a meal most satisfying & how to roast a butternut squash

and garlic butter naan

On Monday it rained all day. It was the first cool day in Charlotte that really felt like winter. It was kind of a bummer.

So Monday afternoon Abe roasted the butternut squash that we grew accidentally from a seed in our compost.

There are two ways to roast a butternut squash, and if you don't know about them, you should, because butternut squash is delicious and inexpensive (or free! Grow your own for next year by accident):

1. The Fancy Way, where you take the time to peel and chop the squash before you roast it, therefore producing beautiful, perfect bright orange cubes like they would serve you in an expensive restaurant, and 
2. My Lazy Messy Way, which involves cutting the squash once from top to bottom, rubbing it with a bit of oil inside and out and roasting it whole face-down in a pan. The squash cavity can also be a good place to roast a bit of garlic, but only if you have a good pan: otherwise the garlic will burn and your squash will taste foul. Oh, and don't forget to scoop out the seeds and stringy bits -- that would be after you cut, and before you oil.

I'm a lazy messy kind of girl (no sense denying it). I'm ashamed to admit how my arms ache after cutting up an entire butternut squash, and also because the skin does come off easily and nicely after it's roasted.

Anyway, on Monday Abe roasted the butternut squash The Fancy Way with olive oil, Herbes de Provence and love. When I got home, dinner was simple:  We caramelized an onion and sauteed garlic, then added the butternut squash, a pinch of marjoram and vegetable stock. A quick turn with the immersion blender, and we had the best butternut squash soup I've ever tasted.

Only by growing some food for yourself can you become acquainted with the beautiful energy cycle that revolves from soil to seed to flower to fruit to food to offal to decay, and around again. You will be fully responsible for any food that you grow for yourself, and you will know all about it. You will appreciate it fully, having known it all its life.

-Wendell Berry, "The Pleasures of Eating." Please read the whole essay here.

We're jammin'

I can neither confirm nor deny whether my glasses have been cleaned since this picture was taken.

Yesterday these figs became jam with a little sugar, a little honey bourbon, and a little orange cognac liqueur.

I don't can often enough to remember what needs to be done: most importantly, to calm down. Part of it's the heat (stirring ten boiling pints of fruit pulp next to a vat of boiling water), part of it's the uncertainty (Why Will It Not Thicken?!), part of it's the frustration that I never wrote down how I did it last year. All of it is taken out on Abe. Poor Abe.

So this year while I tore out my hair with one hand (um, not the same hand I was stirring with) and yelled at Abe to sterilize the jars, I scribbled some messy notes on how to make fig jam:

I Wanna Jam It With Figs

makes 10 pints

5 lb. 4 oz. of figs (cleaned, with stems removed)
1/2 c. Grand Marnier/La Belle Orange
1/3 c. honey bourbon (obviously)
3 c. sugar
1 lemon
Use a vegetable peeler to remove the yellow zest from the lemon in strips, then dice. Chop or smash the figs, then let them mascerate with all the other ingredients in a heavy-bottomed pot for at least an hour. Use this time to sterilize your jars and lids and sample the honey bourbon (if anyone asks, you're doing quality control). Bring the fig mixture to a boil, stirring frequently. Wait for it to thicken. (This takes forever, at least an hour, or possibly not - but I can say that because these are messy notes, not an official "recipe.") Once it thickens to a jammy consistency, it's ready to go into jars. I leave about 1/4" of head space before capping. I use a hot water bath canning method and leave the jars in for 10 minutes.

And I always freak out over the ones that don't instantly seal when they come out of the water. But unless you did it all wrong, they just need time (up to 24 hours), and if I've never managed to mess it all up, your jams will be okay too.

the other kind of hops

I've shown you the more animated hops we've grown at Carolina Backyard Farm. These hops are destined for a delicious homebrew as soon as they're dried out and sticky enough.

More information on growing your own hops here and here.

growing seeds from grocery store peppers

Homegrown peppers - second generation from Trader Joe's.
Also, I'm bringing back The Doily.

