New Pet?

Whew. I took some time off blogging while I did several weeks of movie work, which is now winding down. And a good thing, because clearly my little farm needs more attention...



Roommate Anne went to collect eggs today and instead she found a bizarre little hatchling. This poor guy showed up yesterday, apparently motherless and alone. Keith and the hens chased him away together.

Last night I took extra care to make sure I didn't lock him in with the hens - an opossum will kill a chicken, though I think the opossum needs to be a bit bigger to do that. He wasn't in the henhouse then and he wasn't there when Keith let the hens out this morning. But I guess our henhouse was an irresistible spot to hide out for the day... at least, until our hens beat him up and chased him away.

Poor little orphaned opossum. He just wants a safe place to sleep. And maybe a fresh egg to eat.



I hope he doesn't come back. I might have to adopt him. Wonder what the cats would think?

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"Urban Homesteading." So sue me.

UPDATE: I had to share this amazing post at The Noodle Book: An Open Letter to the Dervaes'. I looked for an excerpt to quote here, but really none of it stands alone; this entire letter is important to share. I hope the Dervaes family reads it and takes it to heart.



So my urban homestead - in lowercase, natch - is a work in progress. We haven't converted the front lawn into edible landscaping yet, we're still in the middle of fencing and building more raised beds in the back yard, the chicken coop leaks in the rain, and the only crop we harvest in any massive quantity is grapes. But our blueberry bushes are growing, the cherry tree we planted on the day we closed on the house is forming new branches, I'm still canning like a mo'fo' when the season's on, and our chickens have begun to resume egg production after their winter vacation. So I have no problem standing up and acknowledging that I am, again in lower case, an urban homesteader.

So what's all this about? Well, a controversy broke yesterday when it was revealed that the Dervaes family of Pasadena has trademarked the term "urban homesteading" (along with six other related terms). The family patriarch, Jules Dervaes, is apparently under the impression that he coined the term in 2001, despite its appearance in news media as early as 1981. There's a decent overview of the furor here at the LA Weekly's website if you haven't heard about it yet.

I had a measure of respect for the Dervaes family before this. They have several websites and blogs dedicated to the urban homesteading movement, and their own little urban farm in Pasadena is truly a model worth emulating. They're off the grid and completely self-sustaining, and while I find their writing to be more self-aggrandizing than educational, they do have a right to be proud. But trademarking a term that they did not invent - a term which has come to represent a global movement - and going after bloggers and educators with cease-and-desist letters... well, that's a tactic more worthy of Monsanto than anyone else.

Urban homesteaders are understandably pissed, though most of us are handling it with good humor. A Facebook group called Take Back Urban Home-steading(s) popped up less than 48 hours ago and has 1,756 followers as I write this, with more fans joining by the hour. Petitions and email lists have already spread to thousands of homesteaders around the world, mostly in response to Facebook responding to the Dervaes' cease-and-desist by deleting nearly every group relating to the subject.

What makes it even worse is the Dervaes response to this outcry. Rather than apologize and retreat, as anyone would if their true goal was increased participation in sustainable urban farming, the Dervaes family has instead watered the Drama Llama with a whining, comment-disabled blog post attempting to justify their actions. Apparently they believe they are rescuing urban homesteaders from corporate co-opting of the term. But, as several have wondered, what exactly are they rescuing us from if they're acting just like a corporate lawyer would?

One thing I do find interesting is that this controversy seems to have stirred up a lot of interest in an excellent book, The Urban Homestead: Your Guide to Self-Sufficient Living in the Heart of the City, by Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutsen (funnily enough, not by Jules Dervaes). Coyne and Knutzen are also in Los Angeles - actually in Los Angeles, not Pasadena - and their blog Root Simple is a hugely informative and educational look at homesteading as young urbanites tend to practice it.

I've owned the book for a couple of years now and would recommend it to anyone with an interest in the subject; it's seriously got everything, from chicken-keeping and composting to greywater recycling and lasagna-gardening. I've seen more references to this book in the past 24 hours than in all the years I've owned it. So if any good is to come of this tsimmes, it'll raise awareness of the urban homesteading movement and the excellent literature out there that has promoted it since long before Jules Dervaes became our self-appointed priest and publicist.

Here's hoping this blows over soon and we can all go back to prepping our raised beds for spring.

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You know it's fresh and organic when...

