Harvest Meal: Roasted Parsnips

This winter we have a surfeit of parsnips to harvest, which is wonderful because they are one of my favorite vegetables.  But parsnips can be tricky to cook well, because they aren't very dense.  So when you roast them (one of the very best cooking methods for this vegetable) with other root crops, they tend to cook through much faster than carrots, potatoes, or turnips.  Add to this the abundant sugars in a winter-harvested parsnip, and you have a recipe for burned, or mushy parsnips, or worst of all, both conditions at once.

So I like to roast parsnips on their own, and I recently hit on a fabulous way of doing that.  It's a bit more fussy than other methods, but it produces such deliciousness that I'm willing to go to the extra effort.  The nicest thing about this dish is that all the major ingredients are either homegrown, or homemade.

I start by cutting up several slices of my home cured guanciale.  I'm sure bacon or pancetta would work fine as well, but the extra seasonings that I add to my guanciale give the dish a little something special.  If you use bacon or pancetta, one or two slices should do it.  My guanciale is small, and my slices short; I used about seven slices for two full pans of roasted parsnips.  A little bit of fatty cured pork goes a long way in the flavor department.  So the slices are cut into bite-sized pieces and gently heated in a skillet just enough for some of the fat to render out into a liquid state.  Some of the guanciale pieces begin to brown a little, but I'm not aiming to crisp them up at this point.

While the fat renders I go to the trouble of peeling several parsnips and cutting them also into bite sized pieces.  I check my quantities by spreading out the chopped parsnips on a sheet pan.  I don't want it overcrowded, but neither do I want too much open space on the pan.  The vegetables should all fit in a single layer with a bit of space around the pieces.  To each sheet pan of parsnips I add several peeled cloves of garlic, left whole, a good amount of finely chopped rosemary, and freshly ground white pepper.  I gather up the ingredients to the center of the pan, pour over the rendered guanciale fat and the guanciale pieces, and add just a bit of olive oil to the pile.  Then I mix everything by hand so that the vegetables are well coated with oil and fat.  These get spread back out to an even layer, and sprinkled with kosher salt just before going into a 375 F oven.

A single pan of these parsnips will take about 25-30 minutes to roast.  If you make two or more pans of these goodies at once, it'll take longer.  It's a good idea to rotate pans between shelves, as well as turning them 180 degrees if you're making a lot.  I didn't need to stir the parsnips around from time to time as they cooked.  With larger pieces of root vegetables I've noticed that doing so encourages more even cooking.  The smaller pieces don't seem to need it.  When the parsnips and guanciale develop a lovely browned appearance, you'll know they're done.

It may seem strange that I'm elevating what most people would consider a side dish to the status of a proper meal.  All I can say is that I tried using these roasted parsnips as a topping for pasta, and while it worked just fine, I noticed that the pasta seemed more of a distraction from the vegetables than a help.  So I gave up and next time just ate a large bowlful of the roasted parsnips.  Not the most nutritionally balanced meal in the world, but I can't stop eating them.  I'm thrilled to have stumbled on a great recipe for parsnips that uses homegrown garlic and rosemary, which is doing well by the way under protection.  We've hardly needed much in the way of season extension infrastructure with the mild winter we're having, but that's another post.

I got the basic idea for this dish from Molly Stevens' All About Roasting cookbook.  She takes her dish in a sweeter direction than mine with the addition of brown sugar.  To my mind, a parsnip that is allowed to stay in the ground through a few frosts so that it sweetens up on its own is plenty sweet enough, so I leave the sugar out.  But I appreciate the attention to detail in Stevens' book.  Hitting on the best temperatures and cooking pans for roasting all sorts of different foods is not an intuitively obvious thing, but one arrived at through much trial and error.  So I'm grateful for the sheet pan and temperature recommendation on this recipe, and the topic of the book is well suited to the season.

Anyway, I hope some of you will try this parsnip recipe, especially if you've never been impressed with this humble treasure before.  It was once the main winter staple crop of Europe, before the potato was brought from the new world.  I do wish that I could retrieve some of the ways our ancestors prepared this vegetable.  I'm sure they had some very good ways with the parsnip.  If you have a favored recipe for parsnips or other root crops, please do share them in the comments!

A Nice Barter Arrangement

With the beginning of cold weather, I've been reaching for canning jars of homemade chicken stock a lot lately.  So much so that I'm completely out, not only of chicken stock, but of any stock whatsoever.  I don't like being without this building block of good soup, which is so fortifying at this time of year.  I have a few carcasses from roasted chickens saved in our freezer, but I know they're not going to make as much stock as I'd like to be putting up right now.  Buying commercial stock, even the organic brand that I used to buy, just isn't on my radar these days.  As anyone who's made their own knows, store-bought stock just doesn't hold a candle to homemade.

So I started looking through the market lists of the grass-based farms in my area.  Even though I'm fully aware of how much work goes into raising healthy, ethical food, I'm still often initially surprised by the prices of animal products from these businesses.  My next thoughts are always the same: the prices are fair, given what I know about labor and materials costs for this type of production, and given the methods they employ which show a proper respect for the environment; and to boot, none of these farmers are getting rich on the prices they're charging for the foods they offer.  Still, when I saw the price of the chicken backs and bones from other animals that I would need for making stock, I decided to try a different tack.

I asked my Farming Friend whether she might be interested in bartering finished stock for the bones to make it, a 50-50 split.  I know she likes to cook with stock, but she's a very busy woman, and I figured she wouldn't mind having someone else do the work.  As it turned out, the offer was especially attractive to her, because she doesn't have time to do the canning.  She has typically frozen her stock, but that ends up using too much of her freezer space, which is at a premium for the meats that she sells.  So I told her I'd be happy to make and can as much stock as she has bones for over the winter months.  It's a win for me because I get free bones and I can do this work when the demands of the garden and livestock are minimal.  As a bonus, the heat generated by the roasting, simmering, and canning processes will be most welcome in the house at this time of year.  She has agreed to return the canning jars and the re-usable lids and rings that I use.  And she'll send lamb and goat bones my way any time she has them on the same barter basis.

I'm always so tickled when things like this work out - a benefit for both parties.  I trust her to produce good, clean food.  She trusts me produce tasty and safely canned stock.  I call that win-win any day, and I'd like there to be more bartering in my life.  It's something I sometimes feel shy about proposing to people, even though no one has ever seemed offended by the idea of barter. 

I'd be curious to hear about any barter arrangements you have.  If you barter, were you the one to propose the exchange?  Have you ever been turned down on an offer to barter?  Any tips on how to successfully arrange bartering agreements?

Back in the Loving Arms of the Grid

The freak Halloween storm that visited the northeastern US left us without power for most of the weekend and Monday.  On Saturday we watched as heavy flakes of snow fell, and kept falling all day.  This came just two days after the first light frost of the year, which came more than three weeks later than the historical average first frost date.  We hadn't even had a hard frost yet in this incredibly mild autumn season.  That meant that most of the trees were still fully garbed in their own leaves.  And that meant a large snowfall was a big problem.

