Fall Cooking

I miss a lot of things about summer, mostly peaches, blueberries and sunlight until 9pm. But you really can't beat autumn food. This weekend I made beef stew, butternut squash curry, corn and poblano pepper soup and pumpkin soup, all of which I froze for busy days to come. It turns out that working full time and starting a farm doesn't leave much time for cooking during the week.

This afternoon, Theo and I went to pick up four chickens from Pete and Jen's Backyard Birds. When we got home, we immediately set to making Apple Cider Roast Chicken. We omitted the parsnip and added squash and a potato. It's in the oven now and I can't wait until it's done! Plus, we'll have enough stock from the carcass that we can make a second round of soup madness in a few weeks!

Dessert is pumpkin ice cream and ginger snap molasses ice cream from Bates Farm in Carlisle. Wonderful!

Roast Chicken with Root Vegetables and Cider

1 chicken

2 tblsp butter

2 firm tart apples such as Granny Smith, cored, peeled, and cut into 1” dice

1 large sweet potato, peeled and cut into 1” dice

1 medium onion cut into 1” dice

1 large parsnip cut into 1” rounds

2 medium carrot cut into 1” rounds

½ head medium cauliflower cut into 1” chunks

Salt and pepper

2 c. fresh apple cider

Preheat oven to 400.

Rinse the chicken, inside and out, under cold water, and pat dry with paper

towels. Place the chicken in a flameproof (so you can put it on a burner later to

make the sauce) roasting pan large enough to hold it and the vegetables without

crowding. Smear the chicken with the butter, surround it with the vegetables,

sprinkle everything with salt and pepper, and pour in the cider.

Place the chicken and vegetables in the oven and roast until the apples have

practically melted, the vegetables are tender and brown, and the chicken juices

run clear when the thigh is pricked with a fork, about 1 ¼ to 1 ½ hours. Stir the

vegetables halfway through for even cooking.

Remove the chicken to a platter. Using a slotted spoon, remove the vegetables

and place them around the chicken, and keep warm. Set the roasting pan over

high heat and bring the cider and juices to a boil, scraping up the brown bits on

the bottom of the pan. Cook, uncovered, for 5 to 10 minutes, until the liquid is

reduced by half.

Serve the sauce alongside the chicken in a sauce boat or pitcher.

Graduation!

Let's start with the sad part: the tomatoes just couldn't handle all the rain. They are ghosts of their former glory. It's kind of ok at this point, because with Fall coming I'm excited for some pumpkin soup and roasted winter squash. That is the joy of seasonal eating.

There was a huge party at the farm with all our friends and families for graduation. My Mom and Dad and Rebecca and Anthony all came to help us celebrate. We kicked off the afternoon pressing cider in the orchard.

Mom helped take the leftovers down to the pigs. They were so excited! (And huge!)

I think the most amazing skill anyone has learned this year is the rare ability to levitate pitch forks. Theo is obviously a master.

We all sat on hay bales (and were given the above pitchforks as a present) for a wonderful ceremony full of poems, thank yous and a violin duet by Emily and Rebekah.

We made Sara a cake for her birthday on Tuesday.

I put a rabbit on it in honor of the angora rabbit she has taken care of over the last year.

Post graduation on the tractor!

With Maggie's Field in the background.

And our diplomas!

And the best graduation presents ever! Sweatshirts for our new farm. I'll post more about this soon, I promise!

Dad, who used to be a welder, checking out my fire cube with me.

And finally, the T-Rex that Betsy and Sarah gave Theo as a graduation present with the Prosecco from Rebecca and Anthony. You can also see Theo's bingo card from Thursday night with Josh, Stephen and Justin on the coffee table as well.

It's Maple Syrup Time!

New England has a whole extra season that other parts of the country lack: icky late winter/ early spring. Nothing says March like dirty, crunchy snow that just won't melt and a forecast of 'wintry mix' for days at a time. To temper these gray days, the forests grace us with the first harvest of the year: maple sap.

We have taps all over the farm and eagerly peer in the buckets hoping to see some sap dripping into them. It takes around 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup. Alternative? Drinking it while it's still cold from the tree.

We filter the sap from the buckets and pour it into an evaporator. Here is Reid lighting a fire to get things going.

That's all steam rising from the evaporator. Sap starts at around 2% sugar content and you have to boil it until that reaches above 66%. It's got a long way to go which is a good excuse to sit inside a natural sauna instead of venturing out into these final snowstorms.

Italian Cooking!

We had a cooking class with some of the cooks who work at Spannochia. It was, as you can see, a serious operation.

It was pretty fun to see how all the meals that we were eating were put together. When we had first come to Maggie's Farm in October, Christina (who was on this trip to Italy with us), had given us a two day cooking class so that we were all up to speed. Every rule that she told us about putting dry meat into a pan with hot oil, or not over crowding what we were cooking was thrown out the window.

We made stuffed chicken breasts, braised leeks, gnocchi and salami dolce. The salami dolce is a cute take on salami: they melt chocolate and crunch up cookies before mixing them together and forming it into a log. When you cut into it it looks just like a meat salami. Very delicious.

We had a lot of fun making gnocchi even though our pieces were constantly too big or too small.

It was really fun to spend a day in the kitchen and then eat all our wonderful food!

Sheep Farm Visit!

We had a number of food classes while in Italy and one of them was a visit to a farm where they make cheese from sheep's milk. It was really neat to eat fresh sheep's cheese since it's so heavily regulated in the US that you can't buy unpasteurized cheese aged less that 60 days. And, they had the cutest lambs!

