Harvest Meal: Kinpira Gobo

This is the most macho harvest meal yet to grace our table. Sure, it looks like a wimpy vegetarian dish, but a lot of muscle went into the harvest and preparation.  It's kinpira gobo, which is Japanese for awesomely delicious burdock root.  I know, "kinpira gobo" sounds so much better.  Gobo is burdock in Japanese.  They've cultivated this root vegetable which is viewed only as a common weed where I live, refined it into a proper crop.  Though if you know your weed lore, you know that burdock burrs were the inspiration for velcro, so show it some respect.

I put a few Takinagawa burdock seeds into a patch of deeply amended ground early this year, watered them once or twice and then largely ignored them through our brutally hot summer.  Like the good descendants of common weeds that they are, nearly every last one of them germinated, and they thrived on neglect.  Really.  What they did can only be described as thriving.  They outgrew the elder seedling we planted nearby, almost to the point of shading it out. (I'm not worried.  The elder is a perennial, and those plants grow big in year two.)

When our first WWOOF volunteer was here, we dug up a few gobo, even though the specimens of this long season crop weren't all that big yet.  She was of partly Japanese descent, and damned if I was going to let someone who knew what to do with this plant get away without cooking it if I could help it.  She whipped up a dish of kinpira gobo with a few early dug gobo roots, plus a few carrots from the garden.  The dish was strikingly hearty and satisfying, and I resolved to master the dish myself when the roots were ready for harvest.

Gobo is reputed to be anticarcinogenic and an excellent tonic plant for the liver, and it's also supposed to make you strong.  The joke is that you don't get strong by eating gobo; you get strong from trying to prize the suckers out of the ground.  Gobo roots will grow up to a yard long if given the right soil conditions.  Euell Gibbons recommended against even attempting a frontal assault on the wild variety.  It's pointless to try to dig the root out directly.  Instead, dig as deep a hole as possible alongside the root, then pull the root into the hole and cut it as low as you can.  Like I said, our gobo was planted in extremely well worked earth, amended with a lot of compost.  And it still felt like earning my dinner to harvest these roots.  Every single time I dug for a gobo root, I left part of it in the ground.  This is fine by me as it only adds more organic matter to the soil.  Dinner and soil amendment in one go.  Yay!

Kinpira gobo ingredients: homegrown gobo in the foreground

Okay, to the recipe.  This is based on the way our volunteer prepared it, and not necessarily "authentic."  She was working within the limitations of the ingredients we had on hand, and substituting as necessary.  As usual, I don't have measurements.  The root needs some moisture to cook through, but not so much that it turns mushy.  It should retain a toothsome firmness.  Here's an ingredient list:

Gobo root - about 5"-8" of root per serving, depending on root diameter
carrots - optional
kombu (a dried seaweed) for dashi (you can substitute another seaweed or another kind of stock if you wish)
cooking oil - peanut, canola, or the like
sake (you can substitute a sweet mirin if that's what you have, but then omit the maple syrup)
soy sauce
maple syrup
bonito flakes (fine shavings from dried, fermented tuna)
sesame seeds for garnish, optional
rice to serve it over

Make a simple dashi (Japanese cooking stock) by gently simmering a 10" strip of kombu (dried seaweed) in a pan, uncovered, with about 1 cup of water for 15 minutes.  Meanwhile, fill a large bowl with water and place another empty bowl in the sink.  Hold the gobo root at one end, so that it points away from you. Using the back of a chef's knife, scrape all the skin and small feeder roots off of the root, allowing the scrapings to fall into the bowl.  Rinse the root as needed to remove all bits of the skin.  As each root is peeled, put it into the bowl of water.  This will prevent or at least slow discoloration on the root surface. Once the skin is removed, swap the bowls so that the bowl of water is in the sink.  Begin cutting off slim shards of the root with the knife, rotating the root as needed, as though you're sharpening a pencil with a penknife. Allow the shards to fall into the bowl of water.  The pieces should be less than 1/2" thick and no more than 3.5" long.  Continue cutting pieces off the root until only a small piece remains in your hand.  Cut the remaining part of the root on a cutting board, into similar sized pieces to those in the bowl.  Leave all the shards in the water until ready to cook to prevent excessive darkening.  If using carrots, cut them into pieces similar in size to the gobo.  You'll want the proportion of carrot no more than equal to the gobo. 

