Preparing for the Day

Today is prep day for the High Holy Day of the year, tomorrow. Without specifically setting it as a goal, pretty much all the dishes I am responsible for will be based heavily on foods from our own garden and a turkey produced on pasture by my farming friend. I went to pick up the bird yesterday. She said we got the prize for the largest bird - a twenty-five pounder. I'd only asked for a twenty-two pounder, but we can handle twenty-five pounds. I've just settled it into its day-long brining soak with citrus peels and herbs from our garden. Tomorrow before sending my husband (the grill master) off to my aunt's house with charcoal, the grill and the bird, I'll ice down the breast with the turkey resting breast down on a bed of ice, and a bag of ice inside the cavity resting against the underside of the breast. The leaner breast meat typically cooks faster than the legs and dries out by the time the legs are fully cooked. This chilling process evens out the cooking rate, so everything is done to perfection at the same time.

Today I will harvest and clean leeks from the garden, and a large savoy cabbage. I'll also prepare the two sauces to go with one or two of our pumpkins that I'll prepare tomorrow morning according to a favorite Afghan recipe. I like giving traditional foods a non-traditional twist. I've already begun prepping some of the stuffing ingredients; the wild rice is soaking and the fresh bread cubes have been drying in a mostly cold oven since Monday. The kitchen will be messy and occupied most of the day. I'll get the au jus gravy done today with the extra necks my friend sold me with the turkey. Since we grill the bird, we don't get any pan drippings on which to build a gravy, so this extra step is necessary. But grilling is the way we go since it not only produces such a delicious, moist bird, but it also frees up the oven for all the other dishes that need to be made at the same time. And yes, we checked to see if a 25-pound turkey fits on our Weber grill. It does.

Tomorrow we'll sit down to a table with twenty-one of my kith and kin. Aunts, uncles, cousins, parents, in-laws, and now the small children of my cousins. I come from a family of excellent cooks and appetites to match. The spread will be impressive. After the mid-afternoon meal, and kitchen cleanup, many of us will bring out our bags of change and play poker. Others will chat or nap on the couch. Someone will keep the woodstove going all afternoon into the evening. We have much to be thankful for this year.

I might snap a picture of the bird on the grill to post about later on, or perhaps a shot of all the dishes lined up. But I don't expect to post anything tomorrow. To all of my American readers, I wish you a gloriously abundant Thanksgiving feast. To those of you visiting from farther away, I wish you the essence of the season: a sense of deeply knit community, food a'plenty to share, and a spirit of gratitude for all that is good in your lives. 8E9CWBS3MD88

Snippets

Some blog-able topics which have been on my mind lately, but that don't seem to merit individual blog posts...

Our new Red Star hens have finally, finally begun laying, or at least one out of four of them has. We bought them as "ready-to-lay" pullets in early October. They should have been laying by mid-October at the latest. Yet we didn't get a single egg for more than a month. Saturday we saw our first egg. The lack of eggs was mystifying since the temperatures here have been very mild for the time of year, and I even took to lighting them starting early in the morning. Here's hoping that single egg heralds a flood of eggy goodness.

We've taken the plunge and decided to go forward with a passive solar heating system. This will cost a lot of money up front, but we'll get roughly half of it back in rebates and tax deductions at both the state and federal level. Not to mention, the price of oil will no longer affect our ability to heat our home. (But yes, in case you're wondering, I'm still deeply conflicted about EROEI, the lifespan of this system, and this sort of spending when we don't know whether or not my husband will have a job after the new year. I just don't see any better options for us.) Work on this project should begin next month. Meanwhile, we've extended the radiant heating system from just the two rooms of the "new addition" on our house (it was already built when we bought it) to the kitchen, which is the central room of the house. These are the only three rooms that will be heated regularly (the last two winters we got by with just two), and we now have programmable thermostats to control each zone of the heating system. So we're fine tuning the heating program to keep the house just warm enough for comfort. My husband has argued me up to a daytime set point of 65 F. After the passive solar is done and inspected for heating, we may look into expanding it to provide for our "domestic hot water" needs - in other words, hot water from the tap.