Everyone who sees these peppers thinks they're spicy. They're not - they're more like tiny sweet bell peppers. These were actually started from seeds harvested from Trader Joe's peppers - those cute mini tricolor pepper-ettes.

It's a bit of a risk trying to grow from commercial seeds (and illegal if the seeds are from Monsanto):  most commercial vegetables are hybridized so that they may not produce, and if they do, the vegetables will be a different variety. But since we'd already bought the peppers, we took a chance, planting a few of seeds from each color pepper (yellow, orange, and red).

Apparently when mini bell peppers are grown commercially, each color is grown separately - they're three distinct seeds with similar size, flavor and shape. As you can see, we got none of the lovely colors from any of the seeds, but we were lucky to get peppers at all, since it turns out store-bought bell pepper seeds are usually infertile.

Have you ever grown anything from the grocery store? A few gardening forums I checked out seemed to indicate decent success growing hot peppers (red chili, habaneros), since heirloom varieties are sold more commonly.

Matt's Wild Cherry Tomatoes

The federal government has sponsored research that has produced a tomato that is perfect in every respect, except that you can't eat it. We should make every effort to make sure this disease, often referred to as 'progress,' doesn't spread.

-Andy Rooney

 

If you're completely overwhelmed when selecting seeds for your garden (and personally, after twenty minutes with a seed catalog, I'm ready to hang it on the wall and shoot darts in lieu of actually choosing), you'll welcome this recommendation:  Matt's Wild Cherry Tomatoes.

We purchased our seeds from Renfrow's Hardware more than two years ago, and we're still going strong. The plants have never given us any problems with pests or blight, and they produce tons of cherry tomatoes all summer long. The fruit is sweet with rich, red flavor, and its seeds produce new tomatoes so easily that you'll likely end up with seedlings next year from this year's plants - perfect for the lazy gardener (a.k.a. me). If you doubt yourself and start too many, let me also suggest Madhur Jaffrey's sweet tomato chutney, which we ate on everything from tofu dogs to grilled vegetables almost every day for two solid months, and still look forward to eating this summer.

the incredible overnight growth of zucchini

We grow zucchini, squash, and some larger tomato varietals in a fenced garden at the back of our yard.  After fighting a desperately impossible battle with devil's grass for two straight years, Abe finally laid landscaping plastic. He used wood from our woodpile to hold the plastic in place over existing garden rows. Then it was as simple as cutting small holes in the plastic to plant the seeds. (We work hard, but we're very lazy gardeners.)

I was in the back garden this weekend picking some veggies. I noticed a small zucchini nestled up under some leaves, and I knew it was almost or probably ready. But my hands were full, so I decided to leave it for another day.

clockwise from 12 o'clock: spring onions, zucchini, cucumbers, summer squash

The next day, that little zucchini had more than doubled in size.  (You can see it in its enormity in the top right.) Lesson learned. 

So for the summer ahead, zucchini are best picked when they're about five inches long and not quite 2 inches around. Younger zucchini (and summer squash, too) is more tender and flavorful. Mammoth zucchs tend to be tough and bland, and are best used for muffins.

Never give up hop

We might not be raising any rabbits right now, but that's not stopping us from growing hops!  Our vine is thriving with all the rain we've had recently (including one thunderstorm that had our brave Cash trying his coonhound best to worm his way into our bed).

With the growing number of breweries making their home in Charlotte (see? and see?), we might just hop ourselves into business.

Someone's been eating my sprouts

After work Abe and I went to enjoy some peace and quiet in the greenhouse. Instead we discovered an infestation of caterpillars. They arrived overnight in hordes. They didn't go for the swiss chard (God knows we have enough swiss chard to share): They went straight for the good stuff, because nothing is sacred when you're a caterpillar.  Brussels sprouts are my favorite, and I'm closer to successfully growing them this year than ever before.

So it's on, Caterpillars. Did you think you could hide from me, skulking around on the underside of leaves like the cowardly tiny pests you are? I knew you White Butterfly Caterpillars right away after a thorough search of my Rodale's Guide and the internet:  your attraction to my brassica was a dead giveaway!  And now you're dead, too.

