Just the Aftermath

We don't entertain as often as we would like to. Probably because it involves cleaning the house, and my credentials in that department are really nothing to brag about. But it was obligatory to prepare spaghetti alla carbonara with the guanciale I made from those freebie hog jowls. And I couldn't do that without inviting the farming couple who donated them. If you're going to clean the house for one couple, I figured, why not invite a few? So two other gardening couples were included as well, including Kelly and Meg of Future House Farm.

Spaghetti alla carbonara waits for no man; you serve it the instant it's ready. So we didn't pause for a picture - we ate. And then the rest of the evening was so filled with gardening, farming, and food talk that we never got out the camera. We talked about local producers of pastured meats and dairy, how to transplant blueberry bushes, the best way to control mint's exuberant growth in a container, organic certification and its value - or lack of value - for small-scale farmers selling to a local market, the abomination of eggs from battery hens, wwoofing, the nitrogen content of human urine and its use for gardeners, the current scarcity of real butchering skills, coq au vin and the flavor merits of roosters or old laying hens, the advantages of vermicomposting over regular composting for those in very small spaces, various local vendors of premises-made ice cream, raw milk ice cream, various cane berries and how to tell when blueberries and wineberries are truly ripe, the necessity of bird netting when growing blueberries, how much we'd pay for our meal if it were served to us in a restaurant, Oprah Winfrey having Michael Pollan on her show, and all the phone calls our farming friends are suddenly getting about their pastured eggs and meat. My kind of conversation.

It was a kick to have such a local meal in January. We ate our own eggs and garlic, plus the home cured guanciale in the carbonara, incredibly awesome fresh salad greens from a local farm, a shallot from the same farm in the vinaigrette, and lemon balm from our own backyard to finish out the meal with a simple herbal tissane. I've prepared carbonara any number of times with American style bacon, which is the best most of us can usually do with that recipe. Guanciale, which is the authentic ingredient, adds a distinctively different taste to this dish. It was sweeter than bacon, and meatier, yet it didn't dominate the other ingredients to the degree that bacon does. This is counter-intuitive to me, since the guanciale is drier and much more concentrated than bacon. I honestly think I prefer the guanciale version. I also used (my version of) Kathy Harrison's "instant" fruit crisp topping for our dessert. (Note to self: make another batch of that soon.) The peaches and blackberries in the crisp were admittedly frozen and store bought, but at least organic, as was the vanilla ice cream.

I ate too much. I don't think I was entirely alone in this. That table was grazed. In a way that would delight the heart of any cook. It's been a while since I overindulged like that. I just couldn't help myself. I may have to skip a couple meals today, just to give my system a rest. But it was a great time.

That picture up there? All that was left of a batch of carbonara made with two full pounds of dried spaghetti, snapped during clean up.

Nature as Artist

Chilly morning: 14 F/-10 C. Finally remembered to take a picture of the frosted panel of glass covering the cold frame. It changes everytime it thaws and then freezes again overnight. Variations on the same theme each time. I couldn't paint this well if I tried. It looks like growing plants to me. Do you think nature's trying to tell me something?


The spinach is doing remarkably well under there. (Click the images to biggify, if you wish.)

On Meal Planning with a Garden

I've been thinking lately about the ways that producing our own food has changed our eating and cooking habits. Although fresh foods are somewhat scarce for us right now, in the depths of winter, in some ways I have more freedom to choose what I feel like cooking. When the garden has passed its peak output for the year, and much of what it produced has either been eaten or preserved, the pressure eases off. Oh, there are still things out there to harvest; parsnips and a few hardy plants in the cold frame. But all these things can hang out for a while. They don't present themselves with the same urgency as summer crops, which will rot, bolt, turn tough or bitter, get eaten by varmints, or simply overwhelm through sheer numbers if not harvested promptly.

What arrives in fall and stays through early spring is a measure of free choice in what I cook and what we eat. Sure, there are the harvested pumpkins, and squash, and potatoes to use up, but they too give me more latitude than summer's bounty. All summer long and into early fall I cook and preserve food in a race to keep up with what's coming in. That comes about from - and requires - a change in the way I think about cooking, and this was no small thing for me.

