Much Needed Moisture

Here on the Front Range of Colorado, we’re in our second day of a snowstorm that’s bringing much needed moisture—the farmers’ mantra–to our soil and water supply. Even the Huffington Post ran an AP story on our snowstorm, reporting the rise in our snowpack to 77% of normal. That might not sound like good news, but it’s better than it was a week ago. And when I checked the National Resource Conservation Service’s snowpack report this morning, I found even better news: statewide snowpack is 203% of last year (154% for our water basin) when we suffered drought and wildfires. The snow may be below normal but any improvement over last year is welcome.

April is a busy time of year for getting vegetables seeded and transplanted, work now delayed by the snow. Two Saturdays ago, we transplanted 7000 onion and leek starts into new beds. With the fields still moist from the smaller snows that followed, we haven’t quite finished that planting. But with a snow day, we can catch up on a few chores that we might not have gotten to otherwise. This morning, John’s repairing our solar lawn mower and I knit a long swatch in assorted yarns for an upcoming public art event (more on that in May). Best of all, this April storm has afforded us time to try our friend Deirdre’s delicious sponge bread, something we’ve been wanting to do for months. Deirdre was right: it’s easy and delicious. I’m glad to have a snow day to find that out.

The snow may not be convenient right now, especially for our loved ones who have to get to work, but we’ll be happy for the snow this summer when there’s water for the fields, and the mountains, we hope, won’t run the risk of wildfire like last summer. A lot will depend on summer heat and wise water use. But for now, the clouds have issued us a reprieve. So here’s a few pics of what “much needed moisture” looks like at Stonebridge.

Snow drifting between our back mudroom and the bunkhouse. Our farmmate Joe tried to sweep a path and broke the broom!

The stone bridge in snow

Typical for a spring snow, the ditch isn’t frozen

John outside the shop in the tractor barn where he’s fixing the mower

The curl of snow around the roof of the Sunflower Room porch

And there’s more on the way

 

A January Tribute to Aldo Leopold

We’re in January, that frigid first month of the year when the sun shines intermittently as snow pellets the already frozen ground. John and I don’t go out much at night in January, but last night we donned heavy sweaters, parkas, and ear grips to attend a small screening of the recent movie Green Fire, a beautiful evocation of the life and land ethic of the early conservationist, Aldo Leopold.

While I appreciated learning more about this important founder of The Wilderness Institute and activist for land preservation, Leopold’s passion for hunting took me aback. When I came home, I re-read some of his essays, not to excuse his killing of animals, but to try to understand his ideas in an historical light. Leopold’s environmentalism evolved from his early days as a forester who approved the killing of game predators like wolves to increase deer for hunters. As a hunter himself, he seemed to view hunters as inherent advocates of wilderness preservation. Later, when overcrowded deer populations devastated wilderness, he realized that such killing only served to unbalance natural ecosystems.Certainly the movie’s use of vintage photo after photo posing dead animals next to men with guns is meant to illustrate the wrong-headed ethic of killing animals with no regard for what their loss means to their environment.

Leopold was also critical of what he called the “artificializing” of the “mass-pursuit” of “trophies” by intensive land management practices that increase the availability of fish and game for “trophy-recreationists,” including by constructing roads into wilderness. Leopold advocated stewardship rather than dominion over the natural world by viewing ourselves as part of that world. The last lines of A Sand County Almanac echo his plea for a change in how humans view land: “Recreational development is a job not of building roads into lovely country, but of building receptivity into the still unlovely human mind.”

Leopold died at age 61 in 1948 of a heart attack while fighting a fire near his family’s Wisconsin farm retreat. One can’t help but wonder how his conservation ethic would have evolved had he lived another twenty or thirty years to see the birth of an environmental movement and the earth’s increasing degradation by short-sighted human folly.

On this cold January day, with a fire in the woodstove to keep us warm, I want to honor Leopold’s passion for preserving wilderness as wilderness with an excerpt from my forthcoming book, A Bushel’s Worth: An Ecobiography (Torrey House Press):

Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, like other classic nature writings such as Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey and Refuge by Terry Tempest Williams, combines exquisite detail of his corner of the natural world with an urgent appeal for protecting that world—if it’s not already too late. First published in 1949, Sand County is arranged by months; the February chapter is particularly apt for Stonebridge: “There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.

