The Larder Line Up...

Aside from the heatwave of the last few days, things feel different here in the mitten state.  The air is different, the light is different.  The breeze is crisp, and the flowers are sending forth their last hurrah.  The barn swallows have left early, and the sandhill cranes are starting to gather in small groups, then larger groups...eventually flying away for the winter by the hundreds.  Things beg to be picked, and eaten, and preserved.  We are on the cusp of fall folks!

Here at the farm that means hard core canning, freezing, and preserving season.  So here is your yearly update on how well we've stocked the larder so far.  (And this is not an invitation to come running our way to eat jam should the zombie apocalypse hit) (Kelly!!).

The cherry haul was impressive, thanks to our new friends in town, and we put many pounds of sweet and tart pitted cherries in the freezer.  This blueberry season was just "ok," due to long stretches of cool weather mid summer.  Also due to the fact that when we should have been picking, we were wedding prepping.  But we still have a decent haul in the freezer, and put up quite a bit of Blueberry-Cherry Jam...which is delicious!  We also picked/saved raspberries, strawberries, and rhubarb...so we made a decent amount of Raspberry Jam and Strawberry Rhubarb Jam.

Despite a tomato blight (again, weird weather year here in michigan), we still hauled in bushel after bushel.  We canned the beautiful heirlooms, and stewed them down into marinara sauce for the freezer.  We made red salsa, and Joe's famous hot tomatillo salsa! We also have four sheet pans roasting in the oven right now with heirlooms, basil, garlic, olive oil, sea salt and crushed pepper.  Not sure if we'll freeze or can these yet, but god they smell good!!  And, we kicked ass at pickles this year...crispy and delicious!

We had so much chard in the garden (and still do), that we picked a few bushels, sautéed it in a little olive oil, and froze it in muffin tins.  I popped them out and put them in freezer bags, so mid winter we can pull them out for soups, stews, pasta, etc!

Ok, on to fall fruits.  We picked peaches, but we ate so many, and made so many damn peach crisps, that none made it in the freezer ;).  We had a great pear pick at the home of our cherry friends, and a bushel from our friends at Family Circle Centennial Farm, so we just finished the second batch of canned pear sauce.  

The first of the apples are ready at Uncle Scotty's orchard, so we pressed cider last week and put five gallons in the freezer ( and drank a bunch ;).  The rest of his orchard is close behind, and so is our trusty apple tree out back, so from this point on there will always be a roaster going on the counter roasting apple sauce or apple butter.  This is a bumper apple crop year, so let's put up some apple goodness!!

Our new set of chickens, the "teenagers," are in laying overdrive.  When I have a few extra dozen, I either make ice cream or pie crust for the freezer!  My "Never fail" amish pie crust seriously never fails ;).

And speaking of eggs, we have an incubator going in the basement with turkey and peahen eggs baking away!  My bourbon red turkeys have been a delight to raise, but I don't want to eat them until I get a new round of chicks going.  Fingers crossed that we have some hatchlings by the end of the month!

Come on eggies...I want little peacocks with their tails up to pop out!!

(but that's probably not how it works ;)

The best part about all of this is spending sweet time with my handsome husband and beautiful daughter...lovely mornings in orchards, hot afternoons in the kitchen - it's all about being together.  It also draws in friends, new and old, who want to eat beautiful local food.  

Yay Michigan!  Yay local food!

The Bee's Knees - Harvest Day!

   Saturday night, I cozied up on the couch with Joe and Coco, and watched "The Secret Life of Bees." It was beautiful; one of my favorite books and movies, and felt ritualistic as we prepared ourselves for honey harvest.  Our little guys had worked so hard for us all summer, and a little Queen Latifah action reminded me to send them love, goodness, and gratitude for their gift to us.

   I'm going to go through this process for you, bees 101 if you will, because it is so entertaining.  Until this summer, this was all foreign to me - yet it's amazing; one of the most perfect little civilizations ever formed...all inside a box.

   You start, in the spring, by ordering a nuc - five frames which include a queen and a few thousand bees.  You also order a hive - a wooden box with empty frames inside.  You take out five empty frames, and put in your nuc frames full of bees and your queen.  Throughout the summer, the bees fill all the frames with babies, honey, comb, etc.  When they fill one box, you add another on top...and another, and another.  Our hive this year had one deep and two shallow supers (extra boxes) added to the hive.

   Today was harvest day.  We took out all of the frames from the top two boxes, and three from the third box down - leaving a ton of honey for our bees to use as food.  The goldenrod is blooming like crazy right now, so they will probably fill the supers back up with goldenrod honey this fall, and we may get one more small harvest in before winter.  Before winter, you leave plenty of honey and a feeder for your bees inside the hive to eat while it's snowing!  

On to the picture tutorial!!

Final count:  Over six gallons (yes, gallons) of honey from our beautiful, productive honeybees!

The bees were really active last night and this morning; this is called the "front porch" of their hive.

Joe taking the lid off and smoking the bees to calm them.  The smoke also covers any "panic" pheromones that the bees let off, so that they don't get each other all worked up.

Joe took out one frame at a time and gave it a quick tap on the ground to get all the bees off.  He then put the honey filled frames in a tote and quickly put the lid on to keep the bees out :)  The bees crawled right back up into the hive (probably close quarters while we had all of their frames !)

When he tapped the frame on the ground, the ground would become a "carpet" of bees.

He ran over a little honey and wax comb for me to chew on while he worked.

On to processing!  We set up shop in Nigel and Emily's food processing barn.  

Step 1:  Hot knife down the frame to "uncap" the honey.  The bees cap it with wax to keep the honey in the comb.  We take the wax off, then put the frame in the spinner.