Farmers' markets are mostly closed this time of year, so we get our produce from a nonprofit cooperative grocery, People's Co-Op. Besides free yoga, excellent prices on bulk goods, and other benefits, we love this place because everything in the store is all-natural and organic.

One of the quirks to eating the way we do is that sometimes a funny thing happens. You go to the store and get your groceries - in January, that includes a lot of kale, an incredibly nutritious green that is sweetest and most delicious during the coldest weather - and stick it in the fridge when you get home. A couple days later, you're starting to cook and you pull out some kale, only to discover that somebody else got a head start on your dinner.



The Very Hungry Caterpillar went right on eating kale in the bowl we keep for vegetable scraps, and then once the bowl was full, he went out with those veggie scraps to the chickens. Snack and be snacked!

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December

It is EXTREMELY December out there. The sun is shining, but the temperature is 40 with a wind chill of 25; the winds are strong enough to knock you back a few steps, and I can hear it blowing from inside the house. Today I woke up watching our massive Douglas fir, swaying like a yoga teacher through the skylights over the bed, and then I bundled up in several layers of jacket, coat, hat, scarf, gloves, warm thoughts, and headed out to the farmers' market.

First stop at the farmers' market was hot coffee, and then I hiked briskly through the wind while thinking back on the summer of peaches. No more peaches now, that's for sure. I noticed quite a lot of turnips but almost none with the greens, which are my favorite part, so I asked and one lady told me that the weather had already wrecked a lot of the greens. It's pretty early for that, but there's one more sign we're in for a hard winter.

Once I got home, I snuggled down, and here I am for the rest of the day, sipping hot tea in my jammies with cats piled all around me. I'm about to work on screenwriting for the rest of the afternoon, but first, some pictures I've taken since the start of December...

The ultimate winter meal, pot roast cooked with potatoes, turnips, and carrots in rosemary and Black Butte Porter.


Fry and Davey, snuggled up warm in a little chair in my sewing room. (They do this a lot.)


Leftovers Soup, made with leftover pot roast, potatoes, and carrots with barley and lentils, in a broth made from red wine and leftover gravy. Unholy delicious on a cold rainy night!


Our hens snuggled up out of the wind on a chilly night.


And finally, my little fire, which I'm going to try and keep going as best I can while I sip hot tea and knock out the rest of this screenplay.

Happy Chanukah!

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Biscuits (Gravy Optional)

I've probably mentioned before that Keith and I have a biscuit tradition. Whenever he goes out of town for work, his first morning home again means biscuits and gravy. This has given me plenty of opportunity to perfect my biscuit technique, and I don't mind saying that I make the best biscuits we've ever had.

The gravy varies a bit, but the biscuits don't; once you've perfected a recipe like this one, you don't need to mess with it anymore. Today I had the chanterelle mushroom duxelles that I made on Monday, so I stirred them into my usual and made mushroom gravy. And then, upon discovering that I've never actually shared my recipe here, I decided to go ahead and gift it over.

There are some tricks to perfect biscuits. The big one is the frozen butter - when I first made biscuits I couldn't get that lovely flaky texture until I decided to treat biscuit dough like pie crust, and it worked. Lumps of frozen butter go into the oven solid and then melt as the biscuits bake, creating air pockets and that gorgeous flaky melt-in-your-mouth goodness.

The other trick is to place the biscuits quite close together on the baking sheet or in the pan. This will keep them from spreading outward, and they'll shoot upward instead, getting thick and fluffy like this:



BUTTER BISCUITS
Makes 4-6 biscuits, depending on size.

3/4 cup warm water
1 1/2 tsp sugar
1 heaping tsp yeast
2 cups unbleached white flour
3 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
5 Tbsp frozen butter, divided

Pour warm water (not hot) into a small bowl and add the sugar and yeast. Whisk it up with a fork until the yeast is mostly dissolved, then set in a warm place (such as on top of the stove with the burners off).

In a separate mixing bowl, blend the flour, baking powder, and salt. Set aside 1 Tbsp of the butter; take the remaining 4 Tbsp and grate it into the bowl with a cheese grater. Use your hand to gently mix the butter into the flour mixture until it's evenly distributed but the butter is still solid and chunky.

