Corn for our seeds

     In today’s Common Prayer – February 22 – we read this prayer:

“Lord God, extend our faith so that even when we fail to see the fruit of our planted seeds, we may have the assurance that every inch of soil overturned will lead to a harvest some day.”

     Last summer our organic farmer friends gave Anita bag of seed corn that was a year old. Joe and Becca said plant however much you want, we can’t risk low germination from old sweet corn seeds. They also generously gave her space for six 100 foot rows. It has always been her dream to grow enough sweet corn for eating delicious golden kernels all winter. The thing is, you might have a good harvest off the ten to twelve corn plants you put in your small urban garden, but that’s still only three ears per corn plant? Three dozen ears altogether? Unless you have room for a lot, it’s a waste of time and space. So the possibilities of corn through the roof had her hungry-eyed.

     This is what happened. We had so much corn we could have begun a factory farm of feeder hogs. We raved over the sweet, tender ears, we ate them like chainsaws – sawdust flying, protective goggles over our eyes.

     It had reproduced itself five hundred fold with wild energy. We ended up freezing 46 quarts and giving away at least 20 dozen ears. For the first harvest we picked three or four wheel barrels full and pushed it up to the yard where we set up a little canning factory. Anita picked, Denis shucked, I cut the kernels off the cob, and together we heated it to boiling point on a camping stove and then put it all in zip lock bags. Tato, the dog ate cobs as he could and all the leftover greens and cobs were dumped over the fence to the chickens and pigs. And that was just the first picking. It’s almost March and we still have plenty of corn to eat.

     thought a lot about that harvest and everything that had to coalesce under sunny days and warm nights to make it so darn good. This rarely happens in life. Sometimes. But rarely. You invest and invest and once in a blue moon you get to see where that seed went and what it did. The prayer above is mostly how it is. Maybe years later you get a facebook message thanking you for all the pizza you served the youth group and how they’ll never forget listening to Purple Rain and thinking about Ferris Buellers Day Off in your living room. We need to keep stumbling down the row year after year because you never know when the corn will come home. But even if it doesn’t, we are assured by God that he grows a great harvest that will overflow all our wheel barrels and burst our freezers. 

Anita and I picked the first load.

 

Denis did the shucking while I began cutting it off the cobs.

Anita took a turn with the knife while I began blanching the corn.

The Chickens feasted on all the leftovers.

   

We made a huge pot of corn chowder on the camp stove in the yard and ate it with Joe & Becca and all the interns. All fresh - even the milk came out of the Jersey cow that morning.

Chickens for Toad Hall

      I've always wanted more chickens ever since we had a few hens back in the dark ages in Albuquerque, and I was putting us through eating hell. One of my little phases of you- may-not-eat, in this case, sugar of any kind. So for the paradox and inconvenience of my philosophy we kept bee hives,  fought the desert to raise broccoli, and included pinto beans and green chili in every dish. 

     Today I have a new flock. Anita knitted them. They require very little care and it looks like they’re already laying. Little Cadbury eggs. How nice. And so you know how far I’ve come, this afternoon I'm eating two of their eggs and am also baking a strawberry rhubarb pie – with sugar – to take out to Heartbeet Farm to share with Joe and Becca for the evening meal.

Christmas at Heartbeet Farm

Gary in recent years had observed, with plate tectonically cumulative anxiety, that population was continuing to flow out of the Midwest and toward the cooler coasts.... Gary wished that all further migration [could] be banned and all Midwesterners encouraged to revert to eating pasty foods and wearing dowdy clothes and playing board games, in order that a strategic national reserve of cluelessness might be maintained, a wilderness of taste which would enable people of privilege, like himself, to feel extremely civilized in perpetuity.

- The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

Gary, we stayed right here in SE Minnesota and joined Anita out at the farm where she was staying while Joe & Becca were away in South Carolina visiting her family for the holidays. We also played games for hours.

And Gary, was our Christmas dinner pasty enough for you?

Shepherd’s pie

Glazed Carrots

Granny’s white dinner rolls with lemon curd and strawberry jam (homemade)

Cranberry wassail

Don’t you love the colors, too, Gary? I used blue potatoes (grown here on the farm) but when you cook and mash them they turn a pale pinky-purple shade. The red plate, the orange carrots? Perfect match. (We glazed the carrots in cast-iron on the Beast.)

P.S. I agree. Although the pie tasted great, it looked pretty icky.

Days of heaven, maybe

A couple nights ago we took another supper out to the farm. Anita and I got inspired by a peppery sort of Mexican menu and before the food was planned she had pulled a red Mexican blanket from the trunk of her car for a tablecloth and I’d chosen a cd - Flaco Jimenez – All Said and Done. Joe and Becca’s interns Nathan & Sarah joined us, Hannah was there, and Daniel, Joe’s good friend, arrived on his motorcycle with his new puppy, Franky, riding in a box on the back.



