We ate our first French breakfast radishes today.
And here’s what the front beds are looking like. Starting to get filled up with sweet potatoes, tomatoes, beans, and greens!
Garden update
Written by karen on May 27th, 2014Like riding a bike
Written by karen on May 19th, 2014It’s been over five years since I’ve been on a bike. And I was never much of a bike rider anyway. I always felt a bit insecure.
But today we got on new bikes! I’ve been missing running (it hurts my knees too much) and have been looking for another way to get out and get some exercise. I wavered a bit on whether bikes make sense out here, but finally decided to give it a try.
It was fun to take the bikes out for the first time today and see what it’s like on dirt roads (and today in high winds).
New projects
Written by karen on May 15th, 2014We’ve been working on some new things. First, we have caged in part of the back garden to try to keep the quail out of the asparagus once and for all. (And this new structure, big enough for Brad to stand up inside, has stood up admirably to the 60+ mph winds here the last couple of weeks.)
And we built a new adobe cold frame for growing during the winter with its own little bench:
Best of all and not unrelated, for the first time in several years, we no longer have a pile of adobe bricks in front of our house!
Is it too much?
Written by karen on May 10th, 2014[edited to include pics…it wasn’t too much]
A tapas-style locally sourced meal:
- Grilled asparagus and garlic scapes
- Fresh fava hummus and sourdough toasts
- Spinach dip with goat cheese and bread
- Chipotle sweet potato bisque
- Salad with poached eggs on garlic bread
Homemade seitan
Written by karen on May 9th, 2014We really like seitan. If you’re not familiar, it’s a meat substitute made from wheat gluten (the protein part of wheat). You can cook it pretty much like chicken. It’s more flavorful and has a better texture than tofu.
Unfortunately, like many things, it isn’t easy to get here. It’s mostly available at health food type stores, which are in short supply.
Imagine my delight when I found a recipe for making your own in one of my new slow cooker books!
The first recipe I found described what seemed like a complicated method for getting gluten out of regular wheat flour by rinsing and kneading a dough several times to separate the gluten. Then I discovered you can buy wheat gluten. I was able to get 5 pounds for about $13. Pretty cheap.
Last week I tried making it. The process was quite simple. You mix wheat gluten and a few other ingredients (in this recipe, chickpea flower, nutritional yeast, soy sauce, onion and garlic powder, salt and pepper) with water. You knead the resulting dough for just a couple minutes. It was quite springy unlike usual bread dough. Here’s what the dough looked like before cooking.
Then you cook the dough in the slow cooker in a broth of water, soy sauce, and onions for a few hours. Here it is what it looked like after that – pretty much looks like what we buy at the store. (Note: You cook it again after this to make the final dish.)
And finally here are a couple dishes made with seitan. The first is ropa vieja, a Cuban dish normally made with shredded meat.
Then there was this barbecued pulled pork…um, seitan.
Garden update
Written by karen on May 7th, 2014There’s been lots happening in the garden.
Here’s an updated map of the beds for this year. 
Between many days of extreme wind, much of this has been planted already. The number of beds has grown to the point that it is a fair amount of work to keep up with all this. I find it very satisfying work and am increasingly more excited about the parts of the days I spend out in the garden than those I spend in front of my computer.
For most of the beans, I’ve planted half a bed now and am waiting to plant the rest until the monsoons come. (There is a school of thinking here that you should wait to plant everything with the monsoons. I’m unsure so am running some tests.)
The tomatoes are looking very good, though I unknowingly mixed in some hybrid seeds and so may get some odd results. (Long story, but we made a huge batch of salsa last year that included some neighbor’s tomatoes. I thought it would be fun to save a mix of the seeds, but didn’t realize that one of the varieties was a hybrid.)
The sweet potatoes are looking especially strong this year. We have over 40 slips (starts). I used a new technique of putting a small potato in a carton of sand this year (the leafy starts are pulled off and potted separately; then more grow):
This worked very well with each potato like this yielding many (20+?) slips. In the past, I’ve just pulled slips off potatoes in the pantry because that way, we could still eat the potatoes. :)
I think our starts in general look a lot stronger this year. I credit that in part to our new potting soil Happy Frog, which was recommended by a guest speaker from the county extension office who we had at one of our seed meetings.
We’ve also been continuing to improve the soil in the beds and are hopeful for a great crop this year.
