Ooooooooohhh

I was in the middle of feeding the poultry Monday morning when I noticed the extra-beautiful sunrise. I absentmindedly set down the tub of feed (much to the turkeys' dismay, because they were next in line) and ran in to get the camera. I probably stood there, staring at the eastern sky, for about 10 or 15 minutes.

Soon afterward, the clouds rolled in and the rain began. It hasn't rained hard--it's mostly misting and sprinkling--but the garden is loving it. I hope the weather stays like this for a while, then turns sunny in time to ripen some more tomatoes for Saturday. (As if I could dictate the weather!)

J and I made another quick trip to the mountains for apples and pumpkins yesterday. The cool, moist weather was invigorating, and we didn't mind it at all. What a difference a month makes: Burt's Pumpkin Farm was a hellaceous mess of parents and elementary-schoolers (why weren't they in school?!) with lines stretching out the door from the cash register. Never mind--we got our pumpkins! I brought home one big carving pumpkin, three good-sized Long Island Cheeses, one Rouge Vif d'Etampes, and two butternut squashes. I wanted a giant banana squash, but theirs were looking a bit worse for wear. Eventually I found a better one at a roadside stand.

That roadside stand also came in handy apple-wise. Most of the apple houses didn't have their tiny, tart Yates apples in yet; apparently they like to wait for the first couple of good frosts before harvesting them, and that had only just happened. But I found half a bushel there. I also found a few of the last remaining Empires, which in my opinion are some of the best cooking apples on earth.

At Mack Aaron's Apple House, the Arkansas Black apples were in (J refers to them as "blapples," which amuses me). I got some of those, plus a gallon of apple cider. Last time we were there the cider was insipid, but now it was tangy and delicious. I guess the different varieties of ripe apples are the reason.

We went back to the Cantaberry Café, whose banana cake with cream cheese frosting had sorely tempted us last time. We were eternally grateful to find that there was banana cake on the menu again. It was everything we had hoped for, and even the two of us together could not finish the massive slice the owner cut for us.

Now my week looks busy, to say the least. There is "work work," and plenty of it. And on top of that, I have a grueling amount of stuff to make for this weekend's farmer's market, which coincides with the Watkinsville Fall Festival. I have been told to expect a Big Day. Our pear tree is starting to drop pears in earnest, so one of the first orders of business will be a big batch of our house special: pear-citrus marmalade. Also apple butter, of course. And pies, pies, pies.

Voila

Here it is--my farmer's market table at the beginning of the morning, before I had a chance to disorganize it (which I do very skillfully). Note the chalkboards, made lovingly by the s.o. Your eyes aren't going bad; I have blurred out our town and phone number on the sign.

I did pretty well again, this time selling a nice even mix of baked goods and preserves (as well as almost all my produce). Mainly I just love the people.

I tried to take a pic of the rest of the market, too, but when I got home and brought it up on the computer, it became apparent that all I had done was take a picture of a few people's backs, and none of the actual tables or booths. Cut me some slack, please--the market happens early in the morning, and all the coffee in the world doesn't make me sentient at that hour!

I hereby present...

...the only presentable Victoria sponge cake I have ever made. It doesn't look sat-upon! I am so proud.

(Props once again go to The River Cottage Family Cookbook. I guess I need a children's recipe to pull this one off. Fair enough!)

Stunned

You know how sometimes a friend does something so kind and generous that it literally takes your breath away?

Today my friend Diane gave me a Squeezo strainer. Just gave it to me. Because, she said, she wasn't using it and I would.

I almost cried. Actually, the s.o. says I did cry a little.

I am going to hug it and pet it and name it George.

Dragging my feet

Advisory: Somewhat traumatic topic.

Here it is, a really beautiful day, and I have to mar it by killing a rooster.

It is for the greater good. We have too many boys in the flock, and this particular Partridge Rock has been terrorizing the other birds, even bloodying the comb of a poor benighted Barred Rock rooster. It is heartbreaking to see a chicken hiding its head because it is being injured by someone higher in the pecking order.

But all the same, I am dreading this task. I do not enjoy it, not one bit, and I find myself inventing anything, anything, anything else to do. On the bright side, the house is now vacuumed.

Okay. Steeling myself. Repeating to myself, "Tandoori Chicken. Tandoori Chicken." Which should make me more eager, but it doesn't, really.

Off I go.

Which fair shall we go to this week?

Yes, we went to another one! (October is really a wonderful time to be in Georgia, let me tell you.)

This time it was the Morgan County Fair, which was comparable in size and offerings to last week's Madison County Fair. The difference: This one had 4-H sheep and goat judging! We arrived near the end of the goat contests, but got a chance to see all the sheep. The numbers were quite meager--sheep aren't big around here, and in fact most of the animals were shown by the same few youngsters, who'd leave the ring after one round only to enter it at the beginning of the next. But there was a judge from the University of Georgia who was really interesting to listen to, and it was cool to see how the kids handled the animals. I learned a few things.


The girl in the background of this photo (sorry it's so dark and blurry--I obviously didn't want to spook the sheep with the flash) raked in the ribbons, big time. Having your sheep come in third or fourth in its weight class at the Morgan County Fair must be kind of discouraging, because that means you really didn't cut it.

Immediately after the sheep show, the s.o. and I headed for the food vendors, and I ate an assortment of food so godawful that I tremble at typing it: a corn dog and part of an order of chili cheese fries. I figure "When in Rome," etc. The corn dog, despite being at heart a nasty amalgamation of animal pieces-parts that I normally wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole, was actually extraordinarily good--really crispily fried and flavorful. But the s.o. was squeamish at the very sight of it, having had a memorable corn-dog-sick experience as a youth. (He finished my chili cheese fries, though.)


Finally, unrelatedly, here is the photo I probably ought to have posted with yesterday's entry. Woo hoo!

Colorful

I'm just putting up this picture because I think purple-top turnips are so beautiful.

What I'm really here to say is:

We have had all kinds of egg-cellent occurrences lately. (Sorry, I couldn't help it.) Two days ago we accumulated enough small homegrown eggs to have scrambled eggs--with homemade sausage and bacon, of course--for dinner. The scrambled eggs were absolutely technicolor yellow. Obviously the hens' varied diet agrees with them.

Yesterday's landmark was TWO EGGS IN ONE DAY. Sweet! And they were completely different shades of tan, which makes me pretty sure we've got multiple breeds laying now. The only hen I've caught in the act was a Barred Rock; beyond that, it's all conjecture.

Today I went into the henhouse to find the biggest egg yet, which was under the fierce protection of our teeny little Black Japanese Bantam hen. She was not pleased when I took it.

"C'mon, pretty girl, it's not even yours," I wheedled.

"Craaaaaaa!" she screeched.

"It's half your size," I reasoned.

"Craaaaaaa!"

So I guess the guidebooks are correct when they say bantams are good broody hens. Nice job, little gal--you are doing what you do best. But you will have to wait.

Another fine fall weekend

On my way into town, I often drive on a back road that goes through a large dairy farm. There are signs--I'll confess they've long been favorites of mine, since how many people get to see these kinds of signs on their commute?--that say CATTLE XING 35 MPH. But until yesterday, I never actually saw any cattle crossing, just lots and lots of them in the pastures and pens on both sides of the road.

But yesterday as I was driving home from the farmer's market, I rounded a curve and was suddenly forced to brake for about 200 Holsteins. As I idled and watched, I began to sort out what was going on. The milk-heavy cows were being herded from a pasture to the milking barn by two men on ATVs, one with a bouncy cattle dog at his side. All three herders were really good at their jobs, expertly zipping around the edges of the herd and hurrying the cows that lagged.

One of the men pulled up at a gate and opened it. As he did so, we caught each other's eye, so I waved and smiled. He turned off his ATV to hear what I had to say, and instantly I felt bad; I had just meant to greet him, not to get in the way of his work. I hastily called out, "Just saying hi!"

"No English. Muy poquito," he yelled back.

I was caught off guard for a moment, not having noticed that the men were Mexican. Then I managed to shout "¡Hola!"

"¡Hola!" he yelled, smiling.

Real cowboys. Cool.

I had had a good morning at the market. Everyone snapped up my Sungold tomatoes, and one woman even called the night before to reserve some vegetables. I had to harvest more so the table wouldn't look bare! I continued my streak of selling all the sorrel I brought. It is my personal goal to convert every resident of the Oconee County area to sorrel-eating...and then, in the spring, to purple-sprouting-broccoli-eating.

In some ways, as I've been told to expect, this week was completely different than last. Where previously I had sold lots of preserves but no baked goods, this time I sold few preserves and almost all my baked goods. The flapjacks sold out and will, I suspect, become a regular offering. People also bought slices of muscadine-apple pie, which is impressive to me because I charge rather a lot more than some of the other pie-makers. (I make deeper, wider pies with more expensive ingredients. I figure I've gotta get paid.)

