Category Archives: gardening

Links Links Links …

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A roundup of interesting stuff:

And in Alice Waters/Ameya Preserve news:

For the record, as I said over at Ethicurean, I admire Alice Waters to no end — she’s done great things for American food, and the Edible Schoolyards is a terrific project. However, there is a problematic disconnect going on when somehow sustainability is considered a luxury, and is being shilled as an amenity in a second-home development (not a “community” — community is town, is public. Behind the gate, it’s a development). I don’t care how many solar panels you put on it, a 5000 square foot home that no one lives in most of the time is not sustainable.

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Indian Summer …

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Indian Summer has arrived — it was 17 degrees on Saturday morning and 75 by afternoon.

Our first hard frost which, surprisingly, everything left in the garden survived quite well. There’s chard out there still, and a lot of endives and chicories, and even a few random lettuces that sprouted from seed I dropped. Oh, and arugula. I cut the arugula way back in August, after it bolted during the record-setting heat we had in July, and it’s grown back quite nicely.

I spent the weekend planting the last of the bulbs. My friend Nina called while I was in the middle of it all. “Next time I decide to buy 400 bulbs on sale,” I asked her. “Remind me how much I hate fall planting.” I do — by fall I’m done with the garden. I’m over it. I don’t want to deal anymore. And even though we’ve had a little bit of rain, the ground is still really dry and hard and I can never remember where I planted anything before and well, fall planting always seems to me like more hassle than it’s worth. “Do it my way,” Nina said. “Just dig a hole and throw a whole bunch of them in …” Which is exactly what I did. Whoever plants the fields of bulbs on the covers of those catalogs might lay out plans, the rest of us are fed up, busy, and over it. I got out the spade, dug a series of holes and into each one I threw a couple of King Alfred daffodils, some mixed tulips, some teeny red tulip bulbs I dug up from the weird place where they grow through the lawn, some scilla, some crocus, and some grape hyacinths. Oh, and there were some narcissus in there too. Like I said, I got a little carried away at Lowes. It’s either going to be gorgeous or I’m going to have weird clumps of flowers scattered all over in the spring.

But it is lovely having late fall greens. The other night I made some pasta with ham, a small red peperoncini that I managed to get out of the garden before the big frost, some arugula, and creme fraiche I made with the gorgeous cream that comes every week on the top of my gallon jar of good, fresh, local milk. It was one of those dinners that sort of evolve as you’re making it — I originally thought I’d do pasta with ham and peas, but the peas had been in the freezer for so long that they were awful and I threw them out. But I had arugula out there in the garden — so arugula it was — a lovely little dinner in a bowl on the couch, watching a movie with the dogs.

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Fall Colors …

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Out here in Montana we don’t have the deciduous tree display like they do back east — we do have surprising splashes of gold aspens on mountainsides dark with conifers — last week I took the dogs up to Pine Creek for a hike and as we were driving into the trailhead there were two yellow aspens, halfway up the mountain, illuminated by the sunlight streaking down the canyon — just two, glowing like candles. One of the many reasons to live here.

Anyhow, we don’t have the gorgeous red and gold and orange displays of the east, but what we do have is fall veggies, roasted hot until they’re slightly caramelized. I have a bumper crop of beets this year, and although I didn’t grow as many carrots as I now wish I had, I have a solid stash of carrots. Deep Creek Green, our local source of fabulous veggies, let most of their fields go fallow this year but they still seem to have come up with a crop of their delicious garlic, and Mark Rehder who is farming both in town and on a 10-acre parcel just outside of town has some beautiful pumpkins and squash.

Because I’ve been trying to pay more attention to my energy consumption, and because I’m really kind of lazy, I’ve started ganging up my cooking. If I’m doing a chicken, I’ll throw in two or three dishes of veggies to roast — and so now I have a refrigerator full of roasted carrots and beets, some squash puree, and leftover roast chicken (I have written before about my near-religious devotion to the powers of a roast chicken).

So, yesterday, trying to decide what to eat for lunch, I pulled out the leftover squash and smooshed some onto a tortilla. Then I added some of the gorgeous beet salsa I made with roasted beets, a chopped shallot from the garden (shallots are easy to grow and expensive to buy), some green tomato salsa, a little leftover chicken and some of last week’s ricotta. Plus a little Herdez Ranchera sauce to perk things up — and there you have it — a sort of swanky “gourmet” lunch made with all local ingredients in five minutes (well, fifteen if you count the time to heat it up in my cast iron pan). With a glass of my delicious local milk — what more could a girl want?

One thing I like about having a lot of stuff in the fridge like that is the way it allows you to keep making up new combos. I’m not one of those people who is good at following recipes — I wind up improvising — so a fridge full of lovely, pre-roasted veggies and chicken or some pork shoulder looks to me like a fun palette of flavors that I can keep combining and recombining all week.

And they’re beautiful. Orange squash. Beets like jewels. My own carrots which are so much better than any carrot I can find in a store. Bright green chard that was growing in my backyard five minutes ago.

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Home Cured Pancetta

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Home Cured Pancetta Here it is … the pancetta — finished and cut. This was SO easy. It takes three weeks, but other than that, the actual preparation was a cinch. All I did was rub the cure on the pork belly and let it sit in the fridge for a week (flipping it every day or so). Then I rolled it and hung it in the basement. You’re supposed to let it hang for 2 weeks, but since even with the humidifier going I couldn’t get the humidity above 20%, and the pancetta looked like it was both getting “hard” (to quote the recipe) and starting to get little mold specks on it, I took it down after 8 days and let it sit, loosely wrapped in the fridge for the next week or so.

Saturday I pulled it out and cut it into chunks, which I sealed with my FoodSaver machine (love my seal-a-meal), and froze. Of course, I fried up a little chunk to see how it tasted (unlike Bob over at Hunger Artist, mine was not heirloom pork raised by someone I know, and I am not trying it raw) — it was delicious — the texture was different than the commercial pancetta I’ve been buying these last few weeks. It’s drier, and the meaty part was almost ham-like — probably because it was the end piece, so it was a little drier anyway.

I’d do this again in a flash — and next time I’ll definitely spring for the organic pork — if you look at Bob’s pancetta compared to mine it’s much more meaty. For now, this is still better than commercial, and since I’m lobbying my milk and egg lady for one of her pigs next year, that gives me plenty of time to plan.

I’d like to try some other cured meats — I’m particularly interested in doing some dried sausages, but I have to figure out a solution to the humidity problem first. There’s a used appliance place just across my back alley, I might have to look into getting a small used fridge so I can control the temps and humidity better — basically, we live in the high desert out here, and the humidity is almost never more than about 30%. I’ll have to think about it.

In the meantime, I was out in the garden pulling up the last of the tomatoes this weekend, and I noticed I have some beautiful frisee out there — I’m thinking lunch might have to be frisee salad with pancetta and a poached egg — yum yum.

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First Snow …

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First Snow ... Yup — although it sounded like rain outside my window all night — look what I found when the sun came up this morning — let’s hope what’s left of the tomatoes are okay under that plastic. Oh, and maybe it’s time to put the folding chairs and the outdoor cushions away for the winter (except that it’ll be warm and sunny again in a couple of days and everything will need to dry out).

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