Occupy the Pantry. . .

. . .and the fridge, and the cupboards, and the stovetop, and the plate. And while we're at it, let's occupy the pasture and the hen house and the dairy barn and the vegetable garden.

Watching the Occupy Wall Street movement crop up, proliferate, and bloom over the past few weeks has been good for my soul.

Enough has been written about corporate control of food systems and how it serves the 1% while harming the planet, our health, and workers. I don't need to add my own long diatribe here. Suffice to say that the multinational for-profit food industry is part of the problem that OWS is rallying against. Industrial agriculture and the food policy it has spawned by way of corporate control of our political process contributes to hunger, pollution, and the destruction of small farms and farmland.

So taking control of your own food supply and working for community food justice is part of the solution. And it feels good to be aware of doing that one small part while a bigger movement grows all around us. I like thinking of planting lettuce in our winter gardens and gathering eggs in the morning and canning tomato sauce as actions in solidarity with the Occupiers all over the world.

Some of my favorite posts on related notes:

• Occupy Your Kitchen (great post with lots of tips for wresting your food supply from corporate control by Laura Everage/Family Eats)

• Revolution Begins In Your Kitchen: Occupy Wall Street from Your Kitchen (Lindsay Curren at Transition Voice)

• Occupy the Pasture (Steph Larsen at Grist)

Along the same lines, check out this great Ted Talk on gardening as a revolutionary, subversive activity:

Roger Doiron reminds us, among other things, that "food is a form of energy...but it's also a form of power. And when we encourage people to grow some of their own food, we're encouraging them to take power into their own hands. Power over their diet, power over their health, and some power over their pocketbooks. And that's quite subversive because we are also necessarily talking about taking that power away from someone else -- from other actors in society who currently have power over food and health. You can think about who some of those actors might be." I also love his statement that "gardening is a healthy gateway drug to other forms of food freedom."

To wrap it all up, here's a great quote from the ever-amazing, Frances Moore Lappé, one of my heroes, whose recent article in The Nation I highly recommend:

‎"At its best, [the food] movement encourages us to “think like an ecosystem,” enabling us to see a place for ourselves connected to all others, for in ecological systems “there are no parts, only participants,” German physicist Hans Peter Duerr reminds us. With an “eco-mind” we can see through the productivist fixation that inexorably concentrates power, generating scarcity for some, no matter how much we produce. We’re freed from the premise of lack and the fear it feeds. Aligning food and farming with nature’s genius, we realize there’s more than enough for all."
~Frances Moore Lappé, "The Food Movement: Its Power and Possibilities"

Bean Season

I spent the afternoon shelling dry beans with my sister Mary. The heirloom varieties we grew are just so lovely, so I had to post a few shots.

Calypso beans

Lina Cisco's Bird Egg beans

Ireland Creek Annie's beans

And our old standby, Cherokee Trail of Tears beans

Up-Cycled Freezer Contents

Homemade ketchup from last year's frozen cherry tomatoes

It's a time of transition here on the farm, appropriately enough in this Equinox season. Two friends who have been living here for the past year are moving away, two new farm residents are arriving, the garden is winding down, we have only one more tailgate market day in the season, and everything is starting to feel cooler, slower, and quieter.

Our new neighbor-friends suggested going in on a bulk meat purchase from the WWC farm next door, which has motivated me to clean out our freezer. Since I went way overboard preserving vegetables last year when we had more produce than we could possibly sell or consume, the freezer was still full of jars of whole cherry tomatoes, wild blueberries, salsas, pestos and etc. It got to the point with the cherry tomato overload last summer that I was just rinsing them and stuffing them in half-gallon jars whole. And there quite a few of those jars still hanging out in the freezer by the end of tomato season this year (that being now).

This is what 10 quarts of frozen cherry tomatoes looks like:

Soooo, it was time for "out with the old." I made some super-delicious juice from all of the wild and tame blueberries piled up in the freezer, and am chipping away at the pesto, but what to do with gallons and gallons of thawed cherry tomatoes?

How could I use them without having to deal with all of the skins? I sure wasn't going to blanch and peel them all - that would have been a full-time job for a few days. Maybe something involving a trip through the food mill to get rid of all of the skins and seeds...something like ketchup!

Last year in the final throes of tomato overload, I made a big batch of green tomato ketchup, which we savored all through the winter. It made an especially delicious dressing for salad or fish when mixed with a little homemade mayonnaise.

