Some Thoughts on Farming and Food

     All these years later, it still annoys me that Julie Powell was the one to come up with such a genius idea first. Granted, I would have only been in my early twenties and still in the Navy when she came up with the idea to spend an entire year cooking every recipe out of Julia Child's masterpiece of a cookbook, and then blogging about it, but I wish she had never gotten around to is so that I could have been the one to do it first.

      I was reading through my copy of Mastering the Art of French cooking the other day before it was time to go out to the barn and do the evening chores. I have been trying to find a way to use up some of our excess eggs. Our laying hens have been giving us over a dozen eggs everyday, and I can only eat so many fried or boiled eggs. Any eggs that we don't use we end up scrambling up and feeding to our herd of barn cats (what the fuck should you call a group of cats? Herd sounds ridiculous, but flock is worse, and I highly doubt gaggle would be appropriate... our gaggle of barn cats...). Anyway, I can poach an egg, and I like the flavor (one of my favorite recipe for poaching an egg comes from a classic German cookbook, I can't think of the name at the moment, but the recipe is for poached eggs on toast with a mustard and butter sauce... delicious) but it is an awful lot of work to poach an egg. I understand that must come out sounding like complete and total laziness; if Julia Child and Julie Powell can find the time to poach eggs during their day, why in the hell can't I? Fair enough, I don't have an answer for that, especially when I find the time to hard boil eggs for deviled eggs at least twice a week (mmmm... deviled eggs). I am so off topic... so there I was, reading Mastering the Art of French cooking trying to find a way to use up our excess eggs, and I couldn't believe how many recipes I found in that cook book that would help me use up all sorts of the produce and other such stuffs that we have been producing on this farm, but haven't been putting to the best of uses. 

 

      One example: cooked cucumber; who would have ever dreamed of roasting a cucumber and then drowning it in a cheesy bechamel sauce? I wouldn't have, but now I can't get the idea out of my head. My uncle brought down some of his over abundance of cucumber harvest the other day, and after making the most kick ass batch of Sweet and Spicy Curry Refrigerator Pickles ever, I still had half a dozen left over, and we planted about fifty or so cucumber plants ourselves this season that are just now starting to produce a crop (this time next week I will be ass deep in cucumbers, water baths, and pickling brine)... so finding an interesting, classic, and completely different way of preparing a cucumber other than as an ingredient in a salad, is awesome.

      But then I came across the souffle section, and I believe I may have found the solution to my egg problem. I have never tried making a souffle before, so I am bound to mess it up the first few times, but it doesn't bother me that it takes five eggs per batch, because if I mess it up a dozen times... we were going to end up feeding most of the eggs to the cats anyway. 

 

      To sum up an out of control story... Julia Child might have saved me from wasting and losing a lot of product this year... but Julie Powell has made it so that if I share all of my experimental shenanigans with you all I will be nothing more than a copy cat... but there is no way I would cook my way through the whole book anyway; I hate fish, and I don't produce it on the farm... but with Julia Child's help, I should be able to transform what I do produce on this farm into a culinary orgasm of awesome.

      Sorry I have been away from the blog so much as of late... I know how important it is to regularly keep you guys updated (especially in the infancy of this project) if I am to have any hope of keeping your interest. I promise to try harder... but anyone who is reading this is probably some form of farmer/homesteader themselves and is well aware of how interesting, and busy, and hectic this time of year is. For instance... yesterday morning I was walking the three gardens with my dad, and when we got to the tomato plants we discovered that the tomato worms had finally found them. We spent about an hour hunting them down and crushing them, but we also had oats that were ready for harvest so that we will have grain to feed our growing goat herd this winter (finally, a reason to correctly use the word herd in a sentence), and tomorrow morning I will have to go back out to the garden for a more thorough hunting. I love tomatoes, and I will murder every last one of those bugs... Either way, now my apology is off topic; I will try harder to update more often. The end.