By now, the yeast water should have a thick bubbly layer on top. Pour that into the flour-butter mixture, then gently stir it in until the dough gets too thick to stir. Knead it with your hands until it's even and all the flour has been worked in; at first it'll look like too much flour, but as you knead it, the whole thing comes together. Don't knead it for too long, just until the dough holds together and looks even throughout.

Sprinkle a little flour on the counter and run a floured hand over your rolling pin, then roll out the dough to about an inch thick. Cut circles with the top of a glass and put them close together in a cake pan or on a cookie sheet lined with parchment. Roll the scraps together and cut until you only have enough dough left for one biscuit, and then shape that one with your hands. They don't have to look perfect - uneven is okay. (If you have little bits of scraps left over, and you know anyone with chickens, they LOVE biscuit dough.)

Preheat the oven to 450 F and set the biscuit pan on top of the unlit stove. Let the biscuits rest and rise for about 15-20 minutes. It won't look like they're rising much, so don't worry if yours don't double in size like bread does. Just give them the time and then pop them in the oven for 10-12 minutes, until they're golden in color.

Melt the remaining 1 Tbsp butter and brush it over the biscuit tops as soon as they come out of the oven. Serve immediately while they're still hot. Top them with any gravy you like, or go the other way and drizzle them with honey, or spread them with jam. They'll make a great little breakfast sandwich - go all out and stuff a biscuit with fried chicken and honey for a decadent treat!

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Yard Food

I got back from my trip late Wednesday night. Thursday I woke up hungry and went looking for something to eat. The pantry was full of staples - flours, barley, spices, etc. - but there wasn't much for a quick bite.

So I went out to the yard.

I gathered up several eggs, picked a bunch of greens, discovered that OH HAPPY DAY a few tomatoes are finally ripening, and I collected a few pounds of white pattypan squashes. Once I had it all inside, I decided to save the squashes, since I found a few slices of wholegrain bread.

Behold my Backyard Sammy: Eggs scrambled with hot sauce and Dijon mustard, on toasted wholegrain bread, with fresh-picked tomato, arugula, and two kinds of sorrel. I can't even tell you how delicious it was. And I didn't have to go far to the store.

That's the most satisfying thing about yard food. It's always there, cheaper and far more tasty than you could get if you schlepped it through the checkout lane. And it's always seasoned with that savory satisfaction that comes from self-sustainability.

The High Cost of Cheap Eggs

Mine:

Theirs:

Kinda says it all, doesn't it?

If you haven't already seen the excellent 2005 documentary Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, drop what you're doing and go watch it. Now. Every American needs to see it, and most of the rest of the world does too.

Now that you're back... I had to share this excellent article, "The Price of Cheap Wal-Mart Eggs." While this is not just a Wal-Mart problem (and invoking the name of the Evil Empire unfairly lets other less infamous retailers off the hook), the article does explain the reason why cheaper is NOT better when it comes to food production. Be sure to follow the links within the article.

And just for contrast, a funny story:

Our hens have a clearly established pecking order, with Lucy on top, Jane in the middle, and Lana far below both of them. This means that Lana rarely gets to enjoy any of the treats. Jane is fine as long as she gets hers, but Lucy will go out of her way to make sure that Lana doesn't get any treats at all, even if it means she herself misses out. (Notice in the picture above how Lucy and Jane enjoy that nommy corncob while Lana hangs back for the grass.)

So the other day, I was pickling beets - ten pounds' worth, so I had a huge bowl of peels and trimmings to take out to the hens. They dove right in and spent much of the day nibbling at those beets. Later in the afternoon, Keith stepped outside to check on the garden, and was startled to see Lucy looking like a lion at a carcass. The feathers all around her mouth and face were dripping red as she gobbled those beets.

At this point, along comes Lana, deciding to see if she can step in and have some beets too. Lucy roared up onto her tiptoes, wings spread, bloody beak open like a velociraptor from Jurassic Park; Lana shrieked and bolted across the yard, and Keith said for a second he almost did too.

I'm happy to report that our little dinosaur is no longer beet-stained, although the inside of the coop kind of looks like they're all dying from massive internal bleeding. But it's not true. In our case, though not in Wal-Mart's, it's just beets.

I pray that more healthy chickens may soon quarrel over fresh veggies on a sunny summer day.