See, I trained as a chef. After mastering the fundamentals, we were taught to approach cooking as a creative challenge and as an expression of "personality." It was about sexing up a chicken breast to make it seem less trite, or assembling flavors in novel ways to tickle a jaded palate. We weren't taught to think about seasonality or regionality very much, unless it was something that could be translated into marketing text on a menu. And yes, we were very much taught to look at menus as marketing tools. Back then, the concept of local food was nowhere near the surface of national consciousness; it had only a small novelty value to a few menu-scrutinizing gourmands. Food miles never entered the discussion of my culinary training - not once.

That way of thinking took hold strongly in me. I've lived in areas where high quality ingredients were available to me at any time, irrespective of food miles or season. For years just about any exotic ingredient you could imagine was at my fingertips, ready tools at the service of my artistic vision in the kitchen. When thinking about meal preparation, it was routine for me to thumb idly through a cookbook, looking for a recipe that caught my fancy. Or I might simply sit back and ask myself what I felt like eating that night, and then proceed to acquire the necessary ingredients from the store. This was a deeply ingrained habit of thought, and it's one that runs counter to the realities of a food garden. This meant that when I gardened back then, I was a dabbler, and the food I produced myself was always adjunct and secondary to the "real" source of food - stores and farmers' markets. If I didn't feel like eating what was ripe in my own garden, I didn't. And I did no preserving in those days. I'm ashamed to say that (while some of it got eaten and some given away) too much of that homegrown food simply went to waste.

When I became more serious about producing my own food and frugality in general, the harvests soon collided with my habits of thought around cooking. It was no longer about what I felt like cooking; wasting home grown food was no longer acceptable. The game had changed, and the challenges were now based in real life and not the creative life of a "culinary artist." It took a while, but I came to consider the garden and my pantry my primary sources of food. Purchased food, from any source, is now secondary. The differences are significant. I now understand the value in single-ingredient-themed cookbooks. When you're getting upwards of 25 eggs per week, or have just harvested 100 pounds of potatoes, cookbooks devoted entirely to egg or potato dishes seem like a really good idea. I used to find such cookbooks boring. Not any more.

Now meal preparation begins with an assessment of what needs using up, whatever the season. That's not to say my cooking is a constant state of triage in which I find ways to salvage food that's beginning to go off. No, I'm talking about staying ahead of the curve and eating or storing foods at their peak. I still have plenty of range for creative expression in my cooking. But now I start with the given of the foods we have, and I take pleasure in finding interesting things to do with these high-quality building blocks. I still use cookbooks, but I'm much more likely than previously to substitute ingredients based on what we have.

Even in winter, the food put up in canning jars, the freezer, or simply hanging out in cool storage needs to be tracked and eaten. Those foods have a shelf life like any other (natural) food. Even if they aren't about to go off, I need to know what I have on hand in order to plan the next year's garden crops and how they will be eaten or preserved. We got almost no tomatoes in 2009, so this year I'll try to put up two years' worth of sauce, just in case we get hit with blight again. On the other hand, we made enough jam to last us a couple of years. So we'll use up the fruit we produce in other ways.

Another difference is that for most of the year we eat fresher, more nutritionally dense food, and we eat in the seasonal sequence of produce gluts. During the winter, we eat food that was processed (by me, at home) at optimal nutrition and freshness. I'm working on making fresh foods more available in the cold months through season extension with cold frames too.

Here are a few ingredient-themed cookbooks I've found useful in helping me cook from both the garden and preserved or stored foods.

Simply in Season
The Compleat Squash
The Bean Bible
The Good Egg
One Potato, Two Potato


If you can recommend any other cookbooks that help use up garden gluts or commonly stored foods, please let me know in the comments.

On Perennials

When we began gardening with the aim of supplying a significant portion of our own food, something became apparent very quickly. Gardening is a lot of work, and the workload is not evenly distributed through the year. The most physically demanding and the most time-critical tasks must be done in the spring - especially when you are breaking ground for a new garden bed. It also becomes obvious that the majority of plants that people add to their gardens only give returns for a very short time. Most are annuals; a few are biennials that can be coaxed to actually yield in two calendar years. The perennials though - the perennials are golden treasures. Who wouldn't want to get many years of harvest for the effort of planting once?

