Category Archives: Dark Days Challenge

So close to the end of March and officially into spring! My garden is suddenly bursting with a whole lot of new growth.

Today we made a serious effort to clean out the freezer so that the freshly cured bacon, Canadian bacon and ham will have a home so we made a mess of ribs for dear friends.

Smoker man asked for potato salad to go along with it so I took a walk through the yard. Mostly unrecognized by all but me I found tarragon, parsley, lovage, chives, fennel, borage, and salad burnett making appearances so I plucked them all.

Then I boiled up some backyard eggs and made potato salad using some home grown, home canned pickles from last summer. If you’ve ever struggled with mushy pickles I highly recommend finding some Mrs. Wages pickling lime. Those pickles were as crisp and crunchy as a fresh cucumber. And as an added bonus you can use it to nixtamilize your corn and turn it into masa harina.

I’ve also been busy harvesting the cole crops to make room for carrots this weekend. I still have a shopping bag full of overwintered carrots and now about 15 pounds of brussel sprouts, cabbage, collard greens and beet greens in the spare fridge. I pulled up the sprouting broccoli plants and gave them to the chickens. The girls were thrilled since brassicas appear to be their favorite garden plant so far.

I combined some Rockridge Orchard apple cider vinegar, mayo and Sweet as Can Bee honey to make coleslaw.

Earlier in the week I headed up to Silvana Meats to pick up Chubby and while I was there I stocked up on a few things like local hot dogs, corned beef and head cheese. Reading Charcuterie got me all religious about not wanting to waste any of the pig but given the enormity of the situation when I was at the farm I decided to take baby steps. Buying a package of ready made head cheese gave me the opportunity to try it without spending any effort or time making it.

So now I’ve tried it and I’m really glad I didn’t try to make it. Got that out of my system! At least my homemade Bluebird Grains bread was good…

My husband was gone the better part of the week so the kids were once again driving the menu. We’ve been on a donut tear, first making chocolate balls which I forgot to photograph and then buttermilk drops. We never made it to the maple bars before my husband returned but he’s leaving town again in a few weeks so we’ll be getting the Cool Daddy back out then I’m sure.

The donuts were Lentz spelt, home clabbered buttermilk and backyard eggs.

We also made the largest chocolate chip cookie I’ve ever made using Lentz spelt. It was delicious with a scoop of our homemade Golden Glen ice cream.

There was a whole lot of sausage since I was mixing and seasoning and packaging all my bulk sausage. We had one night of spaghetti from Azure in Dufur, OR. I had some home grown plum tomatoes in the freezer that I had run out of time to process last summer and just froze them skinned in a ziplock. I cooked a quick sauce using frozen roasted garlic that Skeeter grew for me last summer and some frozen basil. I had frozen the basil in a ziplock still on the stalk and it looked remarkably fresh and was perfect in this quick sauce. One nice thing about freezing instead of canning was how fresh the tomato tasted. Oh summer.

After I mixed up my breakfast sausage I fried up a meal’s worth of patties to be sure the seasoning was on track. Yup.

I spent a fun day with friends who took home the other half of chubby. We seasoned and stuffed bratwurst while the kids played. That night it was nice to have a freezer full of sausages that could quickly go from freezer to grill to plate. I filled the empty spots on the plate with some freshly picked mache.  A homemade pickled jalapeno and Charlotte’s sauerkraut rounded it out, along with a taster of local beer.

No St. Patty’s day is complete without corned beef and it was nice they had some up at Silvana since I didn’t realize when ordering cuts of our Cascade Range beef that brisket is a specialty meat. If you don’t specifically know to ask for it it goes into stew. That one didn’t go over with my husband very well but Silvana redeemed me because he admitted that theirs was better than our home cured corned beef and that’s saying quite a bit. I braised some garden turnips and overwintered cabbage to go along with them

Chicken Little has also been on a smoothie kick ever since I showed him how to use the blender. So far he’s stuck with frozen strawberries that I bought from Billy at UW market last summer. They were in 20# buckets marked #2 which means they weren’t pretty and needed to be processed right away but they made awesome fruit leather and smoothies! We also used Golden Glen cream and milk as well as some of our homemade ice cream. What is nice about that is that it’s only lightly sweetened and loaded with backyard eggs which made it an amazingly healthy after school snack.

