Back to School: Joybilee Farm and Vermont Outdoors Women Doe Camp

Schools and magazines trying to sell you things are a dime a dozen, but few of them are marketing Joy.  Joybilee Farm in British Columbia does just that, with a school for self-reliant skills that pledges to help you "laugh at time to come." Chris Dalziel homesteads, homeschools, writes, raises fiber animals and linen, and lives to share her passion for the independent, authentic life through her blog and facebook page that facilitate the growth of a homesteading community.  Sign up for her free newsletter, and get her free booklet "4 Keys to Security and Homestead Abundance" which should be required reading in every Home Economics 101 course ever taught. Chris offers online tutorials, a subscription service to homesteading kindle books, and an annual linen festival camp-out at the farm amongst other learning opportunities.


Women can find a warm, supporting, fun environment amidst the beautiful Green Mountains of Vermont at the Vermont Outdoors Women Fall Doe Camp.  VOW's mission is "to encourage and enhance the participation of women of all ages and abilities in outdoor activities through hands-on education." At Doe Camp, you can opt learn to canoe, navigate by the stars, cook fresh-caught trout, shoot archery or firearms, fish, kayak, start a fire with flint and steel, hunt turkeys or pan for gold.

Your self-confidence grows with your self-sufficiency, and your food security, health and economic well being are all improved as your relationship to the land becomes richer and deeper, be it through learning new wild foods to forage, new fly fishing skills, or how to sheer a sheep and spin and knit your own sweater. Going back to school with resources like Joybilee Farm and Vermont Outdoors Women are great places to start taking steps towards your own independence and food security.

Bees

Bees love aromatic herbs like anise hyssop.

Bees are the whirling spirit of the garden, moving in mysterious circles, lifting away the scent and essence of each flower drop by drop and transporting it to be transformed into clear amber bliss. 

Bees have been in big trouble lately, plagued with mites, colony collapse disorder and pesticide poisoning. Though it's not politically correct to say so, I also have to question whether some of the large-scale commercial beekeeping operations don't also contribute to a weakening of their bee populations. Keeping millions of bees in warehouses and tractor trailers, feeding the, (gmo?) sugar water, and traveling with them over huge areas must be disorienting to a species which has a highly-honed sense of direction and communication, I would think. 

I opt for honey from local, smaller beekeeping operations, and plant many things to help attract the bees to my garden. It's delightful and meditative to sit and spend a summer afternoon watching them buzz contentedly around sunflowers, anise hyssop, oregano blooms, borage, echinacea, and the drifts of white clover that I seed through my (what passes for) little patch of lawn.  (For the record, I hate lawn -- but I can't plant anything substantial over the leach field.) 

I try not to use anything in the way of pesticides; when I do, it's hot pepper wax spray, and I do my earnest best to direct it right to the greens and stems where it's needed (usually on cabbage and other brassicas in bad cabbage looper years, and also on vining squash stem bases for borers), avoiding flowers. That way the spirit of the garden will continue to bless my patch of earth with buzzing and abundance. 

Saving Seed

Saving peas for next year's garden.

 If gardening is the most revolutionary act you can do at home, then saving seed must be the radical fringe of the revolution. Needless to say,I am a dedicated seed-saver and have been working slowly but steadily to improve my seed-saving savvy from year to year. 

Slow and steady seems to be my watchword with all food production. Each year I add one or two new wild foods or mushrooms to my plate, a few more square feet of garden area and a few more garden crops, and now one or two new kinds of seed to save.

I have long saved flower seeds, particularly marigolds, calendulas, nasturtiums, and lots of perennials. I also nudge along a bunch of self-seeding annuals, preparing the soil around them and then helping the seed ponds make it safely to lightly-covered fertile ground. 

 My vegetable seed saving started with beans, of course. I say 'of course' because they are really easy, and beans don't tend to cross-pollinate. Nothing fancy about it, just let some pods stay on the vines or bushes and dry out. Ditto with scarlet runner beans.

But for some reason I never saved over peas, until this year. Maybe it's because I buy very large packets of peas to plant and they last several years. But this year I saved the three best kinds of peas (one snap variety, two fresh eating types) and am looking forward to seeing how they do next year. 