On Saturday afternoon we went around outside trying to keep the worst of the snow off our fruit trees, young and old, and also off the plastic sheeting of the still unfinished hoop house.  This was accomplished with brooms and poles.  That went well; we had no damage to those trees or the little hoop house.  But the taller trees were much harder to protect, especially the very large shade trees close to the house.  All through the afternoon we could hear trees and tree limbs all around the neighborhood snapping and cracking; it was like a pan of popcorn popping, so frequent and regular were the sounds.  By noon we had lost power, and the phone went dead a couple hours later.  Outside we watched the occasional flash of electrical transformers exploding, waiting just a moment for the sound to reach us.  The audio-visual show continued well into the evening as the snow continued to fall.  After each nearby crack! I checked in anxiously with my husband to make sure he hadn't been hurt by a limb coming down.

I have to admit that even though we had advanced warning of this storm and its likely consequences, I prepared less well than I did for the hurricanes of August and September.  We skated through those storms with barely a blip.  Not so much this time.  I did make sure the dishes were done and that we had water on hand to flush toilets and for drinking.  I showered on Friday night and even filled our large thermos with hot water so we could wash our faces.  But I didn't gather our oil lamps, matches, and flashlights, and didn't fill the empty space in the chest freezer with bottles of water to move to our refrigerator.  Now we keep plenty of stored water on hand all the time anyway, and we did have everything we needed to weather such a storm and power loss.  The large chest cooler got cleaned on Sunday, loaded up with plenty of snow, and placed on the porch to accept the contents of our fridge and house freezer.  We had heat from the gas fireplace insert that I had carefully laid away batteries for in case of power loss; we had our gas stovetop range to cook on; and we were well supplied with tanks of propane to keep those going for quite a while.  All in all we were fine.  But I still felt as though I'd been caught flat-footed.

The funny thing is that just Saturday, after listening to Nicole Foss's description of how she prepared her family for life after peak oil, I had talked with my husband about getting some deep cycle marine batteries to carry us through a few days of power outage.  Or rather to support the truly essential functions of the house through a power outage.  We had talked about installing some PV panels a while back, and part of that project was to include a battery backup so that we would have power in the event the grid went down.  Given our budgetary constraints we decided that solar thermal was a higher priority, so the PV system could wait.  And when the grid went down this weekend, so did all the benefits of our solar thermal system.  It made sense to me on Saturday morning that we should ensure at least a few days' supply of electricity to at least keep our chest freezer working, to keep water moving through our radiant heat floors, out through the sump pumps in the basement, and also out of our taps.  Everything else we could do without, I thought.  And after 48 hours or so without electricity, I still think so.  Flashlights and oil lamps were no big deal.  It was an inconvenience not to have a working oven, because we were out of bread and couldn't make any more.  But everything else in the kitchen was manageable with no electricity and a limited supply of water and light.  Even if we never scrape up the money for a PV installation, the batteries themselves would provide a large benefit in the case of future power outages.

Although the fallen limbs caused no damage to the house, the garden or the hoop house, that's not to say we came through completely unscathed.  Far from it.  The entrance to our house was a scene of devastation.  The driveway was blocked by two large limbs, with another heavy limb resting too much weight on our split rail fence.  The fence in the backyard fared even worse.  One half of a large split mulberry came down across the corner of the fence, taking out four panels.  At least it spared our newly planted Ashmead's Kernel apple tree.  The trellising for all our black raspberries took the brunt of the fall and is almost certainly toast, but the canes themselves probably don't care about any damage suffered during this time of the year.  We needed to revamp those trellises anyway.  On the other hand, the poultry schooner caved in completely from the weight of the snow.  It was waiting in the garden for the tilling power of the chickens.  Somehow as we were knocking snow off other structures we just didn't pay attention to it sitting out in the open there.  Still, we think it's mostly salvageable, and should be good as new with a few new pieces of lumber.

The thing that struck real fear into my heart during this storm was the massive tulip poplar tree that stands where our driveway meets the road.  This tree towers over our house.  If it had lost even one major limb, chances were good that either the road would be blocked, or our house would be very seriously damaged.  Fortunately I recognized that there was really nothing I could do about it and managed mostly not to worry about it.  We've had the tree checked by an arborist who pronounced it in excellent condition, so we'd done due diligence.  More fortunately still, it took almost no damage at all.  It's rather stunning to compare the damage the magnolia, which stands right next to it, took.  We'll be cleaning up the debris from the storm for the next few weeks at least.

Since I'm currently in a glass-half-full state of mind, I see all the fallen trees as material for a hugelkultur mound or two (something I've mulled before, but we didn't have enough wood until now), and as more sunlight next year in our front yard and the garden too.  We have a WWOOF volunteer arriving this evening who will be able to help us deal with the additional work load.   And we had already planned to replace a good portion of the fence anyway, in pursuit of a slow-moving hedgerow project.  It may be that due to the storm damage, we get a little bit of money towards that effort from our homeowner's insurance.  And of course, the storm gave me a valuable lesson in living in this home without electricity.  No thought experiment or advance preparations were quite the same as actually dealing with no power. 

I hope all my readers in the path of this storm came through without any harm.  If you were affected by it, please let me know how it went for you in the comments.

Salvaging the Overwintered Leeks

Last year I didn't start my own seeds of my favorite leek, the Bleu de Solaize. It's my favorite because it is incredibly winter hardy. I've left it in the ground over winter in previous years, and harvested it during a January thaw, when the air temperature warms but the ground is still frozen. Sometimes those midwinter harvests involve pitchforking out a frozen block of soil, letting it sit in the sun for several hours, then coming back to extract the leeks. But I couldn't get Bleu de Solaize starts last year, so I went with whatever leek starts were available at my local nursery. I don't even remember the variety.

So when late fall started turning into winter, and many leeks were too small to be worth harvesting, I didn't have a whole lot of hope for them. I harvested up until the ground froze, starting with the biggest ones first.  The rest were left to winter's untender mercies.  But as winter began to loosen its grip on the garden, I cast another evaluating glance over the bedraggled leeks.  Some of them certainly were looking large enough to salvage.  And with volunteer help around, it seemed like a good food preservation chore to tackle.  Besides, that part of the garden is has a date with 25 crowns of purple asparagus in not too many weeks.

My expectations were rather modest.  Our volunteer and I loosened the soil with a pitchfork and set about "field dressing" the leeks.  We shook off as much of the soil as easily came loose, cut off the roots, stripped off the dirty and damaged outermost layers, and trimmed away most of the greens. There were more beautifully preserved leeks, and larger amounts of leek below the soil surface than I had imagined.  There was surprising little damage from frost, even though we found bits of ice held in the layers of the upper green parts of the plants. Leeks are tough plants. I was amazed to find that the harvest just about filled my garden hod.  It seems that Bleu de Solaize isn't the only leek that overwinters for us with zero protection.


