Poultry Love - Is It Wrong?

That's my son with one of our new chicks a few weeks ago. Local farmers, the Zakarisons, sold us some chicks that will become laying hens when they grow up. For us it was a momentous occasion, like birthing a baby, as it took about nine months to get the coop and fence ready (we started in the fall and halted construction during the winter), and their arrival was preceded by the mulling over of names, the gathering of equipment and bedding, lots of reading about care and feeding. The whole thing was very similar to pregnancy, without the sleeplessness and weird food cravings.

Except these babies put themselves to bed at night, eat almost whatever we throw out there for them, and are a little skittish about being held very much. I adore them, and find myself spending time cutting up our kitchen waste into tiny chicken beak sized pieces and then watching to see what they love and what they don’t love. So far the absolute favorites are the pie cherries from our neighbors’ tree, onion skins, and the prostrate knotweed that grows everywhere in our yard. They also love bread, bits of fruit, grass, slugs and bugs, and a shovelful of almost finished compost to scratch through.

Our girls are about half grown, little Nellie, Dorothy, Mabel, Cinnamon, Margaret, and Leonora. Two barred Plymouth Rocks, two Rhode Island reds, one speckled Sussex, and one blue Andalusian. The barred rocks and the blue Andalusian are downright friendly; the others a little more standoffish. But we’re making progress, and there’s nothing I like better than to sit down and have a little chicken time in the evening to relax after a hard day.

Eventually our girls will give us eggs; you’ll read about it here first!

Fruit crisps to remember

Fruit crisps used to seem painful – all that topping to mix up – but now that I know that a recipe is not required, fruit crisps are my favorite dessert to make.

Topping: a couple cups of rolled oats, a stick of butter, a generous measure of brown sugar, a few teaspoons of cinnamon, and a handful of flour. Mix it up with your hands until the butter is broken down into little pebbles and rubbed into the oats. Add some chopped nuts if you like them. Try something besides cinnamon if you prefer. Maybe cardamom or allspice. I made a cherry crisp this morning that used almonds in the topping and a bit of almond extract mixed with the fruit. Delicious.

Fruit: Grease your baking dish and fill with sliced fruit. Apples, apricots, peaches, pitted cherries, diced rhubarb and strawberries, whatever. Sprinkle sugar on the fruit, more if it’s rhubarb, less if it’s peaches, none of it's Bing cherries, or use your own plum or cherry jam left from last year instead of sugar. That’s what I use for sweetener, and the extra fruit flavor gives it extra depth. Slather the oat topping on top, nice and thick, and bake in a 350 degree oven until the topping it toasty brown and the fruit cooked through, about 45 minutes. Serve warm with vanilla ice cream… in a big bowl. Don’t be shy – you’re only going to eat this a couple times each summer, and the memories of it will last all winter long.

Palouse Potato Salad

Potato salad comes in many forms but I like mine with red potatoes (unpeeled), hard boiled eggs, a bit of dill, something crunchy like celery or cucumber, bacon bits, onion or shallots, a little mayo, and lots of olive oil and lemon juice, plus salt and pepper. If I can get away with a little sweet pickle relish I will, although too much and the rest of my family will complain. The trick is to put the olive oil and lemon juice on the potatoes as soon as they’re drained, and still hot. Mmm.

The potatoes are from Washington, the eggs from here, the cucumber and shallots from the Yakima Valley, and the bacon from a Washington company, Hemplers. Don't know where the pigs grow up; need to find that out.

The opposite of deprivation

We started our locavore diet a few days ago. We’re not militant about it; I’m aiming for 40 percent local (within 200 miles) and 40 percent regional (Washington, Idaho, Oregon, and western Montana.) I have a long list of exceptions such as Inka, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, lemon juice, steak sauce, olives, goat milk (maybe there’s someone nearby selling it I haven’t discovered yet?), peanuts, almonds, cashews, etc. and the occasional pint of store bought ice cream, among other things. My definition of local doesn’t quite mesh with the Co-op’s definition of local; maybe I can lobby the Co-op to change theirs, since I’m not going to change mine!

Saturday morning was the first farmer’s market of our diet and I rode my bike and took two canvas bags, expecting to get a lot of salad greens and some carrots and chard, forgetting that in the river valleys that bound the Palouse they’ve already got apricots, cherries, green beans, beets, and more. And our local growers had cucumbers, broccoli, kohlrabi, onions, peas, arugula, baby yellow squash, mizuna…

Thinking, “I’ve got another week before I get this chance again” I just kept buying and buying, finishing up with two loaves of bread from Panhandle Artisan Bread (they get their flour from Shepherd’s Grain Cooperative in Spokane, from wheat grown right here!) and a glass of iced horchata made this morning by Patty’s Mexican Kitchen. I’ve got to get a recipe for that stuff. I know it’s rice, sugar, water, and cinnamon – not local at all, but who cares, it’s so good. Maybe I just can just figure it out. Anyway, hauling the bags of stuff back to my bike (I had to use plastic bags offered by vendors so next time I’ll take more canvas) and then figuring out how to pack the load home was a good logistical challenge for 9 am on a Saturday.
The Palouse is particularly well-placed from a locavore’s perspective, or at least it would be if there were still salmon to be had nearby. But for fruits and vegetables and meat, the locavore must be prepared for the sheer bounty of summertime. Eating local in July is the exact opposite of deprivation.