Our cat is not doing well. I reported in February that she'd been diagnosed with hyperthyroidism. Unfortunately, she also has kidney failure, and has recently developed cancer too. Up until this week though everything looked good. She had a spring in her step and still loved to spend the day outdoors. Given her multiple conditions, the prognosis from the vet, and her age (14.5 years), we decided not to try any costly medical interventions. While her hyperthyroidism is easy to control, it looks to me like either the kidney failure or the cancer is catching up with her now. My gut tells me she doesn't have any better days ahead of her. Having put off the euthanasia decision on my last cat for too long, I'm motivated to not allow her to decline too far before making that difficult call. We'll use a vet that makes house visits when the time comes.

My husband has been working on turning a corner of our basement into a root cellar. Much of the work is already done, but the door is the tricky part. With an old farmhouse, the basement is of course very low, and there's no way we're going to find a door to fit the doorway at a hardware store, much less a pre-hung door. And the space needs to be fairly well sealed in order to keep the temperature low inside. This is especially true since the basement is much warmer overall since having the house air sealed and the insulation improved. We need a good barrier between the root cellar and the rest of the basement. I'm hoping this gets done in time to take some of the cabbages still out in the garden.

Our other fall project is the conversion of a corner of our shed into winter housing for the hens. Their mobile coop and pen provide too little protection from winter wind and really cold temperatures. The unheated shed will at least get them out of snow and freezing winds which could cause frostbite on their combs. We have electricity in the shed, so we can light them in the darkest days, though I plan to throw open the shed doors whenever feasible to give them some natural light too. Unfortunately, the doors face almost due north, so there will be precious little full sun for the girls over the winter. I'll be trying an experiment with deep bedding in the shed, which should allow me to never clean out their stall until they go back to rotational grazing in early spring. As a bonus, the 12" deep bedding that they're on all winter will be excellent material for lasagna mulching, which will come in quite handy for the permaculture guild I'd like to establish around a couple of our fruit trees next year. More details on this in a future post.

I've arranged to offer an introductory homesteading class next spring. I'll be taking a break from my usual cooking classes and trying something new instead. I'm nervous but excited; I feel under-qualified and I worry about taking on so much during one of the busiest times of year. No idea whether anyone will enroll or not, but I feel compelled to try. I'm reminding myself frequently that it doesn't take a certified expert in a subject to teach people things they didn't know before. I fully expect to learn from my students (if I get any) as well as teach them.

I've been supplementing the girls' feed with acorns every other day or so. They love them. I think they're starting to develop a Pavlovian response to the sound of me crushing the acorns in a burlap bag. They make their excited little anticipatory sounds as I go through the acorns just before tossing them into the pen to make sure each one is crushed and open enough for their beaks to get at the good stuff. The acorn meats are bright yellow and surprisingly soft; softer even than a fresh chestnut. The girls devour them eagerly. I find it incredibly satisfying to feed them something I got for free in my backyard. The acorn drop is over, but I really enjoyed collecting the nuts in October and early November. It was like a six-week long Easter egg hunt, and a race with the squirrels, who still got plenty. I may have to keep an eye open for other nearby oak trees next year.

We attended a class for beginning beekeepers and a meeting of our local beekeeper's association. I got the distinct impression that we were regarded as "fresh meat" at that meeting. The average age in the room was definitely over 60, and it was nearly all men. Not only are these people experts, but they want new beekeepers in this area. And the meetings take place pretty close to our home. It looks like we're going to go ahead with adding bees to the homestead next year. It's a vast subject to learn about, and there are so many things that can go wrong with bees. But I'm excited to try nonetheless.

-All the news that's fit to print. What's new with you?

Tiny Tip: Test Your Pressure Canner

Did you know that if you live in the US and use a pressure canner, you can probably have the accuracy of the pressure gauge tested for free? Neither did I until I read Sharon Astyk's latest work, Independence Days: A Guide to Sustainable Food Storage & Preservation. Like her earlier works, this one is excellent and contains tons of useful information for those who preserve their own foods. That's how I found out there's another way I can make good use of the state taxes we pay. The Cooperative Extension offices in most counties of the US will have someone on staff with the equipment and know-how to test a pressure canner. And they'll do this for you for free.