The harvest tally came to over five (!) pounds (2.3 kg) of trimmed leeks. Only a small number were too damaged to harvest.  It was very satisfying to remove so much food from the row, and have it all cleaned up well ahead of the asparagus crowns' arrival.  We rinsed the leeks in two changes of water outside, to spare the plumbing in our old farmhouse.  Leeks have many virtues, but their hygiene leaves much to be desired.  Because of the way they grow up through the soil, they catch a prodigious amount of dirt in their layers.  That people are known to put up with the trouble of cleaning such a plant should tell you something about the wonders it can do in the kitchen, though not perhaps the detail that these wonders are particularly on display where soups and potatoes are concerned.

After the outdoor work was done, there was still a good deal of indoor processing left to do.  Trimming, assiduous rinsing, chopping, butter melting, cooking and cooling.  The end result was a dozen discrete piles of sauteed leeks arranged on sheet pans lined with baking parchment.  Once the individual clumps of leeks were frozen solid, I bagged them up.  This way I can grab a usefully sized portion of partially cooked leeks out of the freezer whenever needed, rather than having to thaw a huge block of them all at once.

Preserving this many leeks was another task which would have been tedious in the extreme to do all by myself.  Having volunteer help made the work lighter, and I had the pleasure of teaching someone about a previously unfamiliar vegetable.  Another win with the WWOOF.

I've already got quite a few Bleu de Solaize baby leek sprouts started indoors.  And I can't seem to resist planting more of them.  I'm hoping we'll have enough to harvest starting in late summer, and still leave plenty for harvest well into this time next year.

Harvest Meal: Potato and Cabbage Soup

You know what?  There's no way that I have found to make potato and cabbage soup look attractive in a photograph.  Admittedly, my kitchen has lousy lighting, and my camera is hopelessly obsolescent by the standards of our time.  Likewise, there's no way to make "potato and cabbage soup" sound anything other than dreary.  My soup tasted good, and I'll get to all that in a minute.  Right now I'm just going to tell you that the cabbage itself was gorgeous, and the picture above doesn't begin to do it justice. 

It was a mild Sunday, and I was out in the garden, checking things out.  Little shoots of garlic poking up, pathetic looking leeks and cabbages that had never been harvested.   Short rows of tatsoi that looked like they may have actually overwintered.  No sign yet of the long awaited asparagus.  But there among the bedraggled heads of cabbage was one that had a robust red-purple color and some physical integrity.  One of its outer leaves curled protectively over the head like a bonnet.  Did appearances deceive?  I reached down and gave it a gentle squeeze.  It was firm and dense!  Maybe it wasn't the biggest cabbage, but it was ready to eat.  And I was ready to eat it.

I came inside and started putting a pot of soup together.  I hardly even bother researching recipes these days, because meals pretty much come down to eating what we have on hand.  And late winter is lean pickin's, I don't mind telling you.  So.  Candidate ingredients to go with the cabbage included our potatoes and garlic, boughten onions and carrots, a tiny bit of pork sausage (pastured meat from a local farm), some homemade canned stock, and spices.  From there, the recipe wrote itself.

Take the sausage out of its casing, break it into little bits and brown them in a soup pot.  When that's done, set them aside and cook a big, finely diced onion in the remaining pork fat with a bit of added butter.  Sweat, sweat, till soft and golden, adding white pepper, kosher salt, caraway seed, and bay leaves while it cooks.  Then stir in some minced garlic to cook a bit.  Add a quart of stock and a pint of water and heat it slowly, so as to have time to scrub the potatoes (purple!) and chop them into bite sized pieces.  Add the potatoes (~1.25#/~0.5 kg) in the warming liquid, then finely chop half of the cabbage head.  Add that in along with the cooked sausage as the liquid starts to simmer.  Grate a couple carrots with a cheese grater.  Pour a glass of wine, reduce the heat to minimum, cover the pot, and walk away for a few minutes.  Come back, add the carrots, and taste to adjust the seasonings.  A tad more salt.  Perfect.  Serve and eat.  With crusty bread if you like.

It was good soup, even if the potatoes were not the best variety for soup.  The stock made from the Thanksgiving turkey that was smoked with rosemary and apple wood chips really made the soup pop.  I'll even acknowledge the possibility that without superb stock, the soup might not have amounted to much.

Good though the soup was, harvest meals over the winter tend not to be very exciting.  The word "stodge" often lurks just below the level of utterance.  Maybe it's the fact that we're mostly locked in to relying in a very small number of foods that don't change much for months on end.  Spring, summer, and fall are different; the variety is wider and ever changing.  I'm still working on learning how to eat from our own stores through the winter months, with many failures and hard lessons.  But mostly I'm just ready for spring.  I cannot wait for the first snow peas, and arugula, and chives, and asparagus - fresh green things.  In the meantime, I practice gratitude that we have plenty to eat.

Overwintering Rosemary in Zone 6

Time to report on my experiment in keeping a rosemary plant alive through a zone 6 winter.  Last fall I assembled one of Tamar and Kevin's instant mini-greenhouses, made from two window well covers, for my rosemary plant.  I had previously done a little homework to find a variety of rosemary noted for its hardiness, relative to other rosemary varieties.  I settled on the un-euphoniously named Arp rosemary, said to be hardy in zone 7, or only half a zone off our bit of earth.

I drilled a few small holes for ventilation at the top of my greenhouse and began covering the rosemary in November.  It came through the hard frosts of late fall just fine, retaining its green leaves fresh and ready for the picking.  I was pretty sure the truly cold temperatures of winter would send it into dormancy, and they did.  I could see no new growth, and the leaves took on a somewhat dull tone.

The question was, would protection from the wind and direct contact with snow be enough to let it survive?  With such a small space protected, there wouldn't be much advantage, if any, in terms of temperature.  A greenhouse large enough for a person to walk around in would certainly do the trick.  But this greenhouse was essentially a flimsy cloche; not thick enough or big enough to hold heat overnight.  All I could do was wait out winter's harshness and see how the rosemary fared.

Our big dump of snow came towards the end of January, and we've had snow on the ground ever since.  The snow covered the mini-greenhouse completely for several days.   I went out and scraped off some of the snow, to allow a little light in to warm up the space inside.  I suspect the snow that had built up around the sides then acted as insulation.

We're nearly to the end of February now.  Historically the coldest month of the year here is January, though we often see more snow in other months.  We're still seeing overnight temperatures substantially below freezing.  But we should only be headed into temperatures that trend warmer.  Today I checked the plant under there and found it looking fine.  It still has a wonderful scent, and the thicker stems are supple under my testing fingers.  They bend without breaking.  The color of the leaves is still dull green.  But green they are.  I'm pretty confident saying that the rosemary has survived with the help of this protection.  The plant will probably need the shelter of the mini-greenhouse for at least another six weeks though. 

Now that I know I can keep rosemary alive through a zone 6b winter, I wonder how much farther north this would work.  Any northern type gardeners out there tempted to try?

To keep this particular plant over the long term I'll have to keep it pruned such that it fits under the cover.  Or else start new plants each year.  There's enough room under there right now to accommodate another plant.  I may add some early peas in the next couple weeks.  But after the peas are done I might try planting some flat-leaf parsley alongside the rosemary, and see if parsley can also make it through next winter with a bit of shelter.  Home grown, nutritionally dense fresh parsley would be mighty welcome through the winter months.