Obviously, the nature of perennials is to be planted once and then harvested for many years. This is a good return on the gardener's investment of labor. Perennials range from fruit and nut trees, to flowers, to culinary and medicinal herbs, to sundry types of berries, and also include a few vegetables. I see some perennials as a sort of "natural" season extension. Because perennials store a lot of their energy in root systems, some of them are among the first plants to emerge in the spring, without the help of cold frames or hoop houses. The downsides to perennials include that many are purchased as rootstock or seedlings, and these can be quite a bit more expensive than seeds for annual garden plants, that most do not give yields immediately, and that you must be more deliberative in choosing a site for them, since they will remain there for many years. Granted, fruit and nut trees (as well as berries) take up quite a bit more space than a small patch of lettuce. They also create shade as they grow. But there are plenty of perennial food plants with small footprints on the ground. Grapes and other vines, for instance, take well to trellising and can occupy very little horizontal space if given nutrient-dense soil to grow in. Though most nut trees become very large as they reach maturity, hazelnuts and filberts (and hybrids of these two species) remain small enough for a pair to fit on a subacre lot without shading most of the property.

For the space devoted to a dwarf pear or dwarf apple tree, you could expect to harvest one hundred pounds of fruit in a good year, once the tree is mature. Permaculture also includes many techniques for maximizing the production of useful plants under and around fruit and nut trees.

On the balance the benefits seemed to us to outweigh the downsides. In 2008 and 2009 we planted many types of perennials on our property, and we'll put in a few more this year. Below I've listed the perennials we either inherited with the property, have already put in, or plan to put in this year.

Trees and shrubs

• Cherry - standard may bear for 15-20 years, dwarf varieties probably less, best to have two types for pollination
• Pear - reaches full bearing capacity in 8-10 years, may bear for 50-75 years, best to have two types for pollination
• Fig - will be container grown in my zone (6a) and kept in unheated garage during winter, should bear for 15-20 years, new trees can be grown from cuttings
  
• Lemon - will be container grown in my zone and kept indoors during winter, susceptible to scale and other citrus diseases
• Lime - container grown, 3-year-old plant has not yet borne, kept indoors during winter, susceptible to scale and other citrus diseases
• Apple - consider a very late season apple if yellow jackets on groundfalls are a concern, dwarf varieties may bear for 30 years, standard for 50-100 years
  
• Hazelbert - (hazelnut/filbert cross) most growth in first three years is in root system, 8 years to maximum production, can bear for 30-50 years
  
• Black Currant - best to have two types for pollination, can tolerate significant but not total shade, produces best fruit in full sun, bears for 10-20 years
  
• Elderberry - two types needed for good pollination, (eventually) grows large enough for a privacy screen, reaches full bearing capacity in 3-4 years
  

Herbs

• Various thymes
• Various sages
• Chives
• Chinese chives
• Oregano - can be invasive, but can also be controlled by pruning or grown in containers
  
• Lemon balm - both culinary and medicinal, can be invasive, but can also be controlled by timely pruning, important nectar source for honey bees
  
• Various comfreys - multi-purpose, grows exuberantly but spreads only a certain amount unless roots are disturbed
  
• Echinacea - medicinal, grows slowly, can be divided every three years
  
• Spearmint - culinary, extremely invasive, best planted in a container
• Anise hyssop - lovely sweet taste, pretty blooms are a favorite of the honey bee
• Yarrow - multi-purpose, fast growing and spreads indefinitely - somewhat invasive
  

Vegetables

• Ramps - onion relative, very shade tolerant, emerges very early, propagate by seed or division
  
• Asparagus - needs 2-3 years to reach maximum production, can produce for up to 20 years, heavy feeder needing good soil
  
• Ostrich ferns - emerge very early as edible fiddleheads, tolerant of significant shade
  
• Jerusalem artichoke - edible tubers harvested fall/winter, spreads easily, difficult to eradicate once established, late season food source for bees
  

Cane and vine fruits

• wineberries - wild volunteers in our area, appearance/flavor resembling raspberries, lovely sweet-tart taste, plants are of no interest to Japanese beetles
  
• raspberries - purchased rootstock will bear by the 2nd year at latest, reaches full bearing capacity in 3-4 years, may bear for 10 years
• blueberries - can bear lightly in "1st" year if 3-year-old plants are used, pinching off blossoms in first few years helps the plant grow larger sooner, reaches full bearing capacity in 8 years, may bear for 50+ years
• blackberries - purchased rootstock will bear by the 2nd year at latest, reaches full bearing capacity in 3-4 years, may bear for 25 years
  
• grapes - purchased rootstock may bear in 2nd or 3rd year, may bear for 50 years

I have listed here only the perennials that we already have on our property or will plant this year. There are many other perennials to choose among, especially if you live in a warmer zone than I do. We are right on the line of feasibility for peach trees. Just a few miles north of here, and there's no chance of a peach harvest without the protection of a good microclimate. In our area peaches succeed in some years and are wiped out by frost in others. We like peaches, but not those odds, so peach trees were off our list.