While Anita and Denis set up, I finished the poblanos, frying them up in Becca’s cast iron skillet.





Sitting down together in the yard with friends and a loaded table had the distinct feel of eternity – the scent we sometimes get being hundreds of miles or years



downstream from the source. What with the long rays of evening crossing the fields diffusing through the trees, the blend of flavors and textures, sharing stories – it roused hope, the reminder that one day these won't be such a rare moments especially when life is…
Cheez. I’ve been reading too much nineteenth century nature writing. Sounds like I’m channeling James Audubon essays. What I’m saying, okay, is that sometimes God gives grace-filled days and I really, really need to bank them against bad times. Not that I’ve lived with a pessimist or anything, these many years.

This was our menu:

Cucumber-Yogurt Soup with Pepperoncini
(now my favorite cold soup with perfect amount of creamy tanginess)
Flat enchiladas (an easy dish from Hispanic neighbors)
Stuffed Poblano Peppers
Tomato mint salad with pomegranate molasses dressing (unusual foody items like this can make me crabby, but this specialty molasses was worth it)
Challah bread & butter
Fresh lemonade
Café Flan with whipped cream and Kahlua. (a flawless melting of flavors when a spoonful is slowly pressed to the roof of your mouth)

You know, if there was interest, I might post some of these recipes. But only...

Chicken Salad

The other night we took a supper out to Joe & Becca and their interns. I don’t think I’ve ever cooked for such grateful people. Pretty simple meal. I made a chicken rice salad that looks really sexy when done. (Of course, I forgot to snap a pic of the finished dish.) With savory bacon/cornmeal muffins, fresh lemonade, and chocolate chip cookies…man, I just killed my back trying to stomp on something running across the floor really fast…okay missed it…made by Anita. Joe showed us the hens’ nests he’s building in the shop, nice three-storied condos. They even have carpet inside. The chickens began laying this week. Suddenly, 13 eggs the first day, 8 the next and they’re off. Pretty exciting. But sad thing is they’re mainly white laid by the white leghorns and customers are beginning to prefer the brown. They think that when the dog got in and killed so many earlier this spring he got mostly the other breeds which are a bit more laid back personality-wise. The leghorns are wary freaked-out creatures and probably ran away like that centipede I just tried to kill. They sent us home with a huge bag of basil and some other vegetables.

Still, went to market today and took some pics. (See more on my Facebook.)




Here’s recipe for the chicken salad. It can easily morph a lot of directions and is always a little different every time I make it.

Chicken Rice Salad

1 cup cooked chicken breast or thighs (can substitute crab or shrimp)
3 cups rice (I use brown and wild)
¼ cup sliced celery
¼ cup chopped green pepper
¼ cup chopped red pepper
¼ chopped green onion
½ cup mayonnaise
salt, pepper
Combine and chill. (I often add calamata olives.) Serve on platter or large shallow dish on a bed of greens. Mound the salad and garnish all around with alternating wedges of avacado, lemon and tomato. Beautiful.

Slow Sunday

See pics here.

Organic Vegetables

I just got back from the market with this. Most of it is from Joe and Becca's stand. Fresh eggs, butterhead lettuce, baby bok choy, a head of broccoli, scallions, sugar snap peas, beets and greens, strawberries, pea vines, spinach, and radishes. Should keep us in vitamin K for the week, no? I think I'll make a spinach and strawberry salad later today when Denis gets home from the CIVA conference. (he's giving a workshop on beauty found in ugliness) Although I don't have strawberry vinegar I think I have raspberry. That should do.

Romancing the garden

Last week we took a supper out to the garden for Joe, Becca, and their interns Sarah and Nathan. It was a beautiful day and they’d spent it on their knees transplanting lettuces peppers and fennel. Denis and I drove down a lane along side part of the garden, pulled a card table out of the trunk and set up for a simple meal - my hearty version of taco salad (made with their fresh greens and spinach) country French bread I picked up at a good bakery, butter sun tea and lemon bars. As we mixed the salad into a huge bowl, dumping the warm chile and beans from the Dutch oven, Joe came over a low rise saying he knew we had arrived because he could smell the food. Either he was really hungry, has a keen sense of smell, or the garlic and onions were extra powerful. Maybe all three. They had time for about a twenty minute break and then went back to working until dark.

Nathan and Sarah at the "table."


Denis and I wandered around the beds and through the greenhouses where all was quiet except for the swish of water through the hoses and the evening birdsongs. The sun was low but its light still filtered across benches of cucumber vines rising along strings and staked tomatoes setting small fruits - ripening evidence of weeks of work through the cold months of February, March and April.