To avoid the first danger, one should plant a garden, preferably where there is no grocer to confuse the issue.

To avoid the second, he should lay a split of good oak on the andirons, preferably where there is no furnace, and let it warm his shins while a February blizzard tosses the trees outside. If one has cut, split, hauled, and piled his own oak, and let his mind work the while, he will remember much about where the heat comes from, and with a wealth of detail denied to those who spend the week end in town astride a radiator.”

Here on the Front Range, winter eventually catches up with us. New Year’s Eve is cold and snowy and snowstorms come in waves, diminishing in power but keeping the landscape softly blanketed in white. The nights are frigid, but in the house, we’re warmed by a wood fire, one provided by nature and by John with his chainsaw and his willingness to go outside first thing in the morning for wood. Many years ago, our hot water heating system went on the blink. We were using the woodstove pretty regularly already because we liked the warmth it gave, reaching further into corners than less powerful heat. When the furnace went out, we decided to go all the way with wood.

Or almost all the way. The ceiling-high windows on the south side of the farmhouse provide passive solar heat and we have a couple space heaters for our offices or to warm the cast-iron tub in the bathroom. Primarily, though, the woodstove does the job.

Each year since we let the furnace go, we’ve made some improvements. Because the farmhouse is 100 years old, we had extra insulation blown into the walls. What a difference that made, mostly to keep in the heat from the woodstove rather than lose it out the wood walls. Next we built a wood hut to keep the logs dry and handy outside the back door. Designed by Jon Bell with a scavenged satellite dish for a roof, it makes trips to the woodpile much more pleasant, even in the snow. We’ve lined and improved the old chimney and have it cleaned periodically by a chimney sweep. We also bought, at our friend Peter’s advice, a colored temperature gauge so we could monitor the optimum flame. Yellow is too low; red is too high. We like to keep it “in the mustard,” we say, where the wood burns most efficiently.

The biggest improvement is the wood itself from the trees growing along the three irrigation ditches. For years we burned cottonwood, since it was the most common, but that wood burns like toilet paper—lots of ash, not much heat. Now we’re burning willow, apple, and Russian olive, the latter a weed tree that John has sworn to rid from our land.

I’m glad John doesn’t mind swinging an axe as he’s “let[ting] his mind work the while.” And I’m glad to hear the “thump” in the woodbox in the morning as he drops a load of dry logs for the first fire of the day. It’s good to know where our heat comes from, as well as our food. Leopold would approve.

 

Keeping a Farm a Farm

I spotted one again last week, a subdivision with “farm” in its name. Land that used to grow food is now covered with beige houses. I don’t know whether to take offense at the irony of a housing development named after a farm or take comfort that the name evokes its farming past. Once farmland is developed, it won’t be farmed again. That loss affects all of us, not only in the lack of food raised locally, but in the demise of natural habitats for plants and animals. Harder to measure is the degradation of the human spirit as the natural world vanishes from our collective imagination.

The development pressure in our part of the Front Range is intense. More people moving to the area means more homes, more strip malls, more big box stores, more light industrial, and more businesses to assure jobs for the people who move here. And that kind of growth takes land.

At the same time, farming today is a shaky enterprise at best. Costs are going up, the weather is less predictable, yet the physical labor required to farm is still demanding. I don’t know what the figures are in Boulder County, but farmland along the Hwy 66 corridor where we live is disappearing. Older farmers have counted on selling their land to pay for their retirement and who can blame them? But it’s terrible that farms are rarely sold as farms anymore.

At least in Boulder, the county itself is interested in preserving farms and has purchased thousands of acres as agricultural open space. We disagree with the county over the use of GMO crops on that land, but we are glad the county is far-sighted enough to create a new “rural preservation” designation under which our farm now falls.  That means the land can’t be developed for industrial or commercial purposes, at least for the next 10 years and hopefully beyond.