We are eating a lot from the garden right now. Last night’s dinner was almost entirely grown here. We had:
- Steamed artichokes with mustard aioli
- Grilled garlic scapes
- Apples (not grown here) and cheese
- A big salad with homemade sourdough bread with scape compound butter
We’ve also been eating a lot of asparagus and spring onions. Yum!
Let’s go camping
Written by karen on May 6th, 2014We took a spontaneous camping trip this weekend.We didn’t want to spend too long away from home with lots of new seedlings in the garden and hot weather predicted (drip irrigation isn’t running yet), so we decided to camp nearby up in the national monument.
It was really nice to unplug for a few days and enjoy all the unexpected beauty that nature has to share.
We knew there would be many spring blooms this time of year, but hadn’t ever seen a cactus flower this color.
We were able to do several hikes that we hadn’t done before including one that ended with a view of this natural bridge.
The most unexpected thing from this trip was unfortunately one I wasn’t able to photograph. After dark, a wild turkey circled our camp, calling out all the way. “Gobble, gobble, gobble. Gobble, gobble, gobble.” It was delightful. Brad thought maybe we should try to get some to hang around the house. I think not.
Artichoke update
Written by karen on April 25th, 2014As an update to our last post on the artichokes, we harvested the first one today.
On that same plant where the first one popped out, there are now 6 artichokes with new ones coming every few days so far. And several other plants have their first artichoke buds as well.
All in all this is seeming quite successful.
This is the same plant that had its first bud just a couple weeks ago. There are now 6.
Who are you?
Written by karen on April 18th, 2014A son of a friend of mine left college to pursue organic and sustainable agriculture, working on farms with a plan to do this long term.
I recently sent him a link for the National Young Farmers Coalition, a group that works with young farmers to help them succeed. The response to this was “I’m not a farmer.”
That made me think about identity. Who are we? How do we think of ourselves? What makes us one thing and not another? How important is all of this?
When I worked a regular job 60 or 70 hours a week, I had a very clear answer to the question “Who are you?” At various times, I was an executive producer, a teacher, a small business owner. This defined me in many ways. Some that were good; some that were constraining.
Now, I’m not sure what I am, and this is somewhat unsettling. I would never call myself “retired” — I still work and still need to work. But I no longer have a job that I spend as much time on nor one that I feel as strong an identity with. I freelance and do various jobs off and on, some of which I love, others of which I don’t, but none of which are “me.”
There are many other things I spend time on as well. I grow food. I bake and cook. I read. I write. I do wood working. Some of these seem more than hobbies, but none is a full time occupation. None is “who I am.”
Sometimes it helps me deal with these metaphysical questions to make up a narrative, and the story I’ve toyed with for this is that instead of working a job to buy things like food and housing, we’ve just jumped right into producing our own food and housing. That’s not quite exactly the whole story though (not to mention the fact that we still rely greatly on the outside world).
How did this work a hundred years ago? Did people ask each other “What do you do?” Did they think about identity in this way or some other way? Or did they just go about what they needed to do to survive without existential angst?
The slow cooker period of karen’s cooking
Written by karen on April 10th, 2014As you might remember, a couple months ago, when the new kitchen provided more space, I got a slow cooker (aka a crock pot).
I started out slow with it, making some things you’d expect like soups and stews.
Then I started thinking about it as a way to save propane. (Since we’re on solar, using anything electric is preferable. And surprisingly, the slow cooker doesn’t draw a lot of electricity.) So I went to the library to get some books on what exactly you could do with one of these things, and I found two of the most amazing cookbooks ever (which I promptly ordered several copies of):
- The Vegan Slow Cooker by Kathy Hester
- Fresh from the Vegetarian Slow Cooker by Robin Robertson
Oh my gosh! I had no idea.
Here are a few of the things you can make with a slow cooker: granola (which I often make…it takes hours in the oven, not only using a lot of propane but heating up the whole house), baked breads and brownies, breakfast porridges, baked potatoes (which I love, but hesitate to heat the whole oven up for), enchiladas, eggplant parmigiana, curries, fruit butters, chutneys, and much more!
Here are some more pictures of things I’ve made so far.
I’m gradually working my way through many new recipes and will update this picture set as I do.
If you have a slow cooker and haven’t used it much, do yourself a favor and get one of these cookbooks and give something new a try.