Eighth of an Acre Bounty

The world lost an amazing mind and a kind, sharp witted, sometimes grumpy, thoughtful, irreverent and always sentimental man. Solly will be missed.

http://solsaporta.com/

Hmmm, not so scary eh…wait

There we go!

So this is our pumpkin, hefted fresh from the fields by Gary last weekend. Almost 60 pounds of pumpkin, in fact. This little endeavor is the first pumpkin I have carved since being all grown up. I honestly can’t recall the last pumpkin I carved as a kid. I’d been toying with the idea of carving a pumpkin last year, but never got around to it. This past weekend, opportunity presented itself and we got this gem.

Gary actually picked the pumpkin. He was reluctant and was generally humoring me (he does that a lot, good man) when I mentioned making a jack o lantern. But once we got into the fields he was all business, searching out the perfect one. I suspect our selection of such a large pumpkin has something to do with a PBS (?) documentary we watched about a year ago, following people obsessed with growing giant pumpkins.

We had a really good time Sunday night, spreading squash guts over every inch of the kitchen and generally making a mess and getting obsessive. I think this may become a tradition. Besides, pumpkin seeds are inside pumpkins (yum). We live in a neighborhood where people still take their kids out trick or treating to actual houses. This seems to be more and more of a rarity with everyone so petrified of their neighbors and the world in general. So we get a lot of foot traffic on Halloween and vow to always stock the good stuff candy-wise.That is if we can keep our dirty hands off of it in the days leading up to the big night.

Our first real Halloween after moving in to the house we were woefully unprepared for the amount of kids we would get and ran out of candy. This was when there was still a grocery store in our neighborhood and Gary left me to go over to the IGA and pick up some more. I had a little bit of candy left in the bowl and the door rang while he was gone. I opened the door to a giant gaggle of children all clamoring for sweets. I rationed out the candy, one piece per kid, absolutely anxious that I was going to run out. But it worked, I saw the last kid come up with outstretched bag and I dropped my last piece in and heaved a sigh of relief. As the crowd of children moved off the porch and I started to turn to go inside, I heard the littlest voice say “trick or treat”. Horrified, I turned to see that behind all of the other crowding children had been one more child, the littlest Batman in the whole entire world. He was standing there, arms stretched out with his bag open smiling at me.

I just about died – I had no more candy. I didn’t even have cash as Gary and I had pooled our money to send him to the store. I had to tell him that I just ran out of candy. And before my very eyes the littlest Batman in the world got even smaller. He completely deflated. His arms dropped down to his side, his eyes cast toward the ground and his shoulders slumped. He mumbled a tiny little “ok” and turned to walk away with his feet dragging. My heart broke.

We do not live in a rich nieghborhood, far from it. Each year a number of the kids at our door don’t even have costumes. They come around guided by an older brother or sister clutching a pillowcase or a schoolbag as thier candy bag. So Halloween is always a bit of mixed emotions for me. It is nice to see some semblance of what I remember from my childhood nieghborhood preserved nowadays. But it is also tough to see kids who don’t have the chance to fully involve themselves in the excitement of picking a costume/charachter and playing dress up for a night. Kids who didn’t dress up because they had parents that were working and didn’t have the time  or cash to figure out a costume with them. Kids who are self conscious when they show up at your door in thier regular clothes and school backpack halfway unzipped as a makeshift bag. Older brothers or sisters in the background with uncomfortable smiles.

With the aforementioned biggest head of cabbage I decided to give a first go at lactic fermentation. In a previous post I mentioned that last winter I purchased a book all about preserving food without canning or freezing. Among other methods, the book goes over lactic fermentation of numerous vegetables and I decided to start with sauerkraut.

I ended up going with a recipe in the book for glass jar sauerkraut. Despite my best efforts, I have not had any luck finding glazed stoneware crocks of any decent size. Of course I could go buy one, but they are damn expensive. And apparently I’d rather whine about not being able to find them, or send evil looks toward all those people who have a ton of them but don’t use them for anything. Apparently these old crocks are now a collectors item (since so few people do thier own buttermaking, fermenting, pickle making, etc). So there are tons of crocks sitting on display shelves, or hoarded in someone’s basement instead of being put to use. The side effect of this ‘antiques’ business is that the price of any stoneware on ebay or craigslist is through the roof, even if they aren’t old.