All of those jars of cherry tomatoes got me thinking that the different flavors of all of the varieties -- smoky White Currant, sweet Sungold Select, tangy Black Cherry, and tomato-y Peacevine would make a delightfully complex and savory ketchup. Plus, I could throw in some last-year's frozen salsa to spice it up - all of the ingredients in the salsa (onions, peppers, parsley, garlic) are frequently included in catsup recipes, so all the better. More freezer space freed up, more flavorful ketchup.

The tomatoes and onions starting to cook

So here's the recipe:

Cherry Tomato Ketchup

• 10 quarts cherry tomatoes (fresh or frozen)
• 2-3 cups chopped onions, to taste
• Sweet and/or hot peppers, parsley, oregano (optional) to taste
• 1 Tbs black pepper
• 1 Tbs dry mustard powder
• 1 1/2 Tbs high-quality salt
• 1 quart apple cider vinegar
• 1 cup honey

1. Combine tomatoes and onions in a pot with everything except the honey.
2. Pour the vinegar over the vegetables and cook for 4 hours over low heat, stirring occasionally.
3. Put the mixture through a food mill.I use a secondhand Foley food mill which works like a champ.
4. Return to the pot and bring to a boil again, and allow to boil until ketchup has achieved desired thickness. Be forewarned: This takes a LOOONG time! It's good to start the ketchup in the morning and let it cook down on low heat all day long, stirring and keeping an eye on it through the day. A good project for a rainy day.
5. Add honey.
6. Pour into hot, sterilized jars and process in a hot water bath for 10 minutes.

Cooking down, down, down!

The final product - yum! It came out very smoky and spicy, almost verging on barbecue sauce, but still with the classic ketchup balance of sweet and vinegary.

Viola. Freezer space freed up, delicious condiment stockpiled for the winter.

And a little something for the nerds among us: "A confusion has long existed over how to spell and say the name of the condiment 'ketchup', with several different forms recorded..."

On the Unexpected Rewards of Falling Behind

Volunteer potato

For the past few months, I've been bitterly lamenting the fact that our garden has been neglected to the point of chaos because of goats, plant sales, and off-farm work. Last fall, my life was consumed by managing a political campaign. Then our amazing interns finished their summer garden commitment, decreasing the garden labor available substantially. And it's only gotten worse since then.

In the Spring, our business selling heirloom plant starts exploded, and we grew and sold thousands of seedlings to gardeners in Asheville, Hendersonville, and Black Mountain. Plus our goat herd expanded (and will continue to, as pregnant goat bellies swell). All of this farm business was wonderful, but was only possible at the expense of our own garden.

By the first of June, the garden was totally out of control. Weeds were as tall as me in some places, and thick. We had a dense cover crop of ragweed and poke. We were planting annual vegetables at least a month later than usual--in some cases two months later than we had intended. As two Virgo first child overacheivers, and as a household that relies on the garden for all of our fresh produce and much of our food year round, we were getting pretty depressed about the whole situation.

The last of last year's mixed heirloom dry beans

I kept reminding myself of something that a friend said to me in the past few years along the lines of "Everyone's always in such a hurry to get their plants in the ground in the Spring, but it's really no rush - we have such a long growing season here, and there's plenty of time."

Dry beans and winter squash that need 100 days to maturity still have plenty of time before first frosts here, even being planted in early July. Which is a good thing since I just planted the last beans and squash today. Of course the pests get worse and worse the later in the summer it gets, but c'est la vie.

So now to the part about unexpected rewards. Last fall during campaign season, which was also goat barn-building season, we did a thing that we tell the students in our gardening classes never to do. We left almost all of our permanent raised beds exposed - no cover crops, no mulch, nothing but whatever was left of the straw mulch from last season. The only exceptions were the beds we planted with fava beans and garlic in the fall for spring harvest.

I was cursing our negligence as I pulled 5-foot tall Queen Anne's lace and dock from the beds to clear them for my ultra-late bean and squash planting. Until I realized this: we had a whole unexpected crop of volunteer potatoes. Pulling weeds was like hitting the potato jackpot in those ten or so beds. Each 40-foot bed that we weeded yielded about 15 pounds of potatoes. (yesterday's haul from weeding two beds pictured above).

And: there is nothing like volunteer potatoes to aerate a raised bed. The soil was so loose and ready for planting by the time the potatoes were all dug out that we were able to skip the broadforking that's usually part of our no-till bed prep regimen. All and all, it worked out pretty well.

I'm not saying that I ever want to do it again (fight an epic battle with weeds and still be planting beans in July) but I am saying that it's a really good lesson for me that sometimes there are unexpected rewards for not doing things according to plan. Last night we dined on potatoes au gratin made with new potatoes from yesterday's harvest and fresh raw goat milk. Even when things don't work out as planned, sometimes they really work out.

