Grass into Garden

I recently read Joan Dye Gussow's book This Organic Life, a wonderful book that gave us the push and the info we needed to finally turn our grassy front yard into garden space. The problem has been how to kill the grass without spraying it to death, and then turn it into lovely garden dirt without renting a rototiller? The answer came from Joan: cover up the lawn with something that will kill the grass and top it off with piles of compost. This preserves the structure of the soil and enriches it to boot. We decided that instead of using old carpet - Joan's method - we'd just use corrugated cardboard which wouldn't need to be removed later.

So yesterday I reminded Walt he could get some cardboard from the recycling bins at Moscow Recycling, and so he did, feeling unaccountably guilty for taking cardboard for reuse that was meant for recycling, and then realized hey, it's a great day to do this project. So he went home, spread the cardboard out over the front lawn, called the building supply for a truckload of compost, and then gathered all our neighbor's maple leaves and spread them over the cardboard just in time for the huge pile of steaming compost to be delivered.

By nightfall Walt and Reed had gotten the entire pile spread out, so the whole right side of our lawn looked like a garden just waiting to be planted. I love imagining the weedy grass underneath slowly dying and being turned into soil by the hordes of worms that we know are there. And now I get to spend the winter figuring out what to plant and where. Maybe we can do the other side of the lawn next weekend...

Zucchini Bread

What could be more satisfying than turning a vegetable that you're not particularly fond of in any cooked form into a delicious snack or dessert? Making zucchini bread always gives me such a charge cause none of us really eat it otherwise, but hey, in a cinnamony bread we eat great quantities of the stuff. Not as healthy of course, but I figure that eating it in any form is better than none at all. As desserts go it's a pretty good alternative to cake. And it is a great way to use up zucchinis that have grown too huge to use for any other purpose.

Zucchini won't keep for very long after you've picked it. But you can grate it and put it in containers or bags in the freezer, premeasured for your favorite zucchini bread recipe, and make bread all winter long. When you thaw the grated zucchini out, it will be very watery. Don't dump away all the water or your bread will be too dry. On the other hand, if you use it all, it might be too wet. When you make it regularly, you'll learn what consistency of batter to shoot for, and you can adjust accordingly.

Here's a recipe to try, but don't be afraid to experiment. I like to cut back on the sugar and I always use raw sugar instead of white. Or try Sucanat instead. Try a teaspoon of walnut extract along with a teaspoon of vanilla. Also feel free to substitute some whole wheat flour for some of the white flour. Or even try subbing in some unsweetened cocoa for some of the flour! Or sub chocolate chips for the walnuts...Another nice touch is to sprinkle sesame seeds on top of the batter just before you put the filled pans in the oven to bake.

3 eggs
1 cup vegetable oil
2 cups white sugar
2 cups grated zucchini
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
3 cups all-purpose flour
3 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup chopped walnuts

DIRECTIONS
Preheat oven to 325 degrees F ( 165 degrees C). Grease and flour two 8x4 inch loaf pans.
In a large bowl, beat eggs until light and frothy. Mix in oil and sugar. Stir in zucchini and vanilla. Combine flour, cinnamon, soda, baking powder, salt and nuts; stir into the egg mixture. Divide batter into prepared pans.
Bake for 60 to 70 minutes, or until done.

We know beans...

I just read an entire book about beans and was inspired to cook split pea soup this weekend, since these lovely little green babies hail from here on the Palouse. For some reason in our house we refer to this by its color – “green soup” – probably because when Reed was little he was in an anti-pea phase and I thought the words split pea would put him off– and it is generally a favorite, probably due to the generous amount of bacon in which I saute’ the diced onion and carrots before adding the water and the dried split peas and bay leaves. The only other ingredients are salt and pepper, although I have been known to make this with chicken stock in the past. This time I didn’t yet have chicken stock so used plain water, without using a bouillon cube or anything, and surprisingly I found I liked the lighter, less salty flavor of it; it was cleaner and fresher on my tongue. So I might stick with water for green soup in the future.

The other legumes we grow here are chickpeas/garbanzos and lentils. This next weekend our church (Community Congregational United Church of Christ) in Pullman is doing a Habitat for Humanity fundraiser. I’m planning the food and using chickpeas as my starting point I’ve planned a Mediterranean-style menu: pitas, hummus, couscous, tabbouleh, vegetable and lamb stew, cucumber salad, etc. Lots of tomatoes, eggplant, onions, olive oil, and lemon juice. Of course, lemons and olives don’t grow here, but being strictly local is not the point of this fundraiser – thinking about the rest of humanity is the point, and I think olive oil is a great place to start doing that.