However, I do have a dozen half gallon canning jars from this spring’s Craigslist purchase. This seemed like a good opportunity to use them. As we are usually only two people here, canning anything in half gallon quantities is a bit dubious. We would likely not get through it fast enough once the seal is broken. However, lactic fermentation does not require a seal, so we can chip away at the stores with less of an impending sense of doom (or rotteness). Once the kraut is done, I could also can it up in smaller jars if I like.

The recipe was quite simple. Grate or slice cabbabe and densely pack into sterilized jars, layering any spices or herbs you want among the cabbage. I snipped a couple of bay leaves from the tree out back and added those with a sprinkle of caraway every 3 inch layer. Once jar is filled with cabbage, add 1 tablespoon salt to the top for each quart of cabbage and fill to cover with hot water. Place lids on jars and set aside.

The instructions say to leave the sauerkraut in the kitchen for about 3 days before storing. I assume this is to expose the kraut to warmer temps to jumpstart the action before storing in a root cellar or basement (for all those lucky lucky souls that have such a thing). For now the jars are sitting on the kitchen counter and in a few days they will make thier way either to my office or out to our unheated workshop. Who knows if this’ll work out, but I am sure curious to see! Our one giant head of cabbage translated to 4 half gallon jars of kraut, so we will have plenty if it is tasty .

Gary and I had a field trip this weekend. We went down to Kent/Auburn to check out a feed store (horrifying political discussion between the clerk and another customer to be related later) and then stopped by a U pick pumpkin farm. I have been thinking about trying to carve a pumpkin again (as an adult) for several years, and opportunity presented itself. The actual pumpkin carving adventure will be detailed in a later post (Friday, I would guess). But while we were there we picked up a bunch of fresh corn (harvested to make way for the corn maze I suppose), some celery, a kubota squash and the biggest head of cabbage I have ever seen (in real life, I have seen those Alaskan mutants on tv).

Our general plan was to buy some corn to cut off the kernel and freeze for the winter -but it was so fresh and tasty I had to cook at least a little of it right up. Luckily enough, our good friend (the salmon fisherman) had stopped by on Friday bearing a goodie bag of gifts including several frozen portions of King Salmon, Halibut and best of all – smoked salmon.

Now I have to detour from the chowder story for just a moment to pat myself on the back. A few years ago – for the holidays we bought our fisherman friend a smoker. And may I say that was the smartest gift I have ever given anyone? Talk about the gift that keeps on giving! He has gone through several experimental brines and cures at this point and makes an excellent smoked salmon (among other treats). Each year we receive the gift of the smoker back tenfold in freshly caught and smoked wild salmon – it doesn’t get much better I tell ya.

So I had all this corn, and I had all this smoked salmon and it seemed they were meant for one another. I took 3 ears of corn and cut the kernels off into a bowl (reserving the cobbs). These were really large ears of corn, less gargantuan varieties might take 4 ears or so. I diced an onion and two strips of smoked bacon and put them in the pot to saute. I diced up some leftover fingerling potatoes and a few yukon golds (probably about 1.5 cups all told) and added them to the onions and bacon in the pot. After sauteing the bacon, potato and onion mixture until the onions were translucent, I added the corn kernels. Gave it a brief stir and then poured in a quart of the corn stock I made earlier this year. I rounded out the liquid for the chowder with the remains of a half gallon of milk that we needed to use before it expired. I also ‘milked’ the corn cobbs I had reserved into the mix by running the sharp end of a knife along the cobb, draining the starchy-sweet goodness into the pot.

While the chowder simmered I broke up the smoked salmon into bite sized pieces. I then took about 3/4 cup of corn and blended it with some water and about one tablespoon of flour to thicken. I added this slurry to the chowder and seasoned with salt, pepper and thyme. When it was almost done, the potatoes soft and the corn cooked, I threw in the flaked salmon and called it good. I threw a few roasted pumpkin seeds on top for texture. A big bowl of chowder with a slice of Skyway Sourdough alongside made for a wonderfully winterish meal.

