The Taste of Early Summer on Whidbey

A jungle of Ronde de Nice squash blossoms and their developing squashlets

Nothing is as ephemeral or as potetially banal as summer squash.  As a teenage cook, working in not-so-fine-dining restaurants on this island I cooked a lot of zucchini every summer.  I think the chef I worked for chose zucchini as our perpetual “vegetable of the day” because it was inexpensive and easy to cook.  Trucked in from California, it was sort of fresh, and by that I mean it wasn’t frozen and it wasn’t canned.  And we certainly didn’t show it a lot of love:  We would make up a mixture of sauteed red onion, canned tomato and “Italian seasoning” and saute it all up together.  Zucchini came to represent to me the thing you put on a plate because you had a space to fill, the thing that you gave to your guest because you hadn’t thought about it very hard or because you didn’t know what else to do or because  you thought it was good enough.

I hated zucchini by the time I was 18.

Read Full Post »

When is enough enough?

 

Clockwise from right: Amaracana, Buff Orpington, Black Giant and the first Narragansett Turkey egg

I was looking for a book on poultry health care so I checked Poultry Health and Management by David Sainsbury out from the library.  When I got it home, it turned out to be a book about commercial poultry production, and it had pretty much nothing in it dealing with our sort of farm.  It did have a some very interesting data however, like this chart which the author offers in the introduction.

Read Full Post »

When the Shit Hit the Cheese

There has been a lot of discussion on FaceBook about two recent recalls of artisan cheese, one by Bravo Farms in California’s Central Valley and the other, perhaps more serious, by Sally Jackson Cheeses of Oroville, Washington.   Bravo Farms, which produces my favorite California Cheddar, “Silver Mountain”, is not tiny, but is small by any modern standard of a food production plant.  Bravo suffered a recall when the California Department of Food and Agriculture found both Listeria monocytogenes and E.Coli O157:H7 at their plant.  Cheeses were recalled even though, to date, no one has been confirmed to have gotten ill from eating their cheese.  The later FDA report of Bravo shows twelve separate dates when a team of three inspectors visited Bravo over a 26 day period and found numerous – though I must say rather minor – violations. Sally Jackson Cheeses has a far more serious problem, because their cheeses have sickened at least 8 people with the very serious E.Coli O157:H7.  As is evidences by both the photos on Jackson’s web site and the descriptions of the facilities in the FDA report, this is a tiny, ill-equipped “Mom & Pop” operation.  The FDA report is rather shocking in the number and nature of violations for which Jackson was cited.

Read Full Post »

Cracking Our Egg Problem

The array of eggs from our hens, from blue-green to white and cafe brown.

 

I had to do something this week that is thoroughly depressing and demoralizing:  I had to buy eggs.  Now that might not sound like such a big deal to many of you, but you have to understand that I have 21 chickens and 12 turkeys on my payroll and I do expect something in return for providing them with food, water and keeping the eagles and raccoons at bay.  Since the cold snap, however, and with the number of hours of daylight having dwindled to a precious few, the chickens have just plain stopped laying.  Each time I go to the coop and open the door to the laying boxes and look in with eyes full of hopeful anticipation I find a hen staring back at me with a look on her little chicken face that can only mean “It’s cold and dark out here.  If you want eggs, you lay them!”

Read Full Post »

Why Heritage Turkeys?

Here is a video of the four remaining Narragansett Turkeys we have here at our home on Whidbey Island.  We got a dusting of snow and the temperatures have been below freezing for several days, but the turkeys are unfazed.  So what?  Well, 99.9% of all turkeys produced for food in the world are not heritage breeds like these birds, they are one particular hybrid breed called broad breasted white, and those birds would be turkeycicles under conditions like these.  The Narragansetts have the option of hanging out in their coop with a heat lamp, but they choose to forage and frolic and play in the snow.  They are just more vigorous and healthy than the hybrids.

Read Full Post »

Confit on the Way: A Photo Log

Seasoning the legs and wings, prior to pressing.

