It's still no excuse for being blog-delinquent this long

Guess what the s.o. and I did a week and a half ago, while we were in Las Vegas for business?



If you were going to guess "saw the Ronnie James Dio incarnation of Black Sabbath perform at the Palms, and from really good seats, too" that answer is also correct, but it's not what I'm trying to get at.

Life is, indeed, sweet.

Why September is so much better than August

Late September is prime time for the s.o.'s flower garden. It's close to the road so everyone in town can enjoy it--and indeed, we often get compliments on it. He is always improving it; the goal for next year, I'm told, is "to plant so many perennials that there's no room for weeds." A worthy goal.




And now that the worst of the heat is over, the vegetable garden finally has a chance to revive. These are the very first of the fall produce: a bunch of Jaune D'Or radishes.


The other big plus is that now the nights are cool and foggy. Interesting to drive in sometimes (where IS the road, anyway?), but much easier on the plant life and on the soul.

Bark in the Park

Here are some long-overdue pics of our beloved boy Cairo enjoying a baseball game at Turner Field earlier this month.


A couple of times a year, the Atlanta Braves have a promotion called Bark in the Park where they rope off a section of the upper deck for people with canines. It was fantastic--they had kiddie pools and misters and lots of water bowls and free dog-appropriate frozen yogurt (Cairo, the Dairy Dog, had two).


Amazingly, everyone seemed to get the clue that they should only bring sociable dogs. There was very little disruption, aside from a few outbreaks of excited barking. All the people and dogs just hung out and enjoyed themselves.


We'll definitely go again next time they do it. All baseball games should be dog-friendly. Don't you think?

Hello world

I'm connected to the internet WIRELESSLY, using my NEW COMPUTER!!!! Sweet, sweet, sweet. More to come, as soon as I play with it for a while. Oh, and get some arugula and mizuna planted...

Shot down in a blaze of I/O errors

I've ordered a new MacBook. My trusty eMac had been deteriorating fast--unexplained crashes, weird sparkly "snow," etc. I ran some cleanup utilities and thought it was a bit better, but then it locked up and destroyed 8 hours of work (probably the best writing I'd done in six months). I'm typing this blog post on the eMac, but I'm obviously not using it for anything mission-critical. I'm currently trying to remember the lost article and reconstruct it on my old "toilet seat" iBook. Argh.

On the bright side...NEW COMPUTER! AIRPORT HUB! SHINY!

As soon as I have a computer I'm not nervous about, I'll post some photos of the fall garden, which is coming along quite nicely.

It all comes out in the wash

Previously I complained that blister beetles had ravaged an entire row of my chard--which, indeed, they did. They skeletonized it. I was forced to cut it down to nubs.

But I can't complain too bitterly about the situation, because here's what that row of chard looks like now, after regrowing (click to enlarge):


Maybe those bugs aren't so bad after all. No, wait, they are. They also took out my Dragon Langerie beans (although the heat had damaged the plants pretty badly beforehand). And they've been making tomato-picking a harrowing experience.

By the way, note the young cabbages at the left of the photo. Also note the netted chicken runs in the back, draped with overenthusiastic vines of bottle gourd. On the right of the chard (currently not yet poking through the soil) will be a row of variegated land cress.

The fall garden is in progress. So much more fun than summer.

OLS 10

Another One Local Summer comes to an end. Which, I guess, means that summer is coming to an end, too.

OLS has helped us mark the ups and downs of a challenging season. When it comes to cooking, scarcity is as telling as plenty. What have we got, and what can we make of it?

Kudos to Liz for dreaming OLS up and for making it hugely successful. Ready for next year, my friend? Heh.

This was our final meal in the series:

PORK CHOP:
Pork - Dyal Farm, Cobbtown, Ga. (150 miles)

PANZANELLA:
Tomatoes - ours
Cucumbers - ours
Parsley and basil - ours
French bread - Luna Baking Co., Athens, Ga. (35 miles)
Red and green bell peppers - L2's (1/4 mile)
Vidalia onion - Vidalia, Ga. (130 miles)
Capers, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, seasonings - elsewhere

Eat Local Challenge begins tomorrow!

Holy cow...as I was looking at seed planting dates, it occurred to me that September starts tomorrow. That means it's time for the 2007 Eat Local Challenge. The focus this time around is on food preservation, so keep an eye out on the aforelinked site to see what participants learn and accomplish.

This year, there are a zillion different ways to participate, ranging from simple and minimal to big and life-changing. You don't have to be ascetic or hardcore; you could choose, for example, to merely add one local item per week to your repertoire. You could photograph your farmers' market and talk about what you buy there. Anything goes, so there's no reason everyone can't join in.

If you do post something localish, let me know and I'll link to it on the ELC site. I would especially like to see certain bloggers who make homemade wines and liqueurs talk a little bit about the process!

Nice.

Today I managed to clear and fertilize small portions of the garden. Then I planted one row of purple sprouting broccoli and half a row each of red kale and yellow radishes.

Then it began to rain. Gently, yet amply.

Another first

Two quail eggs this morning--our first. I'm amazed that such tiny birds can lay such...well, the eggs are tiny, too, but if you compare them to the birds, they're sort of the equivalent of a chicken laying a goose egg.

I tried to take a picture, but our camera can't handle the smallness. They look just about like the eggs on this page.

I have to take issue with the usual assertion that Coturnix quail thrive in cages. They stay alive in cages, sure. But we noticed a marked difference in the happiness of our birds when the s.o. created Quail World, their outdoor daytime enclosure. They dustbathe and hide in the tall grass and do helicopter imitations. They obviously enjoy it. And it's worth noting that, given the opportunity, they picked a protected area under some branches to nest.

August is...well, just August

August in Georgia has only one mitigating virtue: that from within it, one can just see autumn on the horizon.

The record-setting three-week heat wave seems to have broken, if you are prepared to accept the idea that a drop from the 105 range into the mid-90s represents the end of a heat wave. The one thing that makes it feel real is that we are getting a few refreshing, life-giving thunderstorms.

I think the heat wave may have killed our tiny nascent farmers' market. For three weeks, because the National Weather Service was rightfully telegraphing DEATH DEATH DEATH about the idea of spending any time outdoors, we were forced to cancel. This week, after enthusiastic e-mails to our customer base, we started up again. But we had only one visitor, and she was one of our vendors. That's what you call a small turnout. People are creatures of habit, and the hiatus undid whatever shopping habits we had managed to inspire.

But believe it or not, we are okay with this turn of events. We've slowly been coming to the realization that (a) our town may not be quite ready for a farmers' market, and (b) there are a lot of new farmers' markets in the area, each with not very many vendors. So we spent our idle hours last night hatching some plans for a tiny, just-us-neighbors gardening collective. One entity; a few back yards. Instead of adding another marginal farmers' market to the fray, we'll team up to take our wares to some of the existing outlets. More on that next year, I think.

Meanwhile, it is still the dog days of summer. L2 and I sat, flushed with plans for World Domination via backyard market gardening (or was it the humidity?), and picked out our seeds for fall planting. I ordered them all last night.

Time to start pulling out spent plants and dreaming of cool leafy things. We'll plant as soon as we can get the beds prepared.

One Local Summer, week 9

I never did finish this year's half-pig charcuterie. Many months have passed since January, yet there are still bags labeled "future sausage" in our freezer. (Oops!) So on Friday when we wanted spaghetti with Italian sausage, I had to actually grind meat in order to get it done.