Butterflies love kale flowers.

Kale seedpods are delicate.

I've been saving over kale seed for many years. Kale blooms and goes to seed in its second year. What I do each year is just leave the kale in the garden in the fall, pick leaves as late into the year as I can (they stay green under the snow for a while), and then in the spring, I watch to see which plants come back earliest and most vigorously. The others I pull -- either to the compost bin if they didn't come back, or after pulling off the young leaves to eat if they made a slow showing. Then I let the most energetic ones grow and go to seed.

Butterflies love the yellow spikes of kale flowers. You can keep pulling leaves off to eat (green smoothies, yum) all through the summer season. When the stalks of seed pods turn dry and brown, cut off the stalk, then roll the pods on a plate and sort out the tiny round seeds. The dried pods are very delicate and will pop open at the slightest touch, so handle them gently -- but don't worry, one kale plant produces enough seed to sow far more than my entire garden! 

Do pull your seeds from multiple plants, however, to maintain genetic diversity in your garden kales. 

I'm pondering learning to save over one more type of seed this year, and I'm voting for my Boothby Blonde (OP) cucumbers. Any other ideas for an easy save? 
 

Food Security and Climate Change

Some years peppers are abundant; others, not so much.

This June our local weather here in Vermont has been abysmal. Rain is about two inches over the average for this month, and the month isn't over yet. 

Our deluge appears to be the result of a Persistent Arctic Cyclone of unusual duration. Speculation is running rampant as to whether this is tied to global climate change, and climatologists and sea ice specialists are intently discussing the relationship of the cyclone to sea-ice breakup and a rising thermocline in arctic waters. 

Be that as it may, my garden is seeing record rains. My pepper plants, so fabulously lush last year, look like drowned rats. Several eggplant plants have died. Yet other things are thriving. All the greens, from lettuce to cabbage, could not be happier. I've never had this many peas in all my  years of gardening. And I've been eating beets and turnips out of the garden a month earlier than usual. 

My home food security relies on resiliency arising from planting a wide diversity of food crops, sprinkled with a substantial layer of flexible attitude. I don't dictate to my garden what it will produce. I let my garden tell me what is going to grow well, and just roll with that. 

I never know from one year to the next whether this is going to be a hot dry summer or a cold wet summer (or heck, as it is so far this year, a hot wet summer). So I plant sweet potatoes and kale, hot peppers and overwintering cabbage, tomatoes and arugula -- things that like hot, and things that like cold. I see how the weather is going.  I see what withers and what flourishes. I watch the sky and the almanac and eavesdrop on the farmers in the diner and then take a risk and throw in an extra row of peas or an extra flat of basil. 

I may not get the same produce every year, but whatever I get is a bounty and a blessing and I figure out what to do with it. Last year I had more hot peppers than I'd imagined possible in my small Vermont garden. I dried a bunch, made mountains of salsa, and then looked at the last bucket full and decided to try making hot sauce, which turned out wonderfully.  This year does not exactly look like it's going to be a hot pepper year, but I'll be using that hot sauce on my abundance of turnip greens tonight. 

In bad tomato years, I've made zucchini salsa instead, or batches of apple-green tomato chutney. When the brussels sprouts never came in, we ate the tender delicious greens off the top of the brussels sprouts stems. When the radishes started bolting early instead of forming radishes, I yanked them out, threw them to the chickens, and swiftly planted some heat-loving summer squash in their place. 

Our industrial food system, however, is so large and commercial-market-driven that farmers -- agricultural industrialists -- are not responding to the land and letting the earth and climate guide their hand in what to plant to produce healthful abundance. The drive to deliver X amount of wheat for processed white flour, or iceberg lettuce to decorate burger buns, or watermelons of a certain size and color to meet a contract with a huge supermarket chain, means that the resiliency I've built into my garden is utterly lacking. Flexibility and redundancy are not watchwords of our current food economy. And that puts our large-scale food supply at risk. 

