Zapallito!

Posted on July 7, 2012 by susanmsink@gmail.com

Just look at the size of this leaf. It’s from a zapallito plant, a South American summer squash I planted this summer.

I first had zapallito from the garden of Maria Llerena in Long Beach, California. She brought the seeds with her from Argentina and had kept the crop going for decades, generously sharing them with others in the community garden. The fruit is like a zucchini, but more buttery. And just look at that shape– they will be fun to stuff as well.

I brought seeds with me to Minnesota from Maria’s garden, but they didn’t germinate. Still, I didn’t forget them and looked for the seed in every catalogue. This year, when I got the Seed Savers Yearbook, it was the first seed I looked for. And there it was– one person of all the many listings had it, Suzanne Ashworth, author of Seed to Seed and owner of a seed company with locations in Sacramento, California, and Mexico. I ordered them and hoped for the best.

When the giant, tropical leaves appeared, I felt encouraged. But I’ve had zucchini that have blossomed and don’t produce fruit. When I saw bees buzzing in the center of the blossoms, however, I was even more excited. Yesterday, there it was, the first fruit tucked way down in the giant stems.

There will be zapallitos! I couldn’t be more thrilled. And I’ll be saving some seed for Maria, whose crop failed a few years ago.

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Blueberry-Rhubarb Jam

Posted on July 4, 2012 by susanmsink@gmail.com

A friend of the blog, DeAnn Kautzmann, gave me a lovely jar of blueberry rhubarb jam last year. I enjoyed it on winter popovers and English muffins and toast, with cream cheese or just butter. It could really get in those nooks and crannies and the flavor was not too sweet, the color rich and dark.

This year when the strawberry harvest failed at my local U-Pick place, I asked her for the recipe. I have rhubarb and went to a great blueberry picking place on Saturday near Monticello, Minnesota. Today I made a half dozen jars of the jam. The color is amazing.

The one thing I forgot was to get more canning jar lids when I went to Fleet Farm for pectin! I had exactly six and so, even though I could have made more small jars and had therefore more to give away, I filled two larger jars, one of which I’m sure we’ll have no trouble devouring in the next year. Now to find someone in the family who really, really likes blueberry jam.

Blueberry-Rhubarb Jam

3 cups chopped rhubarb
3 cups crushed fresh blueberries
6 cups sugar
2 tbs lemon juice
1/2 tbs unsalted butter
2 (3 oz) pouches of liquid pectin

Combine rhubarb and blueberries in a large saucepan with lemon juice. Add the sugar and simmer until the fruit breaks down.  Add butter and mix it up. Add the pectin and bring to a full, rolling boil over high heat for exactly one minute, stirring constantly.

Remove from heat.  Skim foam and fill jars to ¼ inch from top.  Process in hot water bath for 10 minutes.

Makes 7 to 8 half pints

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Raw Kale Salad

Posted on July 3, 2012 by susanmsink@gmail.com

Now that all the tender greens are done, but it’s 95 degrees and I don’t want to cook, I decided to try something I’ve been wondering about: raw kale as a salad green.

The common wisdom on kale, like collards and other hearty greens, is that they need to be at least blanched and preferably flavored with something to balance their more harsh flavor. I don’t really find kale to have a sharp flavor, but it has seemed too tough for salad.

According to Steve’s daughters, however, raw kale salads are all the rage in New York City. I’ve been dying to try it but not sure how to go about softening up the kale. With a visit to the farm from a young man who picked up good cooking skills on the East Coast, I got another little nudge.

My sister-in-law Annie said that Gabriel just rubbed the kale between his hands. So today I rubbed the kale between my hands, and yes indeed, it softened up, turned darker green, but did not get wrecked or bruised as I’d feared. I was able to put the softened kale on the cutting board and chop it up for the salad. Later, I watched some Youtube videos and they veined and chopped the kale first and then “massaged” it with their hands for up to two minutes (which seriously reduces the bulk and makes it kind of wet). They also added salt before massaging, and one added olive oil as well.

Not me. I just rubbed the leaves between my hands until they were soft enough to eat.

