A Super Salad

"Too many simple green salads suffer from lack of imagination." - James Beard

Here we are at November 7th and the highs are in the mid-80's.  Looking at the bright side, the garden is flourishing.  For the supper menu tonight, we had some homemade pesto and bowtie pasta as the main course and figured that a FRESH garden salad would be the perfect accompaniment.  If you're not busy, would you come with me and gather the ingredients?

Let's stop off at the cattle panel that doubles as a trellis for the sugar snap peas.  They are healthy and climbing and are almost five feet tall right now.  Blooms are in abundance and there are already numerous pea pods.  We'll pick some of those as they are so sweet and delicious in a salad. 

Here's the lettuce patch.  There are five or six varieties going.  We've been eating a lot of salads lately.  Several years ago I learned something that I feel embarrassed to share, but here goes.  I would harvest lettuce by pulling each up by the roots.  This was dumb.  Super dumb.  Somehow I used my noggin and figured out that if you just snap off the leaves (not by the roots), your plant will continue producing and producing until next spring when it gets warm and bolts.  Then you let it flower and save the seeds.

But for now, we'll pull off the biggest, prettiest leaves from a variety of lettuces so that the salad bowl is multi-colored.  We hear a lot about "Farm to Table" and how fresh that is.  This salad will be picked, washed, tossed and eaten within 30 minutes of harvest.  Let's grab some lettuce and get going inside to put it all together.

The lettuce goes in a salad spinner where we'll wash it up real good and spin it dry.

Not all things in the salad are fresh.  Here are some lacto-fermented cucumbers that we pickled back in the spring.  I like to cube these up and throw in the salad bowl.

Even older than that is some lacto-fermented ginger carrots from February.  So cool, tangy, and tasty!  Let's put several fork-fuls on top.

This stuff here, although its not homemade is like the cherry on top.  This olive salad is the concoction that they put on a muffelleta.  It's delicious on a salad, too.  A spoonful or three on top...

All goes in a big wooden bowl.  We'll top with grated parmesan cheese, green onions, salt & pepper.

We'll add some ranch dressing and top it off with some lacto-fermented HOT banana peppers.

We'll ask a blessing over the salad and pasta and dig in.  Super salad!

Tomatoes 'A Plenty

Each afternoon we go out to the rows of tomatoes and do some picking.  We have a number of heirloom varieties planted.  It is a decent, but not stellar year.  After the deluge of rainfall, some of the tomatoes gave up the ghost and shriveled and died.  Others slowed, but continued to produce.  Some you're gonna win, Some you're gonna lose, Some are gonna get rained out, as they say.

We have Black Krim, Black Vernissage, Cherokee Purple, Roma, Creole, Pink Brandywine, Big Rainbow, Thessaloniki, and a few other varieties planted that slip my mind right now.  So far, the stink bugs haven't been as bad as in prior years, but we have had some worm issues.

We pick what we can and make homemade salsa, and Italian tomato salad, dried tomatoes.  We plan to can a bunch of stewed tomatoes.  I've had the envie for homemade garden fresh pizzas.  We'll use some creole tomatoes for that.  There's only four of those pictured below, but we had a bunch more.

The better half cuts them up to ready for topping.  In the meantime, she's made some crusts.

The basil is producing nicely so she slices some of that up with some mozzarella pearls.

The fresh crust is brushed with some pesto that we made and froze from last year's basil crop.  So good!

She sprinkles some fresh frozen sweet corn from last year over that and then arranges the sliced creole tomatoes and mozzarella pearls over the top.

Pop in the oven and slice and serve.  We learned to wait until out of the oven to sprinkle sliced basil over the top as basil loses its green color and turns black and unappetizing.  In the photo below, we hadn't topped with basil yet.

I didn't get a final photo as we immediately began eating and didn't stop until it was mostly gone!

Fresh Baked Bread in the Oven

"Oh, but anyway, Toto, we're home – home! And this is my room – and you're all here – and I'm not going to leave here ever, ever again, because I love you all! And... oh, Auntie Em, there's no place like home!"  - Dorothy in the last lines of The Wizard of Oz

Home is a haven, a safe refuge from a world gone mad.  There is safety at home. You are surrounded by ones you love and there is a feeling of acceptance and familiarity.  It is a place where you can be yourself and relax and unwind.