Pie-makers proliferated this time. My newest colleagues in the trade are the preteen daughters of a well-known local African-American artist. The two girls grow their own sweet potatoes and make them into pie. They sold out by 11 a.m.! They make good pie, but what really makes me love having them around is that their table is festooned with a gigantic banner that says YOUNG FEMALE FARMERS. I like that a lot.

I also met two longtime vendors who hadn't been around the previous few weeks. One man sells chemical-free greens and eggs and gave me a ton of useful advice and encouragement. (This winter I aim to take the Georgia Department of Agriculture's egg grading and candling class so I can sell eggs. He made it sound pretty easy.) Another is a really witty Asian guy who sells stunning cut flowers and naturally grown vegetables. His shiny stack of bitter melons (I wonder if he sold any?) made me nostalgic for St. Paul, where the market is full of Hmong vendors with exotic backyard-grown wares.

I'm really enjoying the farmer's market. I've noticed--and the woman who runs it corroborates this--a sense of "ownership" among the patrons. They all seem to feel that it's their own little market, and they're proud of it. They like to get to know the vendors and are not shy about asking for what they want.

I plan on making an order-form-type thingie so that people can order holiday pies and fruitcakes from me. Until Saturday, it hadn't occurred to me that anyone would want fruitcake; after all, it has such an evil reputation. But fruitcake is a strong Southern tradition all the same, so I may have been off the mark. At any rate, when I described the homemade brandy-soaked fruit bombs (sans weird geleéd stuff) that I call fruitcake, the market manager told me to put her down for two. Who knew?

While I'm handing out recipe accolades

Hats off to the current issue of Bust*, which contains a very easy and delicious recipe for homemade chai. It's basically a half-cup of good black tea and a lot of nice whole spices, simmered in 12 cups of water for half an hour. (This makes a concentrate, which you combine with milk and sugar as you need it.) I made it last night and drank a couple of cups while watching a movie.

The s.o. walked into the kitchen while the spiced tea was simmering. "It smells like Pier 1 in here," he remarked.

Yeah, but it's good stuff. What's left has been stored in an ex-vodka bottle in the fridge for future occasions. I am very pleased to have learned this new trick!

----------
* By the way, I bought the magazine because it contained an article featuring several 30-something female veggie farmers in Providence. They're all kind of punk-rock and vintage-clothesy, but they are dead serious. They are raising awareness and working their tails off. The article makes the point that the average Rhode Island farmer is 58 years old and male. We need to grow more farmers!

Intoxicating

The house smells wonderful because I'm making a batch of Nicola's Zesty Flapjacks from the River Cottage Family Cookbook. I thought twice about buying this book, because I don't have any children, don't plan to have any, and indeed, don't see children very often (although I do enjoy their company pretty well when they are around). But I was wise to ante up. For one thing, the book includes the clearest, most sensible recipe for a Victoria spongecake I've ever seen. And for another, it has these flapjacks.

Several British blogfriends of mine have extolled the virtues of flapjacks, initially confusing me because Americans use the word to refer to a type of fluffy pancake. I couldn't picture people tucking into a short stack with maple syrup at the local coffee shop in mid-afternoon (although, come to think of it, I've heard worse ideas). But it turns out British flapjacks are a kind of oatmeal bar cookie.

These particular flapjacks are full of orange and lemon juice and zest. The recipe calls for pine nuts, but I have taken the liberty of substituting our own backyard pecans. I've also switched out the golden syrup (expensive and hard to find here) in favor of tupelo honey. I may sell some of these at the farmer's market this weekend, but that'll mean making a second batch; I couldn't possibly part with so many of these.

In her indispensable book Fine Preserving, Catherine Plagemann writes, "Whenever I get a new cookbook, I consider myself lucky if even one or two new recipes happen to add something permanently to the routine of our lives." This is definitely my way of measuring a cookbook: Has it improved our quality of life?

I think it's safe to say that the new River Cottage book is earning its keep. Mmmmmm.

News flash

Hooray--our first teeny li'l egg! We suspect a Partridge Rock is the "artist." This is very exciting!

What a weekend

Some days, the clear sunny sky and the cool breeze are just irresistible. And if those days happen to coincide with a weekend...well, then!

As you may infer from the photo, we went to a nearby county fair on Saturday. Not our own county, mind you--longtime 10 Signs aficionados will recall that the Greene County Fair is beyond pathetic. This was the Madison County Fair, a few minutes' drive to our north.

There was livestock: only beef cattle, but still extremely interesting and fun. We watched the 4-Hers preparing their cows for the show ring. They used blowers to fluff the animals' fur, then hairsprayed and backcombed the fur around the bovines' ankles to make them look pleasingly stout and fuzzy. At one point I saw a young lady walking a cow on a halter with a sort of chokechain. "Mooooooooooo!" complained the cow. "Hush!" the girl stage-whispered, giving the collar a little jerk. The cow hushed. It behaved exactly like a one-ton dog in obedience class.

In the exhibits building, I eyeballed all the contest winners and weighed my chances of earning a ribbon next year. Where could I make the best impression...knitting? Canned goods? There were no pies in evidence, but then again, one doesn't leave pies sitting out in an exhibit building. I made a mental note to ask the Lion's Club people before September 2007.

On our way to the midway, we passed a petting zoo where a gorgeous little pony was being raffled off. I entered not once, but three times. No, I didn't win. *sigh*

There was a booth where the World's Sketchiest Carnie was standing in a pile of wood shavings among scores of tiny adorable bunnies. In the center, wooden ducks bobbed in a kiddie pool. If you threw a ring and it landed around a duck's neck, you won a cage. And if you won a cage, you could--get this--purchase a bunny for a dollar. We watched several hapless parents burn through $15, even $20, buying rings for their children to throw. It was a lot harder than it looked, because the rings barely fit over the ducks' heads, and then only in one direction. I stifled my urge to demand that the s.o. win me a bunny cage.

I had a lemonade. We looked at all the fair food, but opted out. The s.o. and I made one more circuit of the midway, then left in favor of Carmine's in Comer, sharing a stromboli and a predictable case of heartburn.

Overall, the fair was fabulous. My whole weekend has been great, come to think of it.

Early Saturday I started my day at the Oconee Farmers Market, where I sold a whole lot of produce and preserves--although hardly any baked goods (there were too many people selling too much sweet stuff). Everyone there is so welcoming, and the customers are friendly and interested in where their food comes from. I am already planning for next weekend!

Today I have spent mostly in the garden, weeding, moving seedlings, and adding nutrients. I find myself stopping every once in a while to admire the sunny landscape and bask in the sun. I give damaged Sungold tomatoes to the chickens, and usually Our Little Penguin Friend (AKA the Light Brahma Bantam) darts in and runs off with them. The s.o. has turned last year's compost heap--finding gorgeous soil at the bottom, plus an adorable little brown snake.

I smell like a giant salmon because I've been fertilizing my vegetables with fish emulsion. There's no point complaining about the stink--it's unavoidable, and anyway, it makes the dogs all the more affectionate.

If only this weekend could go on forever...

More cheerfully

Here's the nice new Italian sausage recipe I've worked up. It's heavy on the fennel, just the way we like it.

ITALIAN SAUSAGE

2 1/2 lb. pork meat and fat
3 cloves garlic, minced
1/4 c. white wine
3 Tbs. finely grated Parmesan cheese
3 Tbs. fennel seed, lightly crushed
1 tsp. (or a little more, to taste) red pepper flakes
1 tsp. freshly ground black pepper
1 tsp. salt

Grind the meat and fat coarsely, then add the remaining ingredients and work them through with your hands. Don't reduce it to mush, but do distribute the ingredients evenly.
Fry up a test patty. Taste and adjust seasonings. Fry up another test patty. Taste. Repeat as necessary.
Stuff into casings or freeze in bulk.

Futility

Remember how I finally defeated the squash bugs and squash vine borers? Well, now I have these.

*beats head against wall*

I like the cut of their jib

Anyone else want to join in?

Mountain vacation

North Georgia's mountains are hardly even mountains in the grand scheme of things. They are not the sort of mountains you hire a sherpa to navigate; rather, they are gentle, woodsy uprisings whose main effect is to create bendy, fun-to-drive roads and to make the air a little bit clearer so that you feel really good all of the sudden. They are peppered with horse-riding stables and river-tubing liveries and state parks. And, unfortunately, tourists--but that is to be expected, I guess.

The tourists are the reason J and I chose a nice quiet Monday to heed the call of the Georgia mountains. It is apple season, after all, and as we discovered last year, that in itself is reason enough to go to the town of Ellijay.

Last year we had a sudden bout of "English" weather on the day of our trip--which was actually rather refreshing, since it was warm and muggy back home. But this time we really lucked out: It was 75, breezy, and mostly sunny, with clouds so striking and unusual that I had to keep reminding myself to keep my eyes on the road.

