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!

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.

Joel Salatin Makes Me Want a Better Larder

And I bet that title made you click...didn't it?

This week I went to hear Joel Salatin speak the the Michigan theater.  He is, let's say, the godfather of the chemical free, sustainable, and local food movement (all one, not separate).  He is the hero to many who are trying to self sustain, reduce waste, and feed their families and neighbors with food that is, well, good old fashioned "real food."  Without getting too preachy, I did take away a few life lessons and a new sense of momentum moving into the summer growing season.  Before I begin, let me look back at the notes that my nerdy friend took during the presentation, and then promptly emailed to me afterwards (we thought she was texting through the whole presentation.  newfangled fancy phones.)

Mr. Salatin has a few soap boxes that really resonated with me.  You see, at some point Joe and I decided that we wanted to be "farmers," on whatever scale, learning a little more each year.  We house hunted for a farm that we could plant roots in, literally.  Summer one was good, summer two will be better.  We believe in raising our child (or children) (infertility will get its own post someday) with their hands in the soil and their mouths stained with blueberries.  We grow what we can.  We pick, trade, and buy locally, but we could do better.  We put food in the larder/pantry....

Soapbox 1:  bring back the larder.  He spoke repeatedly of canning, freezing, and drying (dehydrating).  We do this of course, but we can do better.  Last year we put up 50 quarts of tomatoes, and a host of jams, jellies, apple and pear butters, applesauce, etc.  We bought and froze local meat for the deep freeze.  We picked berries till our fingers were stained...and still we ran out.  After the talk this week, Joe and I took stock of the larder and came up with this summer's plan based on what we have too much of and what we needed more of (I HATE buying out of season berries at Meijer)...which brings us to...

Soapbox 2:  Why do you need strawberries in Michigan in February?  Perhaps you should have thought ahead when strawberries were in season in Michigan, and canned, dried, and frozen more of them.  Of course we can't be perfect, but I think a balance in this concept is well worth thinking about.  How much fuel did it take to to get them here from California (or heaven forbid, Mexico)?  Trade and commerce is how this nation runs, so if you can't grow it here, you're going to have to buy it from elsewhere (coffee, chocolate, oranges, etc.)  But I think we've all been duped now and again when buying, say, a bag of apples, and not till we get home do we realize that they are Washington apples, not Michigan apples.  I.e...BUY LOCAL.

Soapbox 3:  Kitchen chickens.  If every kitchen had two chickens to reduce the amount of food waste in landfills, we could substantially reduce our garbage output...because chickens eat almost anything! (yes, some people throw food in the garbage, not in the compost bin.  sigh.)

Anyhoo, it was a night well spent.  Bottom line is that it motivated me to do better.  I'll let you keep tabs on me this summer.  We'll keep you posted on filling the larder!

I like a blog with pictures, so I'll just throw in some pics of last summers larder.  I love that word.

Dexter Blueberry Farm - Thank you Uncle Mark and Aunt Linda!

We did not larder the kitten, just the summer squash.

And I'm quite certain we did not larder the pie.  But Joe is so cute when is makin' pies.

If this was already on Facebook, I don't need to get his permission again to

 post pics of him canning in his undies...right?

Cider makin' at Uncle Scotties...we actually just took the last jug out of the freezer yesterday!

This last one may be my favorite.  One day in the fall neighbor Al called and said 

"Old man Carl has some old pear trees.  He isn't gonna pick em', so if you want em'"......yes please.  Ginger pear butter all day long baby.

The End.