Eating from the garden in the very early spring

Our spring garlic at the tailgate market this time last year

This time of year things are just on the cusp of full-on Spring in the garden. Perennials are pushing their miraculous first green shoots up through the April mud, crabapples and apple trees are coming into bloom, and the summer annual veggies are hard at work growing inside, waiting waiting for the moment that it's warm enough to plant them out.

It's a time of year that I find deeply satisfying as a kitchen gardener and garden stockpiler. Having put away food in every way imaginable in order to eat from the garden through the winter (and maybe going a bit overboard, I have to admit), I'm still pulling jars and baskets off the shelf and finding canned goods, dry beans and peas, cured winter squash and sweet potatoes and garlic, dried tomatoes, and the last of the (slightly spongy, at this point) fall potatoes. There is still pesto in the freezer and the last of the fall-planted carrots are lingering in the bottom of the crisper drawer.

I always start the winter out hoarding those preserved foods, rationing out tomato sauce, weighing sweet potatoes in my hand to measure out just the right quantity for dinner, and skimping on the garlic. As the Spring gardening season begins, a sense of impending abundance overtakes me, and those preserved foods start flying in the kitchen as I dive into the stockpiles with reckless abandon.

And just as the preserved foods have their last hurrah, the first few early Spring vegetables and herbs are beginning: spring garlic, sorrel, chives, and hearty biennials and perennials like celery, lovage, and parsley.

I still get a thrill being able to make a meal at this time of year, before spring and summer abundance begin, with foods almost exclusively harvested from our garden.

Here's tonight's homegrown soup:

• 2 cups dried soup peas (I used some of the Blauwschokkers we dried last Spring)
• 4-5 cups of water
• A couple/few bay leaves
• 3 good sized potatoes, thinly sliced
• A few carrots (I used some lovely little oxhearts from our fall garden), thinly sliced
• One large onion, chopped
• 4 or 5 spring garlics, greens and bulb, chopped
• A handful of lovage, parsley, celery, mustard greens, sorrel -- whatever combination of greens you can get your hands on, roughly chopped
• A generous Tbs or so of dried thyme leaves
• Salt to taste
• Butter and/or olive oil for sautéing
• Pinch of dry mustard
• Splash of red wine
• 1/4 or so of red wine vinegar

Gorgeous heirloom Blauwschokker peas as they looked on the vine last May

And the Blauwschokkers today after cooking all day on low heat

Lovage, potatoes, carrots, onions, garlic....

1. Soak the peas overnight and cook on low heat all day with bay leaves in a crock pot or over a low wood fire
2. Sauté everything else in butter or olive oil with salt and thyme, adding the greens at the last minute so that they just get cooked to bright-green and tender
3. Pour a little of the pea broth over the veggies and let simmer for a few minutes until all of the flavors meld and the veggies are soft enough for soup.
4. Combine everything in the soup pot, and add wine, vinegar, and dry mustard. Add salt to taste.

Pea soup, yum. A perfect combination of fresh Spring garden goodness and the last of the winter kitchen stockpile. With a glass of red wine and a hunk of bread and a little cheese, this is a meal that makes me very happy.

Further Adventures in Green Tomatoes: Pickling

Determined to plow through the surfeit of green tomatoes piled on every surface in my house, I have continued my tomato-preserving marathon.

Today's installment: Pickled whole green cherry tomatoes and pickled green tomatoes.

Both of these recipes are adapted from Putting Food By by Janet Green, Ruth Hertzberg, and Beatrice Vaughan, a very fine food-preserving reference book.

I made big batches of each of these last week, and I can report that the whole pickled cherries were a satisfying and relatively quick project, while the sweet and sour tomatoes were much more time consuming (lots of steps), with a relatively small yield for all of the work (because the tomatoes cook down so much). The final Sweet and Sour Pickled Greens did taste and smell divine, though, so maybe it's worth all the effort. When we crack open a jar in the dead of winter and the memory of standing over a hot stove for all those hours has faded a bit, I imagine it will seem worth it.