I got my pressure canners for free through craigslist, and they are obviously old and well used. Though I replaced some of the rubber parts that came with the canners, I had no way of testing how accurate the pressure gauges were for myself. Having now had them tested, I know that both of them read a little high around the 10 and 15 pound mark. That means I've been canning my foods at pressures that are slightly lower than recommended.

The woman who tested the canner gauges for me said that if I followed all other canning instructions to the T, I'm probably fine eating those foods. My gauges were only off by one half to one pound. (I know that with almost every canning batch I've had trouble not overshooting the recommended pressure at some point during the canning process anyway.) She said it's fine to keep using the pressure canners so long as I correct for the slightly faulty readings on my gauges.

It's good to know this about my pressure canners. If you use a pressure canner to store food for your family, I recommend you take advantage of this free testing service. After all, there's no point in preserving your own food if you can't be confident you can do so safely. With the gardening season mostly done for the year, this would be a good time have the testing done. Just so you know, you probably only need to take the lid to the Extension office, not the entire canner. But check with the person who does the testing to make sure.

More tiny tips.

Take Away Lessons From Our Energy Audit

We had contractors in the house in late October to work on air sealing our 130-year-old home. (For those of you in Europe, any home this old is considered venerable in the US.) We'd had our home evaluated for energy efficiency earlier this year, so this was the follow-on work to improve our "envelope" as they say in the business. We were pleasantly surprised to find that as old as our home is, the efficiency was no worse than the average new construction home. Still, there was room for improvement.

That's a picture of a blower door up above. We latched the other exterior doors and sealed all the windows in our home. Then this was installed in our front door and the fan shown there was turned on. It's a powerful fan, and it depressurized our entire house. Then the workers went around checking for any points of air infiltration from outside, and did their best to seal them up. (I'd done some work on this myself since the initial energy audit.)

Of course, these improvements cost money, and not a trivial amount. For what we spent on energy efficiency improvements, we could have made a couple mortgage payments. We see this as a necessary precondition for installing any form of sustainable energy heating system though. Where we live, we heat our home fairly steadily from mid-November to mid-March, with an extra two months of at least occasional heating. If we're to spend money on passive solar heating, or even if we stay with oil heating as long as that's feasible, it only makes sense to make our home as efficient as possible. It's simply the right thing to do, and we can afford it at the moment.

I know a lot of people out there can't even contemplate spending a few thousand dollars on energy efficiency, no matter how much sense it makes. I've posted recently on cheap insulating strategies, and I urge you to check them out if you haven't already. There are tips there for both renters and homeowners. But I picked up a couple extra tips on air sealing from the contractors that I want to share.

Install safety guards in all electrical outlets on exterior walls. You know those little plastic plugs that prevent toddlers from sticking their fingers in sockets and electrocuting themselves? Put them to good use even after your kids or grandkids are grown. Electrical outlets are very often heat leaks because they reside in gaps in the insulation of your walls. The plastic guards can significantly reduce the infiltration of cold air through these gaps.

Look to the cobwebs. Maybe you're such a tidy housekeeper that there are no cobwebs in your home. We've got 'em in spades. Spiders spin their webs where there is airflow. So when you see cobwebs near windows or doors, it's a good indication that there's an air gap somewhere very close by. Cracks in plaster walls are another major culprit.

Check the trim work around all windows and doors. Very small gaps between the wall and the trim allow for an amazing amount of heat transfer. This can be true even if you have modern double- or triple-paned windows. Silicone caulking is your friend. Use it to seal those gaps, even if they look too small to be significant. Believe me, they are significant. Silicone caulking is cheap and simple enough to use that anyone can learn to do it. Get a good scraping tool for the excess caulk to make it look neat and tidy. After a little practice you'll do very nearly as well as the professionals.