Summer Squash Shenanigans

Like most of the country, we have been experiencing a drought/Epic-Heat-Wave, so the last thing anyone wants to do around here is cook. Even grilling outdoors is a chore when it is still over ninety degrees at eight o’clock in the evening… Yet, somehow I found myself spending the day in the kitchen canning and baking. Okay, that is unfair to make it sound like someone forced me; I love to cook. In fact, if this whole farming thing doesn’t work out I still have the closest culinary school on speed dial; it is an option I am happy to keep open. So I wasn’t forced into the kitchen by default (as in nobody else wanted to do it) but rather because there were a few canning recipes I wanted to try out, and the summer squash was ripe and ready to go regardless of how hot it was today.

            The first recipe I wanted to try came out of Liana Krissoff’s book Canning for a New Generation: Bold, Fresh Flavors for the Modern Pantry and the recipe was for “Hot Cumin-Pickled Summer Squash.” I had never tried anything like it before (technically I still haven’t, I just finished pickling them today, and now I am going to let them sit for about a week before the first taste test...) I can tell you all that they smelled delicious before putting the lid on for the water bath, and I promise to keep everyone updated on how they turn out. The second recipe that I want to try is also for pickled summer squash and it comes from Paul Virant’s The Preservation Kitchen. Both recipes are fairly similar (how varied can a pickle get) but there are some key differences so I wanted to make one batch of each in order to decide what flavor I like better before I can up fifty to sixty pints of the stuff. 

            Speaking of summer squash, we are having a pest problem at the moment. Last year we had a problem with the squash beetles, but this year we have found like four or five of them (nothing too tragic) but we have had these worms that have been boring into the stalks and killing the whole plants! That is tragic. It is hot as hell, it hasn’t really rained in two months, we have been watering our plants with buckets and manual labor, and then poof, one morning one plant is dead, and then another, and then another… at this rate I don’t know how much longer we are going to be harvesting any summer squash, and then how am I supposed to stock up for the coming apocalypse?

            Anyway, after spending all day steaming to death in the kitchen I decided to grill some pizzas outdoors for dinner. Homemade pizza and too much cold beer… is there any better way to end a long hot day?

New Location

Okay, so this is the first posting on my new blog. For some of you (hopefully) you are just following me from my old blog www.whiskeycigarettesandhomemadeapplepie.blogspot.com

            This blog isn’t going to be much different; in fact, the content is really just a continuation of my old blog. So why put both my readers through the hassle of having to re-favorite my blog under a different name? Well, first of all, the title and web address of my old blog is too complicated. I have lost count how many times my dad has called me because he was trying to explain to a friend or family member how to locate my blog, but he couldn’t remember the whole title, or what order the words went in (and to top that off, when most people typed the web address in –including myself- at least one word would be spelled incorrectly and with no spaces between words it’s a pain in the ass trying to figure out which one…) So, reason number one, to stream line simplicity.

            Reason number two: My old blog actually started out as an assignment for one of my English classes at college, and since I am done with that class I figured it was time to move on. And this way I can write in my real voice without having to worry about my content being of a certain length, or free of vulgarities. I am a Navy veteran, and it is true about what they say about cussing like a sailor, every other word out of my mouth is fuck or some variation of it…

Reason number three (final): I am trying to become famous for my awesome writing and farming capabilities, and Whiskey, Cigarettes, and Homemade Apple Pie might make a cool name for a book (a farming memoir perhaps) but it doesn’t really help sell the concept that I am trying to project. I believe in going back to the basics in order to live a higher quality of life, and my last title just didn’t convey that message very well. Oh, and I actually quite smoking almost six months ago, so the old title wasn’t even accurate anymore.

So, this is where we are. My new blog. A new beginning. Starting from scratch (kind of, please tell me some of you followed me here from my past ramblings…) Oh, but, and this is important, if you are a new reader, welcome (and thank you… I need the constant positive encouragement for motivation…)

There will be another post coming later today to either update you guys as to what has been going on, or to introduce new people to who I am and what I do.