Here are both of the recipes:

Pickled Sweet and Sour Green Tomatoes

• 7 1/2 pounds green tomatoes (about 30 medium tomatoes)
• 2 large red onions or 2 cups pearl onions
• 3/4 cup high-quality fine-ground salt
• 1 Tbs celery seed
• 1 Tbs mustard seed
• 1 Tbs dry mustard
• 1 Tbs whole cloves
• 1 Tbs peppercorns
• 3 lemons, thinly sliced plus 1 lemon, juiced
• 2 sweet red peppers
• 2 1/2 cups honey
• 3 cups apple cider vinegar

1. Wash tomatoes well and cut off blossom ends, blemishes and stems.
2. Slice tomatoes and peel and slice onions.
3. Sprinkle salt over alternate layers of tomatoes and let stand in a cool place overnight
4. Drain off the brine, rinse the vegetables thoroughly in cold water, and drain well.
5. Slice the lemons and remove the seeds; wash the peppers well, remove seeds and stems, and slice thinly crossways.
6. Put the spices in a muslin bag or large tea ball, submerge in vinegar, and bring to a boil.
7. Add tomatoes, onions, lemons, and peppers. Cook for 30 minutes after the mixture returns to a boil, stirring gently to prevent scorching.
8. Remove spice bag and add honey.
9. Pack the pickles in sterilized jars, and cover with boiling liquid, leaving 1/2 inch of headroom.
10. Scorch lids, cap the jars and process in boiling water bath for 10 minutes.

Pickled Cherry Tomatoes

• 24 cups hard, entirely unripe green cherry tomatoes
• Bay leaves, mustard seeds, dry or fresh hot peppers, black pepper corns, celery seed, dill (fresh or dried), and garlic to taste
• 1 sliced red onion'
• 3 lemons, peeled and thinly sliced
• 4 cups water
• 2 cups cider vinegar
• 1/2 cup high quality, fine-ground salt

1. Sterilize 12 pint jars and in the bottom of each jar put a bay leaf or two, a clove or two of garlic, a dried or fresh hot pepper, 1/2 tsp of mustard seed, a couple of heads of dill or a Tbs of dried dill, and other seasonings to taste.
2. Pack the jars with tomatoes, layering in onion slices here and there. Leave about 1/4 inch head space, and pack the tomatoes tightly.
3. Make the brine by combining the water, vinegar, and salt. Bring to a boil.
4. Pour the boiling brine into the jars to just cover the tomatoes. Wait a couple of minutes for the brine to settle and add more brine if necessary to make sure the tomatoes are covered, still leaving head room. I found that the tomatoes have a tendency to float, so I added a slice of lemon on the top of each jar to weigh them down.
5. Scald the jar lids and cap the jars. Process for 10 minutes in a boiling water bath.

I'm imagining using these pickled cherries as an elegant little antipasto-type dish. I can't report yet on how they will taste, but rumor has it they are a bit like olives. I predict they will be salty, tart, and sour, with a satisfying cherry tomato pop when you bite them. We'll see. I am also anticipating bringing them out for farm-style cocktails -- since they can also be used in martinis!

Green Tomato Ginger Marmalade

In my ongoing quest to not waste food from the garden, I have been processing my way through pounds and pounds of green tomatoes picked before the first hard frost. I've been chopping and cooking and canning up a storm over the past week, and suffice to say that if you receive a holiday gift from me this year, it will probably involve green tomatoes.

My first experiment was a couple of huge pots of green tomato apple chutney yielding 38 half pint jars of sweet-sour chutney deliciousness. Next up: marmalade. Marmalade?! Yes, marmalade. In the search for creative green tomato uses, I came across this one and had to try it. And it turns out it's amazing.

This recipe is modified from one I found in Marilyn Kluger's classic food-preservation reference and recipe book, "Preserving Summer's Bounty", which is an indispensable resource in my kitchen. I added the ginger and some notes about how to process the lemons.

Green Tomato Ginger Marmalade

• 6 pounds unpeeled green tomatoes
• 6 lemons
• 1 cup water
• 6 cups honey
• A generous handful of coarsely chopped crystalized (candied) ginger
• 1 tsp powdered ginger

1. Wash and chop the tomatoes. I used a food processor.
2. Slice 6 lemons into thin slices, removing seeds and retaining as much of the peel as you want, depending on how bitter you like your marmalade
3. Boil the lemons in the 1 cup water. Strain off any unwanted peels and seeds that you may have missed and keep the water, lemon pulp, and as many ribbons of peel as you want to retain (they're beautiful floating in the finished product)
4. Stir the lemony water, honey, tomatoes, and powdered ginger together. Cook slowly, stirring constantly until the mixture is thick and clear. This takes a long time. I kept the marmalade on a low simmer for several hours, stirring every so often, and it reduced considerably and became more and more marmalade-like as it cooked.
5. Add the candied ginger and cook for a few more minutes.
6. Pour hot marmalade into jars, leaving 1/4 inch head space, adjust lids, and process in a hot water bath for 10 minutes.

