Veggies of June

Just as of last week, I've been starting to really feel like the garden is in--like we have enough vegetables to stop buying them from the store, to stop planning too much for dinner ahead of time. Dinner is anything with greens, turnips, radishes, shallots, sometimes beets, now steadily peas, both snap and shell. Add a can of salmon and an olive oil/balsamic dressing; or cook up some egg noddles and stir in soy sauce and sesame oil. Voila. It is good. 

And yet I've been hung up on vegetables of the future. Our sad, tiny onions.  The beans and the leaf spot on some of their leaves. Our tomatoes suffering in the upside down weather—cool and rainy now that they're getting heavy with green fruit. 

I actually cried about it—in fury at the rain and clouds that stayed away all spring, when I wanted them for peas and lettuce and radishes, and at the sun that beat down on everything endlessly until now, when it would actually be more helpful. 

And then I got a grip. Or, I'm trying to get a grip. Trying to rearrange my focus on the present. On sautés with snap peas, on panfuls of just-hot shell peas tossed with butter. On pillowy mashed turnips. On radish pickles and lots and lots of salad. I can do my best to help the rest of the garden along, but I can't let worries about August keep me from enjoying June. 

Rye Brownies

This winter my dad sent me a link to Melissa Clark's rye brownies. We get rye flour sometimes from our Bluebird Grains CSA, so I tried these brownies for a party in January. It was love at first bite. These are not kid brownies, and these are not Costco brownies (that Ghiradelli mix—which I do like). These are fudgy, dense, and dark, with a rye snap in the flavor that makes me never want to consume brownies made from all-purpose flour again. I don't think they're for everyone, or even every brownie lover, but they are for me. My soul brownie. 

But they do call for a lot of baking chocolate, and I didn't want to have to buy fair trade organic baking chocolate as often as I wanted to be able to make these brownies (it is just too expensive to be a basic pantry item for me). Fair trade organic cocoa powder is less expensive and goes farther. So I set out to recreate the rye brownie recipe using cocoa powder only. 

I've started keeping a cooking journal where I scribble down recipes—successes and failures and musings and dinner idea lists. I added my first cocoa powder rye brownie recipe to the journal; it was a conglomeration of Melissa Clark's recipe modified by ratios I saw in cocoa powder brownie recipes online. Besides the ratios, I chose to whip the egg whites separately from everything else and fold them into the batter at the last minute, to try to balance out the lack of rise in rye flour. 

Somewhat disappointingly, for I was in a test-kitchen mood, this recipe was completely and totally satisfying. It was Valentines Day, and Tim was sick with a bad cold, and we were watching What's Eating Gilbert Grape, which he had promised me would fulfill my desire for a light and romantic movie to watch that night—and it totally didn't, but it was such an amazing movie that I didn't care, and the brownies were rich and dark and chewy and we ate the whole pan (it was a mini pan). 

But I couldn't just declare my brownie recipe perfect after one iteration. So for the next few months I tweaked and fiddled, tried extra eggs (too cakey), all coconut oil instead of butter (awful! Oddly crispy on the outside!), and a few other things. I kept coming back to that first recipe, with one change: no whipped egg whites. That way, the recipe takes only one bowl, about ten minutes to put together, and zero fuss. It's the kind of recipe that I can now make on whim, with no notice and no trips to the store for several $10 bars of chocolate. Like tonight, when we decided to go on a picnic at the river and I felt that we must have rye brownies to eat. Thirty minutes later, the brownies were done along with the picnic dinner and we were off. At the river's edge, after a nettle-y bushwack and wander through a mostly maple forest with ginormous old-growth stumps here and there, we consumed the brownies and I declared the recipe done. It's a monumental recipe for me—the first baking one I've patched together myself, taken all sorts of notes about and thought about many times, and tried and tested enough to feel confident in it. 

So, without further ado:

Rye Brownies

10 tablespoons butter, plus more for greasing pan

3/4 cup white sugar

3/4 cup + 2 tablespoons cocoa powder

2 eggs

1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract 

1/2 cup brown sugar

1/2 cup Bluebird Grains rye flour

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon baking powder

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F.

Combine the butter, white sugar, and cocoa powder in the bowl of a double boiler (or a heat-proof bowl set over a saucepan of boiling water). Stir until the butter is melted and the sugar and cocoa powder are smoothly incorporated. Set it aside to cool for a minute or two while you grease an 8x10-inch baking pan.