On the menu in the next few days are stir-fry, chard frittata, borscht, and pizza. This morning after the market I made potato salad, green beans w/ balsamic vinaigrette w/ shallots and bacon, and cherry-rhubarb crisp. The satisfaction of cooking and eating such delicious fresh food cheered me up. It had been such a long hard wet winter and I had begun to lose my appetite while still gaining weight (all those lemon cream scones at the Co-op, yikes), a sure sign of trouble.

What's local at the Moscow Food Co-op?

It's early in the growing season but there is some delicious produce available right now. Try fresh radishes sliced very thinly, served on a sliced baguette with a generous smear of butter and a sprinkle of salt. Yum! And see my previous post on bok choy for a recipe idea.

In the bulk department there are a few options; lentils and split peas! We are on the Palouse after all. But there is also wild rice from St. Maries. And don't forget the big selection of mixes from MaryJanesFarm, right here in Moscow! I'll do some recipes in the coming days that use lentils and split peas.

In the meat department there is lamb, beef, and yak, local and regional, and don't forget about our local Eaton beef, located in the freezer case.

We have local eggs in the fridge case, and a selection of cheeses from the region. Nothing like an omelette, a salad, and a glass of local wine for an easy summer dinner!

What to do with bok choy?

How to make bok choy - abundantly available in Moscow, Idaho right now - into a meal for the family?

I looked at a few recipes that use cabbage and here is what I came up with.

Ingredients: lamb sausage, onion, bok choy, dried cranberries, salt and pepper, log of herbed goat cheese

Two lamb sausage links (from Eastern Oregon) cut into small chunks, sauteed with 1/2 a diced onion (Washington) and finely diced bok choy ribs (Moscow, ID). I used the whole, large bok choy head. When sausage, onion, and bok choy ribs are done, add a sprinkle of dried cranberries (not local), the finely sliced bok choy leaves, and salt and pepper to taste (not local). Put immediately onto plates or shallow bowls, and top with a generous chunk of herbed goat cheese (from Idaho). Stir the melted goat cheese into the mixture and eat while it's hot!

This served 3 of us with no leftovers; we accompanied it with lots of crusty bread to soak up the juice in the bottom of the bowl.

Rhubarb for my birthday

My rhubarb grows in a sheltered spot on the east side of my house, where it gets morning sun and afternoon shade and no wind. On my birthday last week I decided to spend the morning doing whatever I wanted instead of going to work and what I felt like doing the most was harvesting something from my yard and baking something with it. Time was limited so I made rhubarb-strawberry crisp.

I gave up using recipes for crisp once I realized that for the topping you really only need oats and butter and sugar, and for the fruit you just need sugar and/or a jar of homemade jam. I just measure a few cups of oats and rub in a stick of butter and about a half cup of brown sugar with a bit of whatever spice I'm in the mood for; last week it was cinnamon. In the buttered baking dish I put the rhubarb and strawberries, cut into bite sized pieces, and then dusted sugar over the whole thing, and then poured over it a couple cups of plum jam left from last year. The oat topping goes all over the top and into the oven it goes at 350 degrees, until the topping is all brown and the fruit is bubbling and tender. MMM!

This week the rhubarb will be made into a pie, since my family loves it even more than crisp. The principle is the same: fruit mixed with some sugar and jam. But for the crust, well, I make pie crust with flour, butter, an egg, and some vinegar or lemon juice. I found this recipe in one of my mom's old cookbooks and it works for me better than anything I've ever tried. For a single crust, it works out to about a cup of flour with 6 tablespoons of butter, 1 egg, and a tablespoon of vinegar, mixed up in the food processor and then dumped onto a sheet of wax paper to roll out. I usually use a bit of flour under and over the pie dough to keep it from sticking to the paper or the rolling pin, and I use the wax paper so that I can lift the whole shebang and flip it over into the pie pan before filling it with fruit and then again on the top of the pie.

I think the appearance of rhubarb satisfies some deep inner need for tart, crisp, fresh food, that signals the end of our starchy and boring potatoes and carrot winter diet and the beginning of summer's wonderful juiciness. Every house ought to have its own little rhubarb patch.

Once I get over the need for crisp and pie I'll start using it for other things, like as a substitute for apples with cooked pork, or as an ingredient in cake. Rhubarb salsa or relish might be another possibility; I'll keep you posted.

BTW the chicken coop is almost done and our chickens will arrive in a few weeks! And the beehives are literally humming with activity. More on that next time.