John and I are still in our fifties and plan to farm for many years to come. But we are starting to take steps to ensure that Stonebridge Farm remains a real farm—not a housing development called “Stonebridge Farm.” We’re working with our local officials to foresee and guarantee options down the road. And we have a grandchild on the way who may—we hope–want to farm some day. Still, we know that we are the ones who have to preserve Stonebridge now if the farm is to survive. It’s sad to think we won’t be here forever, but even sadder would be the loss of this land to asphalt and concrete.

In the meantime, we’re farming. Our amazing crew transplanted 10,000+ baby alliums—leeks and onions the size of a blade of grass—last Saturday. That’s the first big push for the farm.

Over the next two Saturdays, we’ll plant thousands of brassicas—cabbage, broccoli, and cauliflower—now hardening off in the cold frame. That’s the second.

The third—tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, and basil–won’t come until June 1^st or so when the soil warms and all chance of frost is past. Last week John started the peppers and eggplant in the greenhouse and today we seeded 18 heirloom varieties of tomatoes, including Stonebridge’s favorites—Brandywine and Tiffen Mennonite. As always, we’re trying a couple new varieties, Black Prince to complement Cherokee Purple and Mr. Fumo, a paste tomato that earned raves with Boulder’s culinary gardeners last year.

Every spring for the last 21 years, we’ve started seeds in the greenhouse and transplanted them into the fields. With the help of our wonderful friends, we’ve watered and weeded and waited and harvested. And with the support of a loyal community that understands the importance of local agriculture, we make it through another season.  Preservation requires actions taken each day, one after the other. Only that kind of care and commitment will keep Stonebridge from becoming another subdivision with “farm” in its name.

Newly planted allium field in the shadow of the Two Guides, Longs and Meeker peaks. We think this is worth preserving.

 

Another New Year

Spring has sprung,

The grass has riz,

I wonder where

The flowers is.

                              –Kayann’s 4^th grade poem

January 1^st is the beginning of a new year when we make promises for the twelve months to come. But spring brings its own sense of renewal. After winter’s chill, I’m always cheered to find the daffodils naturalizing along the ditch bank in bloom again.

 

 

March was warmer this year than usual, with NO SNOW. I’m capitalizing it because I can’t remember a March without snow here on the Front Range. We’ve always had snow in March, and not just snow but BIG snow, with many wet inches blanketing the ground. Sometimes, March snowstorms close schools and airports. On my 50^th birthday three years ago, the snow was so wet and deep, everything shut down. I even had to cancel my birthday plans for chocolate soufflé at Le Central in Denver.

With no snow in March this year, we were a little worried about getting the season off to a good start, so snow two nights ago and a few stray flakes and misty rain yesterday were welcome. Even better, the temperatures didn’t fall low enough to hurt the fruit trees that have already started blossoming. Trees in bloom this time of year hold promises for the season. If we don’t still get a hard frost (entirely likely in April or even early May), we’ll have apples for cider pressing this fall.

The old apple in front of the house

This week’s moisture encouraged the seeds John planted last week to emerge in the spring garden. The sugar, snap, and snow peas have germinated well, pledging many pleasant hours of picking in the pea patch to come (try saying that three times). This Saturday we’ll transplant thousands of alliums—onions and leeks—into the moistened beds. Maturing from stout, grass-like blades to round, juicy globes, alliums spend the longest time of any crop in the ground. Once they’re planted, they ground the season with an assurance of dinners to come.

All this generative growth holds another kind of promise, one transacted between farmers and the earth. If we do our part—planting, watering, weeding, thinning, and harvesting–the soil, water, wind, and sun will do the rest. I think we get the better end of the deal. As we start a new season of renewal, let’s work with spring’s optimism toward potent dreams, garden fresh and ours for the growing.

 

My 53rd in the Rockies

Good advice for a 53rd birthday

Robin Chocolates from Longmont are a great start to more wagging!