Then I topped it with a sliced beet, a little of the white-wine-pickled herring and sliced radishes. I could have toasted walnuts or pine nuts, but I was too impatient. Strong cheese, carrots, chopped egg would also be good toppings. Anything, really.

For dressing, I did mix the chopped greens with olive oil and pear-infused white balsamic vinegar. I am really loving the light fruit-infused vinegars by Alessi this summer. The fig-infused one was amazing. They’re pricey, but you don’t use much.

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Midsummer Salad

Posted on June 30, 2012 by susanmsink@gmail.com

JImageust had to post this to prove that miracles do happen (or global warming is worse than we thought). This salad I had for dinner last night does indeed have two cherry tomatoes on it from the garden. Tomatoes in June in Minnesota. Wowee.

Now I did do some extra work to get this to happen. I don’t have a greenhouse, but this year I used Wall-o-Waters to get three cherry tomato plants out early (and the peppers, which are also producing already, though nothing ripe yet). I also planted this particular seed way too early and had to throw out the four other rangy, spindly plants that came of that experiment. Finally, I will probably pull this plant up in the next few days as it is badly blighted and I’d like to prevent the blight spreading to the other plants. BUT, since it had early fruit on it, I just couldn’t bring myself to pull it out before I got a few termaters from it! Because this plant went out earlier, it still faced the worst of the spring rains and weather fluctuations, and thus, blight.

Still, this salad was the first (I think) completely 100% salad product of the garden. It has the last of the romaine lettuce, roasted beets, broccoli, snow peas and garlic scape dressing. The dressing does have purchased buttermilk, yogurt and olive oil in it, and I couldn’t resist putting some feta cheese on there at the end. Still, if you consider the garden veggies free (which I very unfairly do), the salad cost about 50 cents. Even adding the cost of these veggies (and overestimating, given what a small proportion they are of the total), it’s about a $2.50 salad, and amazingly yummy and healthy.

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Black-eyed Susan Season

Posted on June 27, 2012 by susanmsink@gmail.com

The expanded parts of the prairie are totally taking off this year. We have lovely mown paths and can go deep into the world of rudbeckia, black-eyed Susans. Rivers, just rivers of them.

 

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Broccoli Gorgonzola Pasta

Posted on June 27, 2012 by susanmsink@gmail.com

ImageThe food situation is so good right now, solidly in the middle season in terms of the garden. Last week there was the first great stir fry with broccoli, snow peas, onion, radishes and swiss chard that showed the complexity of the current crops.

Tonight, though, I had that great experience of looking at a recipe and finding that one after another, ingredients that weren’t available even last week are at my fingertips. I remember when my friends Mary Beth and Peter first introduced me to gorgonzola/blue cheese tossed with broccoli and fettucine. It was their go-to one-pot dish and always delicious.

I didn’t have a lot of gorgonzola, but what I did have was locally made, smooth and creamy. I went looking for a gorgonzola sauce on epicurious.com and found a great one that also made use of garden herbs. I added the broccoli as well as some leftover chicken breast (from a chicken roasted Sunday that I got from Jim DiGiovanni’s Dancing Bears Farm, one of the great local food producers, like Forest Mushrooms, on Hwy 51).

The basil is starting to take off, which is a great plus. Thyme and garlic also came from the garden. The most expensive part of the meal was the cheese, at $4 for just under a half pound. I figure the whole meal was under $7, and there’s plenty of leftovers. We had a green salad on the side: lettuce, radishes and garlic scape dressing. I didn’t make the pasta from scratch, but that would have been better. Still, for a Tuesday night, this was not too shabby! Here it is, with my adaptations/substitutions:

Broccoli Gorgonzola Fettuccine

12 oz Fettuccine
1 large head of broccoli, stem and florets chopped
leftover chicken breast or rotisserie chicken (optional)
2 Tbs butter
1 Tbs olive oil
3 garlic cloves, minced
1 tsp chopped fresh thyme
3/4 cup milk, half/half or cream
1/2 to 3/4 cup crumbled Gorgonzola cheese or other blue cheese
3/4 cup walnut pieces, toasted
1 cup fresh basil cut into ribbons
salt and pepper to taste

Cook pasta in a medium pot of boiling salted water until just tender but still firm to bite, stirring occasionally. Drain, reserving 1 cup cooking liquid.