Have you ever noticed that every home has a particular fragrance?  When you open the back door and walk inside, it just smells like 'home.'  I tell you what, sometimes home smells extra nice.  For instance, when there is a fresh loaf of bread baking in the oven!

Some realtors will tell you that if you are looking to sell your home, it needs to smell inviting.  Fresh baked bread or chocolate chip cookies evokes a feeling of comfort that supposedly makes prospective buyers make an offer.  We're not trying to sell our home, but when I walk in and smell fresh baked bread, I'm definitely comfortable and happy!

Lovin' in the Oven

When you pull that bread out, everyone gathers round.  The "heel" of the bread, in my opinion, is the best part.  I'll fight you for it.

I like to get some butter and slather (I like the word slather) lots of it on top of the warm bread.  Then I like to pop the warm bread out of the loaf pan and slice it while still warm. Then I either put more butter on the warm bread or I get out the jar of Steen's pure cane syrup and pour a generous helping on the slice.

After the slice is gone, a critical decision must be made.  Should you have another slice? Or should you back away from the warm, fresh baked bread?  While it is still warm, it takes superhuman will power to stop after eating one slice.  Fresh bread is quite the temptress.  Get behind me Satan!

Tomatoes Are About to Finish up

The Spring 2017 Tomato Crop is tapering off now.  The onslaught of the heat and humidity coupled with platoons of stink bugs have the tomato plants waving white flags of surrender.  I've learned a trick that extends the harvest a bit.  The trick involves picking the fruit when you see the first tinge of pink.

I then bring the "just-barely" pink fruit indoors where it can ripen without bug, bird, and squirrel competition.  We have a staging area made up of three platters. Here is an example:  On day 1, you can see the fruit I picked today, mostly green, but with a hint of pink.

Overnight they ripen somewhat on the tray and by the morning, the tomatoes are sporting a reddish color

By day 3 the tomatoes have turned from mostly green to red or blackish-color, depending on the variety.  We grow a number of varieties

Once they are ripe we'll begin to consume them.  Tricia likes to make an Italian tomato salad that she enjoys eating.  It has fresh homegrown purple onions mixed with tomatoes and olive oil and basil

And who can forget about fresh homemade Pico de Gallo.  We can absolutely kill a bag of tortilla chips and a 2 quart container of this stuff.  It has chopped tomatoes, onions, jalapeno peppers, cilantro and the juice of limes with some salt and pepper.

We also slice tomatoes and eat them, dehydrate tomatoes, and can a bunch of them. Here we have quarts of salsa.  In the center, you can see some jars of green tomato sauce.  This came about when we had a hard freeze that popped my Fall crop of tomatoes.  Green tomato sauce is very good, believe it or not!

Then we stewed twenty-something jars of chopped tomatoes that we'll use for cooking when we no longer have fresh ones at our disposal.  Notice the jar of stewed yellow tomatoes below.

We'll still have tomatoes coming in from the garden for a while, but we are stocking up on the inventory of tomatoes in various forms.  Believe it or not, it is only a couple of months before we'll start our fall tomato plants from seeds.  Aside from the summer, we have tomatoes going in some form or fashion.

Keeping the Milk Clean

In This Post from 2014 we gave a little tutorial on how we milk our cows. Everyone that milks cows does it a little differently.  I was talking to a friend the other day who is in his mid-60's.  He grew up out in the country and he and his brothers and sisters had to wake up in the morning and milk their milk cow everyday before school.

When he saw our milking process, he exclaimed, "Wow, ya'll are clean!"  What he was talking about was our "filtering process," which is simply a clean cotton rag that we tie over the milking bucket.  It is nothing fancy at all. He told me that they didn't do that.  They just milked directly into a bucket.  If it was raining and the cows were dripping water, well, the rainwater went into the milk.  If the cow was shedding hair, the hair went into the milk bucket, too.  (Uggghh!)  Same with hay, dust, etc.  He told me that they would remove anything like bugs or straw that they could see floating before they drank it.

The rag filter is a simple thing that catches any of that prior to it getting into the delicious milk.

Milk doesn't get any fresher than this!