Grape Harvest in Kamiah

This weekend we went to Pat and Kathy's house in Kamiah, where they are blessed with Concord grapes and another variety that is sweeter and seedless and delicious for eating out of hand, and harvested some 40 gallons of Concords which we processed into grape juice. The climate is just slightly warmer there than in Moscow, as they are down on the Clearwater River instead of up on the plateau like us.

Pat and Kathy (pictured above on the ladder and at the sink) supplied the grapes and a whole bunch of bonhomie, and we brought a lot of jars and another dose of good cheer and between us we ended up with a very large supply of frozen grape juice. To get it you cook the grapes until they've softened down into juice, seeds, and empty peels, then filter it through a colander and again through a jelly sock. That's it! It is slightly concentrated, too, so each jar goes pretty far. I think we brought home about 15 quarts and about the same number of pints. Pat and Kathy kept a good supply too, hopefully enough to last for a while. Hopefully the purple stains will come off the counter, too. Kathy swears Clorox does the trick.

We brought home some vine cuttings to try to establish our own grapes in Moscow; we'll see if that works out. Next project for our group: our chicken coop!

I made plum jam sometime in the last two weeks, fitting it in where I could, using the entire 5 gallon bucket in two separate sessions. It made beautiful, ruby-colored jam, that needed no sugar at all. So we'll eat it liberally on our toast and cereal this winter and not feel guilty, ever.

Processing Pears

I'll never can fruit by myself again. With Walt and Reed's help, me peeling and him slicing and Reed putting the fruit in the jars, we knocked through a couple of flats of pears in just over an hour, not counting cooking time. If I had done it myself it would have taken three times that long. Walt had picked them last week and let them ripen on a big cushy tarp in the garage. We found that they were perfect just as they had taken on a yellowish tinge, but not gotten all the way yellow. This batch resulted in 9 quarts, which we added to the previous batch that was about the same size, and now we are well-set for canned pears for the winter. The apples are still waiting, and there are a few pears still on the tree in our front yard; I think I'll set those aside for crisp.

Zakarison's Chickens

Two weekends ago we spent a good portion of Saturday morning at the Zakarison farm north of Pullman, processing chickens for the freezer. Eric - that's him in the photo with his hand inside a bird - raises them on pasture, with movable chicken "trucks," a la Joel Salatin (Pastured Poultry Profits, is the name of his book, I think), so they were fat and happy and healthy birds. Also, Eric has an excellent setup for the processing day, which is outdoors, painless for the birds, hygienic, and considering the task, with as little yuck-factor as possible. This was the third time we've killed and processed our own chickens with Eric's help and Walt and I have found it to be a satisfying day of work. At the end of the day, with 20 chickens in the freezer, we feel like we've accomplished quite a lot!

This chicken tastes fabulous, by the way. I had to learn how to cut apart a whole chicken - not a skill one picks up automatically these days - but once I learned that, it was pretty easy to never buy industrial/factory raised chicken again. Eric's chickens are indeed more expensive, but we don't need to eat chicken every day, do we?

Finding Time for Fruit

I picked a 5 gallon bucket of Italian plums last Friday before we left for the weekend; I haven't forgotten how a few years ago we left them, almost ripe, on the tree while we went camping for the weekend, and when we returned, the tree was completely bare - squirrels!! Sure enough, I took a break on Friday and when I came back a squirrel was trying to get what he could before I came back. So I left him a couple and took the rest. They're sitting in the bucket in the basement for later this week when I have time to make jam.

I also bottled up the cherry liqueur on Friday before we left for the weekend. Turns out that with a quart of cherries soaking in vodka, after you filter the cherries out and then filter it through a cloth (a coffee filter won't work, the gooey stuff keeps the liquid from filtering through), add in the 5 oz. of simple syrup, and top it off with water, you'll end up with about 26 ounces of liqueur, or, if you like it a little less strong, about a quart (32 oz.) of liqueur. We taste tested it right away and thought it was pretty delicious all by itself. In a few weeks we'll try it again and see if it has changed any.