Outside, small fields, bordered by fruit trees swathed in grasses, were already filled with curving, orderly rows of young green vegetables. Chard, spinach, peas, all the varieties of lettuce, radishes of many kinds, herbs, fennel. On and on they went, the fields rounding toward the fence where the lama stood on a little hillock staring us down amid chickens who scratched at his feet.

I know on this day only an idiot would miss the beauty and potential bounty of this garden. Even I captured a tiny bit with my camera. But knowing the people who work it, I also know the ache knees and suffering that is bound to our earthly existence. In so many ways, we long for the permanence of everything that is healthy and healing. Until then we weed scratch and water hoping in Christ who will one day restore life to what it was intended to be.

Gone to the dog

Breaking new ground with the team.

We were sad to hear about Joe and Becca’s chickens the other day. The previous week when they returned from their other gardens late in the day and Joe went out to shut in the chickens, (They divide their work between their farm and Joe’s dad’s acreage where the soil is organic and has been farmed in vegetables for years. Most of their own land needs to rest and be organically rebuilt from years of corn and soybean crops that require boatloads of chemicals.) he noticed a neighbor’s dog running away from the yard with a chicken in its mouth. He chased it down and returned it to the owner before knowing the extent of the damage. Back at the chicken house he found carnage. Blood and dead chickens everywhere. A count of the survivors showed the dog must have been on rampage for hours as he killed 95 of the little pre-teen hens. Their babies!! For days they were finding carcasses hidden or buried in the yard. The neighbor’s insurance will cover the cost of the chicks, but not the loss of income that would have come from three years of laying eggs. Here is, “Crooked Beak” one of the survivors. She has learned to eat despite a handicap.


They’ve been using Carla and Kayla to prepare some of the ground to plant potatoes and corn. Joe was very excited about finding a horse-pulled potato planter. (He’s pretty enraptured about all that horse-drawn equipment that’s been rusting for a century in remote pastures around the county.) No surprise that it takes some repair and practice to get it working properly. Recently, Anita, our housemate, was out to the farm for a day to help them plant. While Joe drove up front, she rode on the back of the machine, which with one pass dug a furrow, turned a hopper that dropped a potato, and then covered it with dirt every 18 inches or so. A very pleasing machine. Almost a work of art? She was to make sure the potatoes loaded and dropped at the right intervals. She was to tell Joe when things got jammed up, so at first it was comic and frantic as she kept yelling WHOA, WHOA and the well-trained team kept stopping at her command and getting more confused by the cacophony of voices rising behind them. Joe finally decided Becca and Anita must not talk and laugh so much and Anita must say “Stop” not “Whoa.” Apparently the Amish, from whom the horses were purchased, are pretty much all business as they quietly follow their teams in the field. Who can blame them? This is not a hobby. For Joe and Becca either.

Joe's single bottom horse-drawn plow.

One of Joe’s genius and endearing qualities is how he grasps and warehouses numbers. He knows how much, how long, how far, how many of anything. Thus: 14,000 onion and leeks have been set out in rows. 45 bunches of radish sold by 10 a.m. When I asked him how much potatoes did you plant? he replied, “Well, let’s see, 35 rows at 300 feet each….that’s 1.988 miles of potatoes. Or this: 95 chickens killed out of 172. Down from the original 185, although a few kicked the bucket for other reasons – like eating bits of plastic used to bind hay bales. It was mixed in the straw that originally covered the floor of the barn. They wouldn’t have known except for an autopsy on several that looked healthy one day and keeled over the next. Strings were found wrapped around and warping their little guts. Oww.

Their days are growing longer. Becca might be out in the greenhouse by 6 am with a four gallon spray pack on her back letting the leaf hoppers have it with some kind of “organic” solution. Joe might be out in the field with the girls plowing up more ground for late plantings of corn or cultivating rows of potatoes which are poking through. Often their work lasts until 9 p.m. when the light fades. Just typing that exhausts me. It sure punches a hole in a romantic view of what it takes to run a farm.

You might think, wow, all that great green food right in front of you. Man, think of the salads! How they must eat! Truth is, they’re often too busy to prepare much and might only grab some bread and butter with cheese. That’s where we can occasionally help a little. Last week we took supper out to them.

