Greenstorm's Journal

#56

It starts like magic
Not just the magic of regular beginnings
But with a small child in the kitchen
Learning to read from a book of spells

Spells of abundance,
Creativity,
Satisfaction:
The alchemy of transforming marked-down
Leftovers
Into something good for the spirit
As well as the body.

Though the magic serves well
It’s not always easy,
Standing in front of the fridge
Spellbook in hand
Staring blankly. Or,
Tired at the end of the day,
Eating half a loaf of store bread and some water.

In the middle there are such
Comfortable
Days. The before-coffee rhythm of
Scooping flour,
Measuring salt and baking powder in the palm,
Cutting butter in,
Pouring milk by eye.
The warming oven pings in the bite
Of morning air through open windows
And the cats rub perilously at ankles below.
The rhythms of this magic
Are a dance that can be done in sleep.

Sometimes it’s showy:
A duet in the kitchen now
And two families brought together in a spell for
Contentment
With all their needs met.

The beginning, the middle,
And though the end is not written
I know it will contain magic.

This is the first time I'm doing a meme on here. amazon_syren asked me five questions; if you would like me to ask you five questions comment below. If you would like to just chat but would not like to be asked questions, also comment below. Ha.

1) Based on this year's harvest, are you wanted to try any new varieties of corn next year? Or planning to cross-breed any varieties you've already grown?

The first year, the test year, was about figuring out my foundations and what was realistic, but also about doing my first crosses. Realistically, corn grown anywhere on my property will cross with corn anywhere else on my property if it pollinates at the right time, so many of my saved seeds will be crossed. Specifically I'm interested in most of the crosses I did with my best-performing varieties, gaspe and Saskatchewan Rainbow. There are definitely varieties I'd like to get my hands on, and I am hoping to get a wildly mixed set of seeds to keep a slow drip of genes coming into the projects.

So: new varieties, the landrace grex from my group. Crosses: gaspe x montana morado, gaspe x a little bit of everything, saskatchewan rainbow x a little bit of everything, morden x a little bit of everything, morden x either magic manna and/or painted mountain (to make an earlier flour mix), gaspe x cascade ruby gold, gaspe x atomic orange, and a three-way saskatchewan rainbow x atomic orange x montana morado.

2) How do you sew stretchy knits for waist-bands? Do you use a serger or is there a trick to it? (I've never managed to do well on stretchy fabrics, so I'm looking for tips and tricks, if you've got them).

I'm a waist-band minimalist in a lot of ways. I don't have a serger, and I also wear long enough tops that my waistbands are covered. Last iteration of sewing, I just took elastic that I thought was pretty and that was wide enough, gave it a good stretch before I sewed it to break it in, cut off a piece that sat around my waist comfortably, and sewed it into a ring. I put that ring, pretty side out, on the outside top of my pants waist and did two strips of zigzag stitch to hold it in place, on along the top edge of both the elastic and the pants, and the other through the bottom edge of the elastic and also through the pants. It's held up.

For knit long underwear and outer pants I'm planning to do yoga waistbands with a different fabric than the main pants this year, basically a folded and slightly shaped band 3-4" wide in a stretchy and more snugly-cut fabric than the rest of the pants that replaces the top couple inches of whatever was going to be going on there. But basically the trick to not popping the thread is to use a zigzag or lightning stitch for the initial seam (my machine has a really nice zigzag stitch for this) and if you want reinforcement do a zigzag or decorative stretch stitch over the seam in a visible way, that also captures the raw edges somehow ("overstitch").

For the arenite pants they do an elastic casing, will report back.

3) Pigs: How are they?

Oh my, this is a lot.

Pigs are an amazing survival tool. American colonization happened on the backs of pigs, dropped off in river bottoms on the coast and left for years to multiply. They foraged their own food and in turn became a very low-difficulty, high-calorie supply for the invading armies/colonists. They also were an amazing weapon in a land with no fences, rooting up and destroying indigenous plantations. So ecologically on my farm pigs are calorie batteries, calorie recyclers, and disturbance agents. They're great for turning and piece of land into a garden: happy to dig up stumps, turn over sod, eat down many annual weeds, all the while fertilizing as they go. I have to be careful because I do not always want disturbance on my farm, but they let me make great use of so many things I couldn't otherwise make useful. My breed is also fatty and furry and well-insulated, they're fantastic in the cold and it's easy to put together a shelter for them, it doesn't have to be fancy, though as living crowbars they'll tear it right down again so I'm glad they're easy to put up. They'd do better on a bigger farm where I wanted more disturbance more often, or maybe I just have too many pigs.