As it would happen, chickens like caterpillars almost as much as caterpillars like vegetables in the cabbage family.  I tried to get a picture, but it was such a feeding frenzy that my tired camera couldn't keep up, and all I could manage was this blurry photo where you can vaguely see something green in the ferocious beak of our Buff Orpington.

My brussels sprouts aren't the only thing getting eaten, and the caterpillars
aren't the only ones to feast in our backyard. 

Guerillas in your midst

When we first became interested in producing our own food, we guerilla gardened.  Abe (always the adventurer) discovered a floodplain behind the apartment complex we lived in.  Getting there involved a walk through the woods, a healthy respect for copperheads, and a balancing act across a creek (good practice, maybe?).  But it was land no one was using, and our narrow third floor balcony hardly had enough sunlight to grow a few cherry tomatoes.  We cleared a small patch of ground and dug in.

It wasn't exactly an ideal garden site. The spot was a trek from our apartment.  The land was swampy, and we got itchy red bumps to prove the gardening bug wasn't the only one to bite us. There was the chance of falling in the creek (Sorry, Dad). The area's deer had also discovered this little wilderness and helped themselves to most of what we planted. We may or may not have been voilating the city's flood plain regulations.  Still, we enjoyed a few skinny carrots and our first real taste of vegetable gardening.

Now, two years too late, I'm glad to have come across a land access toolkit by the East Bay Urban Agriculture Alliance.  They provide great advice on negotiating land use for those who might not already have access to a garden site.

havin' a grape weekend

Cash checks the progress of our muscadine grapes. So much to look forward to!

figlets in the afternoon

Our fig tree produces two harvests - one late spring/early summer, and one closer to August.  The first harvest is tentative and smaller, the second is the mother load when we make jars and jars of drunken fig jam. 

HOOKED on PONICS

After a slow and demoralizing start, things are finally starting to come together in our aquaponic beds. We're ready for some pay-off after digging out the pond, investing in the liner, buying the clay balls and working to set it all up.  Favorite thing about aquaponics: no weeding required.

How do you solve a problem like broccoli flowers?

I go straight to the experts.

If you've never grown broccoli before (and this is our first time, too) and you're a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-overalls sort of gardener in an unseasonally warm spring, you might get in trouble.  You might start to see tiny buds that resemble broccoli forming on your plants. You might get excited, but acknowledge their tiny size and carry on your business.  The next day, your tiny buds might be flowers and you might scratch your head wondering how you missed part where the broccoli plant grew broccoli.  You might realize too late that your plants are not supposed to flower.   

When you turn to gardening books for advice, they will make you feel like an idiot by giving you advice about preventing the flowers.  They will cause you to fear that it's too late.

But don't despair!  Luckily for all of us, your beautiful broccoli flowers are as edible as the rest of the plant, and they taste kind of like broccoli and kind of like honey.  If the buds are still semi-closed, the flowers should hold their shape if they're cooked, but they're lovely in a salad or as a greenhouse snack. While you're eating the flowers, go ahead and eat the leaves and stalks, too. Put aside your fear that they'll be woody and tough like the stems of the store-bought vegetable: unless you grow your broccoli til the stalks are the size of small tree trunks, the whole plant will be delicious.

chard for all

Between the greenhouse and weather we've had this spring (downright hot), the seeds we started a month ago are already producing more than we can eat.  Today I brought a grocery bag of swiss chard to share with my coworkers.

It's nice to have something to share so early in the season.  Soon I hope we'll have a handle on how much our garden and greenhouse can produce beyond what we need.  At that point, we'll either try a micro C.S.A. or set up shop at the Charlotte Regional Farmer's Market.  Til then, chard for all!

slow growing

We'll be much better friends if you can pretend like you immediately identified this as a sleepy asparagus lady yawning and stretching.  (What? You couldn't tell? Now this is an angry asparagus queen ordering your head cut off.) (These are the benefits of being a terrible artist.)

Lately I've been wanting an asparagus bed.

Like having a trustworthy reputation or good character, the trouble with growing asparagus is that you have to start working on it long before you want it if you're going to have it by the time you need it.

