Spring Warren's Blog, page 4
June 30, 2011
Green Beans are here!
Though I have scads, scads of cranberry, pinto, and lamar beans making me look good out in the beds by the sidewalk, I was unprepared to push aside the leaves of the green beans to find so many of the things hanging on the vine. It seemed like the last time I peered into the foliage all I saw were the little kidney shaped flowers. It has been a cold spring, after all.
Perhaps they felt the sun, finally, and shot way ahead of themselves, growing faster than beans usually do…or perhaps I felt the sun and allowed lazy days to pass by in a blur and forgot to check the green bean progress…in any case I laud the sun for either effect.
Now to cook the beans. A bit of steam, a toss in some lovely vinagrette with a bit of feta and a bouquet of spinach leaves…the first cucumber, a handful of sweet cherry tomatoes and eggs, (thank you-s to Kalliopi and the Shades) and I've got a salad worthy of dinner.
Sun, salad, summer….ahhhhh.
June 27, 2011
FAQs are posted….
There's a new page on The Quarter Acre Farm – Frequently Asked Questions – To be quick about it we're calling it FAQs on the QAF. See it on the menu?
If you don't see your question answered there, let me know. I think I've missed a few as I've taken a bit to get to them. :( I'll be faster in the future- promise!
New Author photos as well. Which, if any, should I use?
The next photos will be of Hypsipyle…her first birthday is coming up! What kind of cake do geese like? I have a feeling she wouldn't care for balloons, but she has the perfect party dress to wear!
June 23, 2011
Ah, the return home…
Back from a flurry of events which, of course, took place over the hottest days of the year so that leaving the farm was an exercise in cataloguing all the plants that I'd failed to water fully before we left…
And yet, everything lived. 
And how was the flurry of events? Wonderful! Thank you Slow Foods Sacramento for inviting me to be the keynote speaker, I had a wonderful time meeting many fantastic people, eating delicious food, and supporting Plates – a worthy endeavor indeed.
The rollerderby bout? My sweet niece scored over 80 points jamming for the Sacred City team! I was so happy to have arrived in time to see her (and I was the only person in the Roller King to be dressed in a little black dress) and watch her dive in and out of the other team's defenses to make her mark – Go Colt 45!!!
We drove up to Westerbeke ranch in Sonoma next and had a great couple of days talking books with erudite high school teachers. We also had great food there (are you starting to understand a key to my happiness?).
One more stop – Green Acres Nursery (see photos above) where Nicholas from Avid Reader sold books, Jesse "Nemo" Pruet printed book plates, and I…well I did no work at all, merely chatted with gardeners. What fun!
There's one more event to come this week – at The Book Seller in Grass Valley on Saturday at four p.m. I will be sure to water the Quarter Acre Farm well before we begin our journey into the Sierra. See you there?
June 13, 2011
Help, ask me a question!
Ask me a question, any question (well, almost any question), ask me TEN questions, so that I may put together a page of those questions on my website that is being re-vamped as we speak. Save me from having to think them up myself! Help, fellow readers, farmers, writers, please!
June 8, 2011
URBAN AG FEST!
WHAT DO BEES, QUINOA, ICE CREAM, BIBA, BISCUITS, and SPRING have in common? URBAN AG FEST!
Slow Food Sacramento presents our third annual
Common Table: Urban Ag Fest: June 18th
Tickets: This event will sell out. Visit http://3rdurbanagfest.eventbrite.com/ to purchase nonrefundable tickets. Tickets by advance sale only.
Our partner and beneficiary: Plates Café and Catering, a project of St. John' s Shelter
for Women and Children, trains formerly homeless women with culinary skills. This
event raises money for a vegetable garden at Plates to bring good, clean, fair food to all.
The Reception: This year' s Urban Ag Fest begins with an optional Reception ($25/
person) at 4 p.m. featuring Urban Farming 101: Grow Your Own Groceries. Enjoy
wine and fresh, ultra-local appetizers as you eat, sip, and learn with these experts:
Learn the healthy pleasures of backyard chickens from CLUCK
Consider the wonders of beekeeping from Sac Beekeepers Assn.
Learn how to mingle edibles in your yard from CA Victory Garden
Learn to install raised vegetable beds from Sac Yard Farmer
Find out about produce sharing and swapping from Oak Park Crop Swap
Learn to preserve what you grow from Sac Food Preservers
The Dinner: ($85/person) begins at 6 p.m. This is a white tablecloth catered dinner by
Plates Café & Catering. Chef Stuart Edgecombe and Bobbin Mulvaney, of Mulvaney' s
B& L, have teamed up to create a menu full of sunshine and America' s best summer food
traditions, featuring:
Plates starter salad with fresh, local greens
Quinoa salad with fresh local summer vegetables
Slow roasted pork with arugula
Roasted fingerling potatoes and romanesco
Housemade biscuits with local honey and creamery butter
Pies, pies, more pies with handmade vanilla ice cream
Keynote speaker: Spring Warren will regale us with lessons learned as an amateur urban
farmer when she embarked on a goal to grow 75 percent of the food she consumed for
one year in her own yard. Her book "The Quarter-Acre Farm" skillfully captures her
urban farming travails and triumphs featured in her talk.
Live Auction: Bid on food, cooking, and dining related items like:
A year's worth of Family Dinners for 2 at Mulvaney's
Pasta lessons for 8 with Pasta Dave
Drinks with Biba followed by four-course dinner for 4
Pizza lessons for 20 with Tuli's acclaimed chef
Here's the whole auction list – team up with friends for fantastic, unique opportunities
to enjoy Sacramento's finest food for a good cause.
Our sponsors: The financial support of these firms have made this event possible
Dreyer Babich Buccola Wood LLP · Jacobsen & M cElroy PC · Kenyon Yeates LLP · Kershaw, Cutter, Ratinoff LLP · M ulvaney's B& L
Read more about Plates at http://www.eatatplates.com/. Bobbin Mulvaney was
recognized by Congresswoman Matsui as one of the 1,000 points of light for her work
with Plates. http://www.stjohnsshelter.org/
June 5, 2011
RAT!
This probably goes in the category of – Things I shouldn't tell anyone about. But I'm going to anyway. Yes, this is our house, and this is our lamp, and apparently, this is our rat climbing up our lamp in our house. We were watching a movie, I was stretched out on the couch, and this not-so-little guy scaled the lamp and watched us watching him. I had enough time to get off the couch, get my camera and take a picture!
He's cute. Admit it.
Where did he come from? I think he squeezed into the house through a crack between attic and hallway. At least there was a bit of insulation inexplicably scattered on the floor by said crack several weeks ago. I think he was a little lithe pre-teen rat and then he spent two weeks hiding out chez Warren and quickly aged into an angst-ridden, ravenous, in your face adolescent rat with an acne-ridden complexion under that fur of his. That journey up the lamp – Challenge, pure challenge.
So we cut him loose, broomed him out the door and said, "Go ahead, try to make it on your own. Good luck. Don't get anyone pregnant." Just what we don't need on the farm – more lamp rats.
June 4, 2011
Join me at Urban Ag Fest!
Slow Food Sacramento presents the third annual
Common Table: Urban Ag Fest: June 18, 2011
Our annual fundraiser promotes urban agriculture in Sacramento and benefits a partner in our effort to bring good, clean, fair food to all.
Our partner and beneficiary: This year's beneficiary is Plates Café and Catering, a project of St. John's Shelter for Women and Children. Plates trains formerly homeless women to cook and cater and helps place its graduates in related employment. Slow Food Sacramento is raising money for a garden at Plates that will provide fresh vegetables to the Café and Shelter and will teach related gardening skills. Read more at http://www.eatatplates.com/ Bobbin Mulvaney was recognized by Congresswoman Matsui as one of the 1,000 points of light for her work with Plates. http://www.stjohnsshelter.org/
The Event: This year's Urban Ag Fest begins with an optional Reception ($25/person) at 4 p.m. featuring Urban Ag 101: Grow Your Own Groceries. Experienced, enthusiastic urban agronomists will demonstrate beekeeping, chicken raising, raised vegetable beds, food preservation, how to share your excess produce through Sacramento Harvest, and more. You can do it! We have paired the demonstrations with wine and fresh, ultra-local appetizers. Eat, sip, and learn with the experts.
The Dinner: ($75/person before May 15 and $85/person after May 15) begins at 6 p.m. It will be a white tablecloth affair catered dinner by Plates Café & Catering. Chef Stuart Edgecombe and Bobbin Mulvaney, of Mulvaney's B&L, have teamed up to create a menu full of sunshine and America's best summer food traditions.
Keynote speaker Spring Warren will regale us with lessons learned by an amateur urban farmer, which she captures skillfully in "The Quarter-Acre Farm: How I Kept the Patio, Lost the Lawn and Fed My Family for a Year"
Link to Spring Warren: http://www.sacbee.com/2011/05/04/3598748/quarter-acre-farm-feeds-this-davis.html#ixzz1LQdL0pLy
The evening also includes a live auction with the opportunity to bid on food, cooking, and dining related items. Bring the experts to your home, visit them at their homes, ride along on a restaurant review, enjoy the generosity and skill of the best of Sacramento's finest good food enthusiasts. Click here to view the list of auction and raffle items.
Our sponsors: The financial support of these firms have made this event possible
Dreyer Babich Buccola Wood LLP • Jacobsen & McElroy PC • Kenyon Yeates LLP • Kershaw, Cutter, Ratinoff LLP • Mulvaney's B&L
Tickets are limited. This event will sell out. All proceeds benefit the garden project at Plates Café & Catering.
Visit http://3rdurbanagfest.eventbrite.com/ to purchase tickets. Sorry, no refunds.
June 1, 2011
Squash Soup – finds in the freezer
I have a loose rule at the farm, perhaps more of a goal, and that is: Empty by June, full by October. I'm talking about the freezer. Well, today June is nigh, and I have items in the freezer that I need to use, and can't bear to throw away. That Kabocha squash was so good and so sweet, and Eureka, I had three cups of it pureed and frozen. Also a number of bags of frozen corn, some beans, and a few cubes of eggplant. This is where last year meets this year.
I sauteed some new onions
added some fresh herbs (and some of those crazy, wonderfully hot pepper flakes I grew)
Poured in the silky pureed squash and sundry frozen veg, then added baby spinach out of the garden, salted it to taste.
Freezer soup, doing its part to ready for summer bounty!
May 25, 2011
2 Geese a-laying
I thought I'd post a few photos of what the geese are up to right now. Yelling at me every time I approach the goose pen as they are still stubbornly sitting on the two eggs I didn't manage to spirit away.
Weeks, and weeks, and weeks they've been setting these eggs – the two of them in a tag team gosling conjuring event. Of course the eggs aren't fertile. Instead of hatching, they are more likely to explode. I keep trying to find both geese off the nest and jimmy the eggs away, but so far, no luck.
May 24, 2011
Fava Season is winding down – Three more ways to fix these delish beans!
Yes, the heat is coming, the favas are growing into monstrously large beans that I will soon let dry on the stalk to pick later, store, and use for seed next year. But not to jump into summer toooo soon, we still have a week or two of fava season left to us. Here are a few more ways to use them.
Fava Beans as appetizer – It doesn't get much better or much simpler. Lightly boil the beans – just 2 minutes or until tender- then serve them with some great olive oil and salt. A grey salt would be fantastic. My family loves favas this way. Italian edamame!
No, you say? You are tired of de-podding and peeling the things? Try this – One diner takes a sharp paring knife and makes a slice in the side of the pod, while a second diner opens the cut pod up and slides a finger inside, popping all the beans into a bowl. Two of us de-podded three hundred fava pods in just over fifteen minutes this way. We were intent, but we did it.
As for taking the outer skin off the beans, I say leave them on. Sam and I did a taste test. They are better with the skin on, a more interesting texture, and they sweeten the taste. I don't know what people are talking about when they say the membrane is bitter. Perhaps if the bean gets shipped across the country and sits in the grocery store a while it develops bad habits…?
I did peel the favas to put on top of this dish. I sauteed onion and herbs then pureed them (Vita Mix!) with salt and red pepper and three cups of boiled favas to make a sauce. Lovely.
Finally, aglio e olio with a fava twist.
I sauteed about a cup of garlic greens in oil, added some red pepper flakes (if I'd had anchovies, those would have been really good, too), then threw in the lightly boiled favas and sauteed until the skins were loose and had achieved some color. I tossed the whole concoction with pasta and served with shredded Asiago.
Ah, Favas, you know I love you!
