Accumulated Carrots

This morning I made dilled carrots with all the carrots I'd stashed from the farm share - just under 5 pounds.  This hasn't been a banner year for carrots, it seems.  We've gotten tons of onions, peppers, eggplant and squash, but really not a lot of tomatoes, carrots, or beets.  Every year is different.

Also, there has been no dill from the farm, so I had to buy some.  Which meant this batch has dill sprigs and not the flower heads.  It still works just the same.  I used my Korean red pepper this time, and made 4 pints with the red pepper and 1.5 pints without.  (That last half-pint is all the odd sized ends of the carrots, cut into pennies.)  I think 5.5 pints of dilled carrots will be enough for a year, anyway.

It's raining out today so any plans I might have had to do yard work or walk in the woods looking for berries is pretty much out of the question.  We're going to the stables later; maybe if it isn't raining I'll look there.  Last week I came home with a bunch of Concord grapes and a handful of autumn olives - not enough of either to do anything at all.

Elderberries! (I think...)

We just got back from our annual camping trip.  In opting for Labor Day weekend, we ended up camping much later than usual (but got a bonus day out of it!) and, with the weather being what it's been, the foraging was all wonky.

Gone were the blackberries which would have likely been abundant 3-4 weeks ago.  Long gone were the blueberries.  However, there was apple picking and a surprise find of elderberries.

I think they are elderberries.  I looked it up on my phone, confirmed from several different sources that I had elderberries and not water hemlock berries or devil's walking stick berries.  Neither of which is good to eat, but my husband felt that "Devil's Walking Stick Jam" was a great name for a jam.  Sigh.  I even crushed a berry to determine how many seeds were in it.  Everything checked out, so I picked every ripe elderberry I could find.  Don't worry, I left many unripe ones for the animals to eat or for the seeds to propagate or whatever normally happens to elderberries.

Even with all that, I came home with exactly one cup of berries.  The recipes all call for 8 cups, or 3 pounds, or some other crazy amount which was simply unattainable given the shrubs I found.  I pared down the old fashioned (pectin-free) recipe for 1 cup and made exactly one 8-ounce jar of jam.  Which I tasted, being the official taste tester of all things foraged.  It's a complex flavor, and I'm bound to like it because I'm just plain excited that I found something I wasn't expecting simply because I was open to the experience.

I've also made 2 batches of applesauce, which made 5 quarts, and I still have a lot of apples to work through.  I used entirely macintoshes for these batches but the first batch was slightly *ahem* caramelized, which made it a nice color.  The second batch got some cinnamon because it was a really strange green color.

While I have the canner out I'll can the rest of the sauerkraut that finished fermenting last week.  It's been in the fridge; we took some with us on the trip and it went so amazingly well with the Bauernwurst and the Nuremburgwurst we brought.

On the agenda this week:  dilled carrots from all the farm share carrots, an apple pie, maybe more applesauce, and to figure out something to do with all the tomatillos in the farm share.

Potato Leekie Lambie Sheepie Soup

There I was, sitting on a rock at the stables, letting the horse I'd just showered dry and graze in the sun, and I looked down and found a HUGE patch of sheep sorrel!  Yum!

A quick search with my iPhone suggested that I could make a potato sorrel soup and, oh, look!  I have leeks and shallots and garlic from the farm and oh, hey, here's some lamb's quarters instead of spinach!  I can make this soup, from one of the White House chefs!  Only with all farm share or foraged ingredients!  (Well, except for the butter and the spices...)

I picked a big bunch of sheep sorrel and about a cup, maybe a little less, of lamb's quarters leaves.  I grabbed a sprig of what I thought was thyme but turned out to be oregano, so I ended up not using it.  I followed the recipe otherwise exactly and created a yummy soup which I will take in a thermos to work tonight.  

Chicken of the Tree

I found one!  Hahahahaha!

I've been keeping my eyes out for a chicken mushroom ever since I realized they are edible.  Yesterday, on a walk with some friends, one presented itself.  To be fair, my friend saw it first.  It was way off the path and I was willing to walk through the poison ivy to get to it.  It's a huge one and I only took a little bit.