While this risk can be seen as driven by commercial agricultural interests, it can also be seen as responding to market forces. The American consumer demand for white bread, white potato fries, and corn means that vast quantities of these monocrops will be grown -- at least until they fail.

Anything that you can do at home to diversify your food sources will help to ameliorate this large-scale risk. Grow some salad greens or sprouts on a windowsill or porch; buy from a farmers market or swap with a local gardener; even buying types of produce that you haven't tried before (kohlrabi? parsley root?) will help to encourage diversity in food markets. Go for the locally baked multi-grain breads, the brown eggs, the cornmeal from a small regional company. Your choices will help our food systems weather the storms of change.

 

BATNA: Lessons from Conflict Resolution

Self-Reliance Improves Your BATNA

 

My conflict resolution students swiftly learn to apply the word BATNA to every conflict situation. The principle of Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement means that anyone negatively affected by another person or entity should first look for options that are wholly within their own control to improve their own position in a way that will minimize the impact of the actions of others.

For example:  Afraid your place of employment might be downsizing? Bolster your eduction and job skills to make yourself as valuable in your workplace and as employable elsewhere as possible; start up other income streams, even small ones like selling some homemade items on Etsy, so that when your employment ends it won't feel quite like dropping off a cliff. Or, relationship on rocky ground with an uncertain future? Strengthen your network of friends and community, and shore up your financial independence; the boost in self-confidence may help put the relationship on better terms, or will clarify its ending without feeling like the your whole life is ending, too.

Every day brings us reports that food prices are rising, food production is down while population is skyrocketing, climate change is bringing drastic shifts in agriculture and patterns of civilization, and the food reaching our grocery store shelves is full of GMOs, lead, arsenic, high-fructose corn syrup, and a host of chemicals with names we can't pronounce. Health care costs are soaring while our health is diminishing.

It often feels as if we are ever-increasingly the helpless victims of massive corporate and governmental forces that we can not possibly control. Do we even have a BATNA in the face of what experts say is global environmental and economic collapse?

It is true that there are many things in life which any one of us can not control. Yet, you always -- ALWAYS -- have a BATNA. There is always some realm of your existence over which you have at least some modicum of control, about which you can make choices and formulate decisions to better your own position.

The food we eat is an area of our life over which we exercise a large amount of control. As supermarket prices rise and family budgets shrink, it sometimes may not feel that way, but it's true. Remember how I said that in the face of possible job loss, starting even a tiny sideline income stream was useful to improve your position? So it is with food. Even the smallest step towards food independence begins to free you from the power of the corporate agriculture giants and reduces the harmful impact of other people's actions on your body, wallet, and family.

Growing sprouts or shoots on the edge of the kitchen sink adds a nutrient-rich green vegetable to helps stretch your grocery shopping dollars and boosts your health. One pot on an apartment balcony with a single cherry tomato plant and some lettuce will give you fresh, nearly free salads all summer, helping to offset shortened summer work hours. Buying at the local farmers market is a fabulous option if you don't have growing space or time -- and can be cheaper than you thing, especially if you come at the end of the day and negotiate. (Many farmers markets also take EBT cards and some states provide food-assistance recipients with extra farmers markets coupons as well.)

Buying produce in season and throwing some in the freezer creates a buffer for lean times. Eating lower on the food chain -- lentils instead of meat some nights of the week--is cheaper and healthier. Drinking ordinary tap water instead of soda or other bottled drinks saves money and could be the best single thing you could do for your health.

Any one of these little steps empowers you by moving you one small step further away from the impact of decisions made by corporate agriculture--yet without any diminishment in the quality of your life or health. In fact, you'll improve your health, reduce your anxiety over food bills, and likely develop new tastes and food interests that will enrich your life far more than the box of expensive powdered donuts could have ever done. BATNA is about making yourself stronger and freeing yourself from the shadow of others' power over you. The more you re-assert your control over the food you eat, the stronger your BATNA, and the less power bad news about food prices and supplies will have over your life.

Growing Things That Come Back: Permaculture For the Rest of Us

There's an old saying that Society Creates the Crime. It could also be said that Society Creates the Trendy Environmental Solution.  