Lately with all of the rain and resulting mud, the filter has really been having its work cut out for it. For one thing Daisy and Rosie will come into the barn with 'muddy shoes.'  Their hooves will be covered with mud and with grass stuck between them.  During the milking process, they'll kick up their front hooves, slinging mud backward onto me and the milking bucket.  Obviously, I am not going to milk through a mud covered rag as that would put mud (and bacteria) into the milk.

The rag is bigger in diameter than the milking pail and so I simply move the mud-stained rag to the side, revealing a clean portion to milk through.  I can only think of one time since 2007 that I had to walk back to the house to get a fresh rag.  It is not just from the front end of the cow that you have to watch out for, though.  The cows love to swish their tails to swat away mosquitoes.  It just so happens when you are milking them that your head is right in the way.  They swish their tail to get a mosquito or fly and the wet tail whips across your face, getting dew (I hope it is just dew!) all over you.  We've learned to tie some hay twine around their back end that holds their tail in place.  You never want to tie their tail to anything, because if you forgot to untie it, they could pull their tail off! Ouch!!

After all of this rain, we've had a mean hatch of mosquitoes.  They are all over the place biting us and the animals alike.  It is just miserable.  It creates an opportunity for patience building as we are milking.  The mosquitoes will bite the cow (or us) and become filled with blood.  Then they are too full to fly and inevitably fly between the bucket and the stream of milk as we're milking.  The blood filled mosquito will crash land into the cloth filter covering the bucket and you have to be really careful to pick the mosquito off of the filter without bursting her and getting blood on the rag.  (I say her because only female mosquitoes bite.)  This makes milking a cow a longer job than it should in order to keep mud and blood and other impurities out of the milk.

But it is a labor of love and the fruit of our labor is worth it as we get delicious, fresh, clean milk each and every day.  Tricia even made homemade Dewberry and Blueberry ice cream this weekend with the heavy cream that we skimmed off the top.  That was a special treat!

Clothesline Fresh!

According to THIS ARTICLE, in the late 1960's, Audrey Gaiser was doing her laundry.  Audrey and her husband lived on the top two floors of a duplex and poor Audrey had to run all the way down the stairs to the ground floor to add liquid fabric softener to her wash on the final rinse cycle.  Audrey's husband, Conrad was a kind and caring husband. He hated to see his wife work her fingers to the bone and wanted to make her life easier.

Conrad's gears in his head began spinning.  He had worked in the soap and detergent industry and he began testing out some ideas in his wife's sewing room by applying liquid fabric softener to flannel rags and before long, he had a prototype that he called Tumble Puffs.  By putting one of his Tumble Puffs into the dryer, it saved Audrey a trip down the stairs and made her a very happy lady. Conrad was a good guy.

She was, I'm sure, even happier when Conrad Gaiser patented his invention in 1969 and then sold the rights to his Tumble Puffs to Proctor & Gamble.  Proctor & Gamble launched Conrad & Audrey's Tumble Puffs in 1975 under the name of Bounce Dryer Sheets.  You may have heard of those. Suffice it to say that Audrey probably never did a "lick" of laundry after that.  She had someone doing her laundry for her!

We don't use Dryer Sheets at our house.  We found something better.  From my childhood, one of the freshest fragrances I can think of was crisp, white bedsheets after they had hung out on a clothesline all day in the sunshine.  That's fresh!  We use muslin rags to line the top of our milking buckets.  The rags serve as a filter to keep dust, hay, hair, and bugs out of the milk.  After we wash the rags, we hang them out in the sunshine in the morning.

Hung out to dry

As I hung them Saturday morning, the steam was rising off of the rags.  They were wet, so the weight kept them from blowing very much in the wind.

Wet milking rags

By the end of the day, though, the rags were dry.  They were bleached by the brilliant sun.  The sun also acts as a disinfectant, keeping the rags clean and white. If we didn't do this, the yellow cream would have the rags dyed a dull yellow color. The sunshine keeps the rags white.

Who needs Bounce?!

As I pulled at the clothespins and removed the white milking rags from the clothesline, I brought the rags close to my face and inhaled.  Fresh, Clean, Sterile. And we didn't even have to use Bounce. Sorry Conrad...