each blin. Fold up the sides of the blin, one over the other, and flip it over so the seam is down on the plate. Top each blin with a little of the sauce. If you've frozen your blini, thaw them in a very low oven (200F) while you prep the pears and sauce.


Finally, when we couldn't stand looking at the pears any longer and didn't have the time or energy to prep them for the dehydrator, we simply juiced them along with a hunk of ginger and enjoyed the pulpy results mixed with homemade sparkling water. (My husband has a CO2 tank leftover from his more active homebrewing era.)

Phelan has also had a few wonderful posts recently on what to do with pears, including ideas for more long term storage, and healthier recipes than I've offered here.

Still Harvesting, Processing Food, and Gleaning

Well, it's been a long weekend. But we got one of those beautiful Indian summer days we'd been longing for yesterday. And Saturday was cool enough to do some heavy digging and outdoor work without breaking much of a sweat. It's a good feeling to be somewhat caught up on the garden and yardwork chores, but I know there's more, much more to come soon.

I spent an inordinate amount of time baking two pear upside down cakes on Friday. I used about four pounds of the gleaned Bartlett pears from down the road (have I mentioned those?) and a few of our earliest apples. One to eat, one to freeze. The recipe also fortuitously called for almond flour, so naturally I substituted the hazelnut flour that turned up during our recent freezer inventory. It turned out delicious. The one we didn't freeze (smaller than this one) is nearly gone. These gleaned fruits are weighing heavily on my conscience. I don't know that they'll last long enough to be added to our apple cider. And there's this imperative that I have to figure out what to do with them.

The potatoes are all out of the ground. Finally. I was afraid the rain we got compliments of hurricane Kyle might have rotted them. Most of them were sound, but a few of them, the Kennebecs and the All Blues in particular, were eaten away by something. I don't know what was eating them. They looked gnawed, but I don't think it was any toothed animal. We couldn't find any holes in the ground, so I can't figure it out. Sometimes they were lightly "gnawed"; and sometimes there was almost nothing left of the potato. Usually the eaten away area formed a relatively flattened area. Any ideas as to what's going on here? Most of the damaged ones were in a particular area of the garden straddling the rows of the two different varieties of potato. Most annoying. But we got a nice haul of four different varieties of potato, including just enough of the Sangres to serve as seed stock for next year.

Could one of my knowledgeable readers kindly advise me how to store my seed potatoes over the winter? I read so many conflicting things on the web. I've even read that these days only potatoes produced from tissue cultures should be used for seed stock. This seems far fetched to me, but what do I know?

Having gotten the potatoes in on Saturday, we turned our attention to preparing a new bed for the garlic, which needs to be in the ground soon. I've had the girls in the garden as it gets cleared out, so they've been processing compost for me, and laying down some manure. I worked over a 5'x18' bed where some of my squash plants had been and applied the lasagna method of mulching. And I took pictures to illustrate the process.

First I staked out the bed and used survey tape to mark it out. I work best in the garden when I have a clear indication of where the bed is. Then I tore out the weeds and loosened the top few inches of soil with a cultivator. The weeds can be left lying on top of the soil, so long as their roots are out.

While stocking up on free vitamin D for the coming winter months (so frugal!), I used the broad fork to loosen the soil at a deeper level without tilling.

Next, I laid a few comfrey leaves over the bed at regular intervals. Comfrey is a deep mining plant that pulls up minerals and nutrients from 12 inches or more underground. The leaves can be used as green manure, and it grows incredibly vigorously. With the comfry leaves spread out, I began papering over the bed with newspaper.

Once the bed was completely covered in a few layers of newsprint, I hosed down the paper to thoroughly drench it and began covering it with some of that free mulch I get from our township.

When I plant the garlic I'll need to punch through the newspaper to get the bulbs in the ground. The paper will be an impenetrable barrier to other plants, which is good, because I don't like to weed, and garlic doesn't compete very well with neighbors. In the meantime, the worms will happily do their thing in that enriched and loosened soil. A year from now, both the paper and the mulch will have at least partly broken down and will also be enriching the soil. It's especially satisfying to me that my only materials cost (other than the tools) for this project was for the survey tape, which is very reasonably priced. A friend saves the newspaper for me, and I can help myself to as much mulch as I want at the yard waste facility. The wooden stakes were made with a hand ax and a short piece of scrap 2x4.

I found time yesterday to dig some daffodil bulbs up for transplant, and cut out about a third of one variety of comfrey for transplant under the apple tree. I'm told fruit trees enjoy the companionship of comfrey and that comfrey tolerates dividing very well. We shall see.

We also harvested what will probably be the last of the tomatoes. As many cherry tomatoes went to the chickens as came into the kitchen. Many of them were badly split. A few beefsteaks may ripen on a sunny windowsill inside, but I can hardly be bothered. It's October, and no tomato on the vine right now is going to live up to the glory of its name. The tomato plants are due to be ripped out this week. Using a trick I tested last year, we'll uproot them and hang them upside down to allow the green fruits to ripen. This works in a limited way. The "ripe" fruits will be plenty good enough for the chickens. We may use a few as cooking ingredients, but we probably won't eat them fresh. What will probably be the last batch of peppers went into my homemade smoker, and then into the dehydrator. They'll be delicious accents in many dishes over the winter.

We're looking at the apple harvest very soon. Our tree is bearing fairly well, and the apples are turning red, at least on the sides that face the sun. I picked a few on Friday, but I'm going to give them at least another week before picking in earnest. I don't know what type of apple we have, but it's definitely a late variety. We also went back to the neighbors of my relatives to gather more of their apples. We need to go yet again with a really big ladder. Most of their apples are very high up on the tree. We pressed last year in early November. I'll post more on the whole apple cider pressing thing when it happens.