Long's Peak in Rocky Mountain National Park

Cleaning up pine beetle kill along the road

Destination: Alberta Falls

Snowy trail--beautiful day

An Oregon hiker in shorts

A small tree dead from pine beetle kill

Cliff at the lower end of Alberta Falls

Before the wind really picked up

Most of the falls were under snow and ice but we could hear the stream as we hiked

Chocolate turtles in their natural environment

A pine squirrel wants to join us for lunch but is told "No feeding the wildlife!"

Same goes for the gray jay

The blue of the Stellar's Jay is startling in the subalpine forest

We were glad to see snow in the mountains; we haven't had any on the Front Range this month, which is quite unusual and a little ominous

Snow trail-packed across a bridge

Bear Lake is just above Alberta Falls

Despite the snow, the winter's been warm enough to warrant this sign--which a teenager had to test for herself

The view from Bear Lake of Hallett Peak on the left and Flattop mountain on the right.

A favorite of the locals near the YMCA camp and a delicious place for a birthday dinner

Heading through Estes on our way home, a quiet morning before the tourists head back up in a month or so.

. . . and get to the mountains when you can!

 

On Onions

This morning we finished seeding onions and leeks in our greenhouse, the first starts of our spring planting in preparation for the farm season to come. John already planted and covered Walla Walla Sweets in field beds last fall for spring onions, but this time of year we plant other less winter tolerant varieties in the greenhouse instead. Many farmers start onions as seeds or bulbs outdoors but we’ve found that seeding in flats in the greenhouse and transplanting in spring when the plants are about the size of a blade of grass works best for us. Seeding onions is cheaper than bulbs and easier than cultivating newly emerged alliums amongst exuberant spring weeds.

One of the varieties, Cortland, will provide the yellow storage onions that we’ll give to our CSA members in the fall because that variety keeps better than others. Here we are in January and we’ve still got Cortlands in our root cellar to take us through the next few months until we harvest Egyptian/walking onions (so-called because the flower heads lean over and plant themselves) and green onions in the early spring.

This week I got hungry for onion quiche, a recipe I’ve been making for 25 years that’s a kind of cross between French onion soup and quiche lorraine using onions instead of ham. The crust includes sesame seeds, which makes it extra hearty for a winter meal. We sliced and caramelized onions, grated cheese (we use Naked Goat from our local cheese shop), cracked eggs from our chickens just starting to lay again, and added some milk.

Even though I’ve made this quiche many times, this time the quiche came out even sweeter than ever. The Cortlands in winter storage had sweetened; the taste was something like onion marmalade on crust. We probably could have eaten the whole thing between the two of us but saved half for lunch the next day, when it was just as sweet, if not more so.

If you’ve got a few onions in storage, or even if you have to buy a few (preferably at a winter farmer’s market), try this hearty quiche for a warm and filling winter meal.

And what to serve with it? This time of year on our Front Range farm, “salad” is hard to come by, at least in the traditional lettuce sense. Because we’re rebuilding our season-extending “bluehouse” (named as such because it’s not the “greenhouse”), we don’t have our usual winter bed of kale and spinach. But we’ve got some small spikes of last year’s chard and fall-planted spinach out in the field under row cover that will do for now. I like those tiny leaves of spinach with grated carrot and tart green apple with a lime juice and lime-infused olive oil dressing.

Eating last fall’s onions for a winter dinner and starting next summer’s onions in the greenhouse in January bring the cycles of the seasons together. As one year’s harvest turns to the next year’s planting, we’re reminded that farming requires both looking back and looking forward, learning and planning and growing again with one eye to the weather and another to each other.

Stonebridge Onion Quiche
Ingredients:
Filling: 2 large or 4 small yellow onions, peeled and sliced in thin half-crescents
3 Tbl butter
2 cups grated Swiss cheese or a hard goat cheese like Naked Goat
3 large eggs
1 cup half and half or milk
1/2 tsp salt and 1/4 tsp nutmeg
Crust: 1 1/2 cups whole wheat pastry flour (or unbleached)
1/3 cup sesame seeds
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 cup (1 stick) cold butter, cut in pieces
1/4 cup cold water