Then add the eggs, vanilla, and brown sugar, and stir to combine. Finally, add the rye flour, salt, and baking powder. I mound them on top of the butter-cocoa mixture, whisk just the dry stuff with a fork (my lazy way of avoiding getting out another bowl), and then stir it all together. 

Pour into the prepared pan, use a spatula to spread it all evenly, and bake for 23-25 minutes (23 will be fudgy, and your husband might say "these aren't cooked all the way," but you will be happy) until a fork inserted in the middle comes out clean(ish). 

Update, January 22, 2023:

In search of a brownie recipe for Tim’s birthday, I remembered this old recipe and dusted off the blog to check it out. It seemed just right to try again: a one-bowl recipe is even more appealing these days, and we have a plethora of rye flour for our weekly sourdough loaf. I followed the recipe exactly, with one exception—adding a generous handful of chocolate chips. 

Goodness, it turned out delicious! Rich, fudgy, and just the right amount of sweet to counter the rye flavor.

I was wrong on only one point. I said “these are not kid brownies.” Did I have any kids then? Who was I to declare that? My four year old gobbled them up just as happily as me and Tim. 

Maybe in the next iteration I’ll experiment with making them dairy- and egg-free, so my littlest one can partake. 

For now, these are a decadent treat that I will reinstate as my go-to brownie. 

Tarragon Radish Quick Pickles

These days, peas are just around the corner. I ate one yesterday, on the last day of May. While the plants have struggled in the hot spring weather and are still short, some just a foot and a half tall, and even though the snap peas didn't germinate fantastically and look scraggly along the fence, with big gaps between them, it was a delicious and satisfying moment. So we might not have as many peas as we hoped--I am happy for what we have! Last year, we didn't plant any.

We planted thirty-two tomato plants outside last night, and the greenhouse--now home to eight tomato plants--feels so spacious sans seeding tables and the mini forest of potted tomatoes that lived on top of them for two months. Don't tell me forty tomato plants is overboard. I still don't trust that they all will make it, not after last year's rotting-tomato-disease fiasco, and this way I am pretty sure, barring wholesale disaster, we will at least have some. And if they all end up producing, I will achieve tomato nirvana.

Meanwhile, we're eating lots of cherry belle radishes, hailstone radishes, and purple-top turnips. When you catch the turnips young, maybe golf-ball size, they are shockingly sweet and sugary, with just a hint of a snap in the aftertaste.

But I wanted to write about cherry belle radishes. These beauties mature after just twenty-five days, which goes by so fast that it's easy to miss them in their prime--as I almost did with the full-grown cache I discovered yesterday. Besides being quick to grow, they are low maintenance and so satisfyingly red and round and juicy. It seems almost a shame to do anything to them besides slice them into a salad--as much as we like sautéing them quickly in butter and eating them just barely translucent and still a little crunchy, any cooking turns that firehouse red color a sort of lame pink. Pickling does the same; the pigments stain their pure-white insides pinkish, too, after about twenty-four hours.

But I can't resist quick pickles--a first milestone in the garden season, when you have some extra to "put up" rather than just enough for a lunch salad or dinner side. I have to put "put up" in quotation marks because, let's face it, the jar will be empty in less than a week!

Tarragon Radish Quick Pickles 
The fresh tarragon adds a hint of licorice, and the longer you let the pickles sit in the fridge, the more licorice-y they will taste. 

I like these pickles as a condiment for stir-fried noodles, especially if you add a little hoisin sauce--the sweetness of the hoisin plus the tangy tartness of the radishes is addictive. Or fold them into a salad with avocado, Gorgonzola cheese, and almonds—the pickles brighten all that richness to make a perfect dinner on a hot June evening. 

About 20 cherry belle radishes, cleaned and sliced thin
A few sprigs fresh tarragon
1/2 cup water
1/2 cup red wine vinegar
1/4 cup honey
A pinch of red pepper flakes

Wash and dry a pint jar, then fill it with radishes. Stuff the tarragon down the sides. In a small saucepan, combine the water, red wine vinegar, honey, and red pepper flakes, and bring just to a boil. Pour the vinegar mixture over the radishes, fit a lid on the jar, and let cool to room temperature. Refrigerate for twenty-four hours before eating.

The quick pickles will keep for a week or two in the fridge.

Tomatoes in June, and Reflections on Meat

I have never been happier for cloudy weather than I am this week. It's not just my Pacific Northwestern blood talking, begging for a break from summer in May. It's sympathy for the topsy-turvy garden. 

Tomato flowers on May 15? 

At the same time as pea flowers? 