Steam broccoli until crisp tender. Place in ice water to stop cooking then move to a large bowl. Toast the walnut pieces and add to broccoli.

Melt butter with oil in large skillet over medium heat. Add garlic and thyme; sauté until fragrant, about 1 minute. Add pasta, cream/milk, and cheese. Toss until sauce coats pasta, adding reserved cooking liquid by 1/4 cupfuls if dry. Mix in walnuts and broccoli and heat through. Add basil. Season pasta to taste with salt and pepper.

Serve in a bowl topped with shredded chicken.

Read More http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Fusilli-with-Gorgonzola-and-Walnut-Sauce-236567#ixzz1yxDDGBdG

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Garlic Harvest

Posted on June 26, 2012 by susanmsink@gmail.com

Last night for my birthday I wanted to, of course, make a special dinner. I made cavatelli using ricotta and a duck egg in the dough and it was lovely. I topped it with a medley of sauteed mushrooms from Forest Mushrooms, gruyere, onion from the garden and the very first cloves of a garlic bulb from the garden. What a treat!

This is the first time I’ve grown garlic, which is planted in the fall and harvested sometime around the 4th of July. The bulbs were pricey and I spent $40 for the 43 bulbs I harvested. A savings over the $1.50/bulb at the Farmer’s Market, but still steep. However, it has been my goal ever since reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver to eat more local. When I realized that my garlic comes from China, I decided I needed to grow it. Even with 43 bulbs, some purchasing of store garlic will be necessary to get me through the year. But it’s a very good start.

You harvest garlic when the outer leaves turn brown. This is hardneck garlic, so it can’t be braided, but it can be trimmed and stored in a cool place once it has dried and hardened. The trick to harvesting it is to get it when the bulbs are at their maximum size but before the cloves start pulling apart and opening up. At that point, they don’t keep as well.

That first garlic bulb was as big as my fist, or so it seemed when I dug it up. I know I’m supposed to keep the best bulbs and plant those cloves next year, but I think I’ll probably just fork out another $40-60 for “professionally” saved bulbs from Seed Savers and a western Minnesota farm. And next year, as every year, I’ll expand the operation!

 

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Back to the Garden

Posted on June 23, 2012 by susanmsink@gmail.com

After a week away, this morning I ventured out into the vegetable garden. The flower garden in front of the house was looking great, but I wasn’t sure what I’d find out back.

It has rained and rained and rained this week. There were two sunny days, the most perfect of perfect summer days when there’s a slight breeze and bright sun and temperatures that start cool and rise naturally into the low 80s by noon. I enjoyed them at my conference, and I believe the vegetables enjoyed them, too. However, we need more of that– more sun, more heat. Less rain. This morning I went out in a light drizzle to check the progress of things.

The strangest thing that has happened in the garden so far is that all my shallots and the few onions in raised beds bolted. That is, they sent up flowers.

Garlic does this– providing the delicious garlic scapes I use in stir fries and salad dressings, but onions should not. A little research on the internet told me about this phenomenon.

Onions are a two-year plant. They start as seeds the first year, and if you don’t harvest them, they will come back the second year and go to seed. They don’t produce flowers (seeds) the first year.

In places with short seasons, like Minnesota, many people buy seed onions, basically giving them a head start, so that they’re ready to harvest by mid-summer.

With the warm weather in March, I put in the shallots pretty early. Then we had a hard frost and some freezing weather in April. It didn’t kill any plants, but it seems to have profoundly confused the shallots. They thought that it was winter, and so they went into their “second” year in late April when it got warm again. Thus, the flowering.

Flowering doesn’t affect the quality or flavor of the onions, although they will stop growing when they flower. (I tried cutting off the flowers, hoping to get a little more growth, but it doesn’t work.)