On top of all that, we cleaned up and cleared out one bay of the garage. We were pooped last night! Leftovers for dinner and into bed by 8pm for a little reading before sleep.

I'm still trying to find the enthusiasm to keep harvesting, washing, blanching, and freezing our Tuscan kale. It loves cool weather, so the autumnal temperatures we've been having don't dampen its spirits at all. I went shopping for one of my upcoming cooking classes on Thursday last week, and got a chuckle from seeing local organic Tuscan kale priced at $4.99/lb. at Whole Foods. It looked no more or less nibbled by insects than mine does.

Speaking of fall weather, Brrrr! I love the cooler temperatures for sleeping, but I've had to layer up before going out to feed the hens in the morning lately. Winter is just around the corner, it seems.

Fall Gleaning

I'm really getting into this whole feed ourselves on the cheap thing. Last year we pressed cider from our own apples with a group of three other apple tree owners. It was a blast. This year our tree is bearing, but not quite as well as last year it seems. And at least one of the participants from last year is reporting that their tree is bearing very little this year - not enough to press for cider.


Some relatives of mine, however, told me that their neighbors have apple and pear trees from which they do not collect the fruit, and that the neighbors say the fruit is up for grabs. I stopped by their place yesterday morning with just a little time to spare before I had to start a full baking day. Ambitiously, I'd brought a 5-gallon bucket, but I wasn't even able to fill that much. I'll need to return with a ladder to get to the bulk of the apples, which are very high up. Still, I got about 4.5 pounds of apples and - even better - 3.5 pounds of bosc pears for about 10 minutes of "work." That was all I could easily reach with a small stepstool. It boggles my mind that the neighbors don't want these fruits. I suppose it's all to my benefit, and it's nice that they don't spray their trees.

It's true that the fruits have bruises and worm holes and even some pecks from birds. The fruit will need to be washed and the spoiled parts cut out. I guess I'm just not that fussy when it comes to free, local, unsprayed food. It makes me sad to think how many people would spurn this food just because it's not "perfect." Americans have a curiously inverted squeamishness about the food they eat. Apples with sooty mold (which is harmless and washes off easily) or worm holes are to be rejected. But meat from factory farms (sick, stressed animals in literally shitty environments) and high speed meat packing plants (dangerous, unhygienic conditions) is A-okay. I doubt I'll save these until we gather our own apples, which won't come in for at least another three weeks. Guess I'll have to figure out something yummy to make with them. I've had French apple gallette on the brain for a while. We'll see...

The apples from the top of that neighbor's tree will nicely supplement the crop from our one old apple tree. My relatives also have an old hickory tree. If I find the time I'll go poke around and see if the squirrels have overlooked any of the nuts. I might see if a post on craigslist will turn up more conveniently located gleaning opportunities. Can't hurt to ask.

I didn't really intend for this to be a frugal food blog. But I suppose, given my nearly pathological obsession with food, it shouldn't surprise me that it's going that way. I will try to work in a few posts that aren't directly related to eating, even though that's nearly always what's on my mind. It's about 6:30 in the morning as I write this and I'm acutely aware that I haven't yet decided what to have for dinner. Having so much food in a chest freezer does that to me. (I need lead time for thawing.)

Have a great weekend!

Last Night's Dessert

After the thrill of gleaning yesterday, I was in for a treat for dessert. My husband has a wicked way with fruit crumbles. And since he refuses to write down his recipe, he's basically on the hook whenever there's a suitable fruit in the house. In June it was cherries. Last night it was our gleaned blackberries. And he also used some gleaned hickory nuts in the topping. It was divine! Those two in the back are going to be breakfast this morning.

I was particularly proud of this little feat of cheap eating, since it helped us with July's $50 Grocery Challenge. We'd been tempted by fresh berries at the farmer's market, but I remembered my aunt's offer to pick her berries while she was away. True, we spent some gas getting to my aunt's place. But it was on the way to the hardware store, which we needed to visit anyway. Also, you may note that the individual crumbles were cooked in the toaster oven, so we used less electricity to cook them, and we didn't heat up the house so much. I froze the raspberries we gathered yesterday so as to prevent spoilage in this delicate fruit. They'll get used later for some other special treat.

Frugality, for me, has nothing whatsoever to do with deprivation, want, or lack of pleasure. It's much more about creativity, and to a lesser extent, trading cheap convenience for a sense of adventure, self-sufficiency, and accomplishment. We ate very well last night. (Our dinner was a dish of pasta with our garden vegetables, eggs from our hens, and a tiny bit of leftover cooked bacon.) It didn't cost us very much, but it was delicious. We went to bed with the satisfaction of having fed ourselves from our own labor.

Gleaning!

Today my husband and I spent about an hour picking blackberries, raspberries wineberries, and black raspberries from my aunt's berry bushes while she's away on vacation. Of course, I had her permission to do so. I loved the change of scenery, and getting free, perfectly ripe, organic berries. We're going to make some of these into a dessert with some peaches from the farmers' market. The rest we'll freeze. There aren't enough, alas to make it worth the effort of making jam. But we'll use these up with absolute glee, and it'll be worth the few scratches we sustained. (Blackberries, by the way, are far more tenacious of their point than raspberries.)

Now's the time of year to keep your eye out for fruits and other food going to waste. I've got a free basket at the end of my driveway to distribute any oversized zucchini that escape my attention in the garden. Don't be shy about asking a neighbor if you see food going to waste. Many people are happy just to have someone use up what they can't or won't. And many times you'll be saving them yardwork as well.