Whole Foods Kitchen

This week I started Heather’s Whole Foods Kitchen Workshop. I’ve been following her blog for years, but this is the first time I’ve splurged on her workshop. So far I think it’s worth it.

We eat well around these parts, however maybe because it is the middle of winter, I’ve been feeling the need for a kick in the rear. Inspiration for eating healthier. We seem to get in a bit of a rut when fresh veggies aren’t as plentiful. We eat plenty of local, grass fed beef, and we’ve been indulging on our freezer stash of local pork and Scott-caught salmon, but also lots of wheat. Lots and lots of bread and bagels and cookies and crackers. Too much.

To kick off the workshop, the littlest one and I made chai concentrate (though to be honest, I’ll go back to my standard chai recipe next time – too much cardamon made it bitter to my tongue, I think). The next day the oldest one and I made almond milk.

I’ve been enjoying almond milk chai lattes in the afternoon, when I normally hit my afternoon lull. I’ve been drinking them iced or room temperature since I used raw almonds and raw honey and want to consume them in their raw state.

Delicious! Are you taking Heather’s workshop too? How has your eating looked this winter?

Tricky sort of weekends

Weekends can be sort of tricky things around here. As most of us know, kids thrive on routine and we have that in spades during the weekdays. Finally half way into the school year, our weekdays flow through like a well oiled machine. The weekends however, sometimes trip us up. With no set schedule to follow we often falter through the first part. Should we stay at home and tackle the to-do list? Should we go out and adventure into the world? Should we relax into watching some movies? Usually there is a birthday party or some other event thrown into mix. Often our weekends become a jumble of all those things, which can be hard on the kiddos and us. The strange mixture of being bored, doing chores and then being hyped up by outside entertainment. I, and an assortment of kids, often go in one direction while Scott, and the rest of the kids, go in another. Sometimes the weekdays and their structure feel more relaxing.


And then other weekends just flow long at a very relaxed yet productive rate. This past long weekend was just that. The weather has been bitter cold every single morning for weeks now. We awaken to frozen ground but then the mid day offers the taste of spring. The littlest one followed her big brothers out into the field, I of course followed her. Flower picking turned into laying down into the flowers, “Lay down mama! Lay down!” While I soaked in the scenery and watched the bees buzz around me, the littlest and her brothers turned their attention to a found frog and a new habitat for him.


An hour later, when excitement of playing with ‘Hoppity’ died down we came inside and made a Honey Cake from Apples for Jam, a favorite cookbook around here. A very pretty cake with a pretty delicious addition of rosemary and cinnamon.

If only every weekend could be like last!

welcome holidays

Though we held off for a bit, we now have all the holiday decorations out. This weekend was filled with an invitation to an ornament decorating party, a holiday ballet performance, hot chocolate and ornament making and hanging. I hung my little collection of Swarovski snowflakes across my south facing kitchen window this year. My uncle gave these to us each year for Christmas. He passed away quite young and unexpectedly this past spring. It is a beautiful thing to walk in and see hundreds of tiny rainbows all over our kitchen each morning.

I did a little holiday making today too (from the book of course!). As we’ve increased our children count over the years and they in turn have grown older and busier, my handmade Christmas gifts have decreased. As much as I love the idea of making my loved ones all handmade gifts, time is so limited, I try and keep it as simple as possible. There will be many years ahead of me for hand making. These years are about simplifying and enjoying amidst the December madness. Yesterday as we finished decorating the tree, I sat on the couch reading my new issue of Taproot and sipping my hot chocolate while the three kids danced like crazy to Dr. Demento’s Christmas album. It was loud and chaotic, yet cozy and Christmasy at the very same time. Welcome Holidays!

New in the Kitchen

While I sit here next to the fireplace, working on the Handmade Body Care booklet I’ve promised you and waiting for the furnace repair man to come, I thought I’d show you a few photos from this morning. We had an eventful week as a team of men came and laid down the most beautiful Marmoleum floor in our kitchen, the color of water. Another team of very generous and helpful men came to move an impossibly heavy butcher block from Scott’s childhood home into our kitchen. We scurried to finish painting while the appliances were scattered all around the house and this kitchen is another few steps closer to feeling just like home.

The last bit of stolen sweetness that has been sitting on my desk for a couple of weeks is finally draining on the counter top. Scott’s off for a day of clamming/crabbing/fishing with friends, the kids are in school and daycare. All’s quiet and cold. I hope to be back very soon to share news of a finished booklet for you!