The bolting does make them unacceptable for storing. I put a bunch of them on the porch, where the slatted floor is usually a great place to dry onions. Possibly the rain and dampness inhibited this process, but now that I’ve done my research, and seeing how they’re kind of just sitting there with green leaves, I’m bringing them indoors and trimming them and putting them in the fridge. Usually onions are harvested after the leaves completely die and the top of the plants fall over, but in this case the plants were alive– in full flower– when I pulled them. I’ll use them in the next month or so, share them, and hope for better luck with the 100 white onions I’ve got growing out with the potato plants, none of which have shown signs of flowering yet.

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First Person

Posted on June 21, 2012 by susanmsink@gmail.com

view from my porch at the Collegeville Institute

Last night at the workshop I’m attending, we had a visit from Patricia Hampl, a wonderful memoir writer who lives in St. Paul, Minnesota. She spoke to us about the first person, particularly the first person essay. Writing in the first person, she said, is “an enduring American habit.” It is no surprise, she said, that Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” is America’s great poem.

We talked some about an issue I’ve taken up several times recently: veracity in memoir writing. How true does the account need to be? Hampl herself, who wrote the essay “Memory and Imagination,” said she is somewhat disappointed that the essay is still so widely read and taught. She hoped, she said, that we would be beyond this subject by now. What I found most interesting in what she said ont he topic is that it is not so important that you get everything accurately on the page, but that the audience knows that she is being invited with you to imagine.

No one, for example, gave Michael Ondaatje a hard time when, at the end of his memoir Running in the Family, he presents an account of his grandmother’s death in a flood. Everyone knew where they were in the experience of that story, and it was appropriate for the narrator telling that story to imagine his grandmother’s death, and imagine it as he does in the book. It’s not at all a believable account, but that isn’t what is important or, in fact, required.

All of us are excavating shards of our experience, she said, as in an archaeological dig. The important thing is that we invite the reader into the process of reconstructing those shards. What we do, to create a satisfying experience for the reader, is engage the reader with our attempt to understand what these pieces make.

She made another interesting point, relating something a friend said to her. They were discussing the oddness of classifying memoir as “non-fiction.” First, it is as though fiction were the norm, and also it suggests that everything that is “not fiction” is fact, or true, or the same. They agreed that memoir is really more like “non-poetry.”

As a poet, I of course love this idea. But it also makes sense for us to approach a memoir, or most creative non-fiction, as being about the same task that poetry is about, digging and creating, making sense of the shards of experience through language and what we can bring to bear on it.

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Communal Weeding Project

Posted on June 17, 2012 by susanmsink@gmail.com

Last year Steve and Tim decided to cut down on the mowing in the Commons area of the farm and move the prairie in toward the center. They planted large, curved areas of wildflowers and mowed it to keep the weeds down. This year the flowers have come up in abundance. We have lots of yarrow and aasters right now, and we’re on the verge of a gorgeous display of black-eyed Susans and cone flowers. Unfortunately, there are a lot of weeds in there, particularly hoary allysum. It’s not an unattractive weed, but it will crowd out the natives if we don’t get it out of there.

Thus, we held the first communal chore hour I can remember in my four years here on the farm. Sophia and Chloe are home from college and put on some funky clothes (everything is the ’90s with them) and pitched in. We gathered at 9 a.m. and Steve gave us a rundown on the weeds (hoary alyssum, sweet clover and big, velvet-leaved mullein, mostly) and we commenced to pulling. Thanks to the recent rains, the ground was pretty soft and they came up easily. With seven of us, we moved pretty quickly and in 90 minutes had the worst area done.

We whined a bit, and eventually when we took a water break we realized we didn’t want to go back to it. Mostly, though, it was satisfying and a good community experience. Steve hauled off an entire dump box of weeds to the compost pile in the tree nursery.

Looking out over it today, it is sort of alarming how much is left to do, but also astonishing how good the area we completed looks. Steve will go back over it and scatter more flower seed where we disturbed the dirt. And hopefully this is not more than a few years’ annual project which, combined with burning, will make for a lovely prairie.

Here is Wrigley the dog amid the wreckage. He was of no help, but loved being around all the people.

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