Of course, a little success gets me scheming about other things I could plant, other non-hardy stuff I could drag into my hardiness zone by adding a few more shelters.  While it was ridiculously easy to make this mini-greenhouse from two window well covers, it wasn't exactly cheap. Not by my standards anyway.  I bought the heavy-duty ten-year covers, and I think it ended up costing about $30.  I expect they'll last even longer than ten years, since I'll store them in the shade for most of the year.  But I'm still going to keep an eye out for any other materials that might be repurposed for the cause.  I'm thinking an old skylight or the globe of a street lamp might do the trick, if I ever came across something like that in a dumpster.  I could also experiment with straw bales again.  I have plenty of salvaged storm windows to work with as lids for straw bale frames, and overwintered straw bales make such nice mulch in the spring.

The Virtues of Winter

This is one of the hardest periods of the year for me.  I've had my winter break from gardening duties, and it was very welcome.  Now I'm a bit antsy and definitely missing all the summer vegetables.  There is still a week or two to go before the earliest seed starting can begin, though I'm pushing that boundary with some experimental cold frame plantings.  I've done a few germination tests to make sure that the seeds I put into our personal seed vault came through the year in viable condition.  All looks well there, so my seed orders this year will be fairly limited.  We have snow on the ground still from two separate storms, and six-ten inches of mixed sleet and snow predicted for the next 24 hours.  As I write, fat flakes are coming down at a decent clip.  I'm trying to see the upside in winter.  Here's what I've come up with.

I used our recent -1 F (-18 C) temperature to go around the windows of our home feeling for air leaks.  At that temperature you don't need any fancy instruments to find them.  Bare fingers will do the trick, trust me.  I'd brought in a tube of silicone caulking from the garage to warm up in the house.  Then I went over all the leaks I could find, sealing them up.  It made a noticeable (but not huge) improvement in our downstairs bathroom, which has two exterior walls, both of which are only passably insulated.  Upgrading the insulation in these walls is on the list, but the expense will not be insignificant, so the project is not near the top of that list.  But hey, a reduction of those thin drafts of icy cold is all to the good.

I've also got a tiny tip today.  I call it iceboxing - turning our refrigerator into an icebox.  It's easy to do at this time of year, provided there's a little extra room on the top shelf.  I use empty plastic juice and soda containers, given to me by relatives.  The large squarish ones with the rectangular handles are really nice for this purpose. Just fill them with tap water, put them outside and let them freeze solid overnight.  In the morning, I put them in the fridge and put two more filled bottles outside so as to have swaps available when the first two thaw out.  Two large chunks of ice keep the refrigerator's compressor from running much at all.  I don't unplug the machine because I still want the light in there, but it certainly cuts down on our electrical usage.  Easy, free, saves money.  Seems like an obvious win to me.

Winter is also the time of year I most like to knit, and cold hands certainly provide motivation.  I've made myself two more pairs of fingerless gloves.  I finally have some that fit snugly around my wrists, like the ones I made for my husband a few years back.  A pair of these gloves is a quick project that suits my short knitting attention span.  They can be made fast enough to give me a quick sense of accomplishment, and that helps keep me going on other fronts. 

The cold season is a tough sell, but I wouldn't give it up for anything.  I've lived in places without a real winter and always felt slightly cheated.  I grew up with four seasons, so snow and sub-freezing temperatures feel right to me.  Winter has its austere beauty too.  As a gardener, I know the value of the frost heave that loosens up our heavy soils, making them spongy and easier to work.  The glory of spring in this area is part and parcel with the severity of our winter.  Where I live spring explodes out of frozen winter: dramatic, lavish, electrifying.  Other places have springs that sort of saunter onto the scene, a nearly seamless transition from tepid winter, or maybe even just a rainy season.  Not our springs.  So as I look out the window at a world drained of color, it's well to remember this.  I know that in a few short months we'll feast on asparagus and enjoy the succession of breathtaking tree blossoms. Meanwhile I muse on hoop house designs and hope that this time next year will see us harvesting abundant greens as the snows come down.

Have you been making good on winter weather lately?  Do tell.

Cold Frame Near the End of Winter

Our garden beds were under snow for all of February, and still are. I harvested nothing but eggs the entire month. I know there are parsnips out there that I could dig for, but with the snow cover I have only a vague sense of where I would look for them. However, the cold frame has been ramping up over the last few weeks.

Yesterday I was able to harvest a fair bit of spinach, which has come through the winter beautifully. Although 3.7 ounces doesn't sound like a lot, it was more than enough for two omelets. I also removed the most damaged looking leaves and tossed them to the hens, still in their winter quarters, and starving for green things. Defying the 10-hours-of-daylight rule, the spinach grew straight through the winter except right around the solstice. Granted, it was very slow growth in early January, but we didn't get our 10 hours back here until February 2nd. It "shouldn't" have been growing at all with less than 10 hours, but it did.

The Napoli carrots I planted in there last fall have all long since been harvested and eaten. Along with the spinach, they did the best. That's the variety (sadly, a hybrid) that Eliot Coleman refers to as his "candy carrots." The parsley and beets didn't work out so well. The winter density lettuce held on alright until it got really cold. It looks to me as though one rouge d'hiver lettuce plant is going to come back strongly, while the others succumbed. I should probably let that one go to seed and save it. The scallions I planted did so-so. Most of the oniony stuff in there now is a generous contribution from a seed swap.


In early February I casually tossed in arugula seed where the carrots had come out (top center). If you look closely you can see that it has germinated and is beginning to grow. Temperatures have been above freezing during the day for the last week or so. I expect we'll be able to eat that arugula within a few weeks. None too soon as far as I'm concerned. I want green.

Knowing what I now do about what works well in a cold frame in my area, I would concentrate on carrots and spinach if I had only this one cold frame to carry me through the winter. If things go as planned though, we'll have at least a couple more cold frames for next winter.

How's your winter garden holding up? How's your spring garden shaping up?

Yeah, We Got Those Quiche Made

While the snow fell, we dealt with eggs. So far, four dozen down, four dozen to go. I froze one dozen. Another dozen went into quiche with our own frozen kale, our garlic, and our dried smoked cherry tomatoes (rehydrated). And our good neighbor showed up last night to plow again, once the snow stopped falling. He got two dozen eggs. He's getting produce this summer too. I'll probably freeze another dozen eggs today.

My 6'2" (188 cm) husband, stepping off the path he dug to the chicken coop

This was the first proper snowstorm we've seen since moving into our home a little over three years ago. Yesterday was as quiet as a graveyard, delicious silence reigned as traffic dwindled to nearly nothing, and we heard no aircraft overhead either. There weren't even snowmobilers to mar the stillness. Don't ask me how deep it is out there. We already had about 5" on the ground before this storm blew in. This is respectable snow cover. When the snow stopped well after nightfall, all the outdoors took on an eerie, yellowish light. With white surfaces everywhere to bounce light around and around again, all was as visible as in late afternoon, but the world had an eldritch glow, very different from the blueish hue of daytime.