Chili Pepper Season

While this may be our second summer here, we are considering this our first real growing season. It’s been a real delight to discover what does well here and we can say with certainty that peppers are high on the list. We’ve never had such a pepper season.

When it’s pepper season, it also means it’s chili relleno season too. My favorite season! Early on in our relationship, Scott made me chili relleno from some Poblanos we’d bought at the farmers market. Hands down, that was the spiciest meal I’d eaten to date, but they were so good I ate every last bite. We aren’t growing Poblanos, despite the fact that’s what I bought, instead it turned out to be a Big Jim pepper and a few of those are Anaheims too.

He still has the knack for making the best chili rellenos, which is why this plate never got photographed when it was decorated with sour cream and salsa, because who could remember to take a picture with that in front of them?

And now that the corn is ready for harvest, corn kernel have been making their way into the stuffing. Delicious!

We planted only one Padron pepper this year and that was more than plenty. We are all Padroned out! One afternoon the boys came inside from playing with a shirt full of Padrons asking if they could make some as a snack.

As I’m sure you well know, when a young child comes to you asking if they can eat a green vegetable, please!, you immediately say ‘yes!’ Seconds later four hands were putting them into the hot skillet.

Their choice of salt? Pink Himalayan Sea Salt of course. Only because it comes packaged with a little grater. They ate every one!

What’s doing the best in your garden this growing season?

How to Make Fruit Roll-ups : : A Picture Tutorial

(a longer tutorial found here)

1. Find a plum tree.

2. Pick and rinse 24 plums.

3. Put on a simmer with a couple tablespoons of water. Wait about 15 minutes.

4. Remove 24 seeds. Blend with a stick blender.

5. Add sugar to taste.

6. Lightly oil two parchment paper lined cookie sheets.

7. Spread or tip pan until covers parchment evenly.

8.  Fruit should be about 1/8″ thick. Very pretty.

9. Place into a warm oven for about 12 hours.

10. Take it out when it’s done.

11. Roll up while still warm.

12. Cut when cool. Store in freezer in ziplocks, should last a year. Perfect for school lunches.

(if skins of fruit are bitter, it may behoove you to skin the fruit first, in which case, use 28 plums)

Enjoy! (again, more detailed fruit roll up directions here)

A Third Year of Buying Grassfed

Last week Scott picked up our annual beef purchase. We started buying a quarter of a cow three years ago (talked about here in 2010) from a local producer, Beltane Ranch and we haven’t looked back since. At first we started doing this for the health benefits but over the years we’ve found a number of reasons why this makes sense for our family:

•  Buying beef in this way, we know our money goes to three sets of local people, the folks at Beltane Ranch, the butcher, and the meat market. Our money stays in Sonoma, which, because we vote with our dollars, is important to us.

•  We always have dinner on hand. Now that we’ve moved out of town, this is even more important for our busy family. A quick walk through in the veggie garden and a shopping trip in the freezer almost always gives us a dinner. Our quick, last minute dinner now is almost always hamburgers, which are significantly better than any hamburger you can get in a restaurant.

• We eat like kings. All this beef is dry aged for over 20 days. Doing that lets excess water evaporate and increases the tenderness and flavor. You can’t buy dry aged hamburger in the store and to buy dry aged grass fed steaks in the store, for two adults, would cost around $50. We eat them for around $5/lb. and they honestly are delicious (that comes from someone who has never been a big red meat eater). We taste the difference easily now, going to restaurants or parties the difference between our Beltane beef and feedlot beef.

•  We are more creative cooks. We get a little bit of everything in this order so along with steaks and stew meat and hamburger come bones, shanks, and the entire range of steaks. Scott has now mastered the cooking of all the cuts of meat and I know that then I see beef shanks go in the slow cooker, bones simmering on the stove, or a package of ‘T-bone’ steaks thawing on the counter (my favorite cut of steak), dinner is going to be good. We’ve also learned how important it is to raise the temperature of beef up to room temperature before you cook it. Cold beef hitting the grill or stove top results in livery tasting meat. Cooking with room temperature meat completely improves the flavor.

•  It really is much healthier. “Grass-fed meat, milk, and eggs contain less total fat and less saturated fats than the same foods from grain-fed animals. Pastured animals also contain conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), a fatty acid that some recent studies indicate may help reduce weight and prevent cancer, and which is absent from feedlot animals. But perhaps most important, meat, eggs, and milk from pastured animals also contain higher levels of omega-3s, essential fatty acids created in the cells of green plants and algae that play an indispensable roll in human health, and especially in the growth and health of neurons–brain cells.” -Michael Pollen. Grass fed beef also contains much higher levels of Vitamin E and beta carotene. If we are to be committed meat eaters, we are happy to do so in a healthier way.