We had quite the spread of cheeses and it was absolutely delicious.

They also had a white board with this drawn on it:

Translation? Apparently, this sheep is thinking that as long as there is grass, there's hope. He's, of course, lucky to be an Italian sheep. Our sheep have two feet of snow between them and grass.

Winter Eating

You would think that living on the farm would mean delicious, nutritious food all the time. Not so, sadly, at least for these winter months. Our hoop house, which was supposed to provide greens during the winter, bit the dust in a storm this past fall. Only the carrots and some baby spinach survived. Since we have 1,500,000 carrots in our root cellar already, we would have happily them in for some of the endive or broccoli rabe that we planted.

Theo and I are house sitting for two weeks and are taking advantage of an excuse to eat off the farm. So, I bring you the mesclun/ sprouts/ smoked salmon/ mango/ avocado/ grapefruit/ goat cheese salad of champions. Every nutritional component not delivered through turnips, parsnips, potatoes or carrots. Delicious!

Tenderloin?

Right when we got home from the farm, Theo and I volunteered to cook a big dinner the one night the whole family would be home. As we don't have unlimited access to meat here, we opted for some good old fashioned beef.

So commenced the hunt for grass-fed beef. It's good to know that there's a serious market in the greater boston area for it, since it was impossible to find. No Whole Foods around us had it and all they could offer was grass-fed lamb from New Zealand (talk about a carbon footprint!).

We finally found some at a small shop downtown. While paying, I asked where the beef was from. Lo and behold, he tells us it was from Adam's Farm. The same Adam's Farm that we can see from our farm.

I had a few competing thoughts at that point: I'd seen their pastures and wasn't super impressed, I'd seen their cows and wasn't super impressed, and I knew their reputation and wasn't super impressed. What to do, what to do.

We bought it anyway and served up a great dinner of tenderloin with bone marrow, swiss chard souffles, braised leeks, garlic mashed potatoes and tiramisu. But I really can't wait until I have my own farm where I know how everything is raised and don't have to hesitate at the cash register.

Yummy!

We successfully turned this:

into this:

And let me tell you, it was delicious.

Also also...

We pressed cider today! And I forgot my camera!

Cider pressing is incredibly easy (with the right tools) and really fun. We made 9 gallons in an afternoon and had loads of fun climbing the apple trees to shake down the fruit.

Harvest Celebration

On Saturday we celebrated the end of the harvest season. We invited everyone who works on the ridge top with us as well as some friends and family. Most everything was cooked in our wood fired bread oven. We also ate some delicious road kill. A few weeks ago, a deer was hit by a car and lay dying in our swiss chard patch. One of our neighbors came out to dispatch it, rather than let it linger in it's state. We had it butchered and served the back strap, or tenderloin with dinner. So. Delicious. We don't eat much meat here so a piece of juicy deer like that hit the spot (this came after the discussion Emily, Justin and I had if it was ethically right to eat animals).

Andrew supplied a wild turkey that had also been hit by a car and he killed and brought back to the farm. He brined and roasted it. Better than any turkey I've had to date, so I'll have to see how Thanksgiving matches up.

Theo made mozzarella, Sophia made feta, Justin made pizza dough, Emily made brownies, Emma made scalloped potatoes and Bradley brought hard cider (I did chores and lots of dishes).

It was so nice to have everyone sitting together down to dinner, plus children running around the house and delicious food from the farm.

America!

How pastoral: sitting around after a long day of harvest eating apple pie (you'll have to turn your head but it's decorated like Hobbes). The real story? We made pie early in the evening when we still had energy and baked in it in the bread oven. By 8:30 we were all exhausted, laying on the couches and wondering how much longer we had to stay up. Five minutes post-pie and we're crawling into bed, ready for chores in the morning.

Food!

I think it's quite impossible to make bad food here. For instance, this morning began with homemade granola, raspberry pancakes (the berries fresh from the garden) and scrambled eggs with vegetables also from the garden. Lunch was lentil soup with kale and apple salad. Dinner was pasta with tomatoes, chard, onions, garlic and chicken all from the farm along with a butternut squash soup. We went to pick the produce for dinner from the fields. A lot better than where I used to grocery shop, for sure.

Cooking!

We spent the weekend cooking which was a blast and ended in a huge dinner for the whole staff tonight of chicken, chicken, chicken (and some salad, pumpkin soup and the first chocolate chip cookies of the year).

We started the morning by drying some rosemary and tomatoes. Andrew, the second year student who is in charge of our farmhouse, food and helping us out, brought out the dehydrator.

Theo and Sofia cut the meat and skin off pig backs that we then rendered for lard.

We made 10 gallons of sauerkraut and kimchi. It took most of the day to draw the moisture out of the cabbage by mixing it with salt and pounding it. It will last us for most of the winter. You can also see that I dressed as a farmer today in my nifty new red plaid shirt.

This is how the sauerkraut ended up: cabbage in blue water. Delicious.

This is the kimchi spread all over the table as we mix in all the other veggies.

Our very first chocolate chip cookies of the year! The farm egg yolks were bright orange and really changed the color of the dough. They came out as delicious as always.

Chicken fried in the rendered lard.

After 15 chickens, lots of herbs, oil, vegetables harvested from the field, two days and lots of dishes, we are very tired, full and glad to have leftovers.

We start our normal schedule tomorrow so more to come about that!

Cookies

Finally, my cookies are being recognized in the way they deserve (attn. sarah arkebauer: your recipe will never grace the pages of reputable published work). Check it out here!