On a more social level they're great at driving home social relativity. Pigs and humans have a very different sense of personal space: pigs communicate through touch both with their super sensitive noses and through just shoving each other. I've had to learn to speak the shoving language and get comfortable with that. It would take a lot of cruelty to get them to not touch me at all, though by shoving back hard and fast they treat me as a fairly high-ranking pig and therefore don't throw me out of the way as they do the young piglets. They are curious, friendly, and they show when they're cared for well by frolicking and playing. Really they love playing, and any tarp that strays into the enclosure turns into a tug-o-war game. Like any varied population they have individual personalities; some get particularly attached to me (can be annoying, they follow me around and squeal) and some keep their distance. Mamas are happy for me to watch them birth, for the most part. Except for the noise they make, which really does set off my sensitivities sometimes (think continuous loud rusty gate when they're excited), they have excellent temperaments to partner with humans as long as the human is willing to go halfway and speak their language of physical touch.

So pigs are good ecologically, great socially, and good for getting me outside a human-only perspective.

4) What is a favourite Traditional Food Of Your People? Why do you love it, and how do you make it your own?

This is a hard one! I don't really have a people. Maybe I should start with a story about my mom's mom. She lived in a small town in Iowa and had a ton of kids but she was still what my mom describes as adventurous with food. For instance, as early as the 50s she experimented with chow mein: canned bean sprouts, canned mushrooms, spaghetti noodles. It made an impression on my mom and I grew up with my mom as, honestly, not always the best cook but always adventurous: together we made feijouada and wonton soup and sticky rice in lotus leaves and a million things I don't remember, stepping our way through recipes in, among other things, a time-life "cooking of the world" series. She utility-cooked the standard midwestern noodles + tomatoes + ground beef type foods, and we ate a lot of rice, and she did a lot of 90s-era stir-fries, but I'd say the thing that got passed down on that side of the family was primarily a sense of play and adventure. Anything I wanted to make with reasonable indgredients, I was supported in that. So pretty much all my cooking now, from charcuterie to whatever I'm going to do with the duck fat on my counter when I get home to the duck-tonkatso-miso-with-spaetzle I'll probably have for dinner tonight builds on that legacy of play.

However. I memorized my grandma's pancake recipe and have been making it since I was 7. I eat the pancakes off a plate with my fingers, sometimes spreading with jam or dipping in syrup.

My grandma-in-law is jewish and I picked up a love for kugel and for a pseudo-matzo cream-of-wheat-and-egg dumpling in lipton's dried chicken soup packets from her. I make those straight up these days, no spin needed.

Mom always used to make muffins on the weekend for us. They were chocolate chip muffins; sometimes she made a particular coffee cake. Those feel like love to me, though I make pandan muffins with hemp seeds rather than chocolate chip half the time now. I still make that coffee cake.

And I still do the midwestern brown-some-hamburger (pork nowadays, or goose confit), add a can of tomatoes, some pasta, and some garlic powder and cook a minute thing that is probably the biggest Food Of My People, when I'm feeling up to it.

5) Favourite book(s) of 2022?

The new Hardy Apples book by Robert Osborne is probably the only thing I read cover to cover this year. I really, really enjoyed the Noma cookbook though. No fiction this year, and I think Braiding Sweetgrass was last year? Very little book-form reading, I'm afraid.

I think this is the first time I've eaten an entire loaf of bread I made on my own. I have a recipe for a no-knead dutch-oven loaf I made a lot, but it was definitely bigger than I could eat all at once. I got a smaller dutch oven at one point to help shape it. For awhile I experimented with sourdough but couldn't get the intense sour taste withotu accompanying lacto flavours. I made some pretty loaves but just never did eat a whole one (I really don't like stale bread, so after 36 hours or so I usually won't eat it anyhow).