Locally-grown organic food, for example, could only be considered a neat thing by a society which has abandoned locally grown organic agriculture, and then embraces it as a fashionable passion as if it had just been newly discovered. In a way, it's akin to Columbus 'discovering' a half of a planet which was already inhabited by many millions of people. 

'Permaculture' is one of those trendy cocktail-party words that left-leaning publishing houses just can't seem to print enough about. Only a society which had entirely converted to exotic, non-sustainable decorative landscaping, maintained through intensive chemical and labor interventions, could think of permaculture as a trendy new invention discovered by white men from some upscale north-eastern university instead of good-old fashioned practicality. 

For those of us who are not much concerned about how our gardening methods sound to the cocktail-party set, planting things that come back year after year and work well in our local climate and soil is not only common sense, but is cost-effective, environmentally sound, and an efficient means of feeding both body and soul.  Native plants -- in my neck of the woods, mint, sunflowers, black-eyed susan, joe pye weed, Jerusalem artichokes, bee balm, etc.-- and their cultivars make a natural starting place. 

Rhubarb and Jerusalem Artichokes Return Every Year

Locally-adapted, low-care perennial flowers, herbs, fruits and vegetables create a rich and beautiful home environment needing only annual additions of compost and frequent picking. Rhubarb, irises, daffodils, thistles, anise hyssop, rue, oregano, marjoram, aloe, bleeding hearts, elderberry, blueberries, hibiscus, sand cherry bushes, yarrow, echinacea, all come back year after year. 

Self-seeding annual herbs and flowers like sweet williams, cilantro, parsley, bachelor's buttons, lupines, walking onions, multiplier onions, pansies and johnny jump-ups, all establish their own patches and do not need to be replanted each year. Just refresh with a little compost and weed out any intruding grass or other unwanted species to give them a competitive advantage.

Sunflowers self-seed each year, and give goldfinches and other songbirds a place to perch between eating garden bugs. Lilac hedges provide heavenly scent and a practical wind-break. Kale, left to regrow a second season, provides edible flowers loved by butterflies -- and a crop of easily-saved seed to replant. 

The high-end permaculture books would have you believe that this trendy new idea requires consultants, graph paper, earth-moving equipment and a huge financial investment. None of that is true. All it takes is attention to where you live and in the space you have, and to what you want to get out of that space.There's no point planting a big asparagus patch if you can't stand asparagus. Look at what you've got for space, light and soil; look around you and talk to your neighbors about what grows well for them; and plant what works.   

Save the Earth: Rip Up Your Lawn

The largest irrigated crop in America is lawn grass. There is three times as much acreage in lawn grass production as in corn -- and many lawn owners apply just as much fertilizer and pesticides to maintain their outdoor carpets as those big corporate farmers do to produce commodity corn. 

Where does that fertilizer go after you dump them on the lawn? Some gets taken up by the grass, of course, but much of it washes away, into our rivers and lakes causing excessive growth that uses up too much oxygen and ultimately chokes out the aquatic ecosystem. 

Think about the quantity of fresh, potable water nationwide used to water lawns. Think about the amount of air pollution sent into our lungs every week as millions of homeowners or their landscapers mow, leaf-blow, and power-rake. 

Food prices are rising, and most people go without fresh, locally-grown, organic produce because it's unavailable or too expensive. Yet America's suburban homeowners are sitting on the most valuable asset our nation has -- fertile land -- and using it for a home decoration. Instead of generating healthy food for themselves, their neighbors, and those without land, suburbanites waste this resource by using it as an expensive, chemical-laden hobby.  

While it's easy to point fingers at corporate agriculture as the root of food shortages and a loss of food quality, the millions of small landowners who inhabit suburbia have the power to make a significant impact on world food supplies and their own pocketbooks and health simply by ripping up their lawns.

Turning your lawn into gardens means you'll get economic value out of it instead of dumping money into it.  You'll get healthy produce for your own family, saving on the grocery bill, and can even produce enough to share with neighbors or the local food shelf. Check out the Facebook site for Grow Food, Not Lawns if you want to connect with like-minded individuals who can inspire you with stunning photos, plans, and information for transforming your expensive lawn crop into an environmentally-sound, economically-productive garden. 