Before lunchtime we were in good ol' Mack Aaron's Apple House, picking up half-bushel and peck bags of Mutsus and Stayman Winesaps and greedily purchasing multiple fried pies for later. Every apple we sampled was delicious, and I don't mean Red Delicious. I managed to get a sugar rush just from apples.

The only disappointment was the cider, which was insipid. I guess I shouldn't expect great things, since the varieties that make good eating are not the same ones that make good cider.

We visited most of the other apple houses along that stretch of Highway 52, and I managed to find some Cameos and Empires for my apple collection. Then it was time for lunch.

The Mexican place we'd enjoyed last year was closed for renovations, so we were forced to experiment with a little sandwich shop across the road. It was just, y'know, sandwiches, but we appreciated a note on the menu that said they tried to use local or organic produce whenever possible. And when we had finished our entrees, the friendly proprietor came around with the Most Gorgeous Banana Cake Of All Time, piled with great shiny heaps of sour cream frosting. We couldn't possibly have any, of course, since we had all those fried pies in the car. But I very nearly bought a slice to go, and now I kind of wish I had.

Antiquing was next on the itinerary. We didn't buy much, but we enjoyed it nonetheless.

And finally we headed home...except that we didn't. I got an idea in my head that I wanted to see downtown Dahlonega, so I took a turn off the main road. Quickly we realized we didn't want to go to Dahlonega after all, because it was 18 miles. But just as we were looking for a place to turn around, we saw a sign for Burt's Farm. "Pumpkins," it said.

That was an understatement. Our first eyeful was of wheelbarrows, hundreds of them, with a sign that said you weren't allowed to navigate one unless you were 15 or older. And then the pumpkins began, and continued as far as the eye could see. A good acre of them were the giant, prizewinning kind that aren't any good to eat. But plenty more were of the kind I prefer--the kind that are both beautiful and edible.

I came away with a Long Island Cheese, a Kuri, two Sweetie Pies, and a lovely blue-grey-green pumpkin whose name they told me, but which I promptly forgot and now can't find anywhere on the internet. It's similar to some of the Australian blue pumpkins, so I will treat it accordingly.

What was strange is how bright the place was. Technicolor. We walked around almost stunned by the combination of the clear air and the riotous hues. "The s.o. has to see this," I said. J echoed the sentiment regarding her husband.

So we are thinking: Another trip to the mountains in October? After all, we'll need Halloween pumpkins, and the Yates and Arkansas Black apples will be ripe...

Finally!

At last I'm getting a decent harvest of summer squash! These are ready to eat, and there are more in the wings. Here's how I finally nailed it:

(1) Successive plantings until the crop happens to coincide with a natural dip in squash bug population (and an absence of squash vine borers).

(2) Planting squashes far away from one another, mixed in with other plants such as tomatoes and radishes.

(3) Patrolling the garden every single morning, while the insects are sluggish, picking the bugs off and dropping them into a jar of soapy water (this is also how I finally got ahead of the leaf-footed bugs that were blemishing the tomatoes).

Hah.

I am taking a few things to the Oconee Farmer's Market in the morning, but these are not among them. They are ours, all ours. In fact, we already ate the zucchini, and it was delicious.

Loot

Blogger throttled my last attempt to post, so I'm slapping this up quickly in hopes of outwitting it. Here, at least, is a photo of the contents of the gift bags the s.o. and I got at Stitch 'n' Pitch! What a fantastic experience.

Best part: Two elderly bearded gentleman a couple of rows behind us, knitting gorgeous stuff. One wore a t-shirt that said "Man enough to knit, strong enough to purl." The cameramen kept putting them up on the big screen (which, at Turner Field, is mightily big).

Second best part: A woman in the row in front of us cross-stitching a very complex and (admittedly) very beautiful science fiction motif. I have decided that sci-fi/fantasy cross-stitchers are the true badasses of the hobby world, blissfully double-geeking their way through life.

Linky linky

Here's a really inspiring and informative forum on how to change what's wrong with our food industry.

And, if you like, here's what I've just written for the Eat Local Challenge blog.

Also: My radicchio has sprouted! It is camera-defyingly tiny.

Time flies when you're having fun

How can One Local Summer be over so soon? Do it again next year, Liz. I'll be there with bells on.

I went to the DeKalb Farmer's Market today. It's so pleasurable to shop there--the foodstuffs are all meticulously labeled with their place of origin, and so many of them are southern! I bought a bunch of things: Georgia shrimp, Georgia whole wheat flour, Georgia muscadines, Georgia zipper peas. I am easily tempted.

Here are some more of the spoils:

TROUT MEUNIERE

Farmed rainbow trout - north Georgia (about 125 miles)

STEWED BEANS

Pole beans - North Carolina (distance unknown)
Sungold tomatoes - our own (0 miles)
Vidalia onions - middle Georgia (about 125-150 miles)

WARM POTATO SALAD WITH SORREL

Potatoes and sorrel - our own (0 miles)

Up to no good, as usual

I've just received packages from two seed companies: Johnny's, and Gourmet Seed International. I guess that explains why I've been standing out in a steady rain with a trowel in my hand. I'm late planting some of my fall seeds. Again.

From Johnny's:

• Oliver F1 hybrid brussels sprouts - This is what I was standing outside planting. I knew I was way, way late in getting them, so I purchased a super-early hybrid in hopes of ekeing out Christmas veggies. It won't work, of course--the cold will slow them down too fast and too early--but I think a few of them will stagger to maturity in the early spring, which is what happened this year.

• Edonis F1 hybrid Charentais melon - For next spring. Supposed to be resistant to some of the various wilts and blights we get, which will make them an improvement over the plain Charentais melons we grew this year. I am trying Charentais again because, even though they performed poorly this year (due to several factors ranging from drought to poor placement), they were one of the few cucurbits that the squash bugs didn't care about. That in itself makes them SOLID GOLD, baby.

• Tiptop F1 hybrid green acorn squash - Bought because I read somewhere that acorn squashes were remarkably tough in the face of squash bug attacks. Will find out if this is apocryphal next spring.

• Stinging nettle - My importation of this annoying plant is final, resounding proof that watching the River Cottage shows over and over has warped my brain. I picture myself making nettle gnocchi just like Hugh. To doubters, I point to the fact that my Greek cookbook has several recipes that actually call for nettles.

• Baby Pam pumpkin - Supposed to be the ultimate pie pumpkin. Say no more, eh? Also small and early, which may help me to harvest some before they all die from squash bugs and vine borers.

• Estiva F1 hybrid tomato and Valley Girl F1 hybrid tomato - Both chosen for their potential as early-spring hoophouse tomatoes. Did I mention that we're going to try to start selling at the farmer's market? Oh, I didn't? Well, we are.

• Tauro F1 hybrid radicchio - Absolutely have to attempt this gorgeous pastel-colored radicchio. Johnny's sent an entire page of literature on how to grow it. The text suggested starting them indoors and then transplanting them, so there are two little six-packs germinating in the kitchen as we speak. The late planting should be no problem because radicchio matures quickly and is not at all bothered by frost.

From Gourmet Seed:

• Mr. Fothergill's Easy Grow Bean Collection - Four kinds of beans (one wax bush, one green bush, one green climbing, one purple climbing) for one low price. Couldn't resist. Like the tomatoes, some of these will be planted super-early in the hoophouse.

• Parmex carrots - Our standard. Mustn't ever run out of these seeds.

• Meraviglia delle 4 Stagioni lettuce - AKA Merveille des Quatre Saisons, but these are Bavicchi seeds, so it's all in Italian. I love Bavicchi seeds above all others, mostly (I admit) for the spectacularly pretty packets, but also for the broad selection of seeds that usually aren't available in the States. Some of the breeds don't do well here, but I get a lot of joy from trying them all. Some end up working beautifully. So anyway, I bought a packet of this gorgeous red-painted lettuce because it's just about time to plant lettuce here. Finally.

The Russian volume

Of the Time-Life Foods of the World series, of course. I've been delving into it, for no other reason than that I haven't much before.

Two useful items have turned up. One is a Georgian (as in Republic of, not as in State of) method for frying small chickens flat under a weight. We think we'll try it sometime this week. The s.o. has decided it's time for one of the extra roosters to go. It's awfully crowded and roostery in Chicken Land.

The other is the page on infused vodkas. The flavors are all extremely intriguing: lemon peel, tea, pepper, tart cherry pit, anise seed, sweet cherry, buffalo grass. I decided I wanted to try making an infused vodka immediately. I started scrounging around in the kitchen. The tart cherries my mom and I buy every year come pre-pitted, so they were no help, but luckily tart cherry pits are sold as a spice called mahlab, which I had bought some of a while ago on a whim.

Sampled on its own, mahlab tastes stale and vaguely unpleasant. But I smashed some with a pestle, steeped it in vodka overnight, strained it out with a jelly bag, and bingo! We now have half a pint of assertively cherry-almondy vodka. I like.

A few of our favorite things

The turkeys: New pasture every other day

The chickens: Dust baths

The ducks: Kiddie pool

The dogs: Evening rawhide chewie time

Me: Perfect crisp new sheets

The s.o.: Flame weeder!!!!