You too can eat grass fed if you aren’t already. Check out Eat Wild to find local grass fed farmers in your area. And if you are in Sonoma, Beltane Ranch beef is served at Breakaway Café and you can buy it by the pound at Sonoma Market.

(In other news, I thought I’d try out a facebook page for A Sonoma Garden. If you participate in facebook, please give us a like!)

Natural Dying

(left to right: dyed with walnut hulls, fennel with copper, daffodils, fennel with alum, avocado skins)

Ever since I tried my hand at dying yarn with our walnut hulls last autumn, I’ve had the bug to try other natural dying. I bought a couple of inspiring books (Harvesting Color & The Handbook of Natural Plant Dyes) that I’d frequently browse through, but I could never quite find the time to experiment. After giving a fellow knitting friend those two books to borrow and casually suggesting that the wild fennel was starting to sprout up the street, she emailed me saying, ‘let’s try it!’ I made a quick trip down to Dharma Trading Company for undyed yarn and invited her over after we dropped the kids off at school. It was a fun morning, stewing up wild fennel and dried daffodils in large pots while drinking tea and chatting about all sorts of things.

(left to right: dyed with avocado skins, fennel with alum, daffodils, fennel with copper, walnut hulls)

Natural dying is great fun, as long as you go into it without any expectations. In one of my books, one of the authors got a pale green from her fennel dying, so we were both ready to see green appear on our yarn and cotton tablecloth, we got pale yellow instead and barely any color on the cotton when we used alum as a mordant. We divided the fennel dye water into two parts, one for adding alum as a mordant (we combined mordant with dye to save time) and in the next we put a copper pot into the dye pot to weigh down the yarn. If you dye in an unlined copper pot you don’t need a mordant. Since our copper pots are lined, I did the reverse and put the pot inside the dye bath. We got a much different color, as seen above.

After she left I bravely strained out the second batch of walnut hulls I had been soaking since…oh last November. It was fragrant, let me tell you that, but what a much richer dye color it made this time, in comparison with the last batch! The pink/mauve came from avocado skins! Can you believe that? Who would have though avocado skins would turn wool pink!

I have a romantic notion of making an entire fair isle sweater made from yarn dyed from plants grown on my street. I don’t know if that can really happen, but a girl can dream. It certainly has been a fun experiment. You can really delve deep into the chemistry of dying and change colors by adding washing soda or vinegar or all sorts of different things to change the pH. But for now I’m sticking with the basics. I’m now impatiently waiting for the purple iris’ to bloom and then dye to see what they will do!

These blogs really inspired me about natural dying:  Rhubarb in the Garden, Naturally Dyeing, & Tinctory

Weekend in the kitchen

Since we moved into this house we’ve used a small round patio table as our kitchen table. It’s a table meant for two, however we have a family of five, so it’s been a tight fit. I complained for months that I could never find the right table for that spot, and then on our way home from our wooly field trip I hit the brakes hard when I saw a colorful consignment store I hadn’t seen before and there was the perfect table!

Our kitchen has been an inspiring place for me to be in, I think because of the new table. Daffodils are drying for dying someday, the picnic ham got roasted, two loaves of bread are being made at once, some fermenting is going on, and asparagus is almost ever present these days.

Hope you are having a great weekend. I have a fun thing coming up next week just for you! Stay tuned.

 

rain, cover crops, bare plants and ethiopian food

It was rainy here…finally. What a dry winter we’ve had up until now.

Scott ran around throwing out cover crop seeds down before the rain started (an old post about cover crops). The crimson clover and purple vetch are already sprouting.

The favas I planted earlier are thriving.

While I’ve been forcing roses into dormancy…

…Scott’s been on the other side of the yard taming raspberries into neat and tidy rows.

Six new bare root fruit trees await planting. Two cherries, one plum, one persimmon, and two more figs.

The seedlings are coming along well. Now that we have a place to grow inside with warm southern sun, we can start our seeds earlier than before.

All this winter weather has had us in the kitchen cooking with spices. Scott’s been making lentils and curried winter squash soup. Last night I made our favorite Beef in Berbere Sauce (taming the heat by paring the 1T of cayenne down to 1/4t.) with…

…injera. Reminding me of my high school and college days when we used to adventure into Berkeley to the Blue Nile for Ethiopian food. So sad to hear they are closed.

Hope these winter days are going well in your part of the woods.

p.s. As often as I can remember, I thought I’d post back to previous years around the same date. January 26, 2009 More Edible Weeds