Weeds and Thinnings: Greens and More Greens

Pigweed weeded out of the garden and onto the dinnerplate

Beet greens and kohlrabi leaves from thinnings

One of the best things about gardening is getting to eat the weeds and thinnings.






Pigweed, cress, purslane, young dandelion leaves, and many other garden weeds are delectable 'specialty greens' that commandeer high prices at upscale food markets. The young leaves of beets, kohlrabi, turnips, rutabegas, even carrots are delightful in salad, or mixed together and sauteed with the first garlic scapes, chives or new onions, a sprinkle of sugar, and a splash of hot sauce. Over brown rice topped with a fried egg, they make a perfect early summer meal that is economical and packed with nutrients.

Dryad's Saddles

Dryad's Saddles -- also known as the Pheasant's Back, or Polyporus squamosus -- is as easily identifiable mushroom for anyone looking to dip a toe in the great, complex and sometimes scary stream of wild mushroom foraging. I love mushrooms, but am a very tentative mushroomer, only slowly adding to my short list of species I am comfortable enough identifying to bring home to the dinner table.

Giant puffballs or breadloaf mushrooms are probably the first wild mushroom to try, as long as you pick them when they are at least softball sized to ensure that you haven't mixed them up with an emerging head of some other type.  None of the puffballs are poisonous and once they get to a decent size, there is nothing else that looks like them (unless you've inadvertently picked up an old soccer ball that has been sitting in the woods for years).

While there are many other shelf- or bracket-type fungus, Dryad's Saddles are simple to recognize. They have a short, thick angled stem, a curve downward to the stem, a feathery or almost shingle-like top, and most distinctively, a spongy underside of hollow tubes -- NOT gills, and NOT a hard flat bottom surface. The only other mushroom close to meeting this description would be the beefsteak mushroom, another bracket polypore, but it is pink to red, and fortunately is also edible so if you manage to confuse the two, you'll still be okay.

When Dryad's Saddles get older they get brown and dry, but then they are too tough to eat. Way too tough. So be sure to go for the light tan ones with brown feathery tops.

In May and June, look for these about two days after a rainstorm, on hardwood trees and stumps. They'll pop up literally overnight. Pick those that are flexible and have a light tan top like the ones pictured. Often they'll be about 4" across, in groups of 3 or 4. These two, growing right next to one another, had popped out to a full 8" across after we had a big downpour following several very dry weeks.

Sliced up and sauteed with butter and wild ramps, served with foraged fiddleheads or young turnip greens thinned from the early garden bed, they make a wonderful hearty spring meal, free and fresh from the wilds.

Pumpkin Pie

You have to love a dessert that counts as a vegetable...

It's the nice thing about pumpkin pie. True, one could count those apple and blueberry pies as a serving of fruit -- but you get to count pumpkin pie as a vegetable. And a tasty, nutritious vegetable at that, full of fiber and vitamins. 

But pumpkin also holds a certain spirit that satisfies the soul as well as the stomach and good health. Those orange orbs embody the sunshine of the whole growing season, the open sky and fresh air of the fields, those perfect autumn days. 


Deep in January, biting into a slice of pumpkin pie brings the wheel of the year firmly to mind, and thoughts roll back to last year's garden, and forward to looking at the prize-winning pumpkins at next year's fair. Pumpkins bring us continuity across the seasons, across the years. 

That continuity is strengthened by the bonds of generations when you use an old family recipe. There is something magical about cooking the same thing my grandmother did, an invocation of those who are gone from us. 

I start with a Long Island Cheese pumpkin -- a flattened, tan heirloom. It could be any other kind -- but then it wouldn't be MY pumpkin pie. But choose your own -- that's part of what makes is special. I quarter the cheese pumpkin, scrape out the seeds, and roast it on a cookie sheet with a little water in it at 350 degrees for... well, for as long as until it's done. Perhaps an hour, I just keep testing till a knife pokes through it easily. Then I let it cool a bit, scoop out the flesh and measure it, and bag it up in 2 cup measures  in small zipper-seal freezer bags (suck the air out, seal them, and lay them flat to freeze -- then you can 'file' them upright in a milk crate in the big freezer). My recipe calls for 1 and a half cups of puree -- but when using home-cooked pumpkin, I find freezing 2 cups works best as you'll lose some liquid and volume when it thaws.    