OLS 11: Eggs!

How long have I been working on this "Eat Local" thing? More than a year now, right? Well, some things take time. I've been trying forever to get hold of some non-factory eggs around here, and I've finally done it--in the second-to-last week of One Local Summer, and probably a week or two before our own hens start laying. Better late than never, I say!

The eggs came from a friend of a friend in Lexington, Ga., who keeps Rhode Island Reds and Araucanas and absolutely dotes on them. I like knowing that.

The other thing that's happening right now is that the peppers in our garden are going completely crazy. We have pickled, dried, and frozen plenty of them. But the Italian frying peppers--some green, some red--are just begging to be eaten fresh. Begging, perhaps, to be combined with the very last two links of the Italian sausage we made in January.

Here's what I made:

ITALIAN FRITTATA

Italian frying peppers - our own (0 miles)
Eggs and garlic - Lexington, Ga. (25 miles)
Italian sausage - homemade from Dyal Farms pork, Cobbtown, Ga. (132 mi.)

STEWED EGGPLANT (actually leftover from previous night's dinner; this time I served it cold like a relish)

Eggplant, Sungold tomatoes, green beans, and basil - our own (0 miles)
Garlic - Lexington, Ga. (25 miles)
Vidalia onions - middle Georgia (about 125-150 miles)

Crikey

RIP Steve Irwin. You will be missed.

I'm gonna hurt tomorrow

I am a sweaty, dirty mess. I just finished digging up our potato bed, which has been a weedy eyesore for some time. As those of you who've been following along at home are aware, I've been digging potatoes from the bed for weeks now. I've been using them quite liberally.

And today, in cleaning it out, I found an additional 20 pounds of potatoes.

I think it's safe to mark this down as a success.

OLS 10: Delicious antioxidant explosion

This week has been, predictably, turkeypalooza. From last week's roasted bird, we progressed to turkey, bacon, and peas in a cream sauce over pasta; then to turkey soup; and tomorrow we expect to thicken the remaining soup into a filling for turkey pot pie. There is also turkey lunchmeat and a giant baggie of assorted turkey bits in the freezer.

But I already posted leftovers once for One Local Summer. It would seem like a cop-out to do it again. So here's something completely new and, if I do say so myself, representative of the very best Georgia has to offer.

Earlier this year we froze a big batch of the blackberry barbecue sauce from this recipe. Putting it up beforehand makes cooking the ribs a snap. And today was cool and rainy--¡Hola, Ernesto!--so I didn't hesitate to bake a giant rack of ribs from our Dyal Farms half-pig.

Meanwhile, I boiled a few cobs of corn that the s.o. froze during July while I was traveling. And we topped off the meal with the year's first luscious scuppernong grape pie. (The secret I learned today: Put foil all around the edges of the pie and bake it way longer than you think you need to. Finally the grape hulls will soften. And then--bliss.)

I am really proud of this week's meal. I think it's some of my best work! (The photos are uninspired. But can't you just smell the pork ribs?)

Here's where it all came from.

Blackberries - our own
Pork ribs - Dyal Farms, Cobbtown, Ga. (132 mi.)
Corn on the cob - our own
Scuppernong grapes - Paulk Vineyards, Wray, Ga. (213 mi.)
Southern Biscuit Flour - Newton, N.C. (245 mi.)

Play ball (of yarn)!

We have just purchased a pair of tickets for this! Sometimes it's as if the world is engineered specifically for my enjoyment.

Oops

We had guests for dinner today (the s.o.'s dad and brother), so it is not surprising that I totally forgot to take pictures of this week's One Local Summer meal.

So, um, this is what it looked like afterward.

Just about everything was our own: turkey, cucumbers, potatoes, golden beets, purslane, peas, bacon. The beer batter bread was homemade, but the ingredients weren't local.

By the way, 10Signs turkey fans--I don't know how or why, but that turkey was juicy. And it will keep feeding us for a long time to come. All meat, very little fat.

Kudzu blossom jelly

I have had, I admit, an uneasy relationship with kudzu. On one hand, I think the invasive Japanese vine has given the South a particularly haunting, Gothic appearance that, in some ways, has come to define the region. It is undeniably beautiful.

On the other hand, when we bought our property, kudzu had so completely taken it over that we had to hire a man with a front-loader to scrape it off (to the tune of several acres) and burn it. I will always remember that night in December 2002. It was incredibly cold for Georgia--maybe 7 degrees, or 11--and before attending the town Christmas party, I styled my hair by candlelight in the unfinished bathroom, with my breath visible before me. I walked outside and saw our yard red-embered in the frost and silence.

But the next year I discovered something no one had ever told me. In August, the remaining kudzu--hanging like a menace in the trees along the property line--bloomed. It bloomed purple. It bloomed with a scent that was like an explosion of grapes and pheromones.

Ever since then, even as we vigilantly protect our yard from the creeping vines, we look forward to the blossoming. You smell it before you see it. One day, usually a sunny day after a hard rain, you walk out the back door and the odor rushes over you like a sultry, delicious torrent.

This year, I determined to bottle it.

The jelly recipe in the link is phenomenally easy; I think it took me a total of half an hour, not including the time I spent tugging on tree limbs with a shepherd's crook to gather the blossoms. At first it seems as though it will be disappointing. The blossom "tea" is brownish and doesn't smell like the smell. But then when the lemon juice, pectin and sugar are added, it becomes brilliantly plum-red and begins to exude sexiness.

I'm stunned by the result. The jelly's flavor is a tiny bit vegetal, a little floral, and overwhelmingly Concord-grapey, just like the scent of the flowers. It is possibly the best jelly on earth. Why isn't it better known? Why haven't people declared it a local delicacy to be enjoyed on an international scale, like caviar or foie gras?

If you have any way at all of getting hold of kudzu blossoms, I implore you to try it.

Sin noticias de Jamie

I'm so sorry there's no new content. I have a lot of work this week, plus this evening we slaughtered our two broad-breasted turkeys...which means that now, having finished, I am practically catatonic.

Those birds are big. I'll tell you how big after I weigh them.

More soon, really.

Use the Force

I just made a half-sized peach pie without consulting any recipes. Look, ma, no hands!

The makings of a summer salad

Purslane, amaranth, burnet, cucumber, and tomatoes

She can try shade cloth; she can buy bolt-resistant varieties. She can water to her heart's content. But eventually the hapless Yankee transplant comes to understand that lettuces (and most other tender salad greens, for that matter) simply cannot be grown in the summer in Georgia. If she did not know better, she would say that they appear to spring from the ground already bitter and bolted.

So she learns, instead, what does work.

No, thanks

Mmm, delicious--yet another Frankenfoodish way for the food distribution industry to prolong the saleability of old, rank meat.

Or maybe I'm just suspicious because I've had to throw out three shrink-wrapped chickens (organic ones, even) in the past year because they were rotten before their sell-by date. The producers would have hidden or mitigated the decay if they could've. And we would have eaten it, never suspecting that it had sat too long, been kept too warm, or been dropped on the filthy floor.

Bacteria-eating viruses sound as though they might make food safer and potentially save lives, but we all know processors will use the new technology to make up for even more sloppiness and corner-cutting in their meat production. And there's no way bacteriophages can eat all the types of sickness-causing bacteria that grow on rotten meat. If they were broad-spectrum enough to do that, they'd be dangerous for us to consume.

And people wonder why we are raising our own poultry!

On the bright side

I may be limping and itching, but there is some cause for celebration chez 10Signs. We have our new DSL service, and it downloads at about 2550 kbps--nearly twice as fast as our cable internet connection did. Sweet. Also, I had a little trouble with the installation, so I called customer support and they helped me. Lap of luxury.

Test your internet connection speed here. Or, if you're me, test it several times, a little obsessively.

Ow ow ow

Today, while watering the garden at dusk, I:

(1) Picked up a sprinkler to move it, not realizing until too late that it had been sitting in a fire ant hill;
(2) Scrambled to brush all the ants off, getting bitten repeatedly between my fingers;
(3) Discovered that I had been standing in additional ants, which were now biting my feet inside my garden clogs;
(4) Killed every ant I could find on my body;
(5) Ran to go get the other sprinkler and fell into a post hole;
(6) Ascertained that while my ankle was twisted badly, it wasn't broken;
(7) Struggled to my feet and hobbled to the second sprinkler;
(8) Picked it up and realized that it, too, was covered in fire ants;
(9) Cried out, "YOU HAVE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME!"

All the parts of me that aren't coated with Benadryl gel are covered in ice packs. I've had better evenings.

OLS 8: Marx Bros. version

It's One Local Summer time again. I had thought this week's entry might be roast turkey, but it's looking as though I won't get a chance to slaughter a turkey before the weekend. And then it'll have to rest for a couple of days before I roast it. So maybe next week!