When the dashi has simmered for 15 minutes, heat your largest skillet over high heat for a few minutes.  Strain the dashi and drain the gobo root very well.  Add some light cooking oil to the skillet to coat it generously.  Then add the gobo to the pan.  Stir-fry the gobo for a few minutes, until the sizzling of the pan is reduced.  Add the dashi, some sake, and soy sauce to the pan.  Cover the pan loosely with a lid or a baking sheet if you don't have a matching lid.  Stir the gobo about once every minute or so, until the liquids are almost completely evaporated.  If using carrots, add them when most of the liquid has cooked off.  Taste a small piece of gobo for doneness and flavor.  Add a small amount of maple syrup with a little water or additional sake to the skillet, and a generous toss of bonito flakes.  If necessary, also add more soy sauce at this time.  Stir constantly until the liquid is again reduced almost entirely.  The gobo should have a nice golden brown color and a rich flavor.

It surprises me, but I find this dish of two vegetables plus rice to be substantial enough for a full meal.  My husband remarks on how "meaty" the gobo seems, every time I make this dish.  When I include carrots, I don't feel the need to pair it with anything but rice, though something green is also nice to have should the ambition strike me.  If you follow this sketch of a recipe, you'll probably end up with something pretty good, but you can refine it with a little practice and experience.  The dish should have plenty of flavor, with a lovely balance of earthy root, salty soy, rich ocean, and just a hint of sweetness. 

We're definitely planting this crop again next year.

Update: See my follow up post on the portion of the root that remains in the ground after harvest.

The Backyard Chicken Coop - Year 2 Modifications

In April of 2008 we added four laying hens to our wannabe homestead. It might well have been the event that changed us from wannabe homesteaders to budding homesteaders. To prepare for our new arrivals, I designed and my husband and I built a mobile pen and a mobile coop, capable of docking together. Both pen and coop were designed with the aim of making them easy for me to move each and every day by myself. This allowed our hens a fresh patch of our untreated lawn every day. It also meant that no part of our property was stripped of vegetation, overloaded with chicken manure, or hard packed into barrenness.

We tweaked our pen and coop in several ways while we had the girls last year. We added better wheels to allow for easier moving. I'm a little taller than the average woman, with only average strength for a woman. Sometimes after heavy rains moving the pen and coop took a lot of effort. After observing the pen and coop in use for the better part of a year we had other ideas for modifications that had to wait until the girls were gone. (We'd planned to slaughter them, but they ended up going to another farm with better housing for the coldest winter months.)

I thought I would use the opportunity to talk about the design of our coop and pen, and to highlight what worked well and what we have improved upon. Our design began by closely imitating this ingenious mobile coop and pen system used for a very small backyard flock. The coop was built with 2x4's and plywood, some of it pulled out of dumpsters. The footprint is 2' by 4' and about 4' tall from floor to the base of the roof. This is really taller than it needs to be, but I wouldn't go any smaller on the footprint. The 4-foot roosting bar that runs the length of the coop is long enough to hold our four fully grown hens comfortably. They seem to like to snug up together when it's chilly outside.

Keep in mind that this tiny coop with its single nesting box housed just four hens. Four two-year-old hens kept us in more than enough eggs for a family of two adults. We were able to barter some eggs, and to freeze some for the winter months. But if you want a larger backyard flock, you will likely need a larger coop as well.

Our coop has two wheels at one end, and wheelbarrow type handles at shoulder height on the other end. Inside are a couple of roosting bars and below them a little roofed nesting box. The nesting box roof is hinged and rests on struts along the side walls. It protects the nest box and the eggs from droppings and gives the girls a sense of seclusion to encourage egg-laying in that location. The hinge of the nesting box roof allows me to take it off its supports inside the coop, fold it flat, and pull it outside for cleaning.

One thing I would do differently if I were building this coop over from scratch is use 2x2's instead of 2x4's. We had free 2x4's from the dumpsters, but they make the coop quite a bit heavier than it truly needs to be. I wouldn't mind a lighter coop on many mornings. I also wouldn't build the coop quite so tall. I really didn't know what was needed for the girls before I got them, so I erred on the side of generosity. I think we could easily have shortened the coop by 8" and perhaps even by 12". Again, that would make for a lighter coop.

This spring we sealed the inside of the coop, including the roosting bars, side walls, and the nesting box lid with deck sealer. This will make the wood less absorbent and easier to clean. I also replaced most of the floor beyond the nesting box with hardware cloth. I came across this idea in Eliot Coleman's Four-Season Harvest book, when he talks about the design of his "Duckingham Palace" - his duck coop. The hardware cloth floor will allow some of the chicken poop to fall through directly onto the earth, and make the weekly cleanings go faster. But it also makes walking over chicken manure on a daily basis unavoidable.