This is the only think I cook in which I use canned Carnation evaporated milk. I rarely use canned anything in my cooking, but this is an exception. You can use cream or whole milk or raw milk; since I want mine to taste like my grandmother's pie, I use the old-school kitchen staple for this.

Pick your favorite pie crust -- I use the basic shortening crust from my ancient, tattered edition of Betty Crocker's cookbook. But this recipe also works wonderfully as a pumpkin custard with no crust at all.

Pumpkin Pie: 

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. 

Line a pie plate with your chosen one-crust pie pastry. 

1 1/2 cups canned pumpkin, or a two-cup bag frozen home-cooked pumpkin puree
1 cup rich milk
1 cup sugar (not quite full)
1/4 tsp salt

1/4 tsp nutmeg
1/4 tsp cinnamon
pinch of cloves
 --you can add more of these spices to taste if you like

2 large eggs, slightly beaten
1 Tbsp melted butter
1/2 shot glass whiskey

Combine all ingredients and mix thoroughly. Pour into the pastry-lined pie pan -- I avoid sloshing by putting the pan on the oven rack first and pouring the filling in there.  Bake about 45 minutes or until an inserted knife comes out clean. Cool before cutting.

Top with maple whipped cream, and the coup de grace, a maple sugar candy leaf. 

Winter Crunch: Sauerkraut and More

Sauerkraut and Lacto-Fermented Carrots and Turnips

A forkful of crunch, tang, and summer garden flavor in the midst of winter, in old-school style: This is the joy of lacto-fermented vegetables. Much has been written about the new-found health benefits of lacto-fermentation, this food preservation technique is ancient -- and simple.

A great winter read to get you started is the little paperback by the Farmers and Gardeners of Terre Vivants, Preserving Food Without Canning or Freezing. It will give you some food for thought as you plan next summer's garden. But with cabbage available inexpensively through the winter at supermarkets and farmers' markets, it's a great time to try sauerkraut at home.

Slice, Salt, Pound

I had made sauerkraut a few times in the past, but Summer 2012 was a bumper year for cabbage in my garden, so it was time for a larger sauerkraut experience. I started with a crock -- but no need for one of these uber-expensive, water-sealed lacto-fermentation crocks that are en vogue in the seed and garden catalogs. I just found an old lidless one, about 3 gallons, that my mother had been using as a decorative objet d'art in the living room. Washed it well, then proceeded to production. Using about 5 pounds of cabbage, I quartered the heads and cut out the cores. Then I sliced thinly--about quarter inch to smaller-- with a big chopping knife while my husband layered the sliced cabbage in the crock, sprinkled with sea salt, and pounded it with a heavy piece of broken chair leg. A baseball bat end, wine bottle, or any non-pressure-treated and non-splintery heavy board would do, though again, they sell overpriced sauerkraut pounders if you feel compelled to drop lots of money on this operation.

Eventually all the cabbage is sliced, salted (I use about 3 Tablespoons total for 5 pounds of cabbage, but feel free to use a little less, though no less than 2 Tablespoons or the brine won't be the right chemical blend to spawn the right microscopic critter growth to produce the fermentation), and pounded down. At this point it should be swimming in its own brine; if not add a little spring water and perhaps a pinch more salt.

In lieu of those fancy expensive water-seal lids, I put one plastic food bag inside another so it's a big sturdier, fill it with water, and close with a wire twist-tie, then just to be sure, knot the bags over the twist tie to keep it from poking the bags. I put a small clean plate over the top of the cabbage to help weight them down evenly, then put the water-filled bag on top of this -- the bag spreads to fill the top of the crock to its edges, sealing out air but not so tightly as to prevent the bubbling fermentation gasses from escaping. Voila, a lacto-fermentation crock for cheap.