Labor Day

Whew, it's been a canning week! And freezing, too. I've put up enough rhubarb for three or four pies, I've pickled peaches, I've pickled beets, I put up ginger-beet relish, I made mozzarella cheese, I made bread, I made biscuits, I blanched and froze 20 ears of corn (some on the cob, some cut off), and I pickled 20 pounds of cucumbers. I now have ten quart jars and sixteen pint jars full of pickles - half kosher dills, and half bread-and-butter. They're cheerfully pickling away on my kitchen table at the moment.

Yesterday was interesting; Keith and I took a break from canning to help a friend of a friend cull her chicken flock. She had several old biddies who weren't laying eggs anymore, and there were more chickens than her coop could handle, so some of them had to go. This was the first time any of us had seen inside an older hen, and let me tell you, it's NOTHING like the inside of a little one! It was an egg machine in there! Dozens and dozens of yolks in varying sizes, a big veiny egg sac, just some very complex works.

I always kind of thought the egg was a byproduct and they just made one at a time, but I have a whole new respect for my laying hens now. The female chicken is built to make eggs, and lots of them. I'll always remember seeing all those yolks, some full sized and some smaller than a dime.

Today I'm giving the house a much-needed scrubbing and then making some pizza dough and biscuits for the freezer. Maybe a pie crust or two, as well. I also need to stew the aforementioned hen. She's too old to roast (her meat will be all chewy), but she'll be full of flavor and make an excellent stock when simmered for six hours or so with some veggie scraps. I like to reduce my chicken stock until it's thick and strong, then put it into ice cube trays and freeze it. I load the chicken stock ice cubes into a big freezer bag and throw one or two of them into almost anything - pasta water, risotto, gravy, whatever. It's a handy way to keep it.

So happy Labor Day to all who labor. I'm right there with you today!

Chicken Processing (Warning: Bloody)

Don't read this post or look at the pictures if you're squeamish!

On Sunday, we processed five of the seven chicks that were hatched in our garage back in April. One was too small to be worth killing, and the other was a Thank You gift to Dawn, the woman who brought her two kids into town to show us how to do this. (She preferred a live pullet to lay eggs, so that one also lived.) It only took us a couple of hours to completely process all five birds, but it most certainly made for an interesting day.

I was a bit anxious in the morning, worried about how it would go. We went to breakfast with some friends of ours, but first I whipped up a pie crust, and when we got home from breakfast I channeled my anxiety into a strawberry-rhubarb pie. It was just coming out of the oven when it was time to get our day started, so it cooled in the kitchen as we worked outside.



This is the killing cone, which we borrowed from the Urban Farm Store for free and hung on the fence. Underneath it are two gut buckets - one for the feathers and guts, and another to catch the feathers and heads during processing. We had planned to slit the birds' throats in two places, which is what Joel Salatin and some others recommend, but beheading turned out to be much easier. You can behead a chicken with a filet knife, or a paring knife! I had no idea!

We were joined not only by Dawn and her kids (who seemed to have a healthy respect for the process, but were not the least bit squeamish about it), but also by our friend Kelley, who has been primarily a pesco-vegetarian for many years and whose toddler daughter had never eaten meat before. Kelley also has egg-laying hens and has been debating whether to raise meat birds next summer, so this whole process was kind of a trial run for both of us to see if we could handle it. While we waited for Dawn to arrive, we sipped beer and wondered if we would pass out or scream.

Then it was time.

Dawn's teenage son processed the first bird, and then we did the rest, though Keith had to do all the killing of the other four (Kelley and I weren't quite ready for that yet). It was easier to get ready than I thought it would be; you simply hold up the chicken by its feet, and after a couple seconds of flapping around, the blood goes to its head and it loses consciousness. Then you slide it headfirst into the cone, so that it's neatly contained and the neck is easily accessible.



Then, you take your filet knife (or paring knife) and in one quick stroke - THWACK.



Now you leave the chicken there for a couple of minutes to bleed out. This is pretty quick and a lot less gory than I anticipated. There is a surprisingly small amount of blood in a chicken (and thank goodness for that). When it's done, you take your headless chicken, as Kelley does here...



...and dip it in some hot water for a second or two. This makes plucking a lot easier. Despite the blood and guts, I think the plucking was my least favorite part - most of the big feathers just come off in handfuls, but then you have to pick off all the little pinfeathers, the fluffy ones around the legs, and the soft hairy ones on the roosters, and you have to do it without ripping the skin. Two of them, we tore the skin and decided to take Dawn's advice and just skin them. It's a lot easier but you don't get the delicious chicken skin that way. So most of them, we plucked.