Happy Dark Days!

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We’re in the homestretch now – only a few short weeks to go before the rhubarb and asparagus are up. Things are growing like crazy in my garden and I can imagine the farmer’s markets are starting to fill with some new early spring greens.

My chives are up which is nice since I’m almost out of onions and it’s just about time to plant the last of my sprouting potatoes. The pantry still has 3 jars of spaghetti sauce, countless jars of canned peaches, chutneys, salsas, green tomato enchilada sauce, roasted red chili sauce, 2 jars of pickled or roasted peppers, 2 jars of home canned tomatoes and tons of pickles and jams but the freezer is full of dried tomatoes, fruit and berries so we are in good shape.

Next year I won’t make as much jam but I will can more plums and cherries since we liked those more than I expected we would. I don’t think I made enough applesauce this year either since we use it to make fruit leather in addition to eating. It was a good exercise and I guessed pretty well all in all. Or maybe we are just eating what is there since I don’t shop at the store but it doesn’t feel like we’ve wanted for much and the variety has been all right.

My husband was out of town last week so the kids mostly drove the menu. You’ll see it was heavy on the side of baked goods which I normally try to space out because I feel like it’s replacing junk from the store with homemade junk (minus the chemicals) but still not the nutrient dense food I try to make. It felt a little like IHOP since we ended up eating breakfast for dinner quite a bit in the absence of another adult to cook for. Next week you’ll see way more veggies as I try to eat down the garden beds to make room for transplants and spring starts.

French toast from homemade soaked 100% whole wheat bread made from Bluebird Grain hard red wheat, Lentz spelt, Golden Glen milk and backyard eggs.

Aebelskivor from Lentz spelt and backyard eggs.

Have you ever seen how these are made? In the cutest little pan. If you want you can fill the holes halfway and then add a slice of apple or jam or even something savory inside like sausage and cheese. It’s sort of the original hot pocket. I keep meaning to make little pizzas like this and put in my sons’ lunch boxes for school. How fun that would be for them to find little balls of sandwiches for lunch!

I’m trying to clear out the veggie beds for spring plantings so I harvested the last of the over wintered carrots and some nice turnips. We snacked on them all week.

Buttermilk (home clabbered from Dungeness Creamery milk) oatmeal Lentz spelt scones with home dried sour cherries and dried blueberries. I wanted to add home dried apricots from Rama but that sparked a huge debate between the boys so I scrapped the idea. Too bad because I love apricots!

Homemade cavatelli (from Bob’s semolina since I couldn’t find the Fairhaven duram wheat that Brittney had used last week.)

Cavatelli with Willipa Hills gorgonzola sauce served over my turnip greens with steak from our Cascade Range Beef cow and Edmonds Winery claret.

Ina Garten’s maple scones using Bluebird soft wheat and Golden Glen butter (1 pound of it to be exact.) But the scones are a family favorite. We are trying to clear out the old maple syrup to make way for the Stannard Farms syrup buy I organized last week. 26 gallons of it. That’s a lot of syrup!

Home pickled Loki salmon with Rockridge Orchard apple cider vinegar and a bay leaf off my tree. I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to make this. I’ve been looking for local herring and there is none so I finally just substituted salmon. It was delicious and a great quick snack to have around. Pickle Man loved it.

Soaked 100% whole wheat bread using Bluebird grain red winter wheat.

Winter minestrone using my cabbage, home canned tomatoes, freezer corn, frozen chicken stock that I made a few weeks back and white beans from Full Circle Farm.

Black Pepper Plum cobbler with my neighbor Martha’s plums from the freezer and homemade snickerdoodle ice cream using Golden Glen cream, backyard eggs and lightly sweetened with maple syrup. The black pepper lent a depth to the plums that was hard to place and slightly spicy. I wished I had used more but I was treading lightly since I wasn’t sure how it would come out. It was kind of a wacky idea that I luckily pulled off!