The other day I tossed together a loose pizza dough recipe in the style of no-knead, starting with 2 cups flour instead of the 3 or 4 I used to use. I think I was intending to make a pizza dough but habit took over and I tossed it in the dutch oven and it came out really nicely. I ate the whole thing over the course of 3 days -- I think the 90-ish percent hydration and olive oil I put in it kept it from feeling stale. I did two sets of stretch-and-folds, one before bed and one when I turned on the oven this morning to preheat it, and the loaf seems to have kept a nice shape.

So that's nice. Not sure why I'm baking bread again but I'll take it, bread at the store is between 3 and 5 dollars and it's not always great (though sometimes the airy cake texture of cheap white bread is fun).

I got some of my garlic in the ground last night. Everything is a race in the last sliver of light after work, then I put on my headlamp and feed the animals. I still need to get my daffodils in.

I got 200 gallons (!) of milk from the grocery store for the pigs, since the cooler went down with the power outage. Luckily it's in gallon jugs so it doesn't take me too too long to get it poured out for the day.

Both bulbs and milk is going to be complicated because the cold is here. It finally got real cold last night, -10C, which is more in alignment with the temperatures one would expect for this time of year. Days are still barely above freezing for now, and there's only a skiff of snow so far but that won't last. Hoses are frozen/I disconnected them last night and hung several of them to try draining, so I guess that means I'm bucketing water (and milk) now. I should figure out who I want where in terms of animals.

I do wish we'd had a good rain. I'm planting the garlic into dry dry soil, and I'd probably best put a sprinkler on it if we get a day a couple degrees above freezing. I want to cover it with straw but can't do that until it's watered in, I think.

Canned some goose, want to can some pork in the "beef pot roast" style since I realized it fries up really nicely when canned but the flavours in my al pastor and carnitas are sometimes just too much for me.

Money is a big issue right now too, the juxtaposition of the smithers/butcher trip, the last month's worth of feed for all the pigs, my property taxes, my house insurance, and a couple other bits and bobs makes me realize how much I overextended myself on feed over the summer. I do not like carrying a balance on my credit card but here we are. Time to get digging. There's some stuff about work, not having ratified a new contract, and so having not even the token raise we normally get, but I'll keep that out of here. We're not getting cost of living increase anyhow.

Oh! There's the timer on the bread coming out of the oven. Time to leave this and go see how it turned out.

The apples are a perfect template for how I think about the food I make.

I have an abundance of something, in this case apples. I want to use it to make a portion of my diet, across the year if possible, so more than just standing outside and eating apples after I get home from work and tossing the cores to the geese (which I also do).

Drying apples would be perfect, I could snack on them easily while doing other things, but it's too fiddly: my apples are small, and I don't have time to core and slice them, I only have one dehydrator, it's a low return for the amount of work.

Applesauce is easy: cut the apples in half (for a more efficient fit, and to see if there are huge worms in them or anything) and toss them in a pair of slow cookers. Eight to twelve hours later, come back and pour the pulp from the slow cookers into the chinois (does this thing have another name yet?) directly into my stewpot. Heat to boiling, with or without sugar or another flavouring, pour into jars, boil the jars 20 minutes, done.

But wait, this is kind of boring applesauce, I can't eat it that much. Does adding a couple vanilla beans make it into more of a dessert thing? So then I can eat it more? Or burning some sugar into caramel? Why yes, so I'll do that with some.

And adding more sugar and simmering makes it into jam, which I can then flavour with things I either don't have enough to make jam (the last saskatoons, a couple of limes) or that don't make good jam on their own (spruce tips).

But if I make jam, the next step is: can I eat it on anything I've made or obtained locally? Applesauce is good on my pork, or with my goose. Actually, the jam probably is too.

But if I make cornbread or some sort of hoecake from my corn, putting jam on that is a more satisfying experience. Then if I serve that with homemade breakfast sausage, that's even better.

So I'm always kind of thinking, is there an exotic flavouring I can buy to increase the value of what I have, like limes or vanilla? And then, where's the next piece down the chain where I can add something I grew or harvested to make this meal more completely from this place?

That's the basic philosophy underpinning the thought of raising 75% of my calories myself.

Last night I made duck breast for dinner for Tucker and I; today I'm roasting the rest of the duck to have for dinner, to pick at crispy skin and eat the rich leg and oyster meat.

In the oven with the duck is the King Arthur short version of rugbraud (rye hot springs bread from iceland); this isn't proper in that it doesn't cook for 12 hours, but it is rye-only and uses an ok oven temperature to cook with duck and I'm curious to see how it turns out.