Video of Joe uncapping the honey...watch it flow!

Into the spinner.

Joe and Nigel - it's a two man job, really.

Thank you Allison for the spinner!!

Oh my ...it's so beautiful!

Back at the farm - I sent the honey through the strainer to get the wax bits and pieces out.

Everything Joe hot knifed off of the frames went into a big bowl - wax and honey.

I put it in the double boiler and let it simmer down so that the wax floated to the top, and the honey sunk to the bottom.  When it cools, I will lift the wax off and make candles, or lip balm, or..I don't know?  It's just so exciting!

We ended up with three different colors of honey from our one hive.  The darkest came from the first frames on the bottom - the spring honey.  The lightest is the most recent, probably honey from the thistle that's been blooming.

When we got home, Joe put all of the frames back in the supers, and put one super back on the hive.  We'll keep an eye on the hive, and add the boxes back as they grow throughout the fall!

Back to school tomorrow, so I should go...Coco has an outfit to pick out people!  xoxo, e.

Sunday Brunch.

Late August always seems to lend itself to Sunday brunch.  There are always a host of texts or Facebook messages waiting; loving friends trying to squeeze one more get together in before school starts.   Sunday brunch feels mildly noninvasive...we eat, spend time together, and then have the rest of the day to ourselves.

It is also the time of year that we have veg coming out of our ears, and the time of year that our eggs boast yolks of florescent orange....point is we've got all kinds of healthy goodness out here, so come eat with us.

This morning, however, we hosted vegans.  More and more of our friends, it seems, have chosen a vegetarian, vegan, or raw lifestyle.  We are proud meat eaters, but I am more than happy to oblige the people that I love!  So......

Today's Menu:

Allison's honey two ways:  Honey harvest this week from hives she keeps in two different locations - just look at the color difference, and the taste difference in incredible!

Honey to be drizzled on Vegan Corn Johnnycakes!

Fresh corn from Rhulig's.

Bluebs picked yesterday from the Dexter Blueberry farm, peaches picked this week from Erie Orchard, Melon from Rhulig's.

Vegan waffles with fresh blueberry syrup.

Potato and veggie hash with fresh veg from Family Circle Centennial Farm.

The dishes are done, my feet are up, and a whole day ahead of me..xoxo, e.

Time to Make the Chokecherry Syrup.

    I have a beautiful friend named Amy Lesser.  She is an herbalist, a shepherdess, a farmer, a mother, and well, just a really sweet person.  If you were stuck in the wilderness and told to survive, well, you'd want her along.  She would gather wild food for you, make you soap, and probably tell you stories of your ancestors that warmed your heart (I'm guessing on that last part, but I bet she would).  When Amy says it's going to rain, it rains.  When she says fall weather is on the way, it comes.  And when she says that it's time to start nesting and gathering...you better just do it.

   And so we did!  It's funny how we wait and wait for that first tomato to ripen, like its gold, and then before we know it the entire dining room table is covered in ripe fruit, begging to be canned and processed.  Coco Rosie went to my mom and dad's for the weekend, so Joe and I got down to business and started putting up food.  Between the goodies from our garden, and fillers from Family Circle Centennial Farm down the road, there was just produce everywhere.  We canned tomatoes, made dilly beans, and threw on a big pot of veggie beef stew while we worked.  We made blueberry jam and blueberry syrup (bad year for Michigan maple syrup, but blueberries abound!).  There are peaches waiting to be processed, and more zucchini, squash, peppers, and eggplant than I can think about right now.  And then there were the chokecherries...

   We have a bunch of trees out back that we've always called "ornamental cherries."  We were chatting back there with neighbor Al this week, and he called them chokecherries...then he told sweet stories of fishing in the back woods of Canada as a young boy, and helping all of the older ladies make the chokecherry syrup.  Sold.  I live for stories like that.  If some old Canadian wilderness women can make chokecherry syrup, then so can I.

    The tiny berries have an intense tart cherry flavor with a big pit in the middle.  I stewed them down and mashed out the juice.  I make fruit or other simple syrups all the time (ok, mainly for cocktails or coffee, but I make them none the less).  I make blackberry syrup for gin drinks, ginger syrup for Pimms, gingerbread syrup for coffee in the dead of winter...etc.  So, I followed suit and added some sugar and simmered down the chokecherry juice.  I poured it into a jar...and I'll be damned if it didn't set up like the best cherry jam you've ever had!!  Not syrup, but Success!

The chokecherry syrup.  or jam.  or whatever....it's good though!

Harvest Thursday night...

Rain harvest Friday night...

By Saturday we were just screwed (in a good way).

First batch of blueberry jam. The berries are so concentrated with sugar due to the drought this year, that we used less than a cup of sugar for this whole batch..and it set up just perfectly!

This beauty is from Emily and Nigel's crop...gigantic luscious heirloom!

I canned in some of these huge 3 quart jars which will be nice to pull out for soups and chili!

I could not stop taking pictures of gorgeous heirloom tomatoes in jars.  Pure beauty.

Dilly Beans!  I'm not much of a pickler, but we had beans, and we had dill...so there you have it.

An after-canning snack with my honey and the chickens.  They liked dad's cheese-it's more than mom's pretzels.  Fo'Sho'.

The ducks know that there are treats being handed out...just waiting in the wings for their turn.

The Shiekh.  My beautiful rooster.

Lolita, my oldest kitty who is never around for pictures!

Wrapping up canning weekend with a little Sex (the bubbly that is....get your minds out of the gutter people!).  Stay tuned for Saturday morning peach picking pics!   xoxo, e.