Buttermilk biscuits, backyard egg scramble with Beecher’s cheddar and bacon from Akyla Farms.

Home canned Rama peaches, homemade granola and local yogurt! This one was a complete surprise. During an emergency trip to Met Market for kleenex we saw this and had to get it. The kids will only eat store bought yogurt and even my husband expressed his distate for my homemade yogurt. Of course if I put as much sweetener in mine as commercial yogurt makers do they might eat it but I’m choosing my battles carefully these days. I’m still buttering them up to raise turkeys in the backyard this summer…

Next week, onto more veg. Happy Dark Days!

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I’m convinced I have the bubonic plague. How else could I still be sick going on SIX WEEKS? And people, I’m not sickly. I’m finally trying to get in to see a doctor this week so hopefully the menu here will pick up soon beyond Met Market chicken noodle soup and homemade breadsticks.

These were made using hard white wheat grown in Dufur, OR. It’s my pizza dough recipe which I don’t think I’ve posted yet but will shortly. I simply roll it out on a cookie sheet press course salt in it and roll it in, cut into strips, then twist and bake. You can bake them until they are soft or leave them in until they are crunchy. It’s nice to have something crunchy to dip in your soup that doesn’t take long to chew when you can’t breathe through your nose.

Garden kale and carrots combined with juiced Tonnamaker apples that I had previously made and frozen made the basis for chocolate breakfast shakes using local milk and freezer peaches from Rama Farms. Of course the cocoa powder wasn’t local and neither was the yogurt.

I made yogurt last year but I had too many fermentation projects in my tiny kitchen and my fil milk, yogurt and buttermilk cultures all married in the same way all the women in a group end up in the red tent together. I may start yogurt up again but while I am sick is just not the time.

A caramelized onion, Willipa Blue and Met Market mozzarella pizza. Just missing pears and walnuts, neither of which I had or it would have been perfection. I’ve taken my whole wheat pizza dough all over the board this winter and finally realized it’s the technique and not the combination of gluten or grain, or how finely you mill the grain that gets you the bubbles. I’ll share my secret when I post my dough recipe later this week since we also had tacos which I forgot to photograph and we have some meat left. Sounds like a taco pizza on the menu for week 15.

The tacos were my standby recipe using Cascade Range Beef hamburger, freezer corn and I had to use canned tomato sauce finally since I had made 2 gallons of tomato ketsup/sauce but overcooked it with the spice bag and it’s gross. Next year I swear I will not buy tomato products! I do still have some jars of canned romas but that won’t give you that saucey-ness you need for a taco or sloppy joe. Rather than make tortillas I stuffed large mustard leaves from the garden and we ate them spring roll style. I was thinking what a great option that would be for someone on a no-grain diet.

Here is my ace in the hole. My plan B for when the recipes don’t work out and I don’t have any little freezer squares to pull out for dinner or tortillas to whip up burritos. My plan C is always eat out but we’ve only had to resort to it once. I won’t tell you how many melt downs I’ve had trying to force a recipe to work or rebundle it as something else for the dinner table. Azure Standard in Dufur, OR grows their own duram wheat and makes their own line of pasta. It’s outside the 150 mile radius for dark days but it meets my personal guidelines by being the closest dried pasta that I can find for those times when I just can’t make it myself. And that’s pretty frequently these days.

I used it to make a quick carbonara using ham from our Akyla Farms pig, backyard eggs, Golden Glen cream and Rumiana parmeson (again out of range but there is no local parmeson and montasio is not an equal substitute.) At least it’s from California and not back east.

I served it with kale and turnip greens from the garden.

And finally, blueberry spelt muffins with nearly the last of the freezer blueberries, backyard eggs, Lentz spelt and home clabbered buttermilk from Dungeness Farms milk. I’m sad to see the blueberries go but hopeful that this summer we’ll have loaded bushes that we aren’t able to keep up with.

Happy Dark Days Everyone!

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