Overall, we're trying to dispatch some of the things lurking in our freezer. We're currently thawing the last of last year's turkeys, which may appear as OLS 10. Part of the reason is that we need freezer space for current endeavors. We're making a lot of changes in the farmyard. Slowly but surely, extra roosters are being yanked from the flock and processed. (Anyone want some standard Light Brahma roosters? They're magnificent, but they're total jerks. And we have four of them, thanks to the fact that they're only available straight-run from McMurray. We've put them in the Market Bulletin in hopes of repatriating them.)

Some boy animals are luckier than others. Instead of killing one of our two gorgeous, sweet Royal Palm tom turkeys, we opted to trade one of them for four little Japanese bantam hens. Making the swap meant a several-county trip, but it was worth it. The woman we traded with was overjoyed with Puff Daddy the turkey; she hopes to breed him. And we're pleased as punch with our new tenants. Now we have six bantam hens total, so we're hoping to get lots of teeny eggs.

Anyway, back to the dinner:

SPAGHETTI WITH MEAT SAUCE:

Tomatoes, garlic, oregano, and red bell peppers - our own
Candy onions - Sundance Farm, Danielsville, Ga. (50 miles)
Pork - Dyal Farm, Cobbtown, Ga. (150 miles)
Bread - Luna Baking Co., Athens, Ga. (35 miles)
Pasta, olive oil, and spices - elsewhere

A stunning discovery

The s.o. just found a native persimmon tree at the edge of our woods. It is starting to drop fruit.

This calls for a search party! Where there's one, there may be more...

Perfect, perfect, perfect!

Remember my "eh" muscadine cobbler from last week? The cloying, goopy one? And how I said I thought the grapes might do better in a clafouti?

I made one, and I was right. It's one of the best things I've ever eaten. WOW. If you have access to muscadines (this means you, my fellow residents of the south), grab your copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking: Vol. 1 and follow the basic clafouti recipe, substituting halved, seeded muscadines for the cherries. Use brandy (which is, after all, made of grapes) instead of vanilla.

I could eat this whole thing. Mmm.

Another week goes roaring past

Still a heat wave.

Still too much to do and no energy to do it with.

Still a dog in need of extra hugs: Cairo's rear has been healing very nicely, but his first batch of antibiotics made him awfully sick, and we had to take him back into the vet's office to get different ones. He is doing better now--fuzzy and happy and loyal as ever--and thanks you for your kind wishes.

I spent about an hour today floating in L2's pool, which went a long way toward making me enjoy the weather for a change. I should do that more often.

I canned tomato sauce AND salsa on Monday and Tuesday. I made the salsa with Green Zebra tomatoes, so it has an unusual appearance. But if you close your eyes, it's regular hot salsa.

I cooked a lot of local food this week. Unfortunately, none of it was grouped together in a single meal. Local eggplant, squash, and onion shared a plate with exotic tofu. Our own chicken was served, taco-seasoned, with homegrown tomato in storebought tortillas.

So I got to Sunday and hadn't made a single OLS meal. What's more, I couldn't bring myself to make the gumbo I knew would bring it all together: okra! tomatoes! seafood! Carolina Gold rice! So instead, I just boiled some peel-and-eat shrimp. That was it.

I must say these shrimp are pretty special. They're sort of a test run for an agreement that our food-buying club is working out with a Savannah-based fisherman. They're bringing in five-pound bags of freshly caught shrimp--mixed sizes, heads on, straight off the boat. They are really good and fantastically fresh. It's almost like being on vacation, especially if you wear coconut-scented sunblock and mash some Old Bay seasoning into your cuticles.

Here's proof that I grew up landlocked: I had never seen shrimp with their heads on before! It takes some getting used to. For one thing, it's hard to cram all the antennae into the freezer bags; they keep wanting to work their way back out, which is not so good if you're hoping to get a good, tight seal when you "zip" them shut.

A small price to pay, though. I wonder if these people can get us blue crab, too.

A proud moment

I don't know whether to yell "WOOO HOOOOO!" or "NOOOOOOOOOOOO!" Tucker Taylor, one of our most talented local farmers, has been hired away by Thomas Keller.

I met Tucker and his business partner Celia Barss this spring when I profiled their farm for Edible Atlanta magazine. They're supercool people, very dedicated and talented. I hope Celia takes the helm now--otherwise, who'll supply our local restaurants with salsify and sweet turnips? Who'll be the first ones to the market with tomatoes in April?

Sigh.

But what a wonderful opportunity for Tucker!

Make it stop

Well.

We did manage to have a wonderful visit this week with my mother and stepdad, but only despite rather sobering obstacles.

On Monday, their arrival day, I was just starting to work up my One Local Summer post when I noticed Cairo licking his under-tail area. Remembering that the s.o. had complained of not being able to sleep because of "Cairo licking himself," I took a look. It turned out he was oozing and bleeding from a vicious wound that looked like someone had stabbed him with an ice pick. As soon as we stopped him from licking it, it started to get everywhere. We tried stopping the flow, but it worsened. We called the vet and they told us to get his butt (so to speak) into the office pronto.

Four or five hours later, the s.o. brought an unhappy e-collar-wearing Cairo home with a bag full of antibiotics and painkillers. Cairo had an abscessed gland. He was still bleeding and oozing like crazy and, for the first 24 hours until it dried up a bit, had to be locked in the bathroom. This caused him to cry all night, and Gracie to whimper constantly because (obviously) something was wrong among the pack.

Mom and John slept. We didn't. Two out of four ain't bad.

Pretty much at the same time as they arrived, the temperature rose to 105 degrees (yes, that's a record, even for Georgia) and has stayed there every day since. This was almost tolerable while we were in the house or in their car; however, once John left for Atlanta and took his car, we had to run errands in mine, which has a broken A/C unit. I don't know when I've sweated so much.

We lost a young hen to the heat. She was a favorite of mine, unfortunately. Also, blister beetles came and ate an entire row of chard in one day. Apparently they like 100-plus weather just fine.

We canceled the Wednesday farmers' market because nobody wanted to sit outdoors from 4 to 7 p.m. It would have been dangerous, frankly.

On Thursday afternoon the upstairs air conditioner in our house broke. The upstairs is the guest room, so Mom was the one to discover it. ("It's 96 degrees up there!") We shuffled accommodations for the night. I took the floor. The repair guy came on Friday afternoon and informed us that ants had gotten into our heat pump and shorted it out by scorching themselves to death on the wire contacts. A cheap fix, thank goodness.

Friday I drove Mom to Atlanta to reunite her with John at my stepsister's house. The s.o. had the bright idea that I should make the drive in my bikini top. It was absolute genius--I was able to wear a dry, unsticky shirt to dinner because of his quick thinking. Only a couple of truckers honked at me along the way.

We had a great Indian meal here, which made up for a lot of the ickiness.

After the horror of this heat wave, I think our family will still get up the courage to come to visit us. But maybe not in summer!

One Local Summer, week 7

For OLS week 7, it's Greek food again. I can't help myself--Greek food lends itself so well to the type of meat and produce we can get here. It's not typical Greek, though, because these little omelet-roll things look and taste suspiciously like crepes.



Dessert was a cobbler made of Muscadine grapes grown by our friend Mary Lynn. It didn't turn out exactly as I'd hoped, though. Too liquid-y, and for some reason really a jackhammer sugar rush. I think I may have to admit to myself that Muscadines aren't a one-to-one substitution for Concords, no matter how similar their flavor. I recently saw a recipe for a Muscadine clafouti, which is maybe a better idea: isolating them in a matrix of less-intensity.