Ready for butchering now? This is when you cut off the feet, neck, and oil gland, and trim the wings. Here's Keith and Kelley double-teaming this process, while I helpfully snap pictures.



Now it just looks like meat! This is when you eviscerate them, cutting around the vent and scooping the guts out. Most of the innards come out easily in one scoop with your hand, but you do have to dig around in there for the trachea and esophagus, and you have to use your nails to pry the lungs off the ribcage. Those lungs really stick! And they're so very tiny, just about the size of a man's thumbnail. Hard to believe they can crow and cackle as loudly as they do, with those teeny little lungs.

If I were true to my heritage and the spirit of this process, I'd have saved the livers and hearts to fry up or cook into stock. But this is me, and I don't like organ meats. So they went into the gut bucket with the rest of the guts.



Rinse out the bird, take a good look to make sure you got everything out...



...wrap the bird in a plastic bag, and you're done!

It all went really quickly. Neither of us passed out; we handled the whole thing really well, despite not being ready for the killing ourselves. Keith did the killing just fine. There was one unpleasant moment when he hit the bone of one chicken and took two or three loud squawking strokes to decapitate it, but generally we all performed quite well and didn't let the carnage get to us.



(I do have a picture of the inside of that bucket. I decided against posting it. I also have some video footage, which I also haven't posted, but if y'all express an interest in seeing it, then I'll upload it for you.)

When all five birds were processed, Kelley took hers and went home to her family. Keith got the deck cleaned up...



...while I got started on dinner. Remember the Cuckoo Maran rooster, in the foreground of Saturday's picture? He woke me up on Sunday morning crowing enthusiastically, and on Sunday evening I rubbed him all over with schmaltz, sprinkled him with salt, and stuffed his cavity with salted lemons, fresh herbs, and elephant garlic. I roasted him up, made a lucious gravy with the pan juices, and served him with hot potato salad and that amazing gravy.



Kelley made beer can chicken with hers that night, outside in her lovely yard.



The verdict? Obviously the chickens were tiny, as these aren't bred for modern meat production and they take more than a year to reach full-size. Next year, we may get meat birds that grow faster. Each bird made multiple meals for our two families, though, so we can't complain about size.

The meat itself was quite chewy; I later learned that it's better to refrigerate the birds for 24-48 hours after processing to relax the meat. (Rigor mortis makes for chewy muscle!) So the next ones I cook should be much better. Despite the chewy texture, the flavor was incredible. We've got a running joke in our culture about the taste of chicken, or rather the lack thereof, but this chicken had a distinct and delicious flavor that must be what caused our ancestors to domesticate this bird in the first place. Think of the best European chicken stock you've ever had, then solidify that flavor into meat. I really enjoyed it.

On Tuesday I took the leftover carcass from my roasted chicken, all the lemons and garlic that were in it, some veggie trimmings and fresh herbs, and the chicken necks from Processing Day, and I made stock. I now have quite a lot of really awesome stock that I can use for a long time to come. And I still have two more chickens in the freezer!

So I feel pretty good about Sunday's work. It was deeply spiritual in a very earthy way; this is what eating meat is supposed to be like. I wonder if a lot of our social disconnect with murder and violence is rooted in this detachment from the death we eat. Factory birds, drugged and diseased, dismembered by machines and wrapped in plastic at the supermarket... Yeah, I can now say I consider that to be far more barbaric than the natural way. I have finally looked my meat in the face and taken responsibility for it, and I found it to be a positive and uplifting experience.

And that strawberry-rhubarb pie I channeled all my earlier stress into? I am pleased to say it didn't taste like stress at all. Once dinner was done and the kitchen cleaned, that pie tasted a well-earned reward for a good day's work (or a couple of days, if you count the day that Kelley and I spent picking and freezing the strawberries last month).



(I just noticed how many of my happy blog posts end in pie!)

Six-Piece Chicken Dinner

Tomorrow's the big day. I'm nervous.

It's been a good week; I didn't realize how long it's been since I've posted. Keith and I worked on a TV show for a few days, I had my birthday, we ran around Portland for a weekend having a wonderful time, and then we've been busy with gardening and other chores. Yesterday we went to the Bite of Oregon, a lovely tribute to gluttony that is held each year on the waterfront, and today we were going to go back but decided to be productive instead. And tomorrow...