Late night, last night I pulled out the two turkeys I had harvested on Saturday and started preparing them for thanksgiving.  The thing that was so striking about them was how beautiful the birds are.  I have prepared heritage birds for a number of years, but those came from other producers.  As a result they had been killed a couple of weeks prior to Thanksgiving and arrived to me sealed in plastic.  While they were perfectly fine, and certainly better than frozen, commercial birds, nothing benefits from being sealed in a bag for a couple of weeks. 

Read Full Post »

Harvesting Our Own Turkeys This Thanksgiving

 

The final product: Two young Narragansett hens that dressed out to almost 10 pounds each.

My family is about five months into our first efforts at raising turkeys for our own table.  An experienced farmers of heritage breed turkeys might be thinking something is a little wrong with my math because these turkeys take 30 weeks to reach maturity.  Ours hatched out on June 5th, so that puts them squarely at the 24 week mark.  Nonetheless, Thanksgiving is Thursday and we had to make a decision:  kill ours or find some one else’s to buy.

Read Full Post »

Turkey Two Ways

 

Our 2010 crop of Narragansett Turkeys, the oldest breed of turkey there is.

While I have been buying Heritage Breed turkeys for the past eight years, this is the first time that they are making the very short trip from our back lawn to the oven, never having left our sight.  We got a bit of a late start, the birds having hatched out in the first week of June, so we will be culling two of the smaller hens rather than the big toms, which we will retain for breeding next years crop.

Read Full Post »

A little bit of Napa Valley on Whidbey Island

My newly completed Hoop House will be, I hope, the cure to the tomato-less summer blues.

If you have read this blog in the past I’m sure I do not need to tell you that I love Western Washington in general, and Whidbey Island specifically.  The beauty of this geographic region is ideal to me.  I love the fishing, clamming, crabbing and other foraging opportunities that this area alone has.  The access to calm, inland waters is unsurpassed.  And the climate is pretty much perfect in my mind.  It is never much over the mid-70’s in the peak of summer, which is perfect for someone who’s family originated in the bogs of Ireland and Scotland.  I start to wilt when the mercury climbs much above 90.  I really cannot take the heat.

The one thing that has been killing me about this place is that unlike me tomatoes love heat and I love tomatoes.  I have grown accustomed to a certain level of quality from my tomatoes, especially after spending the past 16 years in Napa Valley where, in my opinion, the quality of the tomatoes is at least as high as the quality of the wines.  Western Washington just isn’t tomato country; it’s too cold.  Case in point, last summer a good friend of mine, who also grew up here, came up to the island for the weekend.  He and his very cool family come up many weekends in the season which means my family and I get a chance to hang with them quite a bit, which is a particular treat because Chuck is a great cook.  Anyway, on this particular weekend he brought up a harvest of tomatoes from his garden in Seattle.  He says to me “Hey, I brought up our tomatoes, check them out, they are in a bowl on the counter in the kitchen.”  So, with visions a huge salad bowl brimming with ripe, pound-and-a-half Marvel Stripe and Brandywine tomatoes dancing through my mind I practically ran to the kitchen… where I found a little cereal bowl with about a dozen tomatoes in it, the biggest of which is smaller than a tennis ball.  I know that he was trying, but for the love of God, this is simply not acceptable.

Read Full Post »

The Chicken of Tomorrow

Have you ever wondered why a rubber chicken does not look like the chicken in the grocery store?  A few weeks ago Frank Reese sent me a link (which follows) to an old documentary about The Chicken of Tomorrow contest in 1948.  This contest, which was funded by the A&P grocery store chain, marked a critical turning point in how we raise poultry and could fairly be seen as the beginning of the modern poultry industry.   The whole of the film is worth viewing, in all its kitschy goodness, but one of the most interesting things for me was seeing what the birds of 60 years ago looked like when dressed out.  Guess what?  They look like rubber chickens.

Read Full Post »