The newly-castrated piglets are running around and frolicking in the sun. Water is sheeting off the curved sides of my house as the snow melts, punctuated by loud crashes when chunks of snow let go and slide off altogether.

There's always a sleeping cat in view; also in view is the rack of green pepper sprouts and compact furry tomatoes. Behind me my year-old potted peppers are covered in white bloom. Sun is coming in sideways through the double glass doors.

I'm part of a group on fb (Indri's vanilla bean group) that does co-op direct buys of vanilla beans in addition to its retail store -- it's extremely fair trade consumption and gets me a luxury good affordably. They're putting out a cookbook, so I'm doing some recipe testing for them.

On my list:
x The Coffee Cake (it's topped with toasted oats, which is nice)
x Panna cotta (this one needed a little more gelatin)
x Egg pie (it's a custard pie with flour as a binder, definitely not a delicate custard so it seems like a pretty robust recipe)
o Custard pie (another iteration, I'm curious to compare them)
o Filipino butter mochi (this is in the oven now, I'm interested)
o Emergency milkshake (milk, cream, vanilla, and ice, sounds great)
o Microwave caramel corn
o Vanilla bean instant pot rice pudding
o Creme brulee
o Semolina pudding

It's more than I can eat (needs to be done in two weeks) but it's a fun project. I also submitted my shockingly good vanilla lemonade (seriously, just add a teaspoon of vanilla to a tall glass of lemonade) and I hope it gets in there.

Very interested to see how some of these turn out. I've never heard of oven-baked mochi before!

Edited to add: the butter mochi is truly delicious and much easier to make than the rolled mochi I'm used to. Plus it's gluten free. Hm.

Quick fb repost here, since I haven't written on this much:

I just want to acknowledge how many core beliefs food touches on how our bodies relate to the world and its creatures, and how big and significant restructuring that relationship can be, and finding good meaning in a new type of relationship. Especially if it's been such hard work to preserve the old relationship for so long.

I've never been vegetarian or vegan. There were many years where I was known-source-animal-products-only, which many times looked like functional veganism.

Two things led me to my current system, which is to grow 75% of my calories and carefully source about 15%, then let the last 10% be what it will:

I've always had a very deep relationship to plants where eating their bodies and products feels equally significant to eating the bodies and products of animals. It feels more comfortable for me not to divide creatures into two categories and treat those categories differently, but instead to develop a relationship with each type of plant and animal and fungus and understand how it fits into the environment as part of it also fitting into my body.

I began to let go of 100%ism in everything. I'm allowed some softness and some ease. That roughly 10% is so I don't need to count my calories, go hungry when my mind or circumstances won't allow certain foods, or stand apart from social sharing. I've allowed myself to make choices that are easier sometimes. Allowing myself this grace changed my relationship with food from one of control and scarcity to one of recieving bounty.

It's snowing. My chimney is fixed. There are flashes of sunlight here and there.

I had a great talk with Tucker about stuff, was able to tap out when my emotions were big but not too big, and we had a lovely weekend.

And... I just had a really great lunch.

I have some fatty loin chops in the freezer for quick meals. I'd been eating them with a bunch of chimichurri sauce to offset the fattiness but it's winter now and my parsley/oregano isn't available for chimichurri. I also don't have a big pile of sauerkraut this year and didn't really do any potatoes (though in hindsight I did buy a big bag of potatoes which are now downstairs).

I also have two kinds of wheat kernels, marquis which is a hard red bread wheat and ac andrews which is a soft white wheat. Most recently I'd ground the ac andrews and it behaved oddly, but I had some ground left over. I decided to make some bannock and fry it in with the pork chops to use up the fat and give me a carb. I also tossed a bunch of my pickled carrots (jalapeno, garlic, carrots, salt brine) on the plate too, they're ultra crisp and definitely a veggie.