CHIOS AVGOKALAMARA:

Ground beef - White Oak Pastures, Bluffton, Ga. (240 miles--but I'm friends with 'em!)
Vidalia onions - Vidalia, Ga. (130 miles)
Tomatoes - our own
Eggs - our own
Flour, spices - elsewhere

STEAMED SQUASH:

Yellow crookneck squash - our own
Salt and pepper - elsewhere

MUSCADINE COBBLER:

Muscadine grapes - our friend's (5 miles)
Buttermilk - Diamond Hill Dairy, Antreville, S.C. (70 miles)
Soft wheat flour - Mills Farm, Athens, Ga. (35 miles)
Southern Biscuit flour - see Jenny's OLS Week 6 post!
Butter, sugar, baking powder, baking soda - elsewhere

Horrible

I can't even begin to process that the 35W Bridge in Minneapolis has collapsed. I lived in the Twin Cities for about a decade, and used to hang out in the neighborhood that's the vantage point for many of the photos and videos. It's so surreal and unbelievable.

When the s.o. told me it had happened, I literally felt every hair on my body stand on end--as though I'd had an electric shock.

I hope my Twin Cities friends are all right, and my condolences go out to anyone who's lost someone.

Tomatoes, Southern style

Do you think this is a problem at all?



Would you think it was a problem if I told you this was only half of what's currently been picked?

Yeah. I know. To our credit, we have been selling quite a lot of them, but it's still a little daunting. And I still haven't canned any of them because I keep using up all the ripest ones in our dinners. There was a gorgeous shrimp fra diavolo the other day. And last night there was this:



Let's call it One Local Summer meal #6. Despite its simplicity, it was actually one of the best meals I've made in ages. For one thing, I make a damn fine biscuit; I use Deborah Madison's recipe from Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, but I substitute half of the white flour with soft whole-wheat flour. Knead exactly twice. Use a sharp cutter. They come out fluffy and layery every time.

And the country ham was possibly the best I've ever had. Let's face it: there is a lot of really nasty, dry, oversalted, rancid-tasting country ham out there. But this stuff was outstanding. The package recommended frying it with a little bit of diluted Coca-cola in the pan. Since I didn't have that on hand, I added a dash of unbleached organic sugar to the water. Excellent. And very quickly devoured.

The okra was our first of the season and, as such, even more appreciated than usual!

STEWED OKRA:
Okra and tomatoes - our own
Vidalia onions - Vidalia, Ga. (130 miles)
Louisiana pepper sauce, salt, and pepper - elsewhere

COUNTRY HAM:
Center-sliced country ham - Clifty Farm, Paris, Tenn. (450 miles, but don't I get some credit for an indigenous southern specialty?)
Sugar - elsewhere

BISCUITS:
Red Mule soft wheat flour - Athens, Ga. (35 miles)
Southern Biscuit flour - Newton, N.C. (240 miles)
Buttermilk - Peeler Farm, Starr, S.C. (68 miles)
Baking powder, baking soda, butter, salt - elsewhere

Really, really unfair

Jacques Pépin was making omelets in my dream. And then my wretched alarm woke me before I had a chance to eat one.

*sob*

This, er, rocks

We woke up the other day to find this. One of our best friends in town is the water meter reader, and he had left us a message!

Iron Chef Summertime

Week 5 of One Local Summer has come and gone, and this week the main goal was to use up three rather urgent items:

(1) A young turkey, about 5 pounds, that suffered a severe injury and had to be processed. This was agonizing. It's always terrible to see an animal in pain, but this was also our only male of a variety that we'd very much like to breed in the future. (That's Blue Slate, if you're curious. Really nice birds.) So I steeled myself, as you do in those situations, and did what had to be done. And then I tried my best to think of it as an ingredient. Not "the turkey," but "turkey." Ouch, what a way to ruin your day.

(2) Tomatoes. Thousands of them. Sooooo many tomatoes. Delicious tomatoes, all ripening at once. We've sold pound after pound (people are pretty impressed with the spread at the farmers' market, I think), dried some, froze some, meant to can some but didn't get to it yet, and still all the horizontal surfaces in the house are covered with toms.

(3) Ditto cucumbers. Not only do I grow them myself (three varieties!), but my friend L2 keeps foisting her extra slicers on anyone who'll take them.

What I made out of these three ingredients was sort of pan-Iberian: half Spanish and half Mexican. For the record, the two dishes didn't go together particularly well. But individually, they were both excellent.

Here's the turkey in mole sauce:



And here's the gazpacho:




The photos are awful, aren't they? Especially the mole one, which looks suspiciously like something you'd scrape off your shoe. Ew. But the flavors were outstanding.

TURKEY IN MOLE SAUCE:
Turkey - our own
Tomatoes - our own
Onions and garlic - our own
Dried cayenne peppers - our own
Almonds, raisins, baking chocolate, ancho chiles, lard, and other seasonings - elsewhere

GAZPACHO:
Tomatoes - our own
Cucumbers - our own, and L2's (.25 mile)
Vidalia onion - central Georgia (about 130 miles)
Green pepper - L2's (.25 mile)
Stale bread - Luna Baking Corp., Athens, Ga. (35 miles)
Garlic - our own
Vinegar, olive oil, seasonings - elsewhere

As for dessert, we are struggling to keep up with a burgeoning supply of watermelons--because, I mean, who can turn one down? Fruit salads, licuados, you name it. Our most recent one was a yellow-fleshed watermelon from south Georgia that was one of the sweetest and best I've ever had. I was shocked to find that hardly anyone around here had ever seen a yellow-fleshed watermelon; I remember them from my childhood in Ohio. Maybe it's a regional thing.

I.O.U.

Sorry I've been so tardy about this. Last week after my One Local Summer post, a couple of you requested recipes. Here they are, with my changes noted:

. . . . . .

FRESH CORN CHOWDER
adapted from Molly Katzen's The Enchanted Broccoli Forest

2 Tbs. butter (I omitted this, because I fried up a few strips' worth of bacon and used both the bacon and the grease in the chowder)
1 c. chopped onion
1/2 c. chopped celery (I omitted this because I didn't have it, and it wouldn't have been local if I did)
1 sweet red bell pepper, minced (I used green because we had it)
4-5 cobs' worth of fresh sweet corn
1/2 tsp. salt
freshly ground black pepper
1/4 tsp. dried thyme (I used fresh, so I used a bit more)
1/2 tsp. dried basil (ditto)
1 c. stock or water (I used water)
1 c. evaporated or whole milk (I used whole)

Cook the onions in the butter or grease until soft, then add peppers and corn. Add seasonings, stir well, and cover. Reduce heat and let cook 5 minutes.

Add water, cover, and simmer 10-20 minutes (Molly says 10, but that's pretty bare-bones if you ask me). Using a blender, pureé half the soup and add it back into the pot.

About 10 minutes before serving time, add the milk. Don't actually cook it; just warm it gently until it's hot enough to eat.



PEACH COBBLER
adapted rather loosely from Deborah Madison's Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone

6 to 8 c. sliced ripe peaches
1/2 c. brown sugar
1/2 tsp. cinnamon
1/4 c. flour
1 Tbs. fresh lemon juice
1 1/2 c. flour (I prefer a mix of soft wheat and all-purpose, but in this case I used only the former)
1/3 c. sugar
1 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
6 Tbs. cold butter, cut up
1/2 c. buttermilk

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F. Butter an 8x10-ish oval or rectangular dish.

In the dish, toss together the peaches, brown sugar, cinnamon, 1/4 c. flour, and lemon juice.