With a blower door installed, every air gap in the house becomes evident. If paying a professional to install insulation or air seal your house is out of the question, you might want to schedule an energy audit that includes a blower door anyway. Many utility companies apparently offer free energy audits to their customers, or some portion of their customer base that qualifies based on income. Ours does not. Even if you have to pay for an audit, it will likely cost a small fraction of what the air sealing and insulation work would, perhaps a few hundred dollars.

The blower door will show you exactly where the air gaps are in your house. Some of them you may not be able to address with silicone caulking and a little ingenuity. It may take professional expertise and/or tools. But if you're better set up than we were to mark the air gaps that are evident when the blower door is in place and operating, you could then go about remedying many of them yourself after the audit is finished. I recommend you use brightly colored sticky notes to mark the location of air leaks. Trying to write down all the locations of leaks while the blower door was in place didn't work for us. There were too many to list, and we sometimes weren't sure afterwards what was meant by our own notes. If you take the time before the energy audit happens to work on sealing the obvious visible gaps, you'll be ahead of the game, with fewer air leaks to record during the brief time the blower door is running.

Adding insulation to an attic is also work that can be done by non-professionals. If you've got a weekend and the motivation to do so, this is a job you can do for yourself. Check out a book from the library for some basic tips if you feel you need them.

If your furnace resides in an otherwise unheated, unfinished basement, you might want to put some insulation on the walls around the furnace. Unfinished basements are very common in our part of the country, and furnaces tend to be situated out of the way and right up against a wall. The basement walls in our house are stone in the oldest part of the house, and that stone obviously conducts heat away from the furnace and into the earth. Stopping that constant draining of heat away from the furnace makes a big difference in how often it must fire up and consume fuel.

The good news after all of the expense and work we put into these efficiency improvements is that our home is noticeably warmer and the temperature steadier. We can tell that the house is losing less heat overnight, and it warms up faster when we put the heat on in the morning. It's nice to have such a noticeable and pleasing improvement for the money spent. We now feel ready to seriously consider alternative heating for our old home. More on that to come soonish.

Harvest Meal: Lamb Tagine with Winter Squash

It's a rare meal these days that doesn't include something either homegrown or something I made from scratch, often with local ingredients. Still, not every meal has a critical mass of ingredients to warrant "harvest meal" status. Last night's dinner did though.

I made a tagine, my first ever, with a variety of homegrown, homemade, and local ingredients, plus a few that were none of those things. The lamb was pasture raised and very local, raised by a friend in fact. The cuts that had remained the longest in our freezer were the neck bones and the shanks - two cuts which happen to be traditional for Moroccan tagines. The tagine, after all, has all the hallmarks of peasant cuisine: slow cooking in one pot, vegetables augmenting meat, a fair amount of liquid, and it's traditionally served with couscous or flatbread. The nobles, we must suppose, got the leg and the rack.

I posted last year about making lamb stock from bones given to me by my lamb-raising friend. She gave me some more this summer, so I now have a nice quantity of canned lamb broth from a sustainable, local source. I used only about a pint of this to make the tagine. As stews go, tagines are light on the liquids.

Into the tagine pot (really a dutch oven) also went a tiny bit of our homegrown garlic, a very large leek from the garden, the last of our "summer" carrots, a little of the parsley that is still holding on out there, and one of the stella blue Hokkaido squashes we grew this year. This was our first taste of these winter squash, and my husband liked it. Stringy, fibrous winter squash gives him the squicks, and I had purposely planted this squash variety for its reported "fiberless" qualities. So it made me smile when he remarked on how acceptable it was to him.

Purchased ingredients in the tagine included some slivered fresh ginger, half a can of tomatoes, prunes, golden raisins (or "sultanas" for those of you visiting from overseas), cinnamon, black pepper, kosher salt, and a bare drizzle of olive oil. I didn't really follow a recipe, so I can't provide you with one. But I started it on the stovetop, giving the meat a very light searing before adding most of the other ingredients. Once the liquid (just enough to cover) was in and simmering, the tightly covered pot went into a very low oven (275 F/135 C) and stayed there for several hours, only getting pulled out to add a few ingredients, and to check the flavor. The squash and the raisins went in only for the last hour or so of cooking, and I added just enough extra broth at that point to again cover the ingredients. One of the shank bones came clear out of the meat when I gently stirred things about. When it was done I added more minced parsley and served it over some Israeli couscous cooked up with local shallots. The slow cooked cuts of lamb were incredibly tender. And the gelatin naturally present in the shanks gave the tagine a slight thickness. Very satisfying on a chill evening when the dark draws in early.