What an unexpected and fabulous coping strategy for green tomato overload. So good I could eat it with a spoon (and have). The perfectly melded flavors of honey, lemon peel, and tart green tomatoes are a delight, and the ginger gives it an extra snap.

I still have five bushel baskets full of green tomatoes to process, even with all of the marmalade jarred up and cooling on the counter and enough chutney for years to come. So, dear reader, expect more green tomato recipes coming up!

Pausing for Gratitude

This time of year, marked with harvest festivals in many earth-based cultures, is a time to pause from the garden frenzy, take stock, enjoy the fruits of our labor, and be grateful. In the ancient Celtic calendar, one of the four major festivals of the year was observed at the beginning of August, called Lá Lúnasa, Lughnasadh, or Lammas, which was in that part of the world at that time the beginning of the main harvest season.

In years past, we have celebrated this time of year with fanfare; this year Lúnasa came and went without any vegetables being launched down the Swannanoa river or harvest altars being constructed, but I have been taking time to pause and give thanks for the garden this week.

I spent some time this week in the garden taking photos and feeling immense gratitude for all of the labor that created this bounty, and for the Earth's incredible abundance.

Here are a few shots from the past week in the garden and at market. Happy harvest!

Zinnias and Purslane

Black

Swallow-

tail

Moon & Stars Water-

melon

Cherokee Trail of Tears Black Beans

Edamame

Bush beans, edamame, and lots and lots of pole beans

Depp's Pink Firefly tomato - a gorgeous and delicious Appalachian heirloom that has been a heavy producer for us this year.

Tomato jungle in the hoophouse...

Cucumbers and Globe Amaranth

Sweet potatoes, squash, and pole beans

Edamame surrounded by pole beans

Cardoon flowering

Magenta spreen lambsquarters

Love-Lies-Bleeding and Autumn Joy Sedum

Moonflower climbing

Our tomatoes for sale at the West Asheville Tailgate Market

Italian heirloom frying peppers at market

Cherry tomatoes at market. We are growing the varieties White Currant, Peacevine, Sungold, and Black Cherry.

More tomatoes! Two of my all-time favorite slicers. The green-ripening Emerald Evergreen and the beautiful Flame/ Hillbilly.

Orange Banana, Pearly Pink, and Cream Sausage tomatoes

Cherry tomatoes, sunflowers, and zinnias in the garden...plus some found- object garden art!

Homesteading Summer Camp

Extracting honey

With our three interns and various visitors coming and going all through the summer, things have been very lively at the Red Wing for the past few months. "The 'terns," as they are affectionately known, are incredibly hard workers, smart as whips, and excited about all things garden- and homestead- related.

Because we don't want to exploit the 'terns and their youthful energy, we have tried to break up the hard work with fun and educational activities such as the Farm Tour, field trips, and kitchen projects.

Also, we've been hosting long- and short- term visitors, various friends and family who come to stay for days or weeks and sometimes help out with farm work or participate in Big Projects while they're here. Andriana is here from Manhattan, experiencing composting and chicken butchering for the first time, among other things. Fer was a "day camper" for two weeks while she was visiting from Mexico City, pulling weeds, spreading mulch, and generally jumping right into the fray.

Sometimes it feels like we are running a summer camp --the kind of summer camp I'd like to attend: one where the activities are shoveling manure, chopping vegetables, squishing bugs, extracting honey, discussing heirloom tomato varieties, saving seeds, identifying insects, and fermenting things.

Along those lines, we spent a day extracting honey and making mead with the 'terns and various visitors a few weeks ago. It was one of the stickiest and most delicious ways to spend a day you can possibly imagine. Here are a few shots of the process; you can view more photographs here: honey extraction and here: meadmaking.

Yesterday the campers (aka interns) convened in the kitchen and we made a big crock of sauerkraut and jarred up some brine-pickled (fermented) garlic scapes after a brief lesson on fermentation.

We followed up the festival of fermentation with a garlic tasting, sampling the ten heirloom varieties that we grew this year, cleansing our palates between rounds of baked garlic with a variety of homemade jams, baked brie, and sliced tomatoes from the garden.

Friends and family joined us to gorge on garlic and offer comments on the varieties to help us decide what to grow next year.

I was struck by how our collective work produced this incredibly delicious, nutritious, and beautiful food. Gathered around the table were people who had helped with all of the different pieces of the work of growing food: Shannon and Sharon helped dig and prepare beds, Ali and Nicole and Dau harvested and processed hundreds of heads of garlic this summer, Christopher and I chose varieties, saved seed garlic, and planted and mulched and cared for the plants. And we all savored the fruits of our labor together. It was lovely.

Best summer camp ever.