When the quiche were baked, cooled, and wrapped, I froze them. I have an enormous freezer right about now.

The snowbank just outside the front door. The quiche I could toss out, though I myself can't fit through the opening we can manage at the moment.

Nature as Artist

Chilly morning: 14 F/-10 C. Finally remembered to take a picture of the frosted panel of glass covering the cold frame. It changes everytime it thaws and then freezes again overnight. Variations on the same theme each time. I couldn't paint this well if I tried. It looks like growing plants to me. Do you think nature's trying to tell me something?


The spinach is doing remarkably well under there. (Click the images to biggify, if you wish.)

Winter Quarters for the Girls

A few weeks back an ice storm and temperatures falling below freezing overnight finally gave us the nudge we needed to finish up the modifications to the shed to house the girls for the next few months. I don't like keeping them inside round the clock, but I also don't want them to get frostbite and suffer needlessly. Fortunately, we're experimenting with the deep litter method for their confinement, and they seem to like it so far.

The basic idea with deep litter is that if chickens are kept on bedding both sufficiently deep (12" is the rule of thumb), and sufficiently spacious (at least 4 square feet per chicken), and if the litter is "inoculated" with living soil organisms, the bedding will be able to absorb the manure the hens produce without ever turning foul, if you'll pardon the pun. Ideally such an arrangement would happen directly on healthy soil. Since I didn't have that option, I put a tarp down in my shed and added soil from my garden to a depth of 2". So far I've added about 9" of mulch on top of the soil. (I need to add more soon to handle the manure output and get the litter to a total of 12" of depth. I figure since my stocking density is more generous than 4 square feet per hen, I have some leeway.) Around the tarp is a 5' x 6' framework of garden caging to keep the girls confined. They each have 7.5 square feet of floor space, or exactly as much as they have in their mobile pen during the rest of the year.


They were initially quite intrigued by the looseness of the mulch, and they scratched happily at it for far longer than they do with either garden soil or lawn turf. When it's frozen, they can't scratch it, so I go in there with a pitchfork every once in a while and turn things over for them. Then they get to scratching again. I also throw some of their feed directly on the mulch from time to time so that they have additional motivation to scratch through it and keep the mulch aerated and loose.

Our shed has electricity but no heat. We rigged the fluorescent lights up on a timer, which comes on around 2 am to provide sufficient hours of light to keep the girls laying. It shuts off as the sun comes up, about the time I'm out there with their breakfast and fresh water. On really wet and miserably cold days I keep the shed doors closed and light them with a single CF bulb. If I left the shed doors open on rainy days, the rain would get in and rot the flooring. On better days I can latch the double doors in a fully open position so the girls get lots of fresh air and indirect lighting. The doors face north, so they don't get any direct sun. But when we've had snow there's lots of reflected light from all the white surfaces out there. I don't like depriving them of lots of light, but I don't like to expose them to the bitter cold either. Life is compromise.

Their water does freeze overnight if the temperatures are low enough. I've had to buy a second waterer can to have a spare one ready to go each morning. I swap them out, always keeping one in the sink in our unheated garage, which is warm enough to thaw the water overnight and have it ready for filling the next morning. Because the water needed to be shut off to the hoses and garage work sink, that means I need to make an extra trip each morning in order to clean and fill the waterer inside the house. I fill it with warm water, knowing that it'll take many hours to freeze, and that the hens will peck through thin films of ice to get at the remaining liquid. At this time of year, there's about a 50-50 chance that the water is frozen when I go out in the mornings. The girls don't seem any worse for the inconvenience, so I'm leaving it at that.

As you can see, I totally went the easy route with the nesting box, which is really a plastic bucket. I got this idea from a picture on The City Chicken. It looked great to me, since the other option was to build a wooden box with a lid sufficiently sloping that the girls wouldn't decide to perch up there and poop on it. This is a lesson learned early with chickens: give them as few surfaces as possible to poop on so there's less to clean. The bucket was simplicity itself and the girls took right to it. I cut a piece out of the bottom of the bucket, which is now the back of the nesting "box," so that I can reach in and remove the eggs without needing to get inside with the hens.

As winter deepened, the few green things that had held on through the fall chill were buried in snow. Very few fresh greens now to keep the girls happy. They really had enjoyed cuttings of the winter wheat cover crop my husband had sown along our south fence. Maybe that wheat will rebound in the spring, but right now it's not looking too good. Fortunately, I cut and dried quite a bit of comfrey during late summer, specifically for use as a winter time feed supplement. Wearing gloves to protect me from the prickles, I crush a handful or two of the dried comfrey into the sack of chicken feed every week. The girls get small bits of the comfrey with their grain feed. So far the color of the yolks still looks good. Not quite as deeply colored as when they're on grass, but still far better than store bought.

We're just about out of the acorns I collected. The girls sure did enjoy them. I was most pleased that they could eat a few acorns every other day without any noticeable change in the flavor of the eggs. Jamon Iberico, the cured Spanish ham from pigs fed entirely on acorns was not to my liking, so I was a little worried that feeding acorns to the hens might result in off flavors. But none that we can detect. Collecting a lot more acorns for wintertime feed supplementation is going to be a fall project for next year.

Keeping the girls in this way gives me more access to physical contact with them. I've started handling them every so often when I need to get into their enclosure. I'm surprised how easily they've accepted me picking them up for a few moments from time to time. Perhaps it helps that there's no urgency to me catching and holding them. I'm only trying to acclimate them to being handled, not trying to catch an escaped hen. I'm really not sure how I feel about this extra handling. It makes me a little fonder of them, and them a little more trusting of me. That may make things practically easier on me when it comes time to slaughter these girls, but emotionally harder. Though perhaps slaughter day will be less traumatic for girls used to being picked up and handled, so I suppose I could live with it being more emotionally difficult for me.

We're getting lots of eggs from our girls, and they're of a good size too. That's the benefit of having young layers, though lighting them doesn't hurt either. At three or four eggs per day from this tiny flock of four hens, we had enough eggs to give away a few dozen as Christmas gifts. Chickens are definitely the "gateway" livestock. So easy to care for, so rewarding, and yes, they'll lead you to stronger stuff. Post coming soon on the beekeeping equipment that was under the Christmas tree.

Harvest Meal: Cream of Roasted Parsnip Soup, Plus Scallion Biscuits

I've sort of been on a cream-of kick. Soup has been much desired lately, and I've been wanting to highlight the root vegetables that are still available in the winter garden. Cream-of soups do the trick and are so easy to prepare. We were taught in culinary school how to make cream-of soup out of just about anything. This time around, a predicted blizzard sent us out digging for parsnips. I had in mind a roasted parsnip soup. We dug up a little under two pounds of them as we waited for the storm to begin in earnest. Despite the lower than freezing air temperature, the ground is not yet frozen below the surface. Digging the parsnips was pretty easy.

