So Much to Tell

We have been very busy in the garden & kitchen during 2011, I just haven't had a chance to share with everyone.  In quick summary:

• Despite the extremely slow start to the season and depressingly cool summer, we had a surprisingly bountiful harvest from our garden, especially potatoes, dried beans, squash, and tomatoes.  Once again, we figured we would have no tomatillos and ended up with a bumper crop (although they didn't ripen very well, and as a result didn't store very well at all).  Even our peppers did really well this year, and we smoked our Guajillo chillies in our new Bradley Smoker!  They are fabulous in soups, stews and sauces, with just a little bite and a lovely smoky flavour to enhance anything they're tossed into.  We also tried dehydrated tomatoes and had enough of our Red Ruffle bell peppers to dry again this year, which I've been adding to just about all of my savoury recipes.
• We have our first livestock!  In July, we picked up 9 young Muskovy ducks: 3 drakes and 6 ducks.  They've been enjoying our orchard & field, and keeping the weeds cropped beautifully.  Plus, they really got into slug duty this summer, so we're enthusiastically looking forward to their slugging abilities this coming spring.  They started to lay in late November, and Dave's been collecting about 3-5 eggs every day since then.  We'll be letting them raise their babies in the spring, in the hopes that we can have duck meat to make into confit, casssoulet, ham, sausage, and just duck!

 

• We participated in a Community Supported Fishery through the Michelle Rose in Cowichan Bay.  As a result, we had about 11 pounds of king shrimp and spot prawns, and a little less than 10 pounds of sockeye and pink filets.  We christened the Bradley by cold-smoking some sockeye, and I made my first batch of gravlax.  The seafood (including the smoked salmon) has made it into a few chowders with our root veggies (rutabaga, potato, parsnip, leeks & onions), smoked guajillo & dehydrated ruffle peppers, home-made chicken stock, our grilled corn nibblets and coconut milk finish - totally yum.
• We had our first "feast of the fields" equivalent - we hosted a mid-winter feast with our friends, and dined on the gravlax with home-made butter (sigh, not yet with our own cream) on home-grown home-made rye bread, spicy pumpkin soup, espresso-braised venison, rutabaga potato gratin, and pumpkin pie, accompanied with home-made apple plum wine.  It was fabulous, and we're looking forward to repeating this new tradition annually (maybe even semi-annually with a summer feast, too!). 
• In dealing with eliminating eggs, wheat & dairy (and now corn & rice for the foreseeable future) due to Kate's eczema, I've been exploring baking with allergy-friendly alternatives.  I purchased allergyfreemom.com's recipe book and have made quite a few of her recipes very successfully.  I recommend trying the cinnamon rolls (they're weird to make but really, really tasty) and the gingerbread cookies (even if it's no longer Christmas).  I used sorghum flour in both to great success.     There are also some great recipes on Bob's Red Mill site.  I'm also now trying to eat a lot more veggies, especially greens (check out the TedX presentation by Terry Wahls), and have discovered that I actually love kale chips (go figure)!  I've also invested in some super food stuff via recipes from Meghan Telpner's Making Love in the Kitchen blog.  After enjoying the Tumeric Tea (actually more like spicy chai tea with tumeric added) and Raw Chocolate Bark yesterday, I am definitely looking forward to some more experimentation in this department.

Since I can't seem to keep up with what I'm doing in the kitchen, you can always have a look at my SpringPad site to see what recipes I'm collecting and trying out.

I'm sure there's been more activity - of course there has, Kate's now 18 months and there's been a year's worth full of development and exploration in that department.  The addition is now mostly complete, certainly Mom has been living there since about May, and really enjoying it.  We're now turning our thoughts towards getting Dave a shop built, so that he can get back into making his beautiful furniture.

Progress of Garden

When Mom first moved back to Cobble Hill a few years ago, the property hadn't had any active gardening, at least not from the vegetable raising perspective, for a number of years.

In the first summer when Mom first arrived, we didn't get much done other than a patch of potatoes dug. It looked like a couple of graves in the lawn! And, somewhat surprisingly, the deer had chewed the new potato leaves to the ground. But we did manage to get potatoes that year, and we figured that in order for any edible food to be grown, we needed a deer fence.

So we had lawn to remove, and fencing to put up to keep the deer out. I realized recently that I haven't got any posts showing the progress from grass to garden, so I'd like to remedy that now.

The start of the deer fencing for the Kitchen Garden

Deer fencing up! - Early spring 2006

The first planting - spring 2006

We moved our dwarf heritage apple trees and some blueberries from Burnaby over to Cobble Hill and installed them in the Kitchen Garden, and built some raised beds in the next year:


In 2008 the "little mule" arrived: Dave's two-wheeled tractor, a Grillo made in Italy, which has hugely helped the conversion from raw land to garden. We decided that once we had the tractor, the raised beds were more work than they were worth, so now we just have dirt.

Dave's "little mule" set up to rototill the Kitchen Garden

And while it wasn't the first year we grew tomatillos, it was certainly a bumper crop year (which has been repeated pretty regularly since):

Tomatillos

So we keep getting a little better every year, and try new things to grow. In 2009 we had pretty much all of the Kitchen Garden under production, with chick peas (garbanzo beans), shelling and snap peas, tomatillos, brocolli, kohlrabi, carrots, beets, Chinese greens, and of course the odd left over spud from years before poking through.

Kitchen Garden 2009

Our tomatoes, peppers and ground cherries were moved out to the new greenhouse and we tried our hand at "Early Dew" melons and pickling cucumbers there, too.


And we grew a number of squash varieties and some lemon cucumbers, along with dried beans, out in the newly enclosed Orchard, which I don't seem to have photos of right now.

This year, we've done even more - I'll post photos in a while!

Painless Broccoli

Natalino broccoli

From our garden last year

My Aunt Jean introduced me to an extremely painless, low fat, way to eat steamed broccoli - sprinkle with lemon juice. Thanks Aunt Jean! That's how I always serve it now, with a little scrunch of mixed pepper & pink salt, perfect.

She also introduced me to broccoli slaw, which I don't remember ever having before. I did get the recipe from her, but I believe it's sitting at Mom's right now, doing not much of anything. So I did a search to see what I could turn up, and got this dressing recipe.

I had purchased a couple of deep butcher-trays filled with cut broccoli this week while grocery shopping; each one was less than a dollar, and I'm pretty sure there was the equivalent of one large head in each. I suppose that they were trimmings, but they were all perfectly good and very fresh. So I steamed some up, others went into a frittata this afternoon with the leftover roasted root veggies (very tasty and filling); the rest got de-stemmed, blanched & vacuum sealed for the freezer in single-portion units.

I was going to toss the stems into the compost when Dave reminded me of the slaw. Oh, yeah!! So Dave shredded his way through all the following veggies, and I mixed up the dressing.

Broccoli Slaw

Grate the following using a coarse grater:

stems off of two heads of broccoli
2 gala apples
2-3 medium carrots
1 small zucchini

add

1 cup raisins
1 cup sunflower seeds

for dressing, combine:

1 tbsp malt, balsamic or apple cider vinegar
1 tbsp dark maple syrup
1/4 cup mayonnaise and plain yogurt (half and half)

Stir everything together and refrigerate overnight if you can (or serve right away) to let the flavours develop.