The other modification I made was to reverse the hinges on the door that the hens use to go from coop to pen and back. Last year it was a drawbridge-type door, hinged at the top, that they walked up and down to enter and exit. But it also became another surface that they pooped on; another surface that I had to clean. And because the hinge was on the bottom of the door, it was often difficult to close because hay and other debris got stuck in that area. This was true for the access door to the nesting box as well. So we changed the door so that both of them are hinged on top. This makes it just a little more tricky to get to the eggs. I now have to open the door farther to see if there's a hen on the nest. Before I could just crack the door, peek in and leave her to it if she was occupied. There's also a little more risk that a hen in the nesting box could hop out when I open the door, but so far I'm managing.

As you can see, the roof of the coop is simply hardware cloth covered by plastic sheeting. The hardware cloth provides security from predators, and the sheeting keeps the girls mostly dry when it rains. I say mostly dry because we don't cover the gable ends of the roof with plastic. That means they have lots of good air flow, and a nice view when they're perched on their roosting bar. This ventilation is important for the girls in the summer months when it's hot out; the open gables allows them to catch cooling night breezes, and prevents the top of the coop from getting stuffy and hot during the day. The plastic sheeting also lets in almost 100% of the available daylight, which encourages egg production. Even if I'm late for my morning chores, the girls have plenty of light as soon as the sun rises. When the weather got cold last fall, I covered the whole roof overnight with a heavy sheet to protect the girls from the worst of the chill and any wind that might have come through the gable ends. They were never sick, so I guess this system sufficed for them.

Honey Bees Update

Now that we're settling down into some properly autumnal weather, with temperatures dipping below freezing overnight, I think it's finally time for an update on the honey bee experiment that began in April.  The short version of the report is: we lost one colony early, and the surviving one is understrength going into the winter.

Izhevsk, our colony of Russian honey bees, looked good all through the spring and into midsummer.  But sometime during late July they ate down just about all the honey they had stored, and have basically been limping along ever since.  They appear to still have a functioning queen.  We've seen her clearly, as she's marked with a blue dot.  No signs of supersedure cells, so the workers apparently think she's healthy and capable of performing her duty as the reproductive organ of the colony.  And yet, we've seen precious little brood since July.  Many experienced beekeepers reported starving colonies this year, apparently due to the exceptionally hot and dry summer here in the east.

There was no question of taking any harvest of honey whatsoever.  We've been feeding them sugar syrup, which I don't like to do.  But there's little doubt they'd long since have died without the help.  They have two full feeders' worth of the syrup at the moment, but if temperatures are cold enough they won't even travel within their own hive to get at the food.  Honey bees have been known to starve to death in the center of a hive, with full frames of honey mere inches away.  Right now the colony is mostly huddled into a single medium box.  That's likely not enough bees to generate sufficient heat to make it through winter.

We added a thick insulation layer of rigid foamboard to three sides of the hive, and black tarpaper to the south-facing side, in an attempt to help them along.  We cut plenty of space around their reduced entrance, so that they still have a front door landing pad. The idea is for the insulation to prevent windchill and the black paper to provide a little solar gain.  But we've also left the bottom completely open except for the built-in screen on the bottom board.  We also added a few spacers to increase airflow from the top cover.  Condensation and moisture in the colony is more of a risk than cold temperatures - at least for a strong, well provisioned colony.  Izhevsk is not strong however.   It seems almost futile to insulate the sides of a hive while leaving so much airflow, but such is the received wisdom.

It's possible the bees may survive this winter, and the milder it is, the better their odds.  I figured this first year of beekeeping would be a major learning experience, and it has been.  Experience is one of those things you get after you need it.  Sadly, the bees paid dearly for our year of learning.  If we lose Izhevsk, we'll certainly try again next year, and I believe, make fewer mistakes.  I put in quite a few perennial plants this year with a view to providing bee forage.  They'll be larger next year, and so provide more nectar to them.  In any case, we're likely to try again with an Italian colony next year.  We're not giving up on beekeeping.

So that's the report - ambiguous but definitely not rosy.  It's unlikely we'll check on them or feed them again unless we happen to get a particularly warm day before spring.  Until then, all we can do is hope the golden ladies make it.

Harvest Meal: French Peasant Soup

Tonight we'll have our first serious frost.  Temperatures forecast below freezing, so no ambiguity.  October is the month of goodbyes to all the bounty of summer.  The last vine-ripened tomato.  The last eggplant.  The last basil and parsley and tender sage.  A last flurry of harvests, and a growing appreciation for the sturdy leeks and kale that will hang on a few more weeks through the early frosts.  We draw in, rummage through the freezer for ingredients, turn our thoughts to the canning jars in the cellar, full of preserved spring and summer.