Since I was working overnight last night I felt that perhaps I should wait until after my shift to try a taste, since it has been known to make lips swell and people feel ill.  I confirmed that I had laetiporus cincinnatus, it was growing at the base of an oak tree and, according to the books, there really isn't anything else that looks like it.  I also brought home some boletes which turned out to be a large Frost's bolete and a couple of others which were equally non-edible, and some milk caps which may or may not have been edible but I wasn't about to try it.

I just got home a few minutes ago, broke off a bit and fried it in oil with a little shallot.  It sure does taste like chicken breast.  Now, what to do with the rest of it?

Not Very Zen

Normally when I pick raspberries I zone out a bit.  It's a nice opportunity to be outside in the sun, the plants are tall enough that I can stand, and I spend more time thinking about life than I do about the berries I'm picking.

Yesterday, however, I had to concentrate.

The orb spider with the bee

Apparently there is some new fly that is wreaking havoc on the blueberries and raspberries around here.  So they asked us to take 2 buckets in to the fields, one for good berries and one for bad ones.  They want to get the bad ones out of the field.  That meant that every single berry had to be checked.  What normally would have taken us an hour took two, and I didn't get to zone out and ponder the greater mysteries of the world.  It is also early in the season so the berries that were ripe weren't as plentiful.  Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining.  It is wonderful to have organic raspberries to pick so close to my house.  It's just that the experience was different.

We did find an orb spider which had trapped a honey bee in its web.  I felt bad for the bee.  When we first found it, the bee was trying to free itself, and the spider was just hanging out in the middle of the web.  When we checked on it on the way out, the spider was still in the middle of the web but now it had the bee in its legs and was starting very slowly to wrap it up.  The kids and I watched that for a while.  We also saw a good sized garter snake.

The raspberry farm has been expanding lately; they used to just grow the berries but now they have some other produce and some chickens.  Who get fed a lot of overripe raspberries - the kids took our "bad berry bucket" out and gave them to the chickens.  They are beautiful, healthy looking birds who will eat out of one's hand.  And they sell eggs at their stand!  I'd still prefer to barter with someone for eggs, but this'll do.

Since it took longer than usual to get the berries, I didn't have time to make the batch of seedless raspberry jam I'd intended to make before I had to leave for work.  So I got out the food mill and ran the berries through until I got 4 cups of raspberry juice and puree and let the kids eat what was left of the berries, which wasn't much.  The puree was put in the fridge until I got home from work last night.  At 10 pm I made 8+ cups of seedless raspberry jelly following the Certo recipe.  I'm still using up all my stores of Certo in my effort to switch from liquid to powdered pectin.

What's that Smell?

Every joke about kimchi smelling bad while it ferments is absolutely....true.  We'd be sitting at the desk in the kitchen and, all of the sudden, a bit of foul air would waft over and we'd think, "Ugh!  What IS that?"  And then we'd realize it was the kimchi.  I can totally understand why traditionally it was fermented in the ground, far away from the house.  But while it smells bad, it tastes great!  (Provided you like that sort of thing.)

The recipe had said it would be ready in 3-6 days, but it also said it should be kept at 68 degrees the whole time.  That just wasn't possible in our house, so I figured it was a good bet that it'd be done by 3 days.  I tasted it this morning and it was perfect.  Even a little teeny bit crunchy.  I washed off the jar, since a lot of the brine had flowed out during the fermentation, put the lid on and tucked it in the fridge. Now I can have it whenever I want!

How Did You Make Vegetables Taste So Good?

Tonight, I made ratatouille.  It was fabulous.

My husband felt the need to re-enact the facial expressions of the restaurant critic in Ratatouille, and when that first bite went into his mouth, he legitimately made that happy face.  It was that good.

Overwhelmed by the veggies in the farm share, I used 2 summer squash, 2 zucchini, 3 eggplants, 3 onions, and all the plum tomatoes plus two from my garden to make it.  I followed Julia Child's recipe with only a few modifications:  leaving out the green peppers (used up in the pepper relish), frying the eggplant but not the squashes, and adding a can of tomatoes in thick puree because I needed more tomatoes.  I even laid out the veggies one by one, like in the movie.  This is one of those times when the vegetable dish looks as good as it tastes.

Everyone who ate it had 2 helpings, and that includes my parents and the 10 year old.