In a bowl, mix the 1 1/2 c. flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Rub in the butter with your fingers until the mixture resembles coarse meal. Stir in the buttermilk until dough clings together. Scoop up large spoonfuls of dough and "cobble" them onto the top of the fruit.

Bake about 30 minutes, or until fruit is bubbling and topping is golden and has lost its doughiness underneath (you may have to stick a spoon in near the center to ascertain this). Serve warm.

. . . . . .

By the way, what are your favorite fresh fig recipes? They're in season right now and I've just bought a LOT of them from a nice elderly gentleman at the farmers' market, so I need your help. I already make that classic delicious salad with the fresh mozzarella and basil and prosciutto (mmmmmm). I eat a lot of them plain, of course. I have been known to make fresh fig ice cream, but I'm not in the mood for heavy creamy stuff lately. What else should I do?

The world in mid-Georgia

I think my international cooking craze started when we moved out to the country. Because we were no longer surrounded by restaurants, I got it in my head that if I wanted to eat decent world cuisine, I was going to have to Iron Chef it myself.

About that time, my cookbook collection--already a couple of U-Haul boxes in size--truly began to explode. Now it is all we can do to find places for the new entries. Major collections began to accumulate, especially when I discovered how frequently volumes from the justifiably renowned Time-Life Foods of the World series showed up in thrift stores. (I think I have almost all of them now, both hardbound cultural studies and spiral-bound recipe books. And, as with almost all my cookbooks, I got them for a song.)

For a long time, Asian food has been a weak spot in my repertoire. But a couple of months ago I started learning spoken and written Mandarin, and it seemed as good a time as any to whip my Chinese cooking into shape. So far, reviews have been mixed: I loved my tea-cooked eggs, but the s.o. thought they were "funky" and my friends looked askance at their goth-style cobweb markings. A batch of bitterish almond cookies satisfied no one.

But there's one recipe that has produced a fantastically snackalicious addition to my repertoire. From the Foods of the World China volume, I present...

CUCUMBER SALAD WITH SPICY DRESSING

2 medium cucumbers
1 tsp. soy sauce
1 Tbs. white vinegar
1 Tbs. sugar
2 tsp. sesame oil
1/4 tsp. Tabasco
1/2 tsp. salt

Peel and seed the cucumbers, and cut them into 1/4-inch slices. Toss with remaining ingredients. Chill.

Easy, eh? Don't blame me when you eat two batches of it per day. Remember, I said "snackalicious."

That salad, along with the tasty Fish Fillet Soup Noodles from Stella Lau Fessler's Chinese Seafood Cooking, made up this week's One Local Summer meal. Neither the noodles nor the seasonings were local, but the dishes made such excellent use of our homegrown and home-caught foods that I decided to go with it.

CUCUMBER SALAD:
Cucumbers - our own
Seasonings - elsewhere

FISH SOUP:
White bass - caught in Oconee River (20 miles)
Fish stock - frozen from fish caught at local fishing creek (12 miles)
Green onions and jalapeño peppers - our own
Noodles and seasonings - elsewhere

One Local Summer: Week 3

Back in the old days, produce wasn't the only thing that ebbed and flowed according to the seasons. Meat was seasonal, too. People ate quick-maturing, quick-to-prepare poultry in fair weather, then slaughtered a hog when the first cold snap arrived. With no refrigeration, they depended on the weather to chill the larger animal's meat while they hurried to process and cure it.

Well, we definitely have refrigeration, but the same is turning out to be true for us. We always get our pig in midwinter and eat more poultry throughout the rest of the year. 2007 marks the first time we've raised any chickens specifically for meat, and we're starting to reap the benefits now. Dark Cornishes are flighty, but they are really worth raising!

This is what we ate for this week's One Local Summer meal:

BAKED CHICKEN:
Chicken - our own
Thyme - our own
Vinegar, butter, and wine - elsewhere

FRESH CORN CHOWDER:
Corn - Athens, Ga. (35 miles)
Milk - Starr, S.C. (73 miles)
Green pepper - my neighbor's (.25 mile)
Onion - Vidalia, Ga. (136 miles)
Bacon - our own, from a central Georgia pig
Basil and thyme - our own
Butter - elsewhere



PEACH COBBLER:
Peaches - south Georgia, because all the peaches in north and central Georgia were killed in the spring frost
Soft wheat flour - Athens, Ga. (35 miles)
Buttermilk - Starr, S.C. (73 miles)
Butter, baking powder, sugar, lemon - elsewhere



Mmm...summer.

Ah, the summer slump...

...when I just can't seem to make myself blog anything.

Well, never fear. I am still here, doing all the usual: eating local food, taking naps with dogs, studying Mandarin Chinese while weeding the garden, etc. I heart podcasts. When your body has to do the dishes, it's great to let your brain do something else.

We have also been battling these:



And playing with these:

Fuzzy math

I counted the quail. There are FORTY of them. OMG.

My excuse is that they are small and move quickly.

Identity crisis

Can someone help me figure out what the heck this mystery cockerel is? Yes, this is our friend the mystery chick, all grown up and as enigmatic as ever.



It has naked blue legs, a beard, no crest, and what so far appears to be a pea or rose comb...



...and its feathers are white spattered with black. It is unusually tall and fairly slender in build.



It came from Murray McMurray, so one would assume it's something they sell. In other words, it's probably not an Appenzeller Barthuhner or anything really weird like that.

Anyone? Anyone?

This is how we get overcommitted

Whew! Long time no post, I know. I've just been very busy. First we had a delightful visit from Ms. Jenny, AKA Stew (about which, more later). But right after she left, a friend dropped by to give us a gift: a box of tiny, peeping, chipmunky Coturnix quail chicks. We have so far been unable to count them, but there seem to be at least 20.

I've put off posting about them until I was fairly certain (from web searches, etc.) that we don't need a breeder license to have them. And it appears we don't--that's just native Bobwhite quail, and it's just if you're going to sell live birds. So all is revealed.














Do you know how difficult it is to photograph a constantly-moving animal the size of a shrew? Blursville. Oh, well.

We hadn't planned on getting quail--I mean, we have enough to deal with!--but that's sort of how things work in the country. People have animals, the animals change owners, people take up unexpected hobbies. These do seem relatively low-maintenance, at least: They are kept in rabbit-hutch-type accommodations, and they start laying one egg per hen per day at age 6 weeks. The males are ready to eat at about the same time.

I picture myself from now on cooking like Bobby Flay on Iron Chef: Tiny fried quail eggs on top of nearly everything I put on the table.

In other bird-related news, we took down the partition between the ducks and geese, and they have not bothered each other in the least. Victory! One pen is much more convenient than two when it comes to feeding, watering, etc. Maybe that sort of makes up for the unexpected foray into quail.

So, Jenny. She came on Sunday and we had a really fun pool party over at L2's house. For a while it looked as though we wouldn't be doing any outdoor activities; lightning struck on our property when we were getting in the car. Despite seeing the bolt spark off our power lines, the s.o. heroically managed not to drop the fruit salad he was carrying. Then the skies opened and it rained buckets for about 20 minutes. Then the sun came out again. After a nervous peek at weather.com, we commenced swimming and hot-tubbing.

On Monday we lazed around a lot and then went to our favorite fishing spot. I caught the world's smallest largemouth bass (catching minuscule fish is a special talent of mine) and Jenny got in some quality birdwatching. We saw an indigo bunting, a belted kingfisher, a common yellowthroat, and a prothonotary warbler. The birds there really are spectacular! (Jenny, don't be jealous, but the next night we went back again and I accidentally flushed out a pair of great blue herons at very close range!