Going through my pictures this morning I started looking at all the pictures I took while in Cambodia last year. I haven’t posted any of these, but it seems fitting as we go into winter that this is a little reminder of a warmer place. Apologies in advance for anyone on dial-up. This is by no means a complete representation of all my pictures – much less Cambodia. But it is a small representation of what I saw while there, and should give you an idea of why I want to go back.

Hows that for a title? Sums up this week pretty good. Our cat Bukowski has gone missing and we are both desperately hoping he turns up fresh from a walkabout. He is chipped and we haven’t received any calls yet. Earlier this week we went down to the Animal Control shelter just to double check that they hadn’t picked him up and not scanned him. The shelter was horrifying and  traumatic, so many animals without homes. They are stuffed to the gills and to the point that they are creating extra rooms to house the animals in the parking lot with straw bales, tarps and space heaters. Let me underline once again how important it is to fix your animals. And if you are even considering getting a pet, please get one from rescue or the shelter.

Ok – end of plea/lecture. Unfortunately after going through 8 or 9 rooms full of cats, we didn’t find Buk. I am hoping this means that someone has just taken him into their home, not realizing he already has a home. He is such a sweetheart and although he is our most recent addition (showing up on our driveway about a year and a half ago injured, skinny, stinky and with all his manly equipment) we have grown quite attached to him. Watching an animal go from a half to three-quarters feral state, to cuddling on you lap in the morning sun does something to ya.

In other news, Dahl – the queen bee chicken had an impacted crop. Turns out she is a straw eater (nobody ever said chickens were smart, but c’mon!). Her crop swelled to about the size of a tennis ball this past week, was not reducing and was hard to the touch. My research on the subject indicated that there were essentially 3 methods of alleviating the condition 1) Use a dropper to squirt oil down into the crop to loosen things up (downside: if you didn’t push the dropper far back enough you could suffocate the chicken by dropping oil down the trachea). 2) Massage the mass in the chickens crop back up the throat and make her puke it out (downside: a big risk of suffocation due to sticky nasty masses of stuff covering the trachea). 3) Slit a hole in the chickens breast skin, directly over the crop, then slit through the crop and pull out the nasty stuff – then let the chicken heal. Strangely enough, this third option seemed to have the least number of downsides or horror stories attached to it. I read the forums and a number of people had killed their chickens using the first two methods, but there wasn’t a single chicken fatality (reported) going the surgical route.

I decided to try and find a middle ground before chicken surgery or a several hundred dollar vet bill. I soaked a bunch of breadcrumbs in copious amounts of canola oil and hand fed them to Dahl. I then went out to massage her crop, trying to assist in the breakdown of the mass several times. The following day we created a separate pen inside the regular chicken pen and put Dahl in there with more oily breadcrumbs and water. I removed the regular chicken food at night so she couldn’t sneak anything and continued the several massages a day. As of yesterday her crop was noticeably reduced and she seems to be on the way to a free flowing system again. Now I need to rethink my mulching material for the garden if the dumb chicken insists on gobbling straw and stuffing herself up!

And peppers! I mentioned in my last post that we were just headed out to the last farmers market in Columbia City. One of my favorite farms (Alvarez Farms) has a stand there and they were selling their ristras of peppers. Every year this family grows the most amazing variety of peppers, it makes me homesick for of New Mexico just looking at the colorful tables. I bought several milder varieties of peppers for a batch of mild salsa I will make with the last of the tomatoes. But I also decided to buy a ristra of hot peppers for this winter.

Not only is it beautiful, but these peppers will dry within several weeks (while retaining thier color) and I can harvest off it for the winter anytime something needs a bit of spice. Food as decoration is a burgeoning theme around here, more due to lack of space than anything else. We have winter squash and sugar pumpkins sitting on side tables in the living room too. I get a lot of joy out of the aesthetics of squash….is that wierd?

I completed what was the last of the tomato sauce canning batches last night – and am I glad! It was frustrating this year having to do small batches, bit by bit waiting for the tomatoes to ripen. The majority ripened in boxes in my office, instead of on the vine. Not my chosen method by any means. Seven more quarts of tomato sauce leaves us with 18 quarts canned and another 4 quarts frozen to get us through the winter. I had hoped for more, but this will do. I also made a huge batch of hot salsa. 12 half pints, 2 pints and 3 quarts to be exact (can you tell I am running out of jars?). I have one more smallish box of San Marzanos ripening which I will most likely use to make some mild salsa for Gary (the stuff I made earlier is way to hot).