After being cleaned the parsnips were roasted using a method I usually use for potatoes. I greased a large casserole dish lightly with butter, cut up the parsnips and laid them in the dish, ground some white pepper over them, sprinkled with kosher salt and then drizzled them lightly with olive oil. I tossed everything together with my hands to coat the parsnips evenly, then arranged everything evenly again in the casserole. To this I added about 1 1/2 tablespoons of water and then tightly covered the dish with a sheet of aluminum foil. Into a 400 F (205 C) oven for 35 minutes, and then the foil was removed. I put the dish back in the oven uncovered, and raised the temperature to 425 F (220 C) to let the roots brown up a bit. This took about 15 minutes. (Note that most of the caramelization (browning) takes place on the side of the parsnip in contact with the casserole. If you wait until the tops are browned, they'll probably be burned underneath.) Meanwhile, I was also baking two medium potatoes in the same oven.

I waited until the vegetables were done before proceeding, but if you're in a hurry you can start on the next step as soon as the root vegetables are in the oven. I medium diced two medium onions (boughten) and sauteed them in butter with a pinch of salt until they became somewhat translucent, soft but not browned. Then I put the nicely browned parsnips, and roughly chopped baked potatoes (ours) into the pot and added enough chicken stock (ours) to cover everything and make the parsnips float freely (about 2 quarts). I also added a couple of cloves from a head of roasted garlic (ours) we happened to have around and two bay leaves (boughten). All this was brought to a gentle simmer and then the heat under the pan was reduced. I let it all simmer together gently for about 15 minutes.

The next step is the one that's a pain. I fished out the bay leaves, then strained out the liquid from the solid ingredients, but reserved the liquid. Working in batches, I pureed the solids with a little of the liquid added back in to help everything blend up nicely. The puree and extra reserved liquid was returned to the pot. (I tried the pureeing step first with an immersion/wand blender. It didn't work.) Then I added about 3/4 cup of whole milk (local) and tasted to adjust for salt and seasonings. I brought the pot back to a very gentle simmer and let it go for 5 more minutes. Each serving was garnished with a brilliantly colored slice of parsley butter (our parsley, boughten butter).

It's a simple soup that tastes richly of sweet parsnips. Not something that will necessarily wow guests, but pretty satisfying as a winter harvest meal, and very warming on a chilly night. If I were feeling more adventurous, I might try adding a slice of fresh ginger during the initial simmer (probably best not pureed) or some freshly grated nutmeg.

Moving on to the non-harvest part of our snowstorm feast, I also made scallion biscuits. Ceridwen asked for a recipe, so I'll go ahead and list one. But first, an absolutely necessary little digression into etymology. Blame Ceridwen, or skip ahead a bit if this stuff bores you.

"Biscuit" literally means twice-cooked. The German word Zwieback, and the Italian word biscotti are cognates for the English word biscuit. But the Germans and the Italians actually mean what they say when they use their terms. Both Zwieback and biscotti are hard little farinaceous things baked once, and then sliced and baked again. The English word "biscuit" is an excellent example of the two nations divided by a common language. The Brits, when they use the term, mean what Americans call a cookie. Yet neither American cookies nor English biscuits are generally baked twice. When Americans say "biscuit" they mean something in the general ballpark of what the Brits call scones, and American biscuits are not twice-baked either. Americans eat their biscuits in a savory rather than a sweet capacity. In the US, biscuits are vehicles for ham, eggs, cheese, or gravy, usually showing up at either breakfast or dinner, where they are associated with heavy meals. Though Brits don't put sugar in their scones, they often slather them with jam and cream; and dried fruit might be included in the dough. Usually in the UK scones are associated with tea, rather than a full meal. (Please correct me if I'm wrong in this, British readers.) Americans on the other hand will bake scones with sugar in them or on top of them, but don't add jam to them after baking as commonly as the Brits. So to conclude, an American biscuit is pretty close to a British scone when it comes out of the oven, but not in the way it's eaten; a British biscuit is nothing like an American one; and a British scone may not bear much resemblance to an American scone. -There! I've had my foodie-word-geek catharsis for the day! Here endeth the lesson.

Oh, and Ceridwen, I too was thinking of adding cheese to my scallion (green onion) biscuits (scones). I just hadn't decided which cheese to add.


Scallion-Cheddar Buttermilk Biscuits

2 cups all purpose flour
2 tsp. baking powder
3/4 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 cup thinly sliced fresh scallions (green onions)
5 Tbsp. cold butter, cut into small pieces
3/4 cup grated sharp cheddar cheese*
3/4 cup well shaken buttermilk**, plus extra for brushing

Preheat oven to 450 F (230 C) and grease a baking sheet or line it with baker's parchment. Sift/stir together dry ingredients. Using your fingertips, blend in butter very quickly until the mixture resembles coarse meal. Stop before you think you should, and try not to warm up the butter any more than really necessary. Stir in the scallions and grated cheddar. Add buttermilk and stir just until dough forms. Gather into a ball and knead on floured surface, gently, just 6 times. Pat dough into a square or rectangle. Cut into 9 (sorta) equal pieces (the corner pieces will probably be irregular - don't sweat it) and arrange them on your baking sheet. Brush the tops of the biscuits with a little extra buttermilk. Bake for about 12-15 minutes, or until golden brown on top.

*Plenty of other cheeses will work here too. If you don't have cheddar, try whatever you've got. But firm, somewhat assertively flavored cheeses tend to do best.
**If you have no buttermilk on hand, put 1 tablespoon of distilled white vinegar or lemon juice in a 1 cup measure. Fill the measure the rest of the way with whole milk, stir gently, and let the mixture sit for ten minutes before proceeding with the recipe. This makes just a bit more than is needed for this recipe.

By the way, this recipe doubles well, which I strongly recommend doing if you've got a house full of biscuit eaters. They'll keep a few days at room temperature in a sealed bag, and you can freeze some if you need to. Fresh sage (in smaller quantities) makes an excellent substitute for the scallions. All in all, it's a pretty flexible recipe. Enjoy!

December Harvest Meal: Jerusalem Artichoke Soup

It took a while, but winter is really here. Temperatures will drop well below freezing overnight and there are no daytime highs much above freezing anytime in our 5-day weather forecast. I've sort of been waiting for these days. Today it was finally time to dig up a few of the new vegetables I trialed this year. Despite the cold weather, the ground isn't the least bit frozen yet. I know, harvesting in December in Pennsylvania sounds unlikely, but there are so many possibilities with season extension. My main strategy is the laziest one: just grow things that mature late and don't mind the cold. Such as Jerusalem artichokes and parsnips.

Both of these crops take up garden space for a very long time. From the perspective of overall production efficiency of the garden neither crop makes a great deal sense, since they don't fit into any succession planting scheme. But I really like roasted parsnips. And being able to harvest through the cold months of the year is important to me. So I'm willing to give parsnips the space and time they need.

Jerusalem artichokes on the other hand were a complete experiment. I didn't even know whether we would enjoy eating them. The selling points on these tubers included their ability to thrive on utter neglect, their ability to hold in the ground until I'm ready to dig them, and a reputation for large yields. The liabilities included a reputation for causing "hellacious" gas and for being ineradicable once established. Apparently some people can digest inulin, the main form of starch in Jerusalem artichokes. Other people can't, and their intestines let them know about it. What fun to conduct an experiment on ourselves!