So here, instead, is something that should look slightly familiar. This hearty pot of duck soup is the third meal we've gotten from the duck we roasted last week. (The other was duck and gravy with ciabatta bread.) The soup is full of our homegrown vegetables and herbs, and is a perfect venue for our creamy white potatoes, which are practically melting into the broth.

We wrapped up the meal with whole wheat blueberry cornmeal cake--something I adapted from a recipe in Deborah Madison's Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone.

-----

DUCK SOUP
Duck - our own (0 miles)
Vidalia onion - south Georgia (about 150 miles)
Garlic - either ours (0 miles) or a friend's (25 miles), I can't remember which
Carrots, potatoes, green and wax beans, parsley, and oregano - our own (0 miles)
Salt, pepper, sherry, and a handful of orzo - not local

WHOLE WHEAT BLUEBERRY CORNMEAL CAKE
Blueberries - Watkinsville, Ga. (30 miles)
Red Mule Cornmeal - Athens, Ga. (35 miles)
Logan Turnpike Mill whole wheat flour - Blairsville, Ga. (125 miles)
Most other ingredients (eggs, sugar, etc.) from various locations in Florida and North Carolina

A break in the weather

We had cool weather over the weekend. Not just less hot, mind you, but crisp--the kind of weather that makes you want to drink dark beer and build bonfires. Yesterday got a little muggy again, but today dawned foggy and cool.

I took the opportunity to continue doing what I'd started over the weekend: dragging the garden back from its annual precipice. Every July, the heat overcomes me and I find myself unable to care for the garden. I can't bear to look at it. And it's depressing, anyway--full of insects and rot. So it is abandoned for weeks and it goes straight to shit, brimming with weeds and grasshoppers and squashed tomatillos. And I feel inadequate and fall into a surly mood.

But now the worst has passed, and I have been pulling weeds and discarding spent plants. The s.o. helped me on Friday: he wrestled out all the cornstalks and cast them onto the compost heap. The shape of the garden is re-emerging from the jungly tangle. And because it is now August 15, there is something more encouraging and fun to do. It is time for the first round of fall planting.

I am indulging myself, putting in too much of everything. There is one final planting of summery zucchini and yellow crookneck squash. There are three kinds of beet seeds, three breeds of cabbages, two varieties of turnips. There is lacinato kale, purple sprouting broccoli, collards, parsnips, kohlrabi.

I stopped work for lunch and came inside to wash my hands. As I did so, the rain began. Perfect.

Note to self: I need to go to the feed & seed so I can buy cauliflower plants and cilantro seeds. Plus, we are out of poultry feed...again.

Speaking of poultry, we moved the ducks to more spacious accommodations yesterday and I learned the definitive answer to my question: How many hens remain? The answer (learned by listening to quacks versus wheezes as we picked up the ducks) is two. One of the Rouens is a hen, and so is the odd duck that looks like a Buff but has a puffy crest on its head. So it's settled, then--some of our future generations of ducks are going to be Rouens, as planned, and the others are going to be a little bizarre-looking.

We also checked in on our bees Sunday evening. As usual, I forgot to bring the camera, which is just as well because it is always all I can do to keep the smoker lit. The bees are succeeding beyond our wildest expectations. They have almost filled a second hive body, and we may actually get some honey this year! Which reminds me, I keep forgetting to order a queen excluder (a screen that lets workers through, but not the queen, so the queen cannot lay eggs in the top storey of your hive, and therefore it is all honey and no brood). I had better get on the phone and do that.

Wedding feast

"The table had been set up in the cart shed. On it were four sirloin roasts, six chicken fricassees, a veal casserole, three legs of mutton and, in the center, a beautiful roast suckling pig flanked by four large sausages made of chitterlings and sorrel. At the corners stood decanters of brandy. The cider was foaming up around the corks and every glass had been filled to the brim with wine. Big dishes of yellow custard, on whose smooth surface the newlyweds' initials had been inscribed in arabesques of sugar-coated almonds, quivered whenever the table was given the slightest knock. The pies and nougat had been ordered from a confectioner in Yvetot. Since he had just opened up shop in the district he had done his best to make a good impression, and when it was time for dessert he personally carried in a wedding cake which brought forth a chorus of exclamations. Its base was a square of blue cardboard representing a temple with porticos and colonnades, adorned on all sides with stucco statuettes standing in niches studded with gilded paper stars. The second tier consisted of a fortified castle tower made of spongecake, surrounded by smaller fortifications of angelica, almonds, raisins and sections of orange. And finally, on the top layer, which was a green meadow with rocks, jelly lakes and hazelnut-shell boats, a little cupid was swinging in a chocolate swing whose two uprights were tipped with real rosebuds."

--Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

OLS 7: Gratitude

As of yesterday morning, the yard was a little bit quieter. We slaughtered our two female Pekin ducks--one for us, and one for a friend. (The third Pekin, a drake, is being saved for a friend who isn't quite ready yet.)

Remember how our turkey last Thanksgiving was the Best Ever? Ditto for our home-raised duck. A little meatier than a store-bought one, and much more tender and juicy. Sublime flavor. I followed Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's advice and started it at 450ºF for 20 minutes, then (for a 3-lb. duck) continued roasting it, basting occasionally, an hour and 20 minutes more at 350º.

I don't want to sound new-agey or to horn in on other people's cultural traditions, but I've always liked the Native American idea of thanking the animal who becomes your dinner. To eat an animal is not something to be taken lightly. And maybe for that reason, I felt today that it was important to roast this duck the very, very best I could, because wouldn't it be a colossal waste if it wasn't perfect?

I do feel as though I did my best. And it was not a waste. It brought us a lot of joy, and for that I am truly grateful.

The duck was served with our own potatoes, carrots, and parsley root. (The parsley root, a German type of parsley that is grown specifically for its root, tastes a lot like celeriac--a great discovery, especially since our celeriac doesn't appear to be doing that well.) We finished the meal with peach cobbler made from juicy, flavorful Georgia peaches (from Big 6 Farm, Fort Valley, Ga., 103 miles) and Southern Biscuit flour (from Midstate Mills, Inc., Newton, N.C., 245 miles).

Miraculous

Has anyone ever heard of a lilac reblooming, albeit thinly, in August? I nearly tripped over my own feet when I saw it.

Poultrytainment

It's easy to take pictures of turkeys. They see you coming and they all crowd up close, curious, eyeing you. They want to know: Are you bringing us food? (No, you already have a full feeder.) Water? (Nope, the waterer's full, too.) Shiny rivets on your clothes? (Yes, but don't even think about pecking at them! Hey! Back off, buddy!)

Now, taking good pictures of turkeys--well, that's another thing entirely, a thing that I'm not sure I will ever figure out.

This morning I was feeding the ducks when an ambulance wailed past. The ducks waddled and flapped at top speed into their night pen, and then when that failed to accomplish anything, they waddled back out again. The turkeys froze, stared, and then in unison, called out

GOBBLEGOBBLEGOBBLEgobblegobble!

I love that about turkeys. Gobbling is their version of barking.

Then I saw something I haven't seen before in our ten-week-old turks: One of the Bourbon Reds slowly, ostentatiously puffed up its body, fanned out its tail, and started strutting. I watched, transfixed. And then our meek little Blue Slate turkey (the s.o.'s sentimental favorite) walked up and pecked the offending Bourbon Red on the ass. The nail that sticks up will be hammered down!

We seem to have established an uneasy truce with the neighborhood dogs and cats. The turkeys and the ducks are protected by our portable electric fence--you know, the one the sheep jumped over. The ducks run loose within the fence, since they can't fly. The turkeys can fly, very much so, so they are confined to the turkey tractor, which is sort of like a gigantic parrot cage. It allows them to live three-dimensionally, roosting way up high. It's pretty big, but not as huge as we'd like it to be; there was a limit to how large it could be built and still be portable (the s.o. and I can just barely drag it by attaching straps to its eye-bolts). But the situation will be ameliorated soon. For one thing, the two big, heavy broad-breasted bronzes are due for slaughter, and that'll free up about 50 percent more space. For another, the s.o. plans to make a giant net-topped playpen for them.

It's a tricky thing, this free-ranging business. We'd like to let the turkeys really roam around, but that would involve clipping their wings, and they are creatures who love to fly and roost. Our Storey's Guide says when you clip turkeys' wings, there's a risk of them injuring themselves trying to fly; they simply won't accept that they can't do it.

Of course, we could really let them roam. But then we'd never be able to lay hands on them again, because they'd be up in a tree somewhere. Maybe in the National Forest. Probably in Crazy Neighbor Ed's yard. So barring that, we are doing the best we can do.

Anyway, I was talking about the electric fence. We put it around the turkeys and ducks when I got tired of being awakened at 4 AM by packs of feral dogs. Now we have no problems. The dogs figured out once and for all that they couldn't get into the henhouse. And early one morning we heard a distinct, satisfying yelp! as a neighborhood dog learned about the miracle of electricity. Since then, nothing.