And, today – just a few minutes ago I finished harvesting all of the fennel seeds. I cut the seed heads off our golden fennel plant several weeks ago when it started to get really damp and rainy. I threw them in a paper bag and hung them in my office to dry for a couple weeks. Today I finally got around to separating the seeds from the plant material. I am currently sitting in a licorice flavored cloud. We ended up with just under half a pound. This is a LOT of fennel seed. No doubt some of it will be put to good use in sausage when we get our half pig order later this winter. But I need to find some other uses too. I know it is a key ingredient in Indian/Pakistani cooking and also is one of the five in five spice powder. But if anyone out there has other ideas, I am open (and supplied).

I would guess you could make some version of liqueur out of it, is that what Sambuca is based on? It seems every Mediterranean country has their own version of licorice flavored concoction (Raki in Turkey, Ouzo in Greece, Pernod in France, Sambuca in Italy). Maybe I will have to experiment a bit  -(beware friends and family who are in grave danger of getting nothing but salsa and Fennel Liqueur for the holidays).

It is a beautiful day today, I hope it lasts. We are about to head out to the last Farmers Market in Columbia City before they shut down for the season. The Renton market we usually frequent is already done for the season. Winter comes and we start having to go further and further afoot to get local produce. I think after this week the closest year round market will be in West Seattle.

Early this morning we wrapped up a whirlwind visit with my best friend from high school and her family.  She spent Thursday and Friday night with us along with her husband and five year old daughter. Thursday was a mellow day for the most part. A grocery trip (because we were not at all stocked ahead of time – crazy work week) and a quick stop to pick up the latest Harry Potter movie set the tone for the evening. It was nice to just sit around and catch up as the last time we had seen them was a bit over two years ago (and then just for a few hours).

Saturday morning we had decided to take a trip downtown to the Pacific Science Center. It has been years since either Gary or I had been there and I had heard tell of a butterfly house that had my interest piqued. We spent a solid 4 hours at the Science Center, I suspect some of the adults had as much fun as the little one. The butterfly house was way cool – a tropical haven in the middle of Seattle with a huge variety of butterflies flitting about. And then, on our way out I discovered the mole rat complex.

My fascination with mole rats came from years ago when Gary, myself and a good friend of ours were suffering from severe hangovers on a Sunday after a late-late night. This was back in the days of a service called Kozmo (now since defunct) which would deliver just about anything right to your door, including movies. We rented a movie called Fast, Cheap and Out of Control. A documentary about 4 different individuals with (seemingly) nothing in common. However, one of these men was an expert on the African Mole Rat and had dedicated his life (every part of it apparently) to mole rats. It was a loooooong and weird movie, only exacerbated by the state of our bodies. But something about the extended mole rat footage seems to have burned itself into my consciousness.

I had assumed that the extended footage I watched so many years ago was as close as I was ever going to get to a mole rat in real life. But there it was, a full mole rat complex with them scurrying through tubes and piled in naked little heaps in thier sleeping boxes. They moonwalk, and can move as fast backwards as they can forwards even though they are totally blind.

I know, i am probably killing any readers with the pictures since they are so creepy looking. Creepy but fascinating. The high point of the day!

My friends daughter met the chickens soon after arriving and quickly became enamoured with them. After hanging in the yard with them and hand feeding for a while she went back inside, broke out her craft kit and proceeded to make numerous golden eggs out of construction paper. I think we will find them hidden in corners for a while to come. It was very sweet.

The two little spoiled Princesses of this household had thier first true faceoff earlier this week. While Nin is undoubtedly the queen of indoors (being the only girl aside from me in a house of boys), Blume is the spoiled princess of the yard. As I mentioned in my earlier post, we have been ranging the hens out during the day to clear up garden beds for the winter. The fencing we are using does nothing to keep Blume inside though and she regularly jumps the fence to see what we are up to on the patio.