I thought about making a Jerusalem artichoke and parsnip soup, but then thought it would be wiser to let the unfamiliar vegetable take center stage, the better to judge the reaction of both tongue and alimentary canal. I did however see fit to muddy the water just a little bit with some of our La Ratte fingerling potatoes. Not being a particularly assertive flavor, but contributing a starch well known to our intestines, potato seemed like a good compromise. I put in maybe 1/3 of a pound of potatoes to 1 pound of Jerusalem artichokes, and didn't peel either vegetable, just scrubbed them very well. On a hunch, I boiled the Jerusalem artichokes slowly in a separate pot from the rest of the soup, hoping the cooking water might leach out a bit of the potentially offending starch. Otherwise, the soup was pretty straightforward - garlic and leek sauteed in butter; then salt and pepper; potatoes cooked together with the rest in chicken stock to cover; the separately cooked Jerusalem artichokes added in; everything pureed with a wand blender; cream added, and topped off with a garnish of chopped parsley. Everything but the salt, pepper, butter and cream were produced on our little sub-acre suburban lot.

Gosh, it was tasty! Very simple, but tasty. The appearance, frankly, was not very prepossessing, though that could probably be overcome if purple potatoes or some fancy-schmancy garnishing tidbit were used. The tubers really do have the flavor of artichokes, despite not being at all closely related to them. I could see going in several different directions with spices and vegetable pairings for Jerusalem artichokes. I think they would partner very well with spinach for instance, but I'm also curious about adding a faint note of either fennel or star anise.

I had a small bit of this soup for lunch, then more for dinner, and thus far no intestinal distress. So I think I'm in the clear. And there are parsnips to look forward to with tomorrow night's dinner!

Caught Offguard

Today...













...was a good day.

March Is a Good Time To...

...buy some long underwear on sale. I know winter's almost over. But this is when clothing sellers are most motivated to clear out their winter inventory. If you live in a cold climate, it's hard to have too much long underwear. Might as well pick some up now while it's cheap. If you know you'll be exchanging holiday gifts this year, you could pick up a set for anyone on your list. Wouldn't it be satisfying to know you got your "holiday" shopping done by March?

We just got our REI dividend and a 20% coupon in the mail. It's not a very big dividend, but some of you might have gotten bigger ones. If you have no better use for it, REI sure has some top quality skivvies. And since people go camping any time of year, REI doesn't tend to have seasonal sales on "foundation layers." So a dividend and coupon is about the best you'll get from REI on long underwear.

In my experience, silk long underwear is very warm, thin, and light, but it's extremely expensive and doesn't wear as well as some synthetic fabrics or wool blends. I don't recommend cotton long underwear unless you live in an area where long underwear is hardly needed. It's very comfortable, but doesn't provide much heat retention, and it doesn't wick moisture well at all. Get a warm fabric that will let you crank the heat down another notch next winter.

Well, that's all I got this dreary Monday. If it weren't rainy, I'd be out mucking about in the garden. Spring can't come soon enough.

Bialys!

I woke up yesterday knowing that it was going to be a cold day. I like a good snowstorm when I've got everything I need for a week or more and have nowhere I need to go. There's an unearthly beauty in falling snow that layers itself thickly over branches and fence lines. But the 20 F weather with the 25 mph wind sure makes it forbidding outside.

So I decided to do just a little baking to take the chill off the house. Since I hadn't mixed up any dough on Sunday, it was going to have to be something pretty fast. That's when I stumbled on to the bialy recipe in Artisan Baking, by Maggie Glezer. Don't know what a bialy is? Not too surprising since they're almost unknown outside of New York City. Bialys are very small breads, sort of like a bagel. But instead of having a hole in the center, they have an indentation, and they're not boiled before baking. The dimple in the bread is filled, usually, with browned onions, but occasionally with garlic or poppy seeds. Another Jewish contribution to the world of baked goods. Like bagels, bialys can be sliced and topped with various things, simple butter, or lox and cream cheese apparently being the most popular choices.

I couldn't swear that I'd never eaten a bialy before I made my first batch, but if I ever had, the experience didn't leave much of an impression on me. Fortunately, a bialy straight out of the oven turned out to be a most memorable and enjoyable experience.

I won't copy out the recipe here, because it's long and there would be copyright issues. But I will tell you that it was a real pleasure to work with the dough, which gets worked and warmed several times in a food processor between hand kneadings. The warm dough felt wonderful on my hands in a chilly kitchen. The warmth also gave the yeast a nice head start that would otherwise be hard to provide in my coolish winter home.

I tried two different ways of shaping the bialys and found that the dough really did need to be pulled out very wide and almost flat. The ones I stretched out less than that almost completely lost their dimples and puffed up like balls, despite the fact that they are shaped immediately before going into the oven. I thought handling them too aggressively would deflate the dough and make them flat. Now I know. I enjoyed them all, but the widest ones were best.

The onion filing is usually just ground up and lightly baked onions. Of course, glutton that I am, I went overboard. I had some schmaltz that needed using up. So after grinding up the onions, I cooked them in the rendered chicken fat, and used that for my bialy topping, along with kosher salt. It's not authentic, I know, but I make no apologies. The recipe also warned me to go light on the topping. This I most deliberately ignored. And I'm glad I did.

I ate two bialys right away, the first one piping hot out of the oven. The recipe said they don't keep very well, so I didn't hold back, much. I can see, today, that the cookbook is correct; they really are best fresh from the oven. It's no wonder then that whatever bialy I might or might not have eaten in the past was so underwhelming. I probably got one several hours old. My own bialys were good enough that I would have happily devoured half a dozen. But then I would have had to lay on the floor and moan for a while. I can see that these quick to prepare little gems may become a habit when the weather's chilly and there's schmaltz in the house.

If you enjoy baking and are looking for easy breads to make on relatively short notice, have a look at a good bialy recipe. I mixed the dough at 9 am and enjoyed my first bialy around 2 pm. You don't have to use the schmaltz, as I did, but it sure made for an incredibly tasty, cheap indulgence.

You've all been mighty quiet lately. Did I drive you away with the meat rabbit post, or was it my unannounced absence last week?

Harvest Meal: Colcannon

A lot of our harvest meals are simply the product of using up what we've got, and trying to be a little creative with them. But we also find ourselves falling back on very old, simple recipes that hail from various traditional cuisines. Our dinner last night was one such occasion.

Colcannon is a mixture of mashed potatoes and usually cabbage, or sometimes kale. You see that? Colcannon, and kale. Does that remind you of anything? Kohlrabi? Cole slaw? Cauliflower? Collard greens? It's an old root word for cabbage. Kale is a member of the cabbage family, along with all the rest. Kohl is a surname in Germany. Mr. and Mrs. Cabbage over there. Colcannon comes from the Irish Gaelic, and there's a very similar dish in Wales with a very similar name (cawl cennin) in Welsh. Okay, I'm done playing with the words now. Here endeth the etymology lesson. On to the recipe.