Meanwhile, we solved the chicken problem by learning the dogs' schedule. Our neighbor Eddie Lee (a completely different person from CNE--in fact, someone we like very much) told us that he saw a pack of dogs return to our yard at about 8:30 or 9:00 every morning. They kept trying to get into the chicken-wire run, and eventually they would surely succeed. So I simply started waiting until 9:30 to let the chickens out. Again, so far it has worked.

Not all dogs are created equal. Silver (no feral chicken-hunting mutt!) is so good that she is allowed to be my Partner In Chores. She and I have developed a little chicken-releasing ritual. I take her out to the chicken area and put her in a down-stay. Then I go inside the henhouse and open up the door to the run. All the chickens flap and squawk and cock-a-doodle out into the sunlight, and Silver watches, completely fascinated. Of course, she didn't hold her down-stay very well the first few times, but soon she learned that if she was good, she could watch Chicken TV for as long as she liked.

Works in progress

Time for a knitting post, I guess; In the earlier part of the summer, I allowed myself a brief lull in yarn-wrangling activity, but now I seem to have gotten back in gear.

Actually, I wasn't completely slack. I did knit my mother a pair of yoga socks on and off from May to early July. But other than that, I've been more or less idle. Maybe it's the hot weather. Nothing appeals like wool when it's 95 degrees out, eh?

What got me going again was a conversation with my cousin Beth (the mother of my new niece Liadan). I had a moment of inspiration and asked her what size Lia would be by Christmas. And then I promised to knit the baby a sweater...which is kind of ballsy when you consider that I haven't even finished a dog sweater yet.

Luckily, Main Street Yarns & Fibers stepped into the knowledge gap and offered a baby sweater class. I signed up and no one else did--and would you believe they didn't cancel the class! So I've essentially stumbled into a series of private lessons. Perfect.

The first class was yesterday. We're making this sweater from Elizabeth Zimmermann's Knitter's Almanac, a book so astoundingly funny, useful, and ultraliterate that I would have paid the class fee just for the privilege of knowing about it.

You can see my progress so far in the photo. It's the mauve thing. The yarn is Silky Wool (why don't they name their colors? the number "12" really doesn't capture it), and what you're looking at is the yoke. Note the buttonholes at each end. My instructor very wisely suggested that I mirror-image the buttonholes because it makes it much easier to sew on the buttons on straight. I like the way she thinks! This is actually the second iteration. I had to frog my first attempt because in an increase row I somehow created three gaping holes. (For the curious knitters reading this, my guess is that I picked up the wrong piece of yarn once in a while when I was doing "make ones." But I'm all better now.) I managed to fix two of them--maybe even sort of correctly--but the third one was hopeless. Much better to start over and be really satisfied with the results.

And of course the grey things in the photo are the pair of socks I have been knitting...forever...for the s.o. I finally finished the first one last night. To avoid Single Sock Syndrome, I then proceeded to cast on for the second. I've already warned the s.o. not to expect any future plain grey socks from me. They turn out lovely, but they're simply too boring to knit. Future socks will have stripes, argyles, or stitch patterns. Anything to break up the tedium.

I'm so glad to be knitting again. Maybe my latent northernness is kicking in, telling me that sweater weather will be on its way soon! That's not actually true, but whatever works...

Weather report sticker shock

Yesterday I casually mentioned to some friends that Georgia really hadn't had it so bad, weather-wise, compared to a lot of other areas of the country.


Hi. My name is Jamie, and I tempt fate.

Check it out

I've just written a new post on the Eat Local Challenge site. It's about sexiness, sort of, so you'll want to read it.

OLS 6: Tiny and tasty

In this, the sixth week of One Local Summer, we partook of something that's a specialty around these parts: quail. Quail hunting is practically a religion in central Georgia. What we ate tonight was farmed; I suspect the producer supplies coveys of live quail for Dick Cheney-style shooting expeditions.

I think this meal might be our local-est ever. See what you think:

PAN-SEARED QUAIL
Quail (Greensboro, Ga.) - 13 miles
Bacon grease - see below

GOLDEN BEET AND POTATO SALAD
White potatoes - 0 miles
Golden beets - 0 miles
Purslane - 0 miles
Parsley - 0 miles
Bacon (our own, made from a pig raised in Cobbtown, Ga.) - 132 miles
Duke's mayonnaise (Greenville, S.C.) - 137 miles
Sour cream, horseradish*, salt, pepper, and rice vinegar - not local

BEER
Red Brick Summer Hefeweizen (Atlanta, Ga.) - 80 miles

----------
* One day, we hope to make our own prepared horseradish from scratch. But our plants are just yearlings now, so it'll have to wait.

Nothing to say

So I'll let a couple of the Buff Orpington ladies keep an eye on things while I regroup.

Okay, that's it

Predictably, a minor thunderstorm on Saturday evening knocked out our power for 30 seconds. And almost as predictably, the outage tripped a switch somewhere, and our cable internet was out until 9:45 this morning. Yes, I called on Sunday to complain. No, nobody did anything about it. I could tell by the tone of the help desk guy's voice that the "dispatchers" he was calling really weren't going to do any dispatching.

This has happened before--many times, in fact. If the internet access goes down anytime after 5 p.m. on Friday, good luck getting it back before Monday morning. It's almost as if there's nobody in the office all weekend. Actually, it's exactly like that.

So this morning I called the local DSL provider (which only recently began serving our area) and signed up. It's ten bucks per month cheaper. And it can't be any worse, can it?

Somewhere in the universe...

...my old journalism professor is howling into the void* because I have chosen to use the internet, an instrument of almost unimaginable power and potential, to blog about my hair.



See? It's dark. There are still shiny golden bits in it where the lowlights aren't, but overall, it's dark.

I kind of like it and kind of don't. But on the other hand, it really doesn't matter one way or the other, because in three months' time, it may be completely different. So move along, nothing to see here.

----------

* Dr. Ross, maybe you ought to ask Dr. Thompson, who I assume is in the same place you are, to pour you a shot of Johnny Walker Red. I assume that's still your favorite? Good.

Earthshaking

I spent part of the summer of 1994 in Costa Rica, and it haunted my dreams for years afterward--not because of anything I saw there, but because of something I felt.

It was the only place I've ever been where I experienced frequent earthquakes. I noticed the first one while I was standing on some exposed rocks at the edge of the ocean. The water suddenly lapped back and forth in the tiny tidepool between my feet. I stared at it, uncomprehending. Later I found out that there had been a quake in the interior, and that a restaurant I'd eaten at the night before had been partially destroyed.

Another time I was using a Brunton compass to measure the strike and dip of a rockbed in a housing development. I couldn't seem to get a good read, and I chided myself for being so unsteady. Then it occurred to me, suddenly, that I was staying in one place and the earth was moving.

Let me repeat that: The earth was moving.

For the rest of my time there, I couldn't sleep. At night I would wonder, groggily, if my dormitory bunkbed felt rickety because it was falling apart or because the ground was pitching beneath it. I was uneasy--and still am--with the idea that something I hold so basic could be so undependable.

That's the same strange feeling I've gotten in the last couple of days. Part of it is due to something completely pointless and stupid: my hair color. After having dyed my hair progressively lighter and redder shades over the last couple of years, on Tuesday I let my hairdresser lowlight it in a shade that is more or less the color of my roots. It looked great. I paid, drove home, and went about my life.

Then I woke up the next morning and looked in the mirror, and it was all I could do to keep from yelling in alarm. It wasn't me! Since when did I have such dark hair?

Since I was about eight, apparently. Old photos corroborate it. But I look so, so strange to myself. How is it that a person can forget what she looks like?

Now either the color is mellowing out a little, or I'm getting used to my real hair color again. Maybe a little of both.

The second disorienting issue this week has been a series of power outages. They started during a couple of violent rainstorms on Saturday and Monday. But then, long after the rains had subsided, they continued at random intervals. It was as though we'd been hooked up to a third-world country's power grid.

None of the interruptions lasted long; the average was about 30 seconds. But I quickly got tired of rebooting my computer and recovering my word-processing files every 15 minutes. The s.o. and I became irritable and prone to yelling "What the f-ck!" And even now, some of our clocks continue to blink:

12:00
12:00
12:00
12:00

I have been lax in resetting them, because even though the outages seem to have stopped, I can't quite believe that they won't happen again at any minute.

What will it be next? Will cats and dogs lie down together? Will I eat an olive?

One Local Summer: Aquatic edition

It's the fifth week of One Local Summer, and certain Southerners' thoughts have turned to catfish.

We haven't had time to fish as much as we did last year, unfortunately. We've been too crazy-busy to while away sultry evenings at the creekside. But even when you buy it at the grocery, catfish is pretty dependably local around here. Most of it is farmed in northern Georgia and western North Carolina. (Note that all bets are off if you go to Wal-Mart, where all fish, regardless of type, seems to be imported from China.)