Many reseeding or "self-sowing" annuals function like perennial plants in some ways. These plants grow, reproduce, and die every year, but their offspring grow in the same place without human intervention. Consider this sub-set of annual plants if you can't find a true perennial for the purpose you desire.

Much of the information listed above comes from my own observation. I've also drawn on charts in Edible Forest Gardensby Dave Jacke, a dense but invaluable reference book on perennial plants of use in permaculture design.

Guanciale Report: Awesome!

After a lovely Saturday marked by a January thaw, and filled with local foods bought at an on-farm market, seed swapping with other gardeners, and the chance to further our acquaintance with Kelly & Meg of Future House Farm, Sunday dawned grey and forbidding. A freezing drizzle soon set in. An indoor sort of day. I decided it was time to check on the guanciale ("gwan-CHA-lay").

This project started back just before Thanksgiving, and I was due to check on its progress earlier this month. For a variety of reasons, I didn't get around to it until yesterday. The five weeks of air-curing left the pork jowls quite stiff. The apple-wood-smoked jowl had a lovely light smoke aroma, and the unsmoked one still barely any scent at all. Authentic guanciale is only cured, not smoked, so the smoked jowl probably shouldn't be called guanciale at all. What can I say? I like smoked foods, and I've got that handy homemade garbage can smoker. I couldn't resist.


I brought both jowls inside and weighed them. Unfortunately I didn't weigh the raw jowls before starting the curing experiment, but the finished pieces weighed in together at 3 lbs, 2.4 oz. Then I sliced off a few thin pieces from the real guanciale. The texture was noticeably different from any sort of bacon I've ever handled. The slice itself was quite stiff, not floppy and flexible like a slice of normal bacon would be, even though it was easy enough to cut the slice with a sharp knife. These slices released plenty of fat as they cooked in a skillet. They took less time to cook than bacon would, probably because they contained a lot less moisture than conventional bacon.

The flavor of these slices was intense! Extremely meaty and quite salty is how I would describe it, though the sweetness of the sugar in the curing mix was also there in the profile. The flavors of the thyme, black pepper, and juniper berry added to the curing mix were not very pronounced. Having sampled the real guanciale, we next tried the smoked jowl. It too was much more intensely flavored than any bacon we'd ever tried, but the smokiness really took it to another level. I think the amount of smoke on this jowl was just about perfect, neither overpowering nor faint. We liked them both. But I think if we're honest, we liked the smoky one better. Guanciale affumicato, perhaps?

Because we found both samples quite salty, I brushed the excess salt and sugar off of both jowls before storing them in the refrigerator, though the salt content is likely already set. These cured meats are probably not going to be eaten straight up, the way we sampled them, but more likely mixed into sauces, pastas and other dishes. In those contexts, the saltiness probably won't be an issue since other ingredients will balance the salt. In the future though, I might let the jowls air cure for a week and then brush off the excess salt to limit the saltiness in the finished guanciale.


I didn't use any nitrites in the curing mix, only salt, a little sugar, and herbs and spices. Nitrites are usually added to preserve a nice rosy pink color in cured meats. We found that the meat in the unsmoked guanciale was quite pink anyway. The smoked one has more of a brownish tinge, but looking at this photo (smoked jowl on the right) I suspect the center of the smoked one is going to look more pink and less brown. In any case, I don't care enough about the color to add a potentially unhealthy chemical to my curing mix.

This experiment was exceptionally easy to carry out. It took me about the same amount of time to go pick up the jowls and come home with them as it did for me to complete the necessary hands-on work of trimming out the jowls, mixing and applying the curing mix, smoking one of them, and then hanging the jowls to air dry. Of course, the timing was critical. The air drying stage of the curing process wouldn't work without the cold temperatures of winter. But I am very pleased with how this initial attempt at home curing went. I didn't even have a book to consult, just used what resources I could find online.