This was a pretty great choice. The bannock was perfect. It's not only the fresh grind of the flour that gave me flavour; I think there's something about soft white wheat that makes me think of tortillas. The grain had that sweet/parched/toasty/aromatic flavour from frying, with a little bit of crispy not-quite-deep-fried taste around the edges from the lard it cooked in. I'm out of milk so I added a touch of powdered milk to it (proper bannock) which gave it a ghost of sweetness. The low-gluten fully-whole flour made such a soft and pillowy bread between the flaky/crispy outsides. Then the pork chops are always glorious, about 40% streaked and marbled fat, seared and meaty and silky with the fat just on the edge of melting at serving temperature so that it's textured like butter in the mouth. And then slightly soured, cool, bright, garlicky carrots with an entirely different type of sweetness and a crunch so loud it's almost too much within the confines of my own head. They were the perfect offset to that soft and fat.

This is where I want to be at with my 75% calorie project: not constrained by rules about what I can't eat but instead drawn in by a celebration of place and relationship. Mom brought me the carrots and we made the pickles together with her and my brother; the place she got them is itself a real place (Desert Hills in Ashcroft) I could get to and see and walk the soils. They have goats that climb a tower for treats and Mexican farmworkers who make tamales and sell them from a fridge in the back and have an ongoing relationship with the site. The grain was brought up from the lower mainland by Josh (soon to be my own grain I do hope) from a, no, _the_ grain CSA in the lower mainland who experiment with different varieties and know me as the person up north who probably is the most distant CSA member. And then my pigs about whom I've said more elsewhere. Plus a little dried milk, baking powder, and salt from the store that tie me in to my civilization and back me up when I need variety or just want to engage in the worldwide commerce that humans have always done and that I'm rich and fortunate enough to partake in.

Anyhow. That was a good lunch. Outside the sun is bouncing brightly off new snow and one sunbeam falls through the curtains to lie across my hands as I type.

Time to get back to work.

Edited to add: "had some ground left over" by which I mean flour. Ground wheat is flour. Sigh.

I was going to make mochi today and ended up making vanilla lemonade instead. Vanilla lemonade is very tasty, incidentally.

Now for something actually super great.

The guy came and killed/skinned/gutted 5 pigs last Saturday. I tossed a bunch of primals in the bathtub in ice to get the heat out, put some in the freezers (meat is insulative, so you can't pack too much in a freezer), and got to work. There are still maybe a dozen primals in the freezer -- mostly hams -- and there was a bunch of extra waste of bones and fat trim because I figure I had enough of some things for now. So:

Two dozen jars of concentrated tonkotsu stock
A dozen jars of Ellen's carnitas recipe, likely to make more
A bunch of thin-sliced ramen pork, maybe an oz or two per pkg
Several boxes of chops, mostly loin chops with about an inch to an inch and a half fatcap left on them but some leg steaks and sirlion chops
Many roasts, primarily picnic and leg roasts
A couple boxes of belly, uncured as yet
About ten pounds of ground in 1lb packages, likely to be added to
A box and a half of coppa and prosciuttini and three slabs of bacon in cure with sichuan peppercorn, juniper, whisky, and seville orange in varying amounts
A kilo and a half of "crack pork jerky" waiting for the dehydrator
A bunch of odd bits, ribs, tongues, kidneys, hearts, cheeks
Two jowls in cure and the rest untrimmed in the freezer waiting (those things take a lot of trimming, there are so many salivary glands in there)
A full 5-gallon bucket of soapmaking lard <3
40 or so portions of rendered leaf lard in single packages plus more to be packaged
10 kilos or so of sausage either in process (ground and waiting for casing) or in chunks waiting for grind
5 smoked and a couple unsmoked/uncured hocks

Additionally we smoked a bunch of bacon from the last butcher which had been in cure for long enough, and three prosciuttos and one lonzino. I need to drop my salt percentage a bit for the bacon, since it's eaten hot-- it's good for bacon sandwiches but a little too intense to eat on its own.

Plus we harvested most of the wheat, and I'd previously harvested my beauregarde soup peas. Although the peas were primarily a seed multiplication exercise, I have enough to make a small pot of pea soup from my hocks and my peas and my chive or onions. How amazing.

Some of my pepper plants are inside awaiting frost. I've been picking smallest unripe winter squash and eating them which: makes up for the bad zucchini year, encourages the remaining squash to grow better, and keeps them from being wasted by frost. Plus they're very dense and tasty, unlike zucchini which can sometimes be a bit squishy.

Mikado Black tomato is my new go-to black tomato. Very smoky tasting and it ripened!

Jory is starting to ripen, it's got nice big fruits. Unexpected and I'm interested to taste it.