And lest I forget to mention it, on Monday afternoon we had an all-local Greek-themed meal, which I respectfully submit for this week's One Local Summer entry:


















GREEK CORNMEAL AND GREENS PIE:
Milk - Starr, S.C. (73 miles)
Cornmeal - Athens, Ga. (35 miles)
Feta cheese - Athens, Ga. (35 miles)
Lamb's quarters - Royston, Ga. (55 miles)
Mint, dill, sorrel, chard - our own
Olive oil - exempt

LAMB RIB ROAST:
Lamb - I am having an awful time remembering what town our lamb source is in, and I can't find their business card; let's just say it's no more than 150 miles away and is somewhere in middle Georgia.
Oregano - our own
Olive oil and lemon - exempt

And now, speaking of food, I have to go feed the dogs...

Look! Look!

Liz has started a whole new blog to house the burgeoning One Local Summer project. I've just posted a roundup of the southern participants' Week 1 meals. Go check it out!

Accidentally local

It's week 1 of Liz's One Local Summer event, and I have been very, very distracted. More to the point, I've spent most of my waking hours doing two things: (1) picking wild blackberries, and (2) processing birds and putting them into the freezer. It was only last night, when I sat down to a plate of tandoori chicken with Indian-spiced vegetables, that it occurred to me: Hey, this is a completely local meal. A really, really local meal. These chickens and vegetables, they are ours.

So here's my Week 1 effort. A wrap-up of all the southern U.S. participants (for indeed, I am the regional OLS wrangler!) will follow on Monday morning. Those of you who are participating, make sure to blog or e-mail or Flickr-post by midday Sunday.

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TANDOORI CHICKEN: our own, with a marinade that included our own garlic

INDIAN-SPICED VEGETABLES: our own green beans, onions, and garlic; half the potatoes were ours and half were from a grower in Athens (35 miles away)

SUNGOLD TOMATOES: our own

Open letters

Dear Snake,

Please stop hanging out in the henhouse. You are making the hens uncomfortable, and a couple of times you have nearly given me a coronary. I am forever shooing you out of the coop with a shovel. One of these days, I'm going to decide you've had enough warnings.

Sincerely,
Jumpy

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Dear Tommy Irvin and Zippy Duvall,

Surely, as Ag Commissioner and Farm Bureau President (respectively), you have better things to do than to hold a formal government-sanctioned religious service at which you pray for rain. I know we're all a little desperate, but let's leave that to the ministers, shall we?

Sincerely,
Embarrassed

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Dear Visitors,

Our house is spotless. Gorgeously spotless. The reason we won't let you in has nothing to do with a housekeeping disaster of monstrous proportions. There's a perfectly good explanation, really, which is... um... let us get back to you on that.

Sincerely,
Not Hiding Anything

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Dear Noncompliant Goose,

Lately I have been having a terrible time convincing you to go indoors for the night. All the other geese line up contentedly and wait their turn to go in the door. You, however, always decide to make a run for it at the last moment. Last night you sprinted away from me and got caught in the electric fence. I actually saw sparks fly off you. I am pretty sure our neighbors think I am torturing an opera singer over here.

It is no wonder that tonight you lined up with the other geese. I hope and trust that this improved behavior will continue.

Sincerely,
The Management

One Local Summer 2007

Starting this Sunday, Liz is running her One Local Summer event again. I participated last year and really enjoyed it; it's low-key, because it's only one dinner per week, but it's still educational and creates a fun sense of community among the participants. It's so cool to see what everyone comes up with.

This year she's had such an enthusiastic response (more than 100 people!) that she's had to close further registration. Any more people, and there'd just be too much to handle. As it is, she has delegated some of the clerical work to several regional wranglers (I'm in charge of the southern U.S.). The good news is, you can still follow along if you haven't signed up--we just won't be able to include you in the weekly wrap-ups, and you won't be eligible for the incentives.

If you are a participant, hi! and welcome! Liz gives some great advice on her OLS Questions and Answers page, but if you have any other questions, please feel free to contact me. I'll be watching your blog (or waiting for your e-mail) every week, then including you in a weekly summary (either posted here, or on a subpage of Pocket Farm, we're not sure which yet).

I will be sourcing my OLS meals from Georgia only--and where possible, from a 100-mile radius. In the past I would have said it'd be incredibly difficult, but the more you eat locally, the more sources you find. It's funny how it works.

What's goin' on

• After years of making do with a percolator, we bought a new drip coffeemaker. It is programmable, so it can make coffee all by itself and have it waiting for me when I get up in the morning. Needless to say, this represents a huge jump in Quality of Life.

• The s.o. completed an outdoor chickenwire-and-netting aviary for Chicken House #2--a porch-covered vestibule area that will later lead to a number of separate pens--and today the young chickens and turkeys ventured into the great outdoors for the first time. Bravery is definitely breed-specific: Barred Rocks were the first out the door, followed by Red Star boys (remember them--the padding in the shipment? they are nice guys and we will be rather sorry to eat them, but there's nothing that can be done, because we all know the problems associated with Too Many Roosters), then Speckled Sussexes. Cornish boys were curious, but very flighty and scaredy. Ameraucanas were so docile that they would stay outside if placed there, but they took no initiative. Brahmas, Langshans, and Mille Fleur banties wanted nothing to do with the strangeness, and only ventured out after everyone else had been happily pecking grass for quite a while.

• We are harvesting the first Sungold tomatoes. There is a small Lemon cucumber on the vine, and green beans are starting to roll in in quantity.

• My back is getting better.

• My chores--the ones I can do with a delicate back, at least--have recently been made more interesting by heavy use of podcastable language lessons. I'm taking three languages at once, something my mom did one semester in college. "It won't screw you up," she reassured me. Which is a good thing, because I am enjoying all three. The Mandarin is the best by far, and I have actually plunked down money for a basic yearly subscription so I can download the pdfs. That same company also offers Spanish, but I wasn't crazy about the hosts, so I went with this one instead. It's clear and sensible, and kind of quirkily fun because it's taught by Scots. (I hope I'm not picking up an odd accent.) Lastly, I'm doing French. I already read it pretty well, but I speak it quite badly, so I'm using this for review and reinforcement. I recommend podcast language lessons to anyone; they're great for keeping your mind busy when your body has to do the dishes.

• We have bees again, magically. A while ago our hive swarmed, and half the bees absconded to the top of a 60-foot pine tree, from which we were unable to recover them. We watched the remaining bees closely and were horrified that no brood appeared--they seemed to have been unsuccessful in raising a new queen. The colony began, predictably, to die out. And then...inexplicably...there was a healthy hive again, full of young fuzzy bees that are now busily pollinating the garden. We are extremely puzzled, but have decided not to look a gift bee in the proboscis.

• Lately I am all about this recipe, made with shrimp instead of avocado. I love avocado, but trust me when I say shrimp rocks all over it in this particular instance. I suppose one could use both. Hmm.

This is pretty much how I see it, too

Food for thought. Even our leaders should be able to conceive of the climate change problem in Clint Eastwood terms, no?

Could you move over? I gotta rest.

A couple of days ago I must have slept wrong, because I woke up with my back, as they say, "out." Ever since then the s.o. has had to do a lot of my chores, which is especially unfair considering that he did all my chores while I was away in St. Louis. Poor guy!