I set this in the garage in the late summer -- you are shooting for perhaps 60 degrees. Check it from time to time, and add some more spring water and sea salt if it seems to run dry, but unless you are in an extremely dry climate, it probably won't. Don't let it get too cold or freeze.

How long you leave it set is a matter of taste, preference and convenience. I really like my sauerkraut crunchy and tangy, so I like to leave it sit only two weeks. This year, with a large quantity at hand, I removed a quart mason jar's worth at two weeks and stuck that in the fridge to stop the fermentation, and left the remainder to ferment another several weeks, until it seemed to stop active bubbling and changing. Then I put that remainder in jars in the fridge, where it will keep for many long months.

Of course, I kept eating it right out of the crock daily through this entire time period, just because I could.

The two-week sauerkraut has a bite to it that I love, while the nearly two-month sauerkraut has a mellower, richer more complex flavor and a decidedly mushier texture. I have conducted numerous taste-tests amongst my friends, and find sentiments regarding preference between these two are nearly equally divided.

Beyond Cabbage

Meanwhile, inspired by the success of my sauerkraut efforts and the lovely advice of the Terre Vivant gardeners, I experimented with using the same technique -- minus the pounding -- for other  vegetables. I was producing small quantities of these, so I just used half-gallon mason jars instead of the crock to start. I made one batch of julienned carrots and turnips, and one batch of julienned turnips and snappy black radishes. I packed them in their respective jars, covered with a brine made of spring water and sea salt, and put on the two-piece screw-type canning jar lids, though screwed on just firmly enough to seal but still allow gasses to escape. Paranoid about the potential for exploding glass, I also just turned the lid open then closed again once every couple days to release pressure. I set these jars in a small metal tray on the counter and let them fester several weeks.

The result was delightful. The carrots and turnips are sweet yet tangy, with a nearly citrus-type flavor and delightful crunch. The turnips and radish have an almost horseradish-type condiment flavor. Both can work on their own as a little side dish, be served on salad greens, or brighten up a lowly hummus or turkey sandwich out of its winter doldrums.

Many cooks also add a variety of things to their cabbage sauerkraut. Fennel seed and/or onions are common variations, but I suspect there are dozens of possibilities.

Mason Jar Canning Safety and Lids

I've read several food bloggers getting quite dismayed over the use of the standard two-part canning-jar lid for lacto-fermentation in mason jars, on the theory that it lets outside air in. Some now strongly advocate the use of new special, expensive, one-way-valve lids for this purpose. I admit I don't have the scientific credentials to have the last word on this, but I have not been terribly concerned about it because if the jar is filled right to the top, and the lid lightly screwed on, the fermentation process creates pressure within the jar and is constantly pushing the air out. This is the same reason that the air escapes and then, on cooling, creates a vacuum when you boiling-water-bath can using these same lids. If air could get in under such circumstances, then air and water would get in when you were water-bath canning, wouldn't it? As long as you keep the jar filled to the rim by adding brine, the positive pressure (evidenced by the daily leakage into your metal tray) keeps the atmospheric air out of the jar, doesn't it? At least that is my opinion, and it has seemed to work just fine for me without costly special equipment, but I will leave it to each cook and consumer to use her own best judgement regarding her family's food safety. Just do be sure to use SOMETHING that can be vented if you lacto-ferment in mason jars, to prevent the glass from breaking.

Cold Day, Hot Soup

Slow cooker, old style -- cast iron on the woodstove

Black bean soup with what's-in-the-larder

It's snowing -- but it does that in Vermont in January, so all is right with the world. I had leftover sweet potatoes in the fridge from dinner two nights ago, so I set out to make black bean-sweet potato burritos.

Then I'd cooked more black beans than I needed (dry beans, cooked on the woodstove, are way cheaper than canned beans -- and no risk of whatever chemicals the can lining gives off, either, especially since they are local organic beans). So what to do with the rest?

Black bean soup.