Here's the tally:

PAN-FRIED CATFISH
Catfish - about 150-175 miles
Red Mule cornmeal from Athens, Ga. - 35 miles

CHEESE GRITS
Red Mule grits from Athens, Ga. - 35 miles
Cheddar cheese from Sweetwater Valley Farms, Philadelphia, Tenn. - 268 miles

TOMATO AND BASIL SALAD
0 miles

Oh, wait! I almost forgot to claim partial credit for a blueberry cobbler I made earlier in the day. The flour, butter, and other baking ingredients weren't especially local, but I picked the berries last weekend in Watkinsville, Ga., 35 miles away. Mmmmmmm...

PSA

My pal Marcia (who now constitutes the single best reason to visit Salt Lake City, much as she used to be the single best reason to visit Tuscaloosa) has just returned from a trip to Portland, Oregon. She wrote me the following note:

I just picked up [Tamasin Day-Lewis's] Simply the Best for $15.98 at Powell's in Portland this weekend. I checked, and the sale price
is good on their website too. Thought I'd let you know in case you'd like to inform your loyal readers and/or pick up gift copies for anyone.

So I'm passing it on, because the book is one of the most interesting and appetizing reads on the shelf.

Now, I must admit that I have just had a rather catastrophic failure with Day-Lewis's Steamed Blueberry Pudding. It, um, failed to cohere. (It made a nice trifle, though. Ah, trifle! The repository of many a malformed cake.) And Liz and I recently had a discussion about the recipe for Blueberry Clafoutis. Like some other British recipes for clafoutis that I've seen, it overcomplicated what should be a very simple list of ingredients, and it called for what appeared to be much too short a cooking time. To my taste buds, anything less than 45 minutes results in something gelatinous and raw-tasting.

But there are so many other wonderful recipes and essays in the book that I still think you should buy it. Especially at $15.98! I think Day-Lewis is a genius at salads, for one thing: I love the Asparagus, Fennel, and Red Pepper Salad, and the Cos Lettuce with Cashel Blue and a Cream Dressing too. And I know I posted a pic of her Tuscan White Salad once upon a time.

I should add that the author makes a mean daube. And I have my eye on a lot of other goodies, too.

Anyway, do what you will with this information. I trust we will be hearing from Marcia about koftas or kebabs or seafood soups...

Quack

I don't have much to say; I just thought you might like to see the ducks in all their fat, shiny glory.

Note the three white Pekin (AKA "Aflac") ducks. They are loud and kind of annoying, so therefore they will be the first to go in the freezer. The buff ducks will probably follow once they've gained a bit more weight. The brown ones with the iridescent wing stripes are the Rouens--they're the ones we've decided to keep and breed. They have very nice personalities, will supposedly lay light-blue eggs*, and are a gorgeous addition to the barnyard.

We have a couple of friends who seem to want to buy ducks from us. The darn birds eat so much food, even when they're free-ranging, that we'd have to charge a zillion dollars to make any kind of profit. (No wonder they sell ducklings rather than full-grown ducks in the freezer section of the grocery!) But I guess I'm not awfully concerned about that.

----------
* Some of you may remember me saying that almost all of our ducks are drakes. Well, it now appears that I was wrong. It's just that the Pekins were so much louder than the others that we couldn't tell who was quacking and who wasn't. I think I hear some faint female quacks from a couple of Rouens, and possibly from that weird tufted Buff. Who knew?

OLS 4: Curiouser and curiouser

This week I had absolutely no idea what to cook for our One Local Summer meal. We'd had tofu in eggplant and tomatillo sauce the previous night, so my usual eggplanty tricks were out of the question. The s.o. vetoed my tentative zucchini soufflé idea. And I hadn't had a chance to drive into Athens for local quail or beef.

So I picked up my trusty copy of A Midwest Gardener's Cookbook, a tome that has saved me from despair many, many times. As usual, it immediately yielded solutions.

The main dish was a sausage and zucchini hash that I found in the summer section of the book. The s.o. described it as being "like zucchini sloppy joes" and said it would be welcome on his plate anytime--maybe even on a bun.

For a side dish, I steamed some of our homegrown wax beans. Tender and delicious.

Then there was the dessert. What was it? Well, brace yourself. When I was paging through the cookbook, I stumbled upon something called "Dessert Fried Eggplant": strips of well-drained eggplant dredged in flour and deep-fried, then served with a generous sprinkling of powdered sugar. Normally I would snort at such a bizarre concept and move on, but you'll have to remember that we are up to our earlobes in eggplant right now. I decided that it was worth a try.

The proof was in the s.o.'s response. He picked up a crispy eggplant strip, dusted it with sugar, and took a bite. "Well, I'll be damned," he said.

I have to agree. Dessert Fried Eggplant is not only good; it's positively addictive.

Either that, or we have finally gone off the deep end.

----------

SAUSAGE AND ZUCCHINI HASH
English-style breakfast sausage (our own, made from a pig raised in Cobbtown, Ga.) - 132 miles
Vidalia onion - approximately the same distance
Tomatoes (from my stepsister) - 80 miles
Zucchini - 0 miles
Olive oil - not local

WAX BEANS
0 miles

DESSERT FRIED EGGPLANT
Eggplant - 0 miles
Southern Biscuit flour (Newton, N.C.) - 245 miles
Duke's peanut oil (Greenville, S.C.) - 137 miles
Sugar - somewhere in Florida
Salt - not local

What I've been up to

I'm home now, completely drained and exhausted in that way that means "I have had a perfect vacation." I got to see my brother in Columbus, then spent several days with the family in northeastern Ohio (including a parade, a baptism, and a visit from some lovely Northern Irish relatives that I hadn't even suspected would be in attendance), and then took a wildly impractical but immensely satisfying two-day trip to Toronto!

Yes, I made a run for the border. And they not only let me into Canada, but they let me back into the States again afterward. That in itself is a mark of success.

But what's even better is that I got to spend time with three of my dearest music-geek friends (including this guy, who was the best host imaginable) and then ... are you ready for this? ... got to meet Alda over lunch at the Queen Mother Café! What are the odds that Alda's trip to Toronto would coincide with mine? I don't know, but I do know that she is just as wonderful as her writing suggests.

The trip was a blur. My friends and I mostly drank and talked and made silly inside jokes. We went shopping at Romni Wools, Soma Chocolatemaker, and about eight sari shops. We hung out at a couple of really pleasing bars with horrible names but gorgeous, breezy patios. We had delicious and atmospheric dinners at restaurants both Vietnamese and Indian.

As much fun as I had, it's wonderful to be back home with the s.o. and the dogs and the poultry. My desk is totally on fire with urgent work, but that's to be expected. The only problem is, when am I supposed to catch up on my sleep?

Service interruption

Did I mention that I'm traveling right now? I am!

Greetings from northeastern Ohio. I'm sorry I haven't blogged, but I've been very busy. Mom and I picked up two buckets of pie cherries at Peace Valley Orchards today. We freezer-packed them, and I'll be bringing most of them home in a soft-sided cooler when I fly back to Georgia.

I've also just gotten to meet my niece Liadan, who shares my birthday (give or take a few decades). Good stuff.

More soon...xxx

Potatoes!

For the third week of One Local Summer, I decided to feature our homegrown potatoes. As I mentioned in the previous post, the potatoes' very existence came as a surprise to me. After last year's dispiriting gopher invasion, I was sure that any potato-growing efforts at Chez 10 Signs would be thwarted in one way or another. Well, I was wrong.

They are gorgeous, if I do say so myself. Pink on the outside, crisp white on the inside. Immaculate and full of flavor. I forget what breed they are; they're something that Shumway sells. We have white ones, too, which also look very impressive, but which we haven't tried yet.

Without thinking about it much, I found myself dicing up several of the pink beauties, plus half a Vidalia onion and a smidgen of jalapeño pepper. I cooked them in a little olive oil and butter in a cast-iron skillet--sometimes covered, to steam the potatoes through, and sometimes uncovered to get a crispy edge. I seasoned them very simply with salt, pepper, and fresh parsley.

Meanwhile, a peek into the freezer revealed a tiny end-piece of the ham we had made in January. It was cured in a tub on our back porch in a hard cider brine. I heated it up with a glaze of our homemade green tomato and apple chutney.

The finishing touch was a fluffy omelette filled with cheddar cheese and a chiffonade of sorrel leaves. Sorrel is magic. I know we've converted one person to its charms already, but the rest of the world also needs to get on board. Everyone who tries it likes it. Its lemony tang is perfect with eggs, potatoes, and fish. And if you chop it finely enough, it collapses gently into whatever warm food you add it to--which is basically what you want an omelette filling to do, yes?