So today I gathered huge fistfuls of parsley.  They will keep for a few more days in the refrigerator.  You know this trick, don't you?  Place them in a large drinking glass full of water, cover them with a plastic bag, and secure the bag with a rubber band.  Really, they'll keep beautifully for about a week if they're cut fresh.

But I've also been longing to prepare a recipe I came across in Emelie Carles' book, A Life of Her Own.  It's not a cookbook, but a sort of memoir, from the era before memoirs were fashionable to write and trivial to read.  This book is sturdy, like the peasant woman who wrote it.  Yes, she called herself and her neighbors peasants, and used the term matter-of-factly, with neither pride nor shame.  This endeared her to me immediately.  I like the word peasant, and feel an affinity for it in the sense of being tied to the land.  I recommend the book to anyone interested in how people lived in a isolated mountain valley from the beginning to the middle of the 20th century.

In the Claree Valley, where Emilie Carles lived all her life, wild greens and herbs were available for the picking for more months out of the year than any cultivated crops.  She sketched a simple soup made with an evenhanded mixture of many of these foraged foods, plus a bit of garlic, and potato or rice.  It sounded far too good to resist.  So I also gathered all the herbs and greens I could find today.  Madame Carles stressed that the key was to balance all these green ingredients, so that no one flavor predominates in the soup.


"Wild" arugula - Though in fact it was something I planted deliberately once upon a time.  Now it simply shows up all over the property.









Dandelion - Began reappearing in the cool fall weather after a summer hiatus.







Sage - Only the tiniest leaves now meet my fussy standards.  The bigger ones have toughened up too much in the chill.












Nettles - A transplant put in before our long hot summer.  Apparently thrives on utter neglect.







Chives - Because the recipe doesn't call for any onion, and how could I resist?











Parsley - Surely the backbone of any herb and potato soup.








Thyme - Two tiny sprigs of regular, plus one tiny sprig of lemon thyme.

Oregano - Barely hanging on through the early frost.

Rosemary - So as not to overpower the other flavors, only the merest clipping from the top of one stem. (This one's potted up and sitting winter out in the living room.)










Altogether my herbs and greens came to 100 grams, or 3.5 ounces.  The parsley and chives were finely minced, the rest well diced.  I started the soup with a generous hunk of butter to saute the minced garlic.  I debated the authenticity of this fat however.  Would an Alpine peasant more likely cook with lard, or butter?  Lard seemed more likely to me, and I could have started the soup with some of my home cured lardo.  But I didn't feel inclined that way today, so butter it was.  Once the garlic had sizzled a bit, the finely minced parsley and chives went in to sizzle for a couple of minutes as well.  The rest of the greens and herbs went in along with a double handful of our potatoes, cut up onto bite size pieces. I added a good pinch of kosher salt and several twists of white pepper.

I added just barely enough water to cover, wanting to test how much flavor the ingredients would give a simple water broth.  There was always the possibility of adding some chicken stock later, if it needed a little sumpin' sumpin'.  So keeping the liquid minimal at this stage was important to preserve that option.  I let it simmer gently for 15 minutes and tasted.  The broth was very flavorful, but I still thought the chicken stock would benefit it.  I added 1 1/2 cups of that and another pinch of salt.  This is probably an unforgivable deviation from authentic French low cuisine.  But you know what?  It's really fantastic!  Green tasting, with a straightforward integrity, and yet also a complex interplay of flavors among the greens and herbs. And everything but the salt and pepper were produced right here.

This may well become a late October tradition on the homestead.

Sowing Dragon's Teeth

I'm not sure how it happened, exactly.  With one thing and another, I ended up with well over 300 cloves of garlic, from seven different varieties, to plant this year.  It's been an unusually mild fall, as our spring was unusually early and warm.  Climate change?  Perhaps.  In any case a late garlic planting.  It took me a lot longer of course to plant these 300-odd cloves than it does to get in my usual crop of around a hundred cloves.  More time for woolgathering in the garden.

I felt like Cadmus.  You know, the mythical Greek hero and founder of the city of Thebes.  He had rather a detailed history, with the usual Greek peregrinations, interferences from the gods, and a generous share of the misfortune that generally attends those mortals who attract their attentions.  Not that I felt unfortunate; not in the least.  It was a beautiful day in the garden, and the rich soil made me feel rich as well.  What resonated from Cadmus' story was the occasion of him sowing the teeth of a dragon he'd slain. The teeth then sprouted and grew into an army of bloodthirsty soldiers, who attacked one another immediately. 