Soup is the ultimate flexible dish. The recipe? Stock and whatever is in the larder. Here I even cheated on the stock. I kept the water the beans were cooked in, and added a couple jars of my canned tomato-vegetable juice. Then I grabbed a handful of carrots from the copious bin of them remaining from last summer's garden, a couple heads (yes heads) of garden garlic, and a couple locally grown onions. I was out of peppers and not driving out to the store in this snowstorm (mainly because I'm lazy and the woodstove feels too good) so I also drained and added a small jar of my canned jalepenos. Then the coup-de-grace, three peeled, chopped-up seedless oranges, as we weren't eating through the bag fast enough and they would no doubt have gone bad.

How to spice it? I tasted the onion-tomato-orange combo and decided exotic was the way to go. Some smoked sea salt, black pepper, some cinnamon, some ginger, a little Jamaican allspice, some dried parsley for added iron and vitamins, and just to finish it off, a dash -- more like a splash -- of my homemade hot sauce.

Now back on the woodstove it goes to simmer away and I'll taste-test it later. If it's too hot, I'll add some more tomato-veggie juice or some stock. Not zesty enough, more hot sauce.

Since we have the burritos for tonight, this can simmer along 'till tomorrow, adding some water or stock if it boils off too much. Then I'll make a nice crunchy cornbread to go with it (mine is always crunchy since we grind our own corn) and a green salad, and it will be the perfect hot meal for the predicted single-digit night.

Using up what you've got is the ultimate food security -- AND it can lead to the most creative and fresh dishes. Soup is a good chance to experiment; just chop whatever you have in the larder into roughly equal-sized pieces and throw them into stock or broth. Saute them first if you have a mind to, but it's not strictly necessary. Soup is also so incredibly healthful, usually low cal (unless perhaps it's something like a beer cheddar cream soup), high in fiber and nutrients, and filling.

What are YOUR favorite winter soups?

Winter Salad

Fresh Greens from the Garden--In Vermont in Mid-January!

 

 

In the coldest of seasons, in the darkest of days, life goes on, and hope--and salad greens--spring eternal.

It's January thaw -- that annual occurrence of a few days of balmy thirty or even forty degree weather that feels downright tropical after last week's minus 20 Fahrenheit (yes, that is not a type -- it was minus 20 a few evenings last week). Yesterday, dinner was roasted root vegetables, including the last kohlrabi and the last turnip of the year. In a separate pan, I also roasted the last of the beets, to put on salads through the week.

When temps rose above freezing this delightfully sunny morning, I took a stroll out to examine the yard. It had actually rained last night, and the two-foot snowcover was gone. My kale bed was bursting with new green and burgundy leaves. I pulled the soggy straw off the parsley and chard, and they too were sending forth new growth. I picked handsful of tiny new green leaves to start my salad bowl.

At the other end of the salad greens bed from the chard, a few blackened heads of raddichio had soldiered through the snow cover, without so much as a straw blanket to comfort their frozen heads. I pulled the largest, stripped back the outer leaves, and was rewarded with a nice 4 inch head of bright red raddichio to add to the dinner loot.

On to the cold frames. The small one held some bedraggled arugula; the little bed is really too small to provide much protection from the cold. The larger 4'X8' bed, however, looked like a jungle. Spinach, arugula, mache, and sweet little 2" long French breakfast radishes with their cheery ombre of fushia and white.

Washed, spun-dry and chopped, I had about two quarts of salad greens. Plenty for two big dinner salads and lunch packed for tomorrow. I added some of the roasted beets from last night, some chopped walnuts, and grated some pecorino romano cheese that I had in the fridge since, it being that time of the year, I was also too broke to go spring for some nice blue cheese which would have been the absolutely perfect thing. But the pecorino romano added a surprisingly nice touch, so it's just as well that necessity was the mother of invention for this salad!

It's true that there are salad greens for sale in the market this time of year, but even aside from the carbon footprint question of where those salads came from, the price is nigh on unreachable for those of us feeling the economic pinch. This salad of organic greens with zero carbon footprint cost me the twenty minutes or so of picking, washing and preparing -- and gave me the great joy, deep satisfaction, and yeah, okay, bragging rights, of having picked my dinner from my front yard in Vermont in the depths of winter.