In retrospect, we might have preferred to serve the tagine over some homegrown mashed potatoes. That wouldn't be authentic, but neither was the Israeli couscous, and my husband didn't think that suited the tagine. It would have been nice too to try a little corriander and cardamom in the tagine, or lemon juice spritzed over each serving, but the flavor was surprisingly good with just the flavoring ingredients listed. Lemons are on our list of things to start growing next year (in a container), so maybe at some point I'll be able to include homegrown lemon in my dishes!

I like the combination of vegetables with dried fruit and a meaty broth. I could easily see making a tagine without any cut of meat at all. There are a ton of different tagine recipes out there, with a huge variety of vegetables. So lots of exploring to do!

Chicken Breeds

We first added a tiny flock of backyard chickens to our mini-homestead in spring of 2008. We really enjoy having them, and they've been easy to manage. I'm only a slightly-advanced-beginner chicken keeper. So I'm curious about the differences between various laying breeds. Having had only two breeds, we just don't know all that much about the range of chicken personality traits. In fact we were surprised that there were any significant differences in behavior from breed to breed. Don't know why this is so. It doesn't surprise me at all to see behavioral or personality traits differ between, say, German shepherds and Jack Russell terriers.

By chance we started with Red Star hens, switched briefly to White Marans, and are now back to Red Stars. I feel lucky to have started with the breed we did, since it seems to me now that Red Stars are ideal for our situation. We could easily have been less lucky; our feelings and decisions about keeping chickens could have turned out very differently had we started with a different breed. So I would caution anyone who has never kept chickens before, especially those with limited space and in close proximity to neighbors, to research the breed options carefully before getting your birds.

I'd like to hear from others on the traits of other breeds. First though, descriptions of what I've observed in the hens of the two breeds I "know"...

Originally uploaded by -Mandie-

Red Star - An extremely quiet breed. The only noise they make above normal, very muted, contented or mildly excited burbling noises are when they are truly alarmed by something, or when actually laying an egg. They are very docile and not highly strung, meaning they calm down quickly after an alarming event. They eat like vacuum cleaners however. Someone described them to me as the "Labrador retrievers" of the chicken world. This is accurate in my observation. However, they are also very unfussy eaters once they become accustomed to the idea that what I throw in their pen is generally a treat. They readily eat many weeds and kitchen scraps, as well as sub-par produce and many garden pest insects. This means their eggs have fantastic coloration (in the yolks) and nutrition. They are excellent layers even after two years of age. A great choice for those with little space and neighbors close by.

White Marans - A heritage dual-purpose breed. These are larger birds than the Red Stars and far more vocal. They will loudly protest captivity as soon as the sun is up (sometimes before it's even properly up), which can be problematic in the summer. They also seem to have "fits" of nervousness over nothing in particular which spreads from one bird to the next and leads to loud alarmed squawking of the entire flock which can go on for 15 minutes or more. They are fussy eaters with little interest in several common garden crops including lettuce greens and tomatoes. They did enjoy summer squash and Japanese beetles however. As is to be expected from a dual-purpose breed, they are not great layers even in their first year of laying. The eggs they do lay are absolutely gorgeous however, speaking here of the dark coloration and occasional speckling of the shells. In general, while I support heritage breeds, this one is not a great choice for those in suburban or densely populated areas as their noise could easily annoy neighbors. Also not a great choice for homesteaders or those trying to maximize home economy by supplementing purchased feed from the homestead's own resources. For those without nearby neighbors who want one breed to do two things (meat and eggs) moderately well, this breed may be of use.

Do you keep chickens? What can you say about the characteristics of the breeds you know? If you keep either Red Stars or White Marans, do your observations differ from mine?