Nin has been beside herself the whole time. Yelling at us whenever we happen outside “THERES A CHICKEN IN MY YARD! THE CHICKEN IS OUT OF THE PEN. PUT THE CHICKEN BACK IN THE PEN, IT IS IN MY YARD!”. Blume has absolutely no fear and even flaps her wings a bit to intimidate Nin (and it works).

Nin seems to be torn between being absolutely disgusted with the whole situation and taking it upon herself to monitor the chickens whenever we put them out. She does not come inside during the day now. Instead she stays in the back yard and alternately yells at and watches Blume cluck about the yard.  I think it is some deep battle of the animal wills going on out there while we sit at our computers.

And then there is the Pookawn, I capitalize it because it is indeed a proper name and thing of its own. How to describe to you what a Pookawn is…I suppose I will just have to show you.

Have you been blinded by the bright flashes of immense white furriness? Are you now afraid that the Pookawn is coming to eat your children and lay waste to your towns? You should be!

While not a slim cat, to be fair Nin is more fur than fat in a lot of places, except for her belly. All of her excess body weight is concentrated into one specific point on the underside of her belly. And when combined with the immense amount of fur she has, it seems to almost wiffle in the wind and sway when she trots around as a separate-yet-connected entity.

We came upon the word pookawn when playing a game of Balderdash with friends. For those unfamiliar, Balderdash is a game in which you are given a word and then each team member has to make up a definition of it. The person to get the most votes for thier definition wins the round. Well pookawn came up as the word and without hesitation Gary blurted out his definition as Nin’s belly. Needless to say, it stuck and Pookawn has wormed its way into our common household lexicon.

For those dying of curiosity – pookawn is indeed a word. According to the definition of the game it is a small boat of some sort – but I prefer our definition.

The changing season is making itself evident in our yard now. The signs have been elsewhere for a while. If the falling leaves and biting cold didn’t convince us already, this morning I saw the evidence of our first frost while going to let the girls out of the coop. It had already warmed a bit so the frost was rapidly melting, but there was a good patch of frosty grass.

The Japanese Maple’s leaves have colored and will shortly fall. Tomatoes left on the two remaining plants are looking sad and sickly – I may be able to convice Gary now that thier time has come.  I mentioned in a previous post that we had taken down the hoop house and cleared the tomato bed earlier this week. We’ve been turning the girls out in the bed for the past few days and they are doing a bangup job of turning the soil and working in the straw mulch (while consuming all the damned slugs that displayed such a fondness for our tomatoes this year). Dahl lets out the happiest little cackles and giggles whenever we drop her into a new section of bug rich earth. Chicken happiness may be one of the simplest pleasures in life, judging from her exhaultations.

The past week or so the girls have spent the days turned out in one of the two garden areas we have cleared, fenced in by mobile wire panels that work quite well. Except when we are late or there is work to be done. Now we have always known that Blume can fly – despite the fact that her wing is clipped. She has hopped the fence of the pen to get to me on the other side and sit on my lap. But generally she just stays where put as long as the other girls are there and there is ample entertainment. But earlier this week we were late in getting to the backyard to move the girls back to thier pen/coop for the evening. The sun had not yet set, but had dropped down below the house and it was getting dark. We went outside only to find both Blume and Cleary had jumped thier temporary enclosure and were milling about the fencing to thier normal pen. Clucking and pacing worriedly. Poor Dahl, who is molting right now, had not the feathers or the energy to make the same escape and was still inside the temporary enclosure.

Cut to a few days later when we went out to the back in the middle of the day. Gary checked the temporary pen and only saw Cleary and Dahl. We started looking around for Blume only to realize that she had jumped two fences and was settled comfortably in a nest box in the coop. Because we couldn’t possibly expect her to do her business in the great wide open, could we?  Cleary, on the other hand, will drop an egg just about anywhere and walk away without a second look.

The calendula has rebounded with the cooler weather. It was overtaken by aphids during the peak of summer. When the night temperatures dropped enough to kill off the aphids, the calendula came bounding back and is in a dead heat with the marigolds for a fall display.

I’m thankfull for these last little bits of color before we go into our gray and wet winters. The sun has been shining the past few days too – which makes for cold cold mornings but affords us pleasant cleanup time in the yard.