Taste and see

I saw a recipe online for pizza with crust made from riced cauliflower.  I wilted greens from the garden and made sauce with tomatoes that I canned last fall.  I planned to make a healthy supper.

Turns out that the cauliflower crust is 50% grated mozzarella.

And soooooo good.

Make it.

Argument for the urban homestead

Eating with the fullest pleasure — pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance — is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience and celebrate our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living from mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend.

Wendell Berry, "The Pleasures of Eating"

In exchange for a bit of chalk art, Abe and I have enjoyed a CSA membership through the farm-to-table restaurant where I work. The vegetables are wonderful (best carrots ever!), and I can identify the farms they come from.

Even better are the vegetables we've been harvesting from our greenhouse - I know when they were planted, whether the seeds were heirloom or genetically modified, and what kinds of fertilizers were used.  I've likely even seen the same bugs that nibbled on their leaves.

To me, this is a rich life, but I've been struggling to articulate why.  Then I stumbled across this wonderful article, and decided to let Harvey Usery do it for me.

GROW YOUR OWN, BECAUSE...

1.  There are serious problems with our conventional food system.  Some of the issues include:

• Concerns about food safety.  CDC data shows that more than 25% of the U.S. population suffers from food-borne illness each year.
• Concerns about food quality. We sacrifice flavor and nutritional value by consuming processed food. 
• Lack of ingredient choices. From the abundance of different products on the supermarket shelf, if might appear that a trademark of the American food system is choice.  But the FDA decides what we need to know about the contents of the packages we buy at the supermarket, and many of the different products are just new combinations of the same highly processed ingredients.
• Ignoring the hidden costs of our "cheap" food.  U.S. supermarket prices don't take into account the actual cost of our food system - the pollution, the reduced effectiveness of antibiotics because of their overuse in commercial meat farming, erosion/topsoil loss, and the toll on our health.
• The price we pay for convenience: Ignorance.  We don't understand our food, where it comes from, or what it took to get it to our plate.  There's an opportunity cost here, in that we miss out on the satisfaction of wholesome, clean, fair food.

2.  There are signficant benefits (economic, social, physical, environmental, financial) to having a garden:

• Safe food. Growing our own lets us opt out of a "totally anonymous system based on minimum-wage, exploited, often uneducated workers."
• High quality food. There's no food fresher than what we harvest from our own backyards.  Not only that, but when you choose produce over packaged, convenience food, you get a more nutritious diet.
• True food choice. Growing our own food allows us to decide if we want organic or not, are we for or against GMO's, and do we support the use of added antibiotics and hormones.
• Getting what you pay for. "Every dollar we plunk down for food is first and foremost a vote in favor of the way that food was produced."
• Food security. Even a brief look at our current food system reveals it is anything but sustainable.  Knowing how to produce food means knowing how to "sustain" yourself. 

Modern eating is above all about forgetting — about what it is we are eating, about its origins in living systems. The alternative is to learn to know our food intimately, to care intensely about its quality and its role in our lives, to share it with gratitude and respect.

Whenever we grow our own food, or seek it from local sources, we reconnect with the natural year, the passing of the seasons, the interdependence of all forms of life in the great web. By participating in the creation of our food, from soil to table, we find our way back to food as a sacred gift.

Harvey Usery, "21st Century Homesteading: Why Grow Your Own Food?"

you look radishing

Package of Seeds

They can't see their pictures,
they can't read the label --
the seeds in a package --
so how are they able
to know if they're daisies
or green for the table?

It sounds like a fancy,
it sounds like a fable,
but you do the sowing,
the weeding, the hoeing,
and they'll do the knowing
of how to be growing.

(Aileen Fisher)

This weekend, Abe and I enjoyed the first fruits of the greenhouse (and by fruits, I mean vegetables).  The radishes amazed me.  About a month ago, Abe planted seeds - just tiny specks pushed into the dirt.  He gave them water, the sun gave light, the soil gave nutrients.  And somehow, look!  They became round and red, green and leafy, beautiful, healthy food!

Since I was a teenager, I have struggled to have faith.  But to me, the seeds Abe planted are a miracle.  They don't just grow vegetables - my tiny faith grows, too.