We've had radishes, pak choi, several types of mustard greens, spinach, and arugula already bolt and flower after pretty lame harvests or, in the case of the radishes, no harvest at all. We're nursing the onions along only by watering like it's August. But this stretch of cooler weather has every plant unhunching its shoulders and raising its arms to the cloudy sky, heat stress mostly forgotten. 

The upside is that our actual summer crops as well as fall crops, like dry and green beans, summer and winter squash, peppers, eggplant, and potatoes, are already ginormous. Actually, the squash are bigger than the peas. 

And these beauties, which got mostly shade in the afternoons, made it all the way to our plates. 

I guess even if we have to pull even more bolting confused spring crops in the weeks to come, at least our pigs will be happy to eat them. 

We took these three piglets home about a week ago. Believe it or not, they'll be 250 pounds in a few short months (right now they're about the size of our cat). Until then, we plan to pamper them with an expanse of woods to root around in and a lot of organic feed. They'll live kingly and queenly lives, as far as pigs go. And then they'll pair perfectly with those winter squash and potatoes in early November. 

It's funny, a few years ago I'm not sure I would have approved of a statement like that about baby pigs. I would have squirmed to think of them as future food. But raising our own animals for meat has changed my perspective. Now meat is not just vacuum-sealed protein to buy in a store. Meat is mornings spent striding through dewy pastures carrying buckets of grain and salt, and the baaing hellos of ewes and lambs that nose up to my legs and nibble my work jeans. Meat is the chickens who wander free around our yard and the pastures, forming subgroups and cliques that we nickname and gossip about at dinner. (Have you seen the Deputy recently? He's always hanging around the Three Stooges now.) Meat is planning—electric fence line or hog panels? Can three piglets fit in the back of the Jetta? Meat is poring over YouTube videos on butchering techniques and researching charcuterie recipes and planning what cuts we want to eat, sharpening knives and buying butcher paper. Meat is the fascination and art of transforming a whole side of pig or lamb into cuts that we wrap and mark with sharpie and store up in the freezer and carefully cook through, one at a time. Meat is knowing our animals lived well, ate well, were healthy and honored, and in turn give us nourishment we feel right about.

So it has its messy parts. There's no way to romanticize plucking a chicken or scalding a pig. But my life is infinitely richer for the animals we raise, in their lives outside and in their lives in our freezer. The dots connect. 

Not everyone can or wants to raise animals for themselves. But it's driven home, for me, more than any book or article, how deeply important it is to care about the meat you eat and the animals it comes from—at the most basic, were they given the space they need, fed food they naturally want to eat?—and to use your purchase power to communicate that care. 

Soapbox over. 

Sprouts

Apparently the last few months my blogging energy has hovered around zero...or a little higher if you count posting pictures and no words as blogging. 

I struggle with sitting down at the computer to write or read after work. After a solid day of editing, it's just not appealing. Although we do watch Netflix sometimes on my computer. So perhaps my excuse is not valid. 

Things are a little crazy on the homestead. There's just so much to do. Planting, weeding, watering, tending in the garden; chickens, sheep, soon pigs; a lot of work on the truck (not my realm, but still); and a number of unfinished yard projects. We are frazzled. In a good way though. I find nothing more satisfying than discovering the hunched shoulders of a bright-green bean shoot in the morning and finding it shooting for the sky in the afternoon. 

Spring flowers

Nettle Tea

Up until last week, I have always tried to stay away from this spiny dragon of a plant. It triggers unpleasant memories, like when I squatted down to pee in the woods at Hogsback and basically sat on one. 

But this week I sought it out, armed with bright pink rubber gloves and a big bowl. It's hard not to jump on the fresh nettle train when the shady part of the pasture just steps from my back door is full of them, just three or four inches tall--so many that my friend and I, after picking for an hour, processing, and then coming back for more, couldn't even tell where we'd harvested. We were inspired by a local homesteader, Corina, whose blog I love to read. She just recently wrote about nettle pesto, and we had to try her recipe. Eight batches of it. 

It is delicious enough to snatch a cube of it from the freezer and pop it into your mouth plain, as Tim can testify. 

I also tried dehydrating lots of it for nettle tea. Stacked full, the dehydrator only takes a few hours to turn the leaves shriveled and crackly. I use the very scientific recipe of about one teaspoon dried leaves per mugful of water.

The flavor reminds me of green tea, earthy and somewhat spicy and spinachy. Spinachy tea doesn't sound super delicious, I know, but I have found it quite addicting. Apparently it also has superpower health benefits. I feel much more friendly toward nettles now, at least until summer, when they'll be thigh-high and I'll want to walk around in sandals.