Walt helped me process the few pears that were ripe on Friday, we just peeled and quartered and cored them, and put them into a light syrup in a glass jar, which I put in the microwave for a few minutes and then put in the fridge. So they are like canned pears, but not actually canned. We like the flavor and consistency of the canned pears so thought I'd replicate it without all the major work. But now all the pears sitting on a blanket on the floor of the garage are ripe all at once, so we'll have to do the real canning process, and very soon. Probably tomorrow! Thank goodness the apples will wait a little longer.

We got our freezer lamb from SkyLines last week, and this coming weekend is chicken processing at Zakarison's. We're getting 20 birds for the freezer. Eric says he has a new defeathering machine, even faster than the old defeathering machine, that will make it possible for us to do 20 birds in just over 2 hours. Wow. That many used to take us 1/2 a day. I'll report in afterwards. Combined with a sale on Country Natural beef from Oregon that's going on at the Co-op this week, the freezer is rapidly filling up, and that feels great.

Pears, Plums, and Apples Oh My

The plums, the pears, the apples, they’re all waiting for me now, falling off the trees in anticipation of being turned into jam, into sauce, into slightly sweetened preserved fruit with essence of vanilla, just enough to make you breathe deep when you open the bottle, aah.

Walt picked a bushel of each.

The cherry liqueur is ready for bottling. I need to get some pretty corked bottles for it, and then we’ll tuck them away until November or so.

The lamb we ordered from Melissa Lines at SkyLines Farm will be ready for us later this week. I’m really looking forward to having that in the freezer. In anticipation I made my own version of seven-hour leg of lamb today with some I’d gotten from a friend a couple weeks ago; I browned it in olive oil and put it in the crock pot with about ½ an inch of water. I sautéed in the same pan a diced onion, two diced carrots, and a diced tomato, with some rosemary and mint, and added the browned veggies to the crock pot, and put on the lid. I left it on low from 7 am until 5 pm and then turned it down to keep warm. It was fabulously tender and delicious, absolutely the best lamb I’ve ever done. Alongside garlic parsley mashed potatoes made from new potatoes, and a salad, it was one of the more successful meals we’ve had in a while.

Our nephew Steve came to dinner to get a change from UI dorm food and he was gratifyingly grateful for the home-cooked meal. We topped it off with some European cheeses, a Dutch cheese with nettles, a semi-soft cow’s milk cheese from the Pyrenees with peppercorns in it, some domestic blue, and some Morbier from France, with the layer of ash in the middle – but next time in keeping with the locavore theme I’ll try some just from the Pacific Northwest. I bought a Ste Chapelle wine that was cheap, a “soft red”, thinking it’d be just the thing, but I didn’t realize that “soft” means “sweet.” Next time I’ll go with the pinot noir from Oregon or the Okanagan...

Lentil Festival and Blueberries

After a cool and rainy week on the Palouse, the weather was perfect for Lentil Festival weekend in Pullman, and for the farmer’s market in Moscow, which didn’t appear to suffer any loss of customers to the Lentil Festival. The huge bowl of lentil chili is always an awesome sight, especially the guy up on top stirring it with a canoe paddle; I love the way they fill up pitchers of the stuff from the faucet at the bottom of the pot and then serve it into paper cups for the hordes.

We went to the farmer’s market this morning with our friends Pat and Kathy who were visiting from Kamiah, and came home with two flats of Oregon blueberries (24 generous pints), 10 ears of corn, and a flat of peaches. Also I got some fresh tomatoes from Kate Jaeckel at Orchard Farm, who was so proud to have harvested some 100 lbs. of them this week, thanks to her crop being protected during the early season by a hoop house. With snow on June 10 and frost in early July, it’s a wonder we can get tomatoes at all. We promptly turned them into BLT’s for lunch, accompanied by the boiled sweet corn that Reed and Pat shucked and silked for us.

I put one pint of berries in the fridge and poured the rest straight into Ziploc bags and stuck them – all 18 pounds of them - into the freezer. At a cost of $53 for the two flats, I got 18 lbs. of fresh blueberries for just under $3/lb. Considering that they cost at least twice that in the freezer section of the grocery store I’m feeling great, and that’s before I even pop any into my mouth, which is simply unadulterated pleasure. And for only $3/lb.!!

