I Can Taste it Already

 

“Do I have anything in my teeth?”

As I’ve mentioned a few times, we eat real simple. Not a lot of fuss. This morning, crustless quiche leftover from dinner with friends. For lunch, it’ll be roast chicken, salad, and beets. The chicken is thawing on the counter. I’ll snatch the beets and salad out of the garden around 11:00. Dinner will be leftover chicken and more veggies. Today is actually a day of relatively fancy meals, since we had the quiche and since Penny’s mom will be here for lunch and dinner and she deserves a little extra lovin’ care.

We work really hard to not get so caught up in the business of growing and processing our food that we don’t get to actually eat it. It sounds pretty obvious, but I see it all the time: Folks get so busy with the growing and prep that they end up eating boughten food during the high seasons of spring, summer, and early fall. This seem to be particularly true of people growing for market. In my view, if you’re gonna go to the trouble of raising up all this really good chow, you might as well get to enjoy it.

That goes a long way to explain why we eat so simple. We just don’t have the time to do a lot of fancy cooking. We also tend to eat hyper-seasonally, because whatever food we eat directly off the land is food we don’t have to process. People think growing food is the hard part. Nope. It’s the processing that’s hard. I mean, it’s not that hard, but it is a significant portion of the work load. I think that sneaks up on a lot of people. Surprises them. Truth is, you gotta plan for processing the same way you plan for growing and harvesting.

This time of year, we’re eating blueberries like crazy. Every time we go out in public, Penny and I try to remember to pick the inevitable flecks of blueberry skin from between each other’s teeth, like a couple of chimps grooming one another. We might eat blueberries in some form or another for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Of course, we eat a lot of fresh vegetables in the summer. Right now, we’re starting to snitch potatoes. We just processed those pigs, so there’s a lot of sausage around. We save the roasts and whatnot for winter. Dairy. Some nights we have milk for dinner. Doesn’t sound like much, but our cows make some seriously rich milk. It’s actually pretty satisfying.

Fin making dinner

Matron had a good post recently about planning for abundance. She’s spot on. We plan for abundance the way a business person plans for profit. It’s rare that we don’t have at least some surplus of pretty much every crop we grow. Generally, we barter or sell this surplus. Depending on what it is, we might feed it to the pigs. That’s one of the beauties of pigs. They eat it all. Or most of it, anyway: I’ve found they’re not too hot on three-year-old kimchi.

One of the “challenges” we have this time of year is just keeping up with harvesting everything. This is especially true as our plantings become more diversified; for instance, over the past couple of weeks, we’ve been harvesting blueberries, mulberries, currants (red and white), jostaberries, and raspberries. Pretty soon we’ll be into the wild blackberries. Of course, there’s all the garden stuff: We shelled and froze 40 pints of peas. We’ve lacto-fermented maybe 30 quarts of green beans. The garlic is harvested and hanging. And we’re drying chanterelles almost continuously; this is a crazy mushroom year. I’ve been making butter, though there’s not a chance in hell I’m gonna hit 200-lbs this year. Oh well. And so on. In general, we eat a lot of crops that don’t take an undue amount of effort and time to process. Carrots, onions, ‘taters, kimchi, garlic, winter squash, beets, berries. Those damnable shell peas are an exception. Butter is an exception because butter is exceptional. Sausage for the same reason.

Dry curing sausage. Almost ready

We are advantaged in that we’ve been doing this long enough that we no longer have to think about how much to grow. We have three very large gardens, in addition to the numerous perennial plantings. Each of the gardens is roughly the same layout, with all rows roughly the same length. That way, we can rotate crops and know that three rows of green beans in one garden is the same as three rows of green beans in another. We’re not big on fancy garden designs; we like straight, wide rows. We like squares and rectangles. We like organization. This is not hobby gardening. This is our food. As in, all of it. Or close enough. That’s not to say we don’t like pretty stuff or stuff we fancy just because. But we generally save it for the orchard-y areas.

Once fall and winter come, we’ll spend a bit more time in the kitchen. I’ll make fried chicken in lard a few times. Penny’ll make sourdough donuts a time or two. We’ll thaw the beef, pork, and chicken livers and make a passel of pate. We’ll do up some pork shoulder roasts in a reduction of fresh-pressed apple cider. Pizza. We’ll make us some pizza with our own chèvre, sausage, sun-dried tomatoes and chanterelles on top.

Damn. I can taste it already.