Here's the tally:

SKILLET POTATOES
Red potatoes - 0 miles
Jalapeño pepper and parsley - 0 miles
Vidalia onion - 132 miles*
Butter - probably localish since it's from Ingles, but unknown
Olive oil, salt, and pepper - not local

GLAZED HAM
Half pig from Dyal Farms, Cobbtown, Ga. - 132 miles
Green tomato and apple chutney - homemade from our own green tomatoes (0 miles), Ellijay apples (167 miles), and some exotic ingredients

SORREL OMELETTE
Eggs from Chestnut Mountain, Ga. (a big producer, unfortunately; I can't wait for our hens to start laying!) - 73 miles
Cheddar cheese from Sweetwater Valley Farms, Philadelphia, Tenn. - 268 miles (but a lot less as the crow flies...darn mountains!)
Butter, salt, and pepper - see above
Sorrel - 0 miles

----------
* The s.o. has informed me that not only does the name "Vidalia" signify Georgian-ness, but it refers to a very specific few counties in south-central Georgia. So knowing that our pig producer, Dyal Farms, is also a Vidalia onion producer, I've used the mileage to their farm as a reference.

For the record

This is what I've done in the garden during the last couple of days:

(1) Removed 8-foot-tall collards. They should have been removed long ago, but the bees seemed to love the flowers and the foliage was shading my lettuces, so I kept them. Finally they outlived their usefulness.

(2) Removed 5-foot-tall chard. Was startled to find that, because the plants had gone to seed such a long time ago, there was an understory of younger, unbolted chard underneath, which now looks very healthy and happy. I couldn't make this stuff up if I tried, folks.

(3) Planted second round of tomatoes: one row each of Sungold and Shumway Early Big Red in the garden proper, and one row each of Sungella and Principe Borghese in the greenhouse. The greenhouse isn't covered right now, but it will be later in the year, when those longer-maturing tomato varieties may need a bit of protection from early frosts.

(4) Admired hummingbirds flitting around in the Scarlet Runner Beans.

(5) Planted fourth round of green and wax beans. Harvested a few beans from the third round.

(6) Cleared away last slug-eaten cabbages, dug in some organic fertilizer, and planted a second round of cucumbers (Cross Country this time, because I ran out of Picklebush seeds) in their place.

(7) Because squashes overall are doing so poorly -- probably due in part to their unfortunate placement in the newest section of the garden, which is still rather clayey -- I planted one hill each of zucchini, yellow crookneck, and Delicata squashes in loamier parts of the garden.

(8) Discovered, much to my surprise, that even though the potato plants were attacked by grasshoppers and have never bothered to flower (which I thought was supposed to be one's signal to dig up new potatoes), there are baseball-sized potatoes underground!

Hello, kitty

Here's an in-freezer action shot of my adorable new Hello Kitty* popsicle maker. It was $4-something at Junkman's. I'd been looking for a popsicle maker anyway, and to me (and you know how rarely I say this), it's not the kind of thing you want to buy used. So I got a little crazy and snapped it up.

What's inside is a blackberry real-fruit popsicle mix: a simple syrup stirred with pureed blackberries (I don't sieve out the seeds, since that's where all the fiber is) and fresh lemon juice.

I have been very busy finding creative things to do with our produce. I made a tasty zucchini spice cake (from the Moosewood Restaurant Book of Desserts) that has so far served as the s.o.'s late-night snack and my breakfast (hey! it has vegetables, fruits, and nuts in it!).

Today there's a lot of work to be done. The second plantings of cucumbers and tomatoes have to be done before I leave on a brief vacation to Ohio and Toronto next week...

----------
* I know it smacks of infantilism, but I also have a Hello Kitty toaster that toasts little kitty faces onto your toast. The s.o. is not really very fond of it. When I use it, he turns the kitty face down so he doesn't have to see it while he's eating.

Bounty

We are easy to grow

Well, the garden has officially exploded. Today alone I bagged three quarts of halved Sungold tomatoes for the freezer; the other tomatoes are still just limping along, so I figured I had better make the best of it.

I've harvested the first crop of tomatillos, and now I'm thinking I had better go to the grocery store to get some tortillas and such. I think it'll be catfish tacos tonight.

I pulled four ears of sweet corn. We'll see how they are; we are definitely sharing them with a very overzealous pack of Japanese beetles. Frankly, though, after my dismal failure last year, I am thrilled to have any corn at all. Maybe it's the big, easy-to-cross-pollinate block of corn I planted; maybe it's the weather; or maybe it's the interplanting of purple-hull peas that has helped this time. Whatever it is, we have corn where previously we had none. So hurrah!

A friend has photocopied a couple of pages for me from this aptly named cookbook because we needed the excellent recipe for cold cucumber soup. She made it for us once, and it's genius. You cook most of the soup ahead of time and freeze it. Then another day, perhaps when you are not quite so inundated with produce, you thaw it out, stir in some sour cream and a grated cuke, and you have something totally delicious to eat.

Lastly, I've dusted off the food dehydrator. It's currently humming away, sucking the moisture out of a few handfuls of cayenne peppers. The whole house smells spicy!

One Local Summer: Week 2

For this week's One Local Summer meal, I drew my inspiration from college.

I went to school at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota in the late '80s and early '90s. At the time, there was a kosher vegetarian Israeli restaurant across the street called the Old City Cafe. Occasionally my friends and I would go there and indulge in garlicky New York-style pizza. And many a time, I'd go there to pick up an order of fluffy pita bread and chatzilim to take with me to Physics for Poets.

Yesterday I was standing in the garden, contemplating the army of eggplants, cucumbers, and cherry tomatoes, when I suddenly realized an Israeli dinner was within my grasp. Here's what we ate:

CHATZILIM
Roasted eggplant (0 miles)
Garlic (0 miles)
Duke's mayonnaise - from Greenville, S.C. (137 miles)
Vidalia onion - not sure of mileage, but by definition all Vidalias are from Georgia
Lemon juice - not local
Salt and pepper - not local

ISRAELI SALAD
Sungold tomatoes (0 miles)
Cucumbers (0 miles)
Parsley and mint (0 miles)
Vidalia onion - see above
Olive oil and lemon juice - not local
Salt and pepper - not local

BREAD
Farmhouse boule from Big City Bread, Athens, Ga. (35 miles)

Now I have Death Breath, as my college roommate and I used to call it. Nothing like several cloves of raw garlic to add that extra special something to your personal interactions. But oh! It is so worth it.

Asleep on the couch

Snoring -- that's how I spent most of my Independence Day. I had planned to go to a cookout at Main Street Yarns & Fibers, but I was simply too exhausted after Jenny's visit. Jenny, it turns out, is a woman of taste, beauty, brains, and hilarity. We loved her from the moment she rang the doorbell.

Jenny not only tolerated repeated friendly assaults by our dogs; she actually doted on her furry attackers. She was brave enough to go into the chicken house and be crowed at by the Mille Fleurs. She drove me around Athens in her car because I don't own a car with air conditioning. The weather was so hot and oppressive that we couldn't stay outdoors for long, but I did manage to show her such Athens landmarks as the Tree That Owns Itself and the Double-Barrelled Cannon. We went thrifting (fruitlessly, but, you know, that's how things go) and ate yummy pastries at Big City Bread. Later on, Jenny survived an Athens bar crawl in the company of me and my dear pal J.

So, wow. I am still reeling from the coolness of my first mini blogmeet. We are so glad Jenny came to visit!

One thing we didn't manage to do while she was here was check our beehives. We meant to, but we just ran out of time. So the s.o. and I pried open the lid this evening and took a look. Holy cow, are those little gals healthy. They have expanded into Level 2 of the hive. There are tons of fuzzy young bees, and the hive is crazy with brood and honey. We tasted a bit of it -- it's dark and nutty and delicious.

I also went blackberry picking this evening. That rain we had last week saved the day; the berries that were dry and inedible before are gigantic and juicy now. I plan on making a batch of blackberry barbecue sauce for the rack of ribs in our freezer.

But right now, I think I might lie down again...

Some vegetables...

...are doing very well indeed. For some reason (knock on wood), the eggplants are a roaring success and are not having the pest problems I've had in the past. Right now it's all Ichibans, but the Rosa Biancas aren't far behind.

And my mixed pattypan squashes are doing great--so much so that this white one got way bigger than I intended.

Other vegetables, such as my Marmande and San Marzano tomatoes, are not doing well at all. The Marmandes are growing in funky, difficult-to-use shapes (i.e., they are gnarled up and almost impossible to peel for salsa, plus they have green shoulders); the San Marzanos are tiny and pathetic and are succumbing to blossom-end rot. Good thing I have all those Sungolds..although that doesn't help me where canning is concerned.

The Japanese beetles have eaten the top ends of a lot of our ears of sweet corn, but I think they have left us plenty. Which is a miracle, really, because I consider sweet corn very difficult to grow here.

Most of the squash is doing very poorly, because it is having to play catch-up after a nasty battle with squash vine borers. And yes, the squash bugs are doing their best to kill them while they're trying to rebound.

The various kinds of peppers are doing great. Because I can't make salsa (see above, plus my tomatillos aren't quite ready yet), I am inundated with jalapeños. I'd pickle some, but I still have three jars of pickled jalapeños from last year.