Becca left some fresh greens, shitake and morel mushrooms, asparagus, and a gallon of jersey milk in her refrigerator for us to add to what we brought. When they arrived home about 7:15, I had made Greek chicken and potatoes; it comes out of the oven browned and crisp when you coat it with olive oil, salt, and oregano. Mmmm. Anita had concocted a wine shitake sauce for the steamed asparagus, and sautéed the morels with mild spices to go atop goat cheese and crackers. I tossed a large green salad with about a million different lettuces and spinach, making a simple balsamic vinegar, olive oil, and honey dressing, and crumbling feta cheese over the top. We had a warm rhubarb crisp with cream skimmed off the top of the milk for dessert. Don’t often get to cook for people who have worked so hard they can afford maybe a hundred times the calories of my body. We all sat around beaming. It made me really happy.

Kayla heads for the barn.

Morels and Farmer’s Market

Our first Saturday home for the Farmer’s Market Season. It was 41 degrees with a raw wind when we rounded the rows of vendors to see Becca & Joe’s stand. Becca was there with Sarah, their intern. They were bundled up in woolen hats and sweaters. Becca was shivering, and said she wished she’d worn long underwear. Man, it was cold.

We came home with fresh eggs, asparagus, a bundle of early garlic, and a bag of greens. But it was the morels I would have forgone coffee for a week, not eaten chocolate for a month. I hesitated at $24.00 a pound and almost walked away. Then I thought, no. Let’s see what $5.00 would get and as they were weighed out I listened to the conversations around me. One guy, Larry, said he was out turkey hunting this past week and happened on a patch and picked ten pounds. Sold them instantly to a local restaurant. Someone else said, ya, round here they began showing up last Tuesday and may be around another ten days if you’re lucky enough to find ’em or rich enough to buy.

In our age of being able to purchase any food from anywhere anytime it’s rare to not find whatever you fancy. However, morel mushrooms defy domestication and refuse to grow under artificial conditions. Their needs remain a mystery and they show up only when and where they want. Which is partly why no one will ever tell you exactly where they find this treasure, unless you threaten to kill them or kidnap their children.

I appreciate morels for the very reason that they are rare. When I get a few once every other year or so, I could roll in crap like a dog I’m so pleased. We came home this morning and I sautéed the garlic and some fresh asparagus for a cheese omelet. And even though vendors and chefs will suggest adding chopped morels to something like an omelet, or will have you add them to a sauce for meat or some such, I can’t EVER do that. I ALWAYS eat them pure and undefiled. I prepare the mushrooms, which are about as ugly a phallic knock-off as you could imagine, by.. oh, I might as well post it as a recipe...:

Sauteed Morel Mushrooms
Soaking briefly in salted water. This rinses off some of the dirt and brings the insects crawling out of crevices. Drain, pat gently in paper towels.
Cut in half lengthwise.
Make a simple light batter with 1/3 cup flour, 1/3 to 1/2 cup milk, one egg, a little salt and pepper. Whisk together.
Drop morels in batter and very carefully fish out one by one and drop in a fairly hot frying pan sizzling with butter. It only takes about three minutes to brown them lightly on both sides and drain on paper. Should be eaten hot. O man, Paradise!

The only thing about morels in my life that isn’t perfect is Denis -- who hates mushrooms and has nothing good to say about them, and digs them out of every dish that might contain a few, saying if God had intended us to eat “fungus” they’d be called by a different name, (he’s not ALWAYS the logical half of our partnership) LOVES morels. Thus, I don’t get to eat them all myself.

Shooter, sixguns, and such

Last Sunday we were to Joe & Becca’s farm with some indigenous locals and a few foreigners from Iowa and Australia where intended to get our bellies full and then fire off a lot of ammo, takin’ care not to disturb the neighbors or alarm the Amish mares, Kayla and Carla, who were new to the farm – we were bein’ partickler about safety, anyway. The mares back in their stable never flinched and we didn’t hear nuthin from nobody else. It was cold and drizzly all afternoon, but it didn’t discourage anyone as Joe led us across muddy ditches to the other side of his fields.

At first we had intended it to be a small hunter/gatherer party, but as word leaked out more and more would-be gunners came out of the closet until we finally said, no more. One friend who’d never shot a gun before said the previous evening he’d been with friends who cried out that the only difference between the southern Bible Belt conservatives they knew and their current Mpls church group was their Minnesota accent – mainly, they all owned GUNS! This discouraged him from revealing where he was going the next day. However, we fancy this could be a new model for “outreach” (Fired-up Evangelism. Or… no, don’t get started.) for our church as there were a goodly number of folk with us who don’t generally consider themselves people of faith. The were warmly received and really into it.

We arrived with enough firepower to arm a militia. And I thought I’d try to post a several videos. Even though I’m totally handicapped and the lens of my camera had moisture on it making every scene, you know not what…fog? Gunsmoke? And my breathing and laughing. Ugh. On a more peaceful note – the last video, if you’ve ever wondered if adolescent chicks cluck or do they still peep (not tweet)? Joe and Becca’s chickens were fun to watch.