We're going to try to corral a few friends for a dinner of spaghetti alla carbonara, made with our own eggs and garlic, this home-cured guanciale, a local "Asiago" grating cheese, and some boughten organic pasta and black pepper. A mostly local dinner in the depths of winter! If that dinner materializes, I'll let you know how it goes.

Food Production in Small Spaces: Honey Bees

I sort of threw down the gauntlet to my readers on the cusp of 2010. I'm curious to see how much food we can produce on our little property, and I invited others to find out and document how much food their backyards and back gardens, or balconies, or whatever, could produce. I'm far from an expert on this topic - maximizing food production in limited spaces. I wish I were, but I'm relatively new myself to serious attempts at feeding myself from my own property.

Still, having nudged people to play along at home, I feel somewhat obligated to offer some ideas to help out. I'm not going to do one monster length post on all the possibilities. I figured I would take the ideas one or two at a time and see if we can get conversations going about each of them. One thing that is much on my mind at the moment is the honey bee, because we're planning to start with them ourselves this year. I know this isn't for everyone, but as livestock go, honey bees are really quite special in a number of ways.

A bee hive takes up very, very little space; less space than you would need to allocate to just about any other livestock. Maybe you could keep a few quail in complete confinement in the same total area as a bee hive. But a hive's footprint on the ground is minuscule; you could put one on an apartment balcony. And if you did that, you wouldn't have to worry about mice, skunks, or bears that more rural beekeepers contend with. Bees also don't compete with humans or other livestock for the same feed. While the cost of equipment is undeniably high when starting up with bees, there are no pangs of conscience when it comes to feeding them. As far as stacking benefits (i.e. what else do they do for you other than produce food?) honey bees obviously help with the pollination of fruits and vegetables in the garden. Frequently overlooked is the soil amendment value of bee manure. Each colony can be expected to deposit 100 pounds (45 kg) of nitrogen-rich manure in a 120 foot (40 m) radius around the hive, each year. Over the years, that adds up to a lot of free organic nitrogen, a critical plant nutrient. Free fertilizer I don't have to shovel!! Bees are also very different from most other livestock in that they do not need daily tending. You can take a vacation away from home (provided you time it right) without getting a sitter for your bees. That's simply not true with most animals. Bees take care of themselves pretty well.

Additionally, there's no need to slaughter your bees in order to harvest. Granted, a great many bees will die natural deaths over the course of the year. But most people can handle a dead insect or several, and a strong colony will take care of most of their own mortuary duties. Some beekeepers will kill an underperforming queen, but this is a choice that other beekeepers will argue against. So if you're not up to the task of dispatching an animal, even a sick or injured one, bees may be the livestock for you.

Now as for the harvest, one can't count on any surplus honey at all the first year, as the colony needs to establish itself and build its strength. But after that, a healthy colony can easily produce twenty pounds of extra honey that you can harvest each year. Some backyard beekeepers see 50 or even 100 pounds of honey per healthy, established hive in good years! (Does it strike any of you as interesting that 100 pounds of honey per hive per year is outstanding, while 100 pounds of manure is a given?)

I can't think of ANY other way of producing as much high-quality food in a given area while still maintaining humane conditions for livestock. Obviously, yield will depend on many variables, as it does with all types of food production. Some studies show that city bees are exposed to fewer pesticides than bees in suburban or agricultural areas. So if you're a city dweller dealing with very limited space for food production, you may want to consider beekeeping. At this time of year you have almost no time left to mull the decision if you want to start this year. But a year of reading and learning about beekeeping is an excellent plan before getting started. In many areas you can find low-cost introductory beekeeping classes through Agricultural Extension offices or local beekeeping associations.

I would only caution an aspiring beekeeper not to underestimate the initial investment costs for equipment. The start up costs for bees are very high compared to some other livestock, as the housing and equipment for bees are so particular. Chickens can be housed in any number of ways and the housing can be made from easily found scrap materials. No equipment is needed for harvesting eggs (beyond a basket if you happen to have a large flock). Unfortunately, with so many diseases prevalent among honey bees, used hive boxes are not a good idea because they can be a vector for disease. Unless you know and absolutely trust the practices of the beekeeper selling such equipment, it's usually a better route to buy or build new hive boxes.

I'll be discussing both honey bees and techniques for producing food in limited spaces quite a bit this year. Stay tuned.