You don't really need a recipe though. You know how to make mashed potatoes, right? Well you make those and you add butter, salt and pepper, some sauteed members of the onion family, and a hefty amount of either cabbage or kale. If you're feeling a little indulgent, add some parsley or chives, and maybe a little bacon. Typically a cheap but nourishing vegetarian, peasant-type dish, colcannon could even be made vegan if you so desired.

Almost everything I put into our dinner was stuff that needed to go. So I ended up with something that I would call a variation on colcannon, rather than a canonical colcannon. (Maybe not completely done playing.) We've been avoiding the last of the potatoes because they're so small that cleaning them was a bit of a pain. I got one leek out of the garden, and combined it with half an onion that had been sitting in the refrigerator. I still have bags and bags of chopped kale in the freezer, the product of our summer garden. There was also some cream, a little bit of schmaltz, and half a bunch of flat-leaf parsley hanging around in the fridge that needed using up. Oh, and some cheese that didn't do too much for us, so we weren't using it up in a raw form. This all was going in, one way or another.

After my husband had nobly scrubbed each and every tiny potato, I made the mashed spuds. While the potatoes boiled, I sauteed the chopped leek and onion in the schmaltz, seasoning generously with salt and pepper. Then I added the frozen chopped kale and let that thaw and warm up. When that was done, I added the cream that needed using up, a little over a cup, I'd say. I also grated the cheese, which was a simple farmer's cheese, probably about 6 ounces or so. When the potatoes were cooked, I added most of the cheese and a hunk of butter while mashing them up. Then I folded in the leek-kale-cream mixture. All that I put into a casserole dish, topping it with the remaining shredded cheese. I cooked it at 375 F for about half an hour, until the cheese was melted, bubbly and just beginning to darken. After letting it cool, I topped the dish with minced parsley.

I make no claims that this is an authentic version of colcannon. Traditional colcannon certainly would not have included schmaltz or cheese. Irish peasants probably wouldn't have used either of these, nor the typical quantities of dairy fat in modern versions of colcannon. However, they might have used some buttermilk. My dish is clearly in the colcannon neighborhood though. And my method of cooking - using up what we've got that needs using up - fits perfectly with traditional cooking the world over.

When all was said and done, it was delicious. The intense potato aroma coming out of the oven was incredible; a homey, comforting scent on a dark and chilly winter night. It was hard to let the dish cool enough so that we wouldn't burn our mouths. It was especially nice to see that even this long after our harvest, we can still make something so tasty and healthy out of three crops we grew ourselves (leeks, potatoes, kale). It would be a pretty cheap meal, even if we had to buy those ingredients. Best of all, there are plenty of leftovers.

Three guesses what's for breakfast. Yeah, I'm weird that way.

Tiny Tip: Make the Most of Old Man Winter

Winter is a tough time for frugalites. We're cooped up inside a lot. We pay to warm our houses and there's not much opportunity for most of us to garden or take advantage of other outdoor money-saving activities. Still, there are a few ways we can take advantage of winter's chill.

My first suggestion has to do with your freezer, particularly if you have a chest freezer. I've already posted about winter being a good time to defrost your freezer, since your frozen food is less likely to thaw while you tackle the defrosting. But here's another suggestion. If you're like us, your freezer stores are probably dwindling about now, as you eat through food produced during the warm months. That means extra room in your freezer. If you leave those empty spaces, your freezer will end up working a little harder to cool itself after every time you open it. Why not fill the space with free ice?

Containers of ice can take up the extra space in your freezer to act as cold storage. And while the temperatures are below freezing, you can produce ice essentially for free. Just fill some empty plastic bottles or jugs with water, leaving a decent gap at the top for the water to expand as it freezes. Put the bottles outside in freezing weather, with the caps off or only on loosely. When the water freezes, put the bottles in your chest freezer or kitchen freezer.

Over the summer, as you need the space in your freezer for storing more food, just remove the bottles to make room. If you move them into your refrigerator, that appliance will need less electricity to keep the food in there cool for a few days. Set the bottles of ice on the top shelf for most effective cooling of the entire compartment. The frozen bottles can also be used in coolers to keep food chilled for a picnic. Set the bottles aside to be refrozen and re-used come winter.

My second suggestion runs along very similar lines. When you make a nice hearty, warming dinner for yourself, use the cold outdoors to chill the leftovers before you put them in the fridge. Since the outdoors is frequently colder than a refrigerator in winter, this will cool your food faster, ensuring better food safety. It will also prevent your refrigerator from heating up and having to work harder, and the food in the fridge from warming up and spoiling more quickly. Be sure you cover your food well before chilling it outside. And exercise caution if your leftover food will tempt wild animals into undesirable behaviors.

These tiny tips will save you small amounts of electricity. Every little bit helps, especially in this economy!

More tiny tips: More Sunlight in Your Garden, Parboil Your Pasta, Repurpose Your Credit Card, Broccoli Stalk, Scallions

Harvest Meal: Kale and Barley Soup

As winter wears on it's getting harder to cobble together dishes that I can justly call harvest meals. But I manage it, more or less, sometimes. Here's one example. This is a hearty soup made with our frozen but homegrown Tuscan kale, a few leeks I literally chopped out of the frozen ground during a brief period of above-freezing temperatures, my homemade lamb stock, a little homegrown garlic stored as garlic butter, and purchased ingredients including some pearl barley, carrots, fresh oregano, and local, pastured bacon.

My method for this soup was a little more fussy than I would normally bother with. I steamed the pearl barley because I was in a hurry. I figured I could start it steaming before I did anything else so that the soup would be nearly finished by the time I had all the vegetables chopped and cooked. It worked out pretty well, even if it did involve more things to clean than is normally necessary when making soup.

After the pearl barley was in the steamer, I cut three slices of smoked bacon into small strips and melted a good hunk of garlic butter in the soup pot. When the butter was melted and the garlic was sizzling I added the bacon strips to brown up over medium-high heat. Meanwhile, I cleaned and trimmed the leeks, and finely chopped them, then peeled a few carrots and chopped those as well. When the bacon had begun to crisp up, I added the leeks to saute for a few minutes. When they were well softened, I added a quart of my double-strength lamb stock, an equal amount of water, and a vegan bouillon cube (for extra flavor), and brought the liquid to a low boil. The chopped carrots, a generous amount of our frozen, pre-chopped Tuscan kale, and a few sprigs of fresh oregano were added. I seasoned with bay leaf, salt and pepper and reduced the heat to a steady but low simmer. I let that cook until the carrots were no longer hard and raw, and then added the steamed barley, which was nearly fully cooked. I let it go a few more minutes to finish off the barley. When ready to serve, I fished out the bay leaf and the stems of oregano, which had released their leaves into the soup.

The soup was good the first day, drizzled with a garnish of olive oil. Very hearty, nourishing, and warming. But like many soups, the leftovers have definitely improved in flavor as they sat around for a few days. I especially like the chewy goodness of the barley, and the meaty quality of the soup that comes from very little meat.

What soups are keeping you warm these days?