We're killing chickens.

I didn't fully grasp the enormity of it all until we were in the backyard today, debating where to hang the killing cone we've borrowed. My friend Kelley, who is joining for the experience and is also one of its chief instigators, already called today just to talk about it a little more. She's been watching videos upon videos in preparation, and I need to do that too but I've been putting it off. I saw one. It was intense.

And yet this is NOT a big deal in the long run. How much chicken have I eaten in my life? How many chickens are killed for food every day? Or, how many meat chickens get to live to a ripe old age of 16 weeks, outside in the grass and sunshine, scratching around together and enjoying a chicken's natural life?

I went vegetarian at 11 years old, in the Delta of 1990. It wasn't easy; I pretty much had to learn to eat all over again. I remained a committed vegetarian for 12 years, guided by a set of ethics that still guides me today. It might sound weird to say that the same inspiration lay behind my vegetarianism and my plan to slit the throats of six chickens tomorrow, and I don't know if I can really explain this properly, but I do believe that homegrown meat is better for the body, the soul, and the planet than processed soy products shipped from distant factories. And homegrown meat comes with killing. I owe it to these birds, to the universe, and to all the meat I've eaten before, to go through the entire process at least once.

So there it is. These birds entered our lives as a carton of fertile eggs that we picked up on a spring day, from a farm in Scappoose. They were hatched in our garage in April, and moved to our backyard when their feathers came in to keep them warm. Keith and I (and my friend Ashly when we were out of town) have fed them, watered them, given them our kitchen scraps, watched them grow. For a few recent mornings we've woken up to the boys' first crowing attempts. And now that they're fully grown, they will return the favor and nourish us with (hopefully) delicious, healthy, homegrown meat. It's a beautiful thing, really.

Just got to get through tomorrow's bloodbath first.

I hope I don't chicken out.

Who crowed?

Was it youuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu?

The chicks will be 15 weeks old on Tuesday. Most of them are Cuckoo Marans, and I've been reading lately that Cuckoo Marans make the most delicious and succulent meat bird! Yay! They also lay gorgeous dark chocolate-colored eggs, so the one lucky survivor out of this batch should make a nice addition to our egg basket.

Everyone tells me I should be able to tell by now if I have a rooster in the bunch. But I can't. So, about a year into chicken-keeping, I am finally asking the question that every novice chicken-keeper asks: Do I have a rooster?

The main reason I ask is because I haven't noticed any of the telltale signs. No saddle feathers, no spurs. I've only heard one crow, and of course I was changing the laying hens' water at the time and wasn't looking, so I have no idea who crowed (and yes, I've read that hens will occasionally crow too, so that's not necessarily an automatic rooster sign). The other reason I ask is because I'm pretty sure of the Marans and the Cochin - they look pretty hen-like, with one minor exception - and I fear that the Australorp may be my late-blooming cockerel.

It figures. A purebred Australorp was the ONE breed I really wanted, and we only got one out of the eggs Lana hatched... out of seven chicks, it figures that the one I really wanted would be a rooster I can't keep.

But that's not definite! You tell me what you think! (And I apologize in advance for the picture quality - it's pretty difficult to shoot chickens with a digital camera, as they don't stand still for long and the stupid camera has a delay on it.)

Here's the two most likely candidates. Of the seven, five are obvious hens. These two we call The Comb and The Australorp.



The Comb has a pretty roosteresque personality - large and in charge. It's by far the biggest of the chick flock, and sports one really impressive comb and wattle. The only thing is, Jane (our Rhode Island Red) also has a dominant personality and a spectacular comb and wattle, but she is most definitely a laying hen. And going by The Comb's wing feathers and body type...



...I'm kinda thinking she's a hen after all.

Which leaves us with the Australorp. No saddle feathers that I can see, but there is that proud stance...



...and that spectacularly beautiful upright tail.



But what about the wing feathers? They don't look like long, pointed saddle feathers to me.



So what do you think? Rooster-in-training, or a very pretty pullet?

UPDATE: The word is in from the experts - BOTH of them are roosters! DARN, DARN, DARN on that Australorp. The Comb... eh, looks pretty tasty, doesn't he? We'll freeze him for