Spoiled for Choice

Cherries macerating in vodka
Saturday - I went to the Moscow Farmer’s Market this morning on my bike, arriving just a few minutes after the opening bell at 8 a.m. I thought I would beat the crowds as in days of yore but wow, the crowds were out in full force, purposefully carrying away flats of blueberries, peaches, tomatoes, sweet corn, cumbersome melons, bags of green beans, new potatoes… just about anything you want vegetable wise is available on the Palouse in mid-August. It’s been hot this week so the tomatoes are finally ready, and we’re fortunate to have the Lewiston/Clarkston valley just an hour away, where the temperature along the Snake River is about 10 degrees warmer than the Palouse all year round. Also, Tonnemaker’s from further west in Washington have milder weather than us, giving them an advantage in the stone fruits and warm weather vegetables.

Way more people at the market than there were a year ago, before we left on our sabbatical. I thought maybe Moscow’s “groovy quotient” had risen but Walt and I both observed that people were really serious about the food – and so perhaps it’s less about what’s groovy and more about what’s economical and even better, what tastes good.

All I had room to carry on my bike were potatoes, onions, peaches, tomatoes, apples, eggs, basil, and blueberries, which I got from 3 different stands in order to spread the wealth around. Simple economics forced me to forgo the $15/qt. huckleberries, much as we love them.

When I got home I made a breakfast of blueberries and peaches with yogurt and granola; for lunch we made a tomato salad with finely diced fresh red onion, fresh basil, salt and pepper, and balsamic vinegar and olive oil; which we ate alongside homemade bread (made with Montana flour) spread with my son Reed’s special garlic/basil cream cheese, and some scrambled organic eggs from Avon Farm in Deary, Idaho, where the chickens are “living good like chickens should.”

We’re debating the location of our backyard chicken run, but we’ll have to decide soon, as we’re due to get our four hens from Zakarison’s outside Pullman WA in a few weeks.

Cherry Update: My fingers are still blackened from slicing and pitting 6 quarts of sweet cherries for my batch of cherry liqueur. I used almost the whole large bottle of 100 proof vodka for that many cherries, but there’s a little left over for vodka tonics. I didn’t use the Idaho vodka, though, since it was only 80 proof. Only!

Cherry Carnage

The kitchen looked like I murdered a small animal but in reality all I'd been doing was pitting cherries that my husband picked from our neighbor Kate's tree. Normally we harvest cherries in July on the Palouse but it was a long winter so they were waiting for us when we arrived home from our European sabbatical last week. Walt doesn't actually love cherries that much - too bad since his birthday is in July - but he admitted they are "fun to pick," because you can grab them in bunches, which is very satisfying. They are huge, sweet, and almost black, and when I pit them on my homemade nail-on-a-board pitter, the best ones burst open with a geyser-like squirt of blood-red juice. My glasses, my face, the cupboards, the counter: everything is blessed with syrupy spatters.

First we ate some fresh for dessert. Then I froze several gallons of plain cherries for making cherry crisp this winter. Then, I made cherry jam, or, if it doesn't quite set up, cherry compote. Either way is fine, because the intended use is as a topping for breakfast oatmeal, or on yogurt or ice cream for dessert. The next bucket that Walt picks for me will be dedicated to cherry liqueur. Served on its own as a dessert drink or in white wine or sparkling white wine as a kir or kir royale aperitif, I predict it will be the essence of summer in a glass. Everyone we stayed with in France last year had a well-stocked cupboard of homemade liqueurs, and I intend to follow their example.

If you want to find cherries to pick in your area try the website www.pickyourown.org. Normally the Tukey Orchard at WSU in Pullman has U-pick cherries in July but I believe that most of them were used for research this year - ain't that the pits!

Here is the recipe I'll use for cherry liqueur. I don't know why the quantities are so funky - when I figure out more normal sounding measurements I'll replace this recipe with my own.

2½ c., (591 ml.) sweet cherries (Bing)
12.7 oz., (376 ml.) 100° proof Vodka (non-flavored)
5 oz., (148 ml.) simple syrup (two parts sugar dissolved in one part water)
2-6 drops lemon extract

• Into a quart jar, add cherries that have been cut in half and pitted. Add alcohol and water to cover cherries. Macerate—tightly covered 2 to 3 weeks at room temperature, shaking daily. Filter through cheesecloth and then through a coffee filter; add simple syrup and lemon extract (optional). Next add (top with) water to bring the total volume up to 25.4 ounces. The liqueur is very good at this point; it will become smoother if it is aged for a few weeks or more.

Note: You can also make this recipe using 80° vodka, 16 oz. (476 ml.).
24% Alc. by Vol. (48°). Makes 750 ml.

Eating Local on the Palouse

This new blog will get underway in August 2008. Watch this space!