Recipe Generator & Michael Pollan's new book

The New York Times recently posted a "Farmers Market Recipe Generator."

Excellent!  You select a produce item, it then gives you a method of preparation and a garnish.  The combination is sort of like the game of clue, Professor Plum, in the Conservatory, with the Wrench, but you can't go wrong in this case.  You'll always end up with a neat recipe.  I would love to see this expanded.  Anyone know of something similar out there?  A more complete ingredient list?  Seasonally /regionally adjusted lists?  Anything that makes turning fresh produce from the farm into a tasty meal easier is great in my opinion.

On this line of thought, I highly recommend Michael Pollan's new book Cooked.  He delves into the idea that we have outsourced much of our food preparation to corporations, and the result is a loss of skills, deleterious effects on our health, and unsustainable food systems.  How to fix this?  Cook at home!
Perhaps a more thorough book review will be coming along here.

Meanwhile...
Basil is looking good.  Plenty has been harvested off here so far

Lil' chicken supervisor

 Cukes are going gangbusters

Time to get the garlic out!

You can't see it, but I did snap some of the scapes off.  Mostly I leave them on though.  Reports are that if you leave the scape on, the cloves won't get as big, but they store for a longer period of time.  So far, I think my experience confirms this.

Soggy

Gosh it's been raining a bunch.

But, the bee balm and elderberries are blooming!

But in the hoophouse, it's dry and I got some cukes trellised up.  Nice tendrils grabbing onto the twine.

I had a young supervisor today.  

I think she's telling me to clean up those clippings.

Or she's just admiring the fine veggies.

Meanwhile, back in Portland, some random interesting pictures of the day.   A big oil tanker is running it's engine at the dock.  It's vaguely farm related, fossil fuel use is intertwined with so many parts of agriculture. 

 [insert oil dependency rant]

The smoke trail did do some neat stuff over the bay though.

And as I followed it around the peninsula, it led me to this.  Wow!

Little projects

The farm is partly on paternity leave this year.  But we still have some tasty projects simmering.

Garlic and Herbs are looking nice

Rosemary is cruising

and the chive blossoms are very pretty in omelettes

We also got to take our first ever father/daughter trip to Fedco!

Inspecting the sage blossoms.

Wintery Summary

What happened this winter?

First the ground froze...

...and I thought that would be a great time to plant garlic.

The chickens found The Great Pumpkin.  (and ate it) 

The deer found my parsley (and ate it)

I moved the chicken coop to another field...

...but the chickens had other ideas.

The hoop house got buried in snow...

...as did the truck...

...and the chicken coops...

so we eloped!

(that makes sense right?)

Meanwhile, the deer ate everything left in the field...

...and we had a baby! 

 Looking forward to spring!

Fall Cleanup and Hurricanes

Hey there!  Here's what has been going on as we finished the summer CSA and started fall cleanup.  The farm looks pretty nice.  Plenty of older plants in the ground, and many more blank spaces as others have been tilled in. 

The left side of the hoophouse still has some perennial flowers growing, but they'll come into their own in the spring.  There are still a few onions out there and some broccoli to keep them company.

The winterbor kale has ben trucking along and shows no signs of giving up!

But it can look a little goofy after picking all season.

We took down the yurt before hurricane Sandy.  It was a nice shelter for some of the nastier weather this fall, but I did not want to deal with strapping it down for a hurricane.  It's been in plenty of high winds, but mostly the canvas takes a long time to dry.  After a few nice sunny days, it was ready to pack up for it's next adventure.  Where to?

We finally took down the pea trellis!  That only took,...uh, 4 months...  Other things were going on ya know.

The netting is strong stuff though, so it's ready for use another year.  Ah, there's a nice blank space in the field now, ready for some winter rye.  Or maybe garlic?

To prepare for the hurricane we added extra wiggle wire on the parts of the hoop house which normally roll up.  There is normally a little gap there, but in a high wind, it could lift up the whole side, and then possible the whole hoop house.

We also added more soil to hold down the row cover over the herbs and salad greens.  This worked ok,  the wind caught a few holes in the row cover, and ripped it open in places.  But most of the row cover stayed in, or close to the bed...

And then the storm blew in.  The sound of the wind in the trees was mixed with raucous ocean waves crashing!

The air was thick with misty rain and smelled of the sea.

The trees were waving around plenty too.

This was the worst of it down in the creek.  We feel very fortunate, and hope that others who got hit by the hurricane harder can recover quickly.

And then it was Halloween.  Say, I've got an idea for a jack-o-lantern!

 It met mixed reviews from the trick-or-treaters...

First Frost

We had the first frost of the season early Saturday morning!  As such, we spent Friday evening harvesting all the remaining peppers by headlamp.  Soooo, thats about 150lbs of peppers.  Sweet red bell peppers, green peppers, and Jalapenos.  Peppers anyone?  Salsa?  Jambalaya?

Big bucket of Jalapenos

The next morning, the pepper plants were pretty sad looking.  No more brightly colored fruits.

The look of a plant burned by the frost has a sort of 'wet' appearance to it.  All the leaves are dark and droopy.

Meanwhile, inside the hoophouse, we harvested the last good tomatoes and pulled out all the vines. They survived the frost just fine inside, but we need to put lettuce and spinach in there.  Make some room!

The last of the tomatoes.

Off on the sides of the hoophouse I had rows of basil which I had intended to harvest Friday night, but never got around to it.  I figured it would survive inside the hoophouse, but alas, not so!  It got cold enough inside the hoophouse to kill the basil (it's pretty wimpy stuff anyway) but the peppers right next to them were fine.  Yep, more peppers...

Hey, more dead stuff.  Nasturtium.  Toast.

Outside, there are rows of lettuce and bok choi under row cover.  It's still looking fine after the frost, and the hoops which support the row cover should help it along for quite a while.  

Things are winding down out there.  But I've got a pretty big to-do list to put the field to bed for the winter.