Fall is for cooking.

Jess and I made a great dinner tonight. The first course was the squash soup pictured above. The recipe is from the latest Jamie Oliver book. It is flavored with sage and rosemary from the garden. It also has a little spice from our last jalapeno. It was served with some crusty bread and Parmesan cheese. Jess also made a pot roast from the Alton Brown recipe which we had as our main course. An excellent dinner.

Rick

Earthen Ovens

Not a lot to report in way of the farm, winter is closing in. We had our first frost two nights ago and most of the leaves have fallen. Like any good mammal my thoughts have turned to food and sleep.
In the food direction I have been thinking about building and earthen oven. I am told they are great for baking breads and pizzas. We have dabbling a bit in pizza as of late summer so this might be a nice addition to the farm stead. Appropedia has 2 examples, here and here. I also love the picture and metal hat on this one. This part of the state has lots of clay so I will really have to look into this some more next spring.

Drinking New Belgium's Mothership Wit with dinner, nice belgian funk with good spice flavor.

Ferndale Market

Jess and I stopped by the grand opening of the Ferndale Market in Cannon Falls this evening on the way home from of work. The have a nice selection of local and organic foods including many that are produced locally. We picked up a few items including a Lorentz potato sausage we had with dinner along with some roast home grown potatoes and pan fried volunteer tomato. Not a bad dinner.

Rick

Garlic

Last year was the first year that I planted garlic. I had good success with it. I planted a few different varieties that I purchased from SSE. I originally planted them all in separate rows. However I decided that keeping them all separate during drying and then planting them seprately again was more work thatn it was worth. So instead I mearly planted those that did the best and I figure that over time my garlic will trend twords the species that does best here. So far it looks like mostly purple varieties. All in all I planted 90 cloves so I am hoping to have plenty of garlic next year. Will have to get a garlic roaster I guess.

Rick

I have been watching the happenings of the financial world lately with the detached fascination usually reserved for horrible bus crashes. Unfortunately I am currently seated on the bus, Seated too far from the drivers to truly prevent the disaster if I was even capable of such a thing. Instead I find I have no choice but to watch it all unfold and hope chance and preparation will save me. I feel like I should be telling everyone I know what little I know about growing tomatoes and beans. I know that is fairly ridiculous. I know it is a combination of fear and a certain desire I have to test my own limits that makes me think about disaster as much as I do. I hope.

Good luck
Rick

PS lost 20 % of my retirement money in the last 2 weeks, how about you guys??

Personal food sovereignty. That is the term I have recently encountered that best describes what we are about here on our little plot. With the shape of the world economy today and the impending contraction of energy world wide it just seems prudent to be able to feed oneself regardless of happenings in far off places. I have recently been looking for what exactly my motivations are with regards to efforts here at the farm. Cost is a hard issue to argue, I could probably earn enough money at a second job to pay for the food we eat rather than attempting to grow it. Also I could probably specialize in one crop and sell the surplus to earn enough to feed us. But either of these approaches require that I rely on conditions that are not sufficiently under my control. Growing food also has conditions that I can not control, Frost, hail, insects, disease, ect. But I can control for those conditions and if I am smart I can mitigate there effect on us. Howeve conditions off the farm I can not control or mitigate so I choose to control what I can and grow my own food.

Current happenings

So lots going on here at the farm. Not as much as during the height of the summer but the days are getting shorter. So I guess there is still the same density of work after all. I have been getting things ready for fall mostly. I am thinking we should have some form of harvest party soon.

Rick

Autumn arives

Fall arrived today and I celebrated with a fire and chopping wood.

Rick

We've got cows.

Yesterday and today I spent the day making repairs around the house patching the holes where the foundation should be in places. That is one of the frustrations of buying an old and distressed property is that you know you will find any number of farmer fixes. Every time I dig in this place I encounter some artifact or other. Usually broken glass and old nails. In the last 2 days I removed an entire wheel barrow full of junk from the vicinity of the foundation. I removed almost more junk than dirt. But the job is finished and I am feeling pretty good about the job.
Jess offered to take me into town for dinner as a reward. On the way into town we encountered a bull standing next to the road. I made Jess turn around and we went up to the house to let them know that they had a bull loose by the road. Nobody was home so Jess and I attempted to herd the bull back into the field using the Vibe. I am pretty sure that is the first time that anyone in these parts has herded cattle from a compact hatchback.The bull decided he wanted nothing to do with the car and jumped back through the electric fence. Just then the home owner came back and we stopped up to tell them what we were doing.
Then we went to dinner, but the bull stayed at home.

Rick

Picalila-Chow

Yesterday Jess and I made a batch of Chow-Chow/ Piccalilli relish. We had a ton of green tomatoes growing on the volunteer tomato plant that came up from the compost I spread earlier in the year. I was inspired by a post on making Chow-Chow over at Musings from a Stonehead. We made it according to a recipe in the Ball Blue Book. I can't recommend that book enough, especial if you don't have a kindly mentor to show you how to can.
We ended up modifying two recipes that were close. We combined the spices found in both chow-chow and piccalilli relish. The recipie was also supposed to make 7 pints but I think we added too many green tomatos because we ended up with 12 pints.

Rick