I think I did something to one of my lumbar muscles. Probably it started with luggage-carrying. I almost rue the $70 worth of spices I brought home from Penzey's in my carry-on! Almost.

My initial thought was to go for the Midol. You know, muscle relaxant. But then when I looked at the packaging, there was nothing but a pain reliever, a diuretic, and some caffeine. So I went to Target and looked through every single box of, er, female-troubles medication. No muscle relaxant. What the...? Obviously I can't be misremembering this; if there had never been a muscle relaxant in Midol, that wedding scene in Sixteen Candles would never have been written.

Has anyone noticed that they're taking all the medication out of our over-the-counter medication? I understand the pseudoephedrine thing--even if I don't like it--but why have they defanged Midol?

Disappointed, and ever-so-slightly crippled from pain, I ended up trying Aleve for the first time. I actually like it pretty well. Millions of older Americans with arthritis can't be wrong, it turns out.

Every day my back is getting a little better. Which is a good thing, because the garden really needs to be weeded now that we have started getting a little rain.

I'm back

I had a great time, but it's taking me longer to recover from the late nights than it has in the past.

I came back to find a zucchini in the garden as big as a cantaloupe. We ate half of it, and the other half went into a doggie dinner.

There's fresh basil, and the first of the wild blackberries are ready!

I think this means summer's here

That's about a 14-inch colander, by the way, if it helps you get the scale. The Tondo Chiaro di Nizza zucchini got rather large overnight!

Tonight I'll cook one of my favorite recipes: Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's pasta with creamy zucchini sauce. For those who don't own the River Cottage Cookbook, all you do is slice a couple of pounds of zucchini very thinly and cook them quite slowly with a couple of good glugs of olive oil and some minced garlic, without browning, until it all completely breaks down. This removes the wateriness from the squash and turns it into a sauce. Then you season it, add a few tablespoons of cream, and grate in some Parmesan cheese. Serve it over any kind of pasta you like.

Flying the, er, friendly skies

From Thursday to Sunday of this week, I'm traveling to St. Louis to attend a music festival that, over the course of a decade or so, has become quite dear to my heart. I'll see a lot of my best friends from far-flung locales. And in a gorgeous harmonic convergence, some of my other best friends from Athens are attending this year for the first time. Can you feel the love?

Instead of driving, which would be excruciatingly expensive at current gas prices, I'm flying. That means putting a lid on my usual Stevie Nicks-like luggage tendencies (i.e., lots of costume changes) and, even worse, coping with draconian air travel regulations. So I've been scouring the drugstores, looking for travel-sized containers for my toiletries.

I find it interesting that, while the regs specify that your shampoo, etc., must not be in a container larger than 3 ounces, the vast majority of travel bottles on the market are... wait for it... 4 ounces.

Who did this?! They deserve to be bitchslapped.

Well, never mind. I still feel the love.

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Briefly noted:

My mother took me at my word when I said that everyone ought to have geese. In my honor, she purchased a Flock of Hope from Heifer International. Someone out there will have birds of their very own--and a leg up in this uncertain world--because of her generosity.

Heifer is one of my very favorite charities. I'd love it if this post inspired a few of my readers to give the gift of sustainability. Give a goat! Choose a chicken! Transfer a tree!

A long time coming

The Cleveland Cavaliers have finally won the Eastern Conference--and against the loathsome Detroit Pistons, to boot.

I'm not a sports maniac, but I think it's fair to say that I've waited for this day my whole life. The Cavs were born in northeastern Ohio the same year I was, and this is the first time they've managed to win the East. This victory is all the sweeter for the fact that star LeBron James is a local hero, a high school prodigy from Akron.

Anyone with really good sense would avoid Ohio pro sports altogether, because it's been a story of injury, disappointment, last-minute choking, bad coaching, stupid trades, generally lackluster play, etc., from time immemorial. But I have a soft spot for my hometown basketball team because my ex-stepmother worked in the Cavs' marketing department in the late 1980s and early 1990s. As a result, we had really great seats at the old Richfield Coliseum--right behind the players' wives--during a time when the Cavaliers actually showed promise and might have even won something if it hadn't been for a fellow named Michael Jordan on an opposing team. It's enough to make anyone enjoy sports. To this day, we have a Cavs ornament on our Christmas tree every year.

The Cavaliers are up against the San Antonio Spurs in the finals, a team that the s.o. finds as repellent as I do the Pistons. So you can bet we'll be glued to the TV.

In other sports news, I trust you've all seen this video? I can't remember the last time I laughed so hard. Amazing.

Hooray

Goose #1: Say, this is extraordinary. It appears that water is actually falling out of the sky!

Goose #2: I know! This has never happened before in our entire lives!

Goose #1: HONK!

Goose #2: HONK, indeed!

Rain, please!

They're saying we may get some rain in the next several days. If we do, it'll be the first real rain in weeks--maybe months, I've lost count. We're experiencing a major, historic drought.

On Wednesday I was talking with my friend L, and she told me that an acquaintance who lives down the road from us was forced to send his cattle to slaughter because he couldn't afford to feed them anymore. Pastures are brown and crackly, and the price of hay has gotten up to $70 per large round bale. As we stood in the park talking, we saw a cattle trailer turn the corner, as if on cue, bearing another farmer's cattle toward the sale barn.

Yesterday we had one of our smoky days. It was a full moon, and the moon shone eerily orange through the haze.

I heard from a fellow vegetable vendor that he has nothing to sell because of the dryness. We have that problem to some extent, too: You can water all you want (or all you can afford), but all it seems to do is keep the plants alive. They don't really grow the way they ought to.

WE NEED WATER! Please cross your fingers.

A hairy tale

I've promised Kitchen Witch, who recently wrote about her run-in with some Canadian bears, that I will tell the story of "the time I punched a baboon." Everyone should have a story like that, don't you think?

It happened in 2002. I went on a trip to South Africa with my mom and stepdad. We had a lovely tour guide named Colin who said things like "jolly good" all the time. (The older generation of English-heritage South Africans have a vocabulary that is sort of hilariously Jeeves and Wooster-like, because they were essentially walled off from global pop culture during much of the 20th century, due to apartheid. This leads to phrases such as "ring the doorbell" being translated as "touch the goodie." I would love to see a thorough linguistic examination of the phenomenon. But I digress.)

We had a lot of amazing experiences, including walking through the Cape Malay district of Capetown, visiting the botanical gardens at the base of Table Mountain, touring the Stellenbosch and Paarl wine country, and checking out a lot of really pretty beaches and seaside towns.

Near the end of the week we took a day trip to Cape Point, which is part of the national parks system. It's a breathtakingly beautiful place where we were able to see some very large elands and other wildlife.

If you followed the link in the previous paragraph, you may have read this:

"At the car park there’s a reputable restaurant with great big windows which take in the awesome views and dizzying drop below. Here one can retreat from the wind and have a bite to eat with no danger of baboons snatching your scoff."

That pair of sentences is one of the best I've ever seen written about South Africa. It is awesomely prophetic, because the park is awash in hairy, fanged primates.

On the way to the park's main gate, we had to stop several times to wait for baboons to scuttle across the road. At the gate, we were handed a pamphlet that offered helpful advice such as "Keep your car doors shut when you get out to take photographs. Once a baboon gets into your vehicle, it is very difficult to get it back out again." There were entire baboon families perched atop many of the vehicles in the parking lot. And the restaurant had installed barbed-wire fencing along the edge of its roof, because apparently in the past there had been a problem with baboons waiting up there, then jumping down on hapless patrons who were leaving with takeaway lunches.