Garlic cloves look somewhat like teeth.  In Russian the word used for a garlic "clove" is in fact exactly the word for tooth.  And if the fiery heat of garlic can be ascribed to any mythical creature, it seems only fitting that it belong to the dragon.  A garlic dragon.  So there I was sowing my dragon's teeth, and imagining the trim ranks of slender soldiers that would spring up in that place after the winter snows have passed.  My green soldiers will not fall violently upon one another until only five remain alive.  They will however betray their military bearing by the lances they wield.  I will disarm them all, and turn the scapes to peaceful culinary purposes.

Three hundred-odd heads of garlic next year...!  The dehydrator notwithstanding, I may have to find a market for them.

Ridiculously Cheap - A Minor Rant

Last Thursday I went to the market to pick up an order of pumpkins and kabocha squash from one of my farmers.  I've been to this woman's tiny farm on the opposite side of our county.  I know how she operates and what's important to her, though I can't recall if she bothered with organic certification or not.  I'd emailed her to ask for half a dozen pumpkins, and half a dozen smallish winter squash to replace the crops that failed for us this year.  I had purchased a single pumpkin from her two weeks prior to that, so I thought I had an idea of what to expect in terms of cost for my bulk order.

When I arrived to pick up my order, it was all put together in a large cardboard box, and the farmer showed me a little receipt with the weights and totals for the two different crops.  She wanted something like $16 - total - for the dozen orbs in the box.  At first I didn't understand, thinking that was the charge for either the pumpkins or the kabocha.  But no, that was all she wanted for everything.  Thirty cents per pound, she said.  I pulled out $30 and told her she wasn't charging nearly enough money for her vegetables.  I was serious. That's about what I'd arrived expecting to pay, and I was shocked that she was asking so little for the fruits of her labor.  Of course she protested, but finally consented to take $20 for more than fifty pounds of her produce.  But only after adding a pepito pumpkin to the box.  She said it was a seed pumpkin, and then added apologetically that the flesh was not edible and that sadly, the pumpkin was a hybrid, so I couldn't save the seed.

Now I know my blog is ostensibly about frugality, and hey, I'm all for the stocking of larders with wholesome, local food purchased in season, when it should be cheapest.  October is certainly the time to stock up on winter squash if you have any storage space and didn't grow your own.  But this was ridiculous, and it has nagged at me ever since, even as I lugged my purchased bounty down into the root cellar.  I really feel this farmer should be charging more for her food.  I want her to stay in business and contribute to my foodshed more than I want to supplement my homegrown food for the lowest cost.  If she can't make a profit from her farm, she won't be around to help feed us in the future.

I suppose I should see this as a good thing, especially for those that are really struggling in this economy.  $20 for a dozen winter squash will give me the basis for at least 48 individual servings; less than 50 cents per serving.  For some people, the lower price per pound might mean the difference between kids going hungry or being fed.  But we can still afford to pay more.  I'd be happy to pay on a sliding scale for the few kinds of produce I still need to buy.  Last month I paid over $1.50 per pound for onions produced at a local farm incubator project, and was happy to do so.  So why should the squash cost so much less than the onions?  In fact, when I was in our local supermarket to buy tofu and some kosher salt the day after my farmers market purchase, I saw a whole display table of non-organic squash in the produce aisle.  You know what they were charging for winter squash?  79 cents per pound - more than 2 1/2x what the local farmer was asking.  The really big and impressive hubbards and pumpkins were going for $1/pound.

I feel like going back to the market this week and telling her about the supermarket pricing.  I don't know why this riles me so much.  Maybe it's because I know how much work it is to raise vegetable crops.  I certainly wouldn't sell my winter squash to anyone for thirty cents a pound.  It would seem downright insulting to accept that little.  I'd feel better about giving it as a gift than valuing it so cheaply.  I'm going to take that farmer a loaf of my bread the next time I have a big baking day.  It seems only fair to me.

Anyway, I'm not entirely sure where I was going with this rant.  Bottom line is, if you're worried about food security in the near term, now is an excellent time to ask a local grower about a bulk purchase of winter squash.  They are among the easiest vegetables to store.  Make sure those you buy for storage have stems intact, and don't pick them up or carry them by the stem.  Put them in a cold part of your house, (55-60F/13-16C is ideal) and use them up by spring.  For those of you concerned about long term food security without any immediate personal economic crisis looming, you might consider paying top dollar to your local farmers for what you need to get through the winter.  Food security is, after all, both personal and regional, both immediate and long term.