Preheat oven to 450.
Melt 3 Tbl butter in a large pan over medium-high heat and add onions. Stir to brown evenly, about 15 minutes, until just beginning to caramelize.
Shred the cheese in the food processor and set aside.
While the onions are cooking, make the crust in the food processor. Mix flour, seeds, salt and baking powder until blended. Pulse in butter until pea-sized. Drizzle water through top of feed tube until dough forms a ball. It should be moist but not soggy. Roll out dough on pastry cloth and place in standard pie plate (8” diameter across bottom; 10” across top).
Place shredded cheese on top of the crust and top with cooked onions to cover the top evenly.
In food processor, mix eggs, half and half, salt, and nutmeg. Pour over onions.
Bake at 450 for 15 minutes; reduce heat to 350 and bake another 45 minutes. Let quiche sit 10 minutes before serving. Makes 4 2-piece servings.

 

A First Week of Firsts: 2012

The chickens started laying again this week after a couple months off. We got our first egg on Jan 2 and our second egg on Jan 5, quite possibly from the same chicken, but the others should follow before too long.

We don’t light our chicken house because we think it’s good for the hens to follow their natural cycles and take a break when the days get short. I once asked a group of students what natural phenomenon determines when chickens lay eggs during the year and one thoughtful student (whom I imagine was a woman) wrote, “They start their cycles in the spring and go through menopause every fall”! Imagine menopause on a yearly basis! The answer is the amount of daylight but maybe mini-menopause is accurate in its own way.

Another first this week was spotting a bald eagle over the meadow yesterday. I noticed a very large, dark bird flying overhead with a flash of yellow and pointed it out to Peter and John, who were taking stock of our materials pile for an upcoming building project. John said he thought he saw its white head and Peter, a birder, said it flew like an eagle rather than a turkey vulture and that it would have to be a mature bald eagle to have a white head. I’m not sure whether the yellow flash I saw was its beak or the sun on its head but it was a thrill to know an eagle is circling Stonebridge in this new year.

This week has been warm, in the 60s, which is a high temperature for Colorado’s Front Range in January but not terribly unusual. I’ve been wanting to take a little drive in the mountains; with such nice weather, yesterday was the day for my trip. The sky was clear and the afternoon sun on the peaks magnificent. I couldn’t quite capture it because I couldn’t quite reach it—the highway just didn’t take me close enough yesterday. Here’s a pic from the pull-off where tourists stop to take their photos with the Estes Park sign. I thought about erasing the yellow curve markers but that’s the reality of a mountain highway—lots of signs to tell you what to do and how to act in the natural world.

With the warm weather, the ground has thawed a bit so this afternoon John and I dug some leftover carrots for winter meals. They look fresh and will taste good tonight with our lentil walnut burgers.

Walking back to the house, we heard the shriek of red-tailed hawks and then some sounds we hadn’t heard before, like squealing more than cries. We saw a pair of snowy winged red-tails circling each other in what might be a mating dance and then they both dove to the earth, perhaps to “have a moment,” as John said. I don’t know the mating habits of red-tails but I loved hearing their banter on this clear January day.

 

 

Snow comes tomorrow, ending our lovely warm first week. As Front Range farmers always say, we need the moisture, so snow is not unwelcome. John’s laying in wood and I’m taking stock of the New Year, loving the slower pace of a January retired and revitalized for what comes next.

 

 

End of Season

At Stonebridge Farm, the season starts with spinach and ends with . . . donuts. On-a-string, that is. The mini powdered sugar kind that provides little nutritional value; the kind I’m embarrassed to buy at the convenience store the week before Halloween. They’re not organic. They’re not whole grain. They’re full of processed sugar, but they’re the essential ingredient to our end-of-season party on the last Saturday of October every year.

This year, a snowstorm preceded our last pick, dropping 12” of heavy wet snow and broken branches everywhere. Stonebridge always has at least one mucky fall pick; this year’s waited until the very end but made the most of its procrastination. Much of the foot-high snow had melted by Saturday morning but the ground was too muddy to harvest the rootiest vegetables like carrots and beets, so we settled for pulling up leeks and turnips to give for the final share.