After a hike to the lighthouse, we were hungry, so we decided to have a meal at the restaurant. We sat down at a white-tableclothed, Evian-umbrella'd table on the outdoor balcony. We were perched directly on the stony cliffs that led down to the crashing waves of the Atlantic Ocean. An immaculately dressed waiter brought us a basket of bread rolls. Then he reached into his apron and handed me a generous double handful of smooth rocks.

"Keep the bread rolls covered," he said. "And if the baboons come for them, throw these rocks."

I stared blankly. I had a sense, at that moment, that no odder sentence would be spoken to me for years to come.

But seeing no apparent danger, I ordered a sparkling water and a springbok carpaccio, and we fell into lively conversation.

Jabbering about something or other, I distractedly opened the cloth napkin that enclosed the bread rolls and began to pull out a roll. It was at that moment that I saw, over my mother's shoulder, a dark shape bounding over the balcony wall. A 40-pound baboon arced through the air and, with a thump, landed on the table in front of me.

My first thought was of the little pile of rocks next to my plate, but the baboon's face was at most two feet from mine, so throwing something wasn't really the way to go. I panicked. Instinct took over, and I reached out and punched the baboon in the chest.

Startled, the baboon sprang, frog-like, over my shoulder and narrowly missed landing on the next table. The family at the table screamed and scattered. The baboon disappeared over the low stone wall.

"Good heavens," said Colin. My mother and I stared at each other incredulously.

Then the food arrived. It's really a very good restaurant.

They grow up so fast

Geese, in pictures. Click to enlarge:









You know what? Geese are a little like turkeys in that they suffer from a bad reputation, but in reality they are so much fun to have around. I think everyone should raise some!

Subconscious intentions?

I didn't realize until I had practically finished decorating this birthday cake...



...that I had made a giant Hostess Snowball. Nice.

Thank you for the birthday wishes, everyone! You are all very important to me, and I'm so glad we know each other. Have a great Memorial Day weekend!

In other news...

The geese spent most of the day out in their yard yesterday, happily crunching grass and gargling water. They seem to have no desire to re-test the electric fence. I'm about to go put them out again. I'm sure the turkeys appreciate the relative cleanness of their living quarters without their big clumsy friends in the room.

The s.o. took the old ragged plastic off the greenhouse and weed-whacked a good percentage of the garden paths. The garden looks much more impressive now that the intentional plants are taller than the unintentional ones. Foolishly, pridefully, I wish that J and her sister and her nephew could have seen it the way it is now, instead of the way it was on Wednesday when they visited! Don't mind our squalor, people. Nothing to see here. Heh.

Tomorrow is my birthday. I don't feel 37, although actually, when I think about it, I have no idea what 37 feels like. So maybe I do feel 37. All I know is, in general I am very happy and I feel lucky to lead the life I lead! Hugs and kisses to the s.o., the dogs, and our families and friends for bringing so much joy. It's been a good year and (weather aside) I think it'll be another good one.

When snakes panic

Last night, after dark, I put the ducks and chickens to bed and locked the doors of their coops. On my way out of the area, I turned the electric fence on. I suddenly heard two sharp POP noises. Startled, I turned the fence back off.

Caught with its tail in the electric fence and its head in the adjoining chickenwire fence was a several-foot-long black rat snake. It wasn't moving. Upon closer inspection, it appeared the snake had been shocked by the electric fence and, in its confusion, had bolted headfirst through the chickenwire. It had woven itself through two loops of wire, and was stuck like a size 40 man in a pair of size 30 jeans.

I did the sensible thing and hollered for the s.o.

He came outside and I filled him in on the situation. He poked at the snake gently with his pocket knife, and it flinched. He took the flashlight from me ("Don't move--I'll be right back!") and went to get a pair of wire cutters from his truck. When he returned, he clipped the wires that bound the snake, and we watched uneasily as it slithered into one of the chicken yards.

"We should have killed it," he said.

"They eat mice, not chickens," I said. "Although it might steal eggs if it could get in. Which it can't."

I'm right, aren't I? I hope I'm right. I like snakes.

Climate change is not our friend

Lately, about every second or third day, we are bathed in smoke. At first I thought the forestry department was doing controlled burns in the national forest nearby, but then I realized they'd never be so foolish since the weather is so dry. Then I thought there might be local brush fires, but none of consequence came over the s.o.'s fire department pager.

Finally I realized it was smoke from the vast, raging wildfires in southeastern Georgia, about 150 miles away. When the prevailing winds are a certain way, we get a faceful of it. It lingers in a thick, polluting haze. It must be terrible closer to the fire. It is expected to keep burning until the area is hit by a hurricane.

There is no rain here. Everyone's crops are a month behind and tenuous at best. The grass crunches when you step on it, and clouds of dust rise whenever a vehicle turns onto a dirt road.

The other night some dimwit was shooting off fireworks. The s.o. and I tried to see where they were coming from. "One more, and I'm calling the police."

What with the late freeze that killed all the fruit, and now this, it's not a good year so far.

Eggcellent.

I just heard that I got 100 percent on my written egg test. However, let's not count those proverbial chickens, because my practical egg candling test has not yet been graded. My lab partner and I were the very last ones done, and it felt as though we were guessing almost all the time. Yikes!

The s.o. is a genius. For a lot of reasons, actually, but for one in particular right now. You see, we were looking online to find an egg candler, and mostly they are really cheesy. The only ones that looked even halfway acceptable were more than $50. The ones that looked as though they might actually be useful on our brown eggs were several hundred dollars. Horrifying. But the s.o. noticed a resemblance between the very high-end candlers and an old filmstrip projector he had picked up at a thrift store for $15 a couple of years ago. We fired that baby up (500 watts!) and could see through even the darkest egg. Awesome. And, aside from the fact that you don't want to leave it running for long because of the wattage, incredibly cheap.

I wish I had had my filmstrip projector for the practical exam. Talk about an unfair advantage!

So, about the rest of it. We have to cobble together a facility--not in our kitchen--with a separate sink and fridge for egg handling. The s.o. favors building it in a quick, no-fuss manner on the back porch, although it would mean enclosing the porch more fully. I'm not as thrilled with that idea. I think I might like to wait and make it part of the commercial kitchen we hope to build within the next couple of years. We can definitely get by on exempt egg selling* until then.

No predictions right now. We'll see how it pans out.

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* There's an exemption in Georgia wherein you can sell up to 30 dozen a week, ungraded, from your farmstead without having to comply with the normal regs. But the people actually have to show up on your property in person; you can't take the eggs anywhere off your property to sell them. Not to a farmers' market, not to someone's house, not anywhere. That's a little tricky for us because we live out in the boonies and are not "on the way" to anywhere. Still, I think a FRESH EGGS sign in the yard might go a long way.

Ha!

We have a new laser printer.

I have just printed out The Georgia Egg Law and Supporting Regulations, a 25-page document I will need for my egg candling and grading course tomorrow. Cross your fingers for me--I hope to be a legal egg seller in time for Saturday's market!

A ruckus

I was just drawn to the back kitchen window by a loud chattering sound. When I arrived, I saw a small tuxedoed cat--a real elegant little beauty--with a limp squirrel in its mouth. The squirrel was at least a third of the cat's size.

In the pin oak, above, the squirrel's partner was cussing furiously: "CHIT! CHIT!" And our resident pair of mockingbirds flitted from one end of the hammock to the other, joining the indignant chorus.

The little black-and-white cat stood for a moment, indecisive, then took the squirrel under the house.

