In the home stretch until Dark Days become…I guess light days or not so dark days. I have some overwintered salad greens putting on lots of new growth and lovage almost ready to drink through but not many other heralds of spring are ready to eat yet. The strawberries have new growth, the rhubarb is shooting up and everything is going to seed. I’m in a race to eat down the cabbage bed so that I can get the carrots planted and need to take out the turnips & rutabagas so that I can plant the potatoes there should Territorial see fit to send them to me…St. Patrick’s day is this week and that is when you are supposed to start your potatoes. I can’t even chit mine yet! But I digress. On to last week’s lineup.
Barbecued chicken from Pastured Sensations, homemade whiskey barbecue sauce, Skeeter’s sweet meat squash and my purple sprouting broccoli.
Cheesy broccoli rice. Golden Glen cream, Pleasant Valley cheese, homegrown broccoli, California rice, backyard eggs and Skeeter’s sweet meat squash.
Smoky white chili on homemade Lentz spelt tortillas with garden fresh greens and carrots and home canned salsa. The chili was from the freezer made with broth from our Pastured Sensations smoked turkey from Thanksgiving and Full Circle farm white beans. We also ate a lot of wraps this week using roast Cascade Range beef from the freezer. Last summer when I made this salsa we were very meh about it.
I even told a friend I probably wouldn’t can salsa again because it doesn’t taste as fresh as garden tomatoes. Now that I haven’t had a fresh tomato since early October this salsa rocked. Everything is relative, right? I’ll be making lots of salsa this summer for next March and April. By May Billy will have some hothouse tomatoes at the UW farmer’s market and this year, I’ll be gladly paying his prices. They may be grown in a hothouse but they are grown in honest to God dirt and they taste amazing.
Dungeness crab cakes using homemade Bluebird Grain emmer and hard white wheat breadcrumbs, garden greens and backyard eggs for the aioli.
Crab cake poor boys the next day using the same bread and aioli. Can I just say that I could eat this every day?
Two kinds of beef jerky – my regular kind which comes from thinly sliced steak against the grain and an experiment. I added pepperoni seasonings to grass fed hamburger from Cascade Range Beef. The texture was much easier to chew and I think this will work great as a pepperoni substitute on pizzas for the kids. It’s not as tangy as pepperoni which is fermented and cured for weeks but after all, it’s for kids.
Backyard eggs and sausage links from our Akyla Farms pig.
Mondo Brothers sausage, home grown pickled beets, collards and turnips from the garden, lacto-fermented carrots that I made using Nash’s carrots and homemade mustard made from Redhook Brewery Blackhook Porter.
Happy Dark Days!
yea – where the heck ARE those potatoes??? I’m wondering the same thing
I am a huge advocate of healthy living and I just heard about a book that might be useful to anyone else interested in a natural way to improve health and weight. The book is called “Looking Good Naked” and it outlines steps that you can take to improve your general health and lifestyle. I haven’t read it yet, but I’m interested to get my hands on it.
Last fall I made some lacto-fermented salsa. It was my first time making it and every time I take it out of the fridge it amazes me and I say to my husband “I made this way back in September.” And every time, he just smiles and says “Yes, I remember.”
Kim let us know what you think once you’ve read it. I’m more interested in being healthy than looking good naked but that’s not a bad bonus.
Brook – would you consider doing a guest post about it? I’ve never done salsa but canned tomatoes leave quite a bit to be desired not to mention the energy & bpa that goes into canning them. I really need to do more entried on lacto-fermenting but I’m always so rushed I don’t blog about much that I do since my blogging time competes with my working time when the kids are in bed.
I’m drooling with envy over your eggs (and everything else).
Nora get chickens! They are so easy and fun. Mine just live in a converted dog house.
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I called Territorial and asked to have my seeds sent sooner than the normal April date. You could do that too. Mine just came yesterday.
Suzanne, I requested they be sent asap when I ordered them and they finally sent me the shipping notice. So they usually send them in April? I didn’t get seed potates from them last year and may not again, this has been frustrated waiting for all the backorder seeds, onion starts and potatoes. Of course it was a monster order, like over $1,000 since I combined orders with as many others as possible. But oh so fun to fun my fingers through that huge box of seeds!
They ship them at two times apparently, spring and fall. You can order them earlier and then save them to chit later. I am going to put mine into potato buckets tomorrow. I have never ordered from Territorial, that is just what I was told when I called them asking about my potatoes. They sent me my seeds ages ago. Last year I ordered from a different company. To be honest I was disappointed with the number of potatoes I got this year. I thought I would get more for the price that I paid. I was expecting a much larger bag than I actually received. I apparently didn’t pay much attention to the weight catergory. Hopefully I have/get enough potatoes out of these, although it is less than half of what I started with last year.
Suzanne, mine are supposed to come today so we’ll see if they are all I was expecting. That is good info on their shipping schedule. I don’t get why anyone would want to get them so late since you can control the light exposure and chit at will. Thanks!