Luckily, John had the foresight to harvest chard before the storm and protect it in the barn in trugs of water. Weeks ago, we had harvested plentiful garlic, onions, and squashes; on that last Saturday, they round out the share. Not a bad last pick and one that will extend a few weeks in storage. We park the bikes and trailers for the last time by the barn, another harvest morning and another successful season finished together.

A shorter harvest meant less delay in donut-on-a-string. Our young farm friend built us a “donut dangler” as a school project a few years ago; it hangs in the center of the greenhouse, a long board with five clips from which threaded donuts can be dangled just above a child’s nose (and an adult’s hairline).

The kids (and later, the even more competitive adults) line up, hands behind their backs, until John gives each donut a sly swing and yells “Go!” Jumping and standing on tippy toes with tongues out and smiles flashing, the children’s determination brings laughter from parents and farm members familiar with the limits of children’s concentration.

The kids play until each one has bitten the donut off the string, sometimes with a little re-adjustment downward from John. Donut won, they carve pumpkins and wander the party with powdered sugar faces, a little Halloween “trick” from the farmers.

Now the snow’s melted, the air is softly breezy, and a second storm is on the way. Our 20^th season is over, except for a final pick-up of Thanksgiving shares in two weeks. I’m still drying apples and a few tomatoes picked green and ripened in the house. I’ll make our favorite tomato tart (see recipe below) this week with some of those house-ripened fruits, our last taste of fresh tomatoes until next summer.

One season is ending; another is beginning. Stopping and starting overlap again. We’ll miss our friends’ stalwart company in the gardens, but we’ll meet again after resting—and sleeping late a few Saturday mornings.

For John, winter will bring trees to prune and wood to chop and an ending to a magnificent teaching career, leaving more time for new adventures. For me, winter will mean waiting for news of projects finished and the initiation of others. And while we work and rest in the winter cold, we’ll plan next year’s gardens and re-arrange our lives in anticipation of the 21^st season to come.  

Stonebridge Tomato Tart

I make this with tomatoes picked green and ripened indoors. They’re a little less juicy so make a nice, firm tart. This tart is really rich, so will serve 4 alongside a fall salad.

Preheat Oven to 375.

Ingredients:
3/4 cup grated Gruyere cheese
6 oz Chevre or feta or any soft, crumbly cheese
1 1/2 cups unbleached flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground pepper
6 Tablespoons cold (or frozen) butter, cut in pieces.
1/2 cup very cold water
2 large or 4 medium firm, shelf-ripened tomatoes (Using gold and red tomatoes is prettier)
1/4 cup olive oil
1 teaspoon dried basil
1 teaspoon dried tarragon (or rosemary or thyme)

Grate 3/4 cup of Gruyere cheese in cuisinart. Remove and save for filling.

Make crust:
In Cuisinart, place 1 1/2 cups unbleached flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground pepper
Pulse. Place 6 Tablespoons cold (or frozen) butter, cut in pieces, into flour mix. Pulse until pea-sized. With machine running, slowly pour 1/2 cup very cold water through feed tube until the dough forms a ball. Shut off machine (you may not use the full 1/2 cup). Form into disk and chill in freezer until filling is prepared.

Slice 2 large or 4 medium firm tomatoes into 1/4 inch slices.

In small bowl, combine 1/4 cup olive oil, 1 teaspoon of dried basil, and 1 teaspoon of dried tarragon (or whatever herbs you have).

In a 10” diameter ungreased tart or quiche pan, pat dough out by hand to cover bottom and form a short (1/2 inch) crust up the side. Crimp.

Place grated Gruyere on top of crust.

Arrange tomato slices (alternating colors) in concentric circles on top of Gruyere.

Drizzle olive oil mix over top.

Cover entire tart with 6 oz crumbled Chevre or feta cheese.

Bake for 35 minutes. Let cool for a few minutes before slicing into 8 pieces. 

 

In Celebration of Local Food

Finally, a cool down. After the hottest August in the last 140 years with temperatures in the high 90s for over three weeks, I walked outside at 6:30 yesterday morning to noticeably cooler air, as if a damp towel had been laid over the farm. We welcomed the cool down as we harvested for four hours, our biggest pick yet of the season—and we haven’t even started on the winter squash. Until the first frost, the garden will be burgeoning and we’ll be running to keep up with it.

Last week we participated in several activities for Local Food Week. I spoke on a “So You Want to Be a Farmer?” panel for Transition Boulder about nurturing community in CSA (I read Red, Red Barn to portray what community looks like at Stonebridge), and our hundred-year-old farm was one of four hosts for a Slow Food Bike-to-Farm Tour. Cyclists sipped our cold mint tea as John showed them around the vineyard and talked about creating a local winemaking culture on this side of the mountains, or Front Range Backyard Viticulture, as we call it.

Bird-netted and protected from raccoons with electric fencing, our vines look great and promise to be heavy enough to justify the purchase of a large crusher-destemmer for our cold-hardy grapes. John’s been teaching classes in planting, pruning, and harvesting grapes and the idea of growing varieties suited to this climate—and discovering what wine grown here tastes like—is catching people’s attention.

Every week is local food week at Stonebridge but this time of year brings its own pleasures. The fall garden is just starting out with small bok choy, turnips, and napa cabbages to pick for the share, while the summer garden is at its height with zukes, cukes, green beans, arugula, basil, dill, cilantro, parsley, chard, kale, onions, garlic, carrots, and beets.

The heirloom tomatoes are ripening fully and the peppers are gorgeous. We gave five varieties of peppers yesterday, from the sweet red skinny Jimmy Nardellos (so delicious stuffed with slivers of Manchego cheese and roasted at 395 for 20 minutes or so) to juicy Red Cheese for slicing to San Ardo Poblanos for stuffing to Hungarian Hot Wax (our favorite to spice up marinara or salsa just a bit) and the hot hots like Serranos, as well as the more prudent sweet green bells.

Even the As You Like table of “cosmetically challenged” freebie vegetables is full—but it’ll be empty by the end of the day because our members know a little scratch and dent doesn’t ruin the vegetable.

Except for yesterday when we were up and outside early for the pick, I’ve started each morning of the last week by slicing something for the dehydrator. We got our Western Slope peaches a week ago so I’ve been drying those in wedges for winter fruit. One day I dried parsley to give as part of our Thanksgiving share, but mainly I’ve been drying paste tomatoes for all our winter and spring pizzas and pastas. I grow four varieties of paste tomatoes—Opalka, Amish Paste, Flame, and Gold Paste—and we’ve come to depend on them for our off-season pantry. One of my favorite things about paring tomatoes is how excited the chickens get about tomato scraps for breakfast!

This week also brought something new to our local food preparation and cuisine: goat milk. A friend gave us some milk from their dairy and another friend shared the additional ingredients and instructions for making chevre, so we got to make a little cheese of our own this week. We used it on a wonderful bruschetta last night by layering arugula, chevre, fresh tomato slices salted and peppered, dried parsley, and a little sprinkled romano on a locally made crusty baguette and baking for 20 minutes at 400. Served with a little white wine, this was local food at its best.

In the overfilled barn yesterday, one of our members stopped to thank me for my guest editorial that appeared in several of our local papers this week against the growing of Genetically Modified crops on Boulder’s Open Space. I appreciated her gratitude because it shows that people are paying attention to the issue. John and I attended the community comment session this week and, although the vast majority of speakers listed compelling reasons to ban GMOs on Open Space, I don’t think that’s what the commissioners will decide. They’re too worried about managing weeds on county land and too near-sighted to make the necessary changes at this point. We’ll see.

For now, we’ll rejoice in the plenitude of local, organic food as we turn the corner from summer to fall and the overlap of vegetables that fills the barn with thoughts of simple meals prepared in celebration of taste.

 

Still Winter Granola

Those of you who don’t live along Colorado’s Front Range of the Rockies would probably be surprised at the vicissitudes of our winter weather. Last weekend felt like spring with sunshine and highs in the 60s. Now it’s bleak winter again: highs in the teens today and ten below zero tonight with just enough icy snow falling to make the roads slippery and dangerous.