This is what we call a "teaching moment"

No sooner had I written the last post than the s.o. finished an outdoor pen for the goslings--sharing a fenceline with the duck pen, but not fully open to it. He called me away from my work yesterday evening (which I appreciated, frankly) to help him give the young geese a supervised taste of the outdoors.

We picked up the four geese and set them out on the grass. At first they sat in a corner, huddled together in a downy lump, for about 10 minutes. Then they began to explore, grabbing everything they could find with their bills. (All-time favorites include: the s.o.'s t-shirt, the drawstring of my hoodie, and of course tall grass with crunchy seeds on it.)

I should add at this point that part of the goose pen is made of the same portable electric mesh fence that contains the ducks. It doesn't have a steady current, but rather a periodic electric pulse--a little "zap" every second or so. I've caught it once or twice and it's pretty unpleasant, but nowhere near as bad as the type I grew up with at my dad's place, which would sit you down in the dirt before you knew what had happened.

So anyway, one goose delicately stuck her head through a square of mesh and chomped a piece of grass on the other side. The pulse came through, and all of the sudden there was a jumping, a flapping, and a HONK HONK HONK! The goose ran to the s.o. and did not approach the fence again.

The other three milled around in confusion for a second, then continued to graze in the same area. I saw one look at the fence, consider it for a moment, and then reach out to delicately take a wire in its bill...

HONK HONK HONK HONK HONK

And that was the end of the geese's flirtation with the electric fence. What followed was about 45 minutes of happy web-footed exploration, without incident, and then it was bedtime.

Joel Salatin has said that the difference between turkeys and other poultry is that whereas most birds learn about an electric fence the first time (as our geese did--geese are exceedingly smart and don't need to be told twice), turkeys never do figure it out. They persist in sticking their heads through the mesh to grasp good-looking tidbits on the other side. Chomp, zap, chomp, zap, chomp, zap. And this, my friends, is why the geese will soon be free-ranging in a portable electric fence, whereas the turkeys will be in turkey tractors.

I really, really enjoy all four kinds of poultry we have. Their personalities are very different in a way that's hard to explain to people who don't raise birds, but I'll try anyway:

Chickens - Funny, curious, show-offy, possessing the world-conquering instincts of small dogs who don't understand that they are small

Ducks - Operate via "prey animal"-type groupthink rather than individually most of the time (which is a nice way of saying that one-on-one, they aren't the sharpest knives in the drawer); fun-loving and goofy

Turkeys - A little wary and contemplative, yet quite curious and social, even with people; obsessive about shiny objects and new stimuli

Geese - The most social of the bunch; will "flock" on a person rather than avoiding him/her. Clever and able to think on a strategic level, like goats with feathers.

A poultry post

Things are pretty good in Chicken House #2. After we lost those 8 chicks to pneumonia in the first 3 days, things calmed down. The medicine took effect, the stress wore off, and everyone else thrived. They've all been busy eating, growing feathers, and quadrupling their size.

This year's Mystery Chick continues to be mysterious. It is black-and-whitish with Egyptian kohl-rimmed eyes. It has greenish-blue legs like our Araucanas, but doesn't otherwise resemble them. It is larger than most of the chicks. Any ideas?



In the other half of Chicken House #2, the geese and turkeys have been coexisting much more happily than you'd expect. The geese are (and have always been) several times larger than the turkeys, so the group looks like 4 Gullivers and 11 Lilliputians. We watched them carefully at first to make sure the geese weren't picking on the turkeys, and we were pleased to note that they all seemed to get along quite well. The only real downside is that the turks have a sort of spiky look to them, because the geese get them wet and sticky by grooming them and otherwise drooling water on them.

Now the geese are large enough that they could theoretically go outdoors--maybe with the ducks, we're still ironing that part out. But it seems a shame to separate the geese from the turkeys, since the turks seem to have gotten the idea that the geese are their parents. They imitate the geese, extending their necks to "honk" irritatedly when we visit:



And they sleep curled up on, under, and against their larger, downier friends. It's heart-meltingly adorable. I wish I could show you, but the geese always wake up and honk at the camera.

I suppose eventually they will have to be separated, because turkeys really don't enjoy splashing around in a kiddie pool. The geese are going to want to, pronto, when they get more feathers.

Don't tell anyone, but...

...our dogs are hippies.

Inspired by my copy of Dr. Pitcairn, I have taken decades of vegetarian and carnivorous cooking lore and blended them together to create a seriously communal canine concoction: Dogaroni and Cheeze. Note the spelling, which indicates that it is not actually cheese-with-an-S. However, unlike most "cheezes," (see The Farm Vegetarian Cookbook, Laurel's Kitchen, et. al.), it does include dairy.

The dish is made of the meat from a pound of chemical-free chicken thighs, a cup of mixed carrots and peas, some leftover mustard greens, and a pound of whole-wheat pasta. It is sauced with a bechamel made primarily of goat milk, whole-wheat flour, and a quarter-cup of nutritional yeast.

Cheezy. It's actually not bad, although it has the characteristic unsalty blandness of dog dinners.

Paging Terry Pratchett

This is maybe even better than the Cthulhu carrot I got last year.

I love melodic, 1970s FM radio-style pop

The song "Sewn" by The Feeling is absolutely slaying me right now. Which is cool, because it's been since sometime in mid-2006 since I last liked a song this much.

And you know what I really like? The damn thing is almost 6 minutes long. Usually I want a songwriter to get in, get the point made, get out. Haiku-like. Three minutes and done. But in special circumstances like these, I want the song to last forever. I wouldn't have blinked at 12 minutes.

*hits repeat*

There is no photo because we destroyed the evidence

Yesterday, in baking for the farmers' market, I knocked two recipes off the list for the Nana Project: A batch of date-nut tartlets (which Nana called Chess Pies, even though they aren't; and which the s.o. calls Nutjobs) and a batch of no-bake peanut butter bars.

The recipe for date-nut tartlets is one of my favorites, ever. They are basically muffin-sized pecan pies, only made with walnuts and dates. They are positively decadent. And mine are actually better than Nana's, I have to say, because I use real butter instead of margarine and put them in a sour cream pastry crust. I split one with L2 and, when she said it was her favorite of all my baked goods, sent her home with the two that didn't sell, too. Why don't I make these more often? They're easy.

The no-bake peanut butter bars are really good--they're candies along the lines of Reese's Cups, except they're padded out with a little graham cracker, cinnamon, and nutmeg in the peanut butter part. They remind me of Christmas because they used to appear seasonally, like clockwork. They are not, however, ideal for farmers' market sales. For one thing, any size that's big enough to charge money for is big enough to be really cloying. They ought to be cut into the tiny bite-size morsels we always used to snack on over the holidays. And for another thing, the coating of melted semi-sweet chocolate (Ghirardelli, in this case) melts at a temperature remarkably similar to yesterday's ambient one. I had to keep the bars in the cooler with the radishes and baby bok choy, and even then, they turned to goo as soon as they came out into the open air.

26 recipes to go!

Rawk

Was it just me, or was the Bon Jovi-mentored episode of American Idol one of the best ever?

*SPOILER ALERT FOR THE S.O., WHO HASN'T WATCHED IT YET*

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I totally expected Lakisha and Blake to crash and burn, but they so didn't. They took risks. They owned those songs. I love surprises.
I'd say something about Melinda's excellent performance too, but it wasn't a surprise to me. She can do pretty much anything she sets her mind to, and she seems especially good at visualizing (auralizing?) which songs are going to work well with her voice.