As one friend wrote this morning, it’s a good day for seed catalogs. I agree, but since we sent in our orders last week, I’m making granola instead.

I started making my own granola several years ago and couldn’t believe how many years I’d wasted buying granola. As many of you undoubtedly know, making your own granola is really easy, but even better than that, you can customize your own recipe in so many ways, why settle for less? Ingredients, sweetness, texture, and, best of all, toastedness are all under your own control. To make granola, all you need are ingredients—most of which you can buy in bulk, a large baking dish, and half an hour when you’re hanging out near the kitchen taking care of some other domestic task like balancing your checkbook, folding laundry, sending emails, or writing your blog lol.

To me, granola is SO 70s, part of the “back to the land” and “natural foods” movements that inspired me as a teenager. Unlike my memory of my first quiche, I can’t remember exactly when I first tried granola but I did make “Back to Nature” granola cookies in high school from store-bought granola (or “store-boughten,” as we say in our family).

I like making granola because it combines two kinds of activities: mindless and mindful. When I’m mixing the ingredients, I like to be mindful of the textures involved: the round flakiness of the oatmeal with the shredded flakiness of the coconut, the precise size of the walnuts chopped in my vintage chopper, and the smoothness of the honey drizzled gently into the oil and vanilla.

But once granola’s in the oven, you don’t have to think much about it, just enough to stir every five minutes or so until the end, when you better get mindful again or you can ruin the whole batch. The last few minutes are when you need vigilance to attain the perfect shade of brown and crunchy texture for your personal granola. No one can put that in a recipe—you have to discover that for yourself.

This past Christmas I gave my daughter and son-in-law—who have a beautiful new house with a perfect kitchen for cooking—my granola recipe and bulk bags of ingredients. They made their first batch right away and now can adapt the recipe to their liking.

Also last Christmas, a dear friend gave us a huge bag of homemade granola, a wonderful gift because she’d used walnuts AND almonds, honey AND maple syrup, while I always use just one nut and only honey, since we’ve got our own farm hives. It felt luxurious to eat such exuberant granola, a welcome change from our own.

So to celebrate the last day of January by warming up our kitchens as well as our palates, I’m including my Stonebridge Farm granola recipe below in the hope you’ll share your own granola recipes, favorite ingredients, and innovations.

Stonebridge Farm Granola

4 cups organic rolled oats (not instant)
1 cup coconut flakes (I use 2/3 cup shredded and 1/3 cup larger flakes)
1 cup chopped nuts like walnuts, hazelnuts, almonds, or pecans
2 Tbl of seeds like sesame, ground flax (or wheat germ)
¼ cup honey (1/3-1/2 cup if you like it sweeter)
¼ cup safflower oil (or same as for honey, plus some for oiling pan)
1 tsp vanilla
1 tsp good ground cinnamon like Vietnamese cassia
1 cup raisins or other dried fruit like cranberries or cherries or apples

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Very lightly oil a 9 x 13 baking dish and mix first 4 ingredients right inside the dish. If you’re using larger coconut flakes, you may want to reserve them because they brown more rapidly than the shredded kind.

Place in preheated oven and bake for 5 minutes.

Take out of oven and stir well.  (Add large coconut flakes now if you’ve reserved them.)

Bake 5 minutes, remove, and stir. Repeat. (15 minutes total).

Sprinkle cinnamon over granola and mix well.

Mix safflower oil, honey, and vanilla in a two-cup measuring container with a pouring spout and pour uniformly over granola. Mix well.

Bake 3 minutes, remove, and stir.

Now comes the mindful part. Bake another 1-3 minutes depending on your oven and how brown you want your granola. I’d suggest baking for one minute, checking and stirring, and then repeat until you’re there.

Once you’ve attained perfection, stir well, being sure the granola isn’t sticking to the dish. Cool a few more minutes and stir again. If you don’t stir a couple times initially while it’s cooling, it’ll stick to the dish.

If you like your granola chunkier, you could mix 1/8 cup honey with 1/8 cup oil and drop in spots to harden some of the granola into chunks during this cooling period.

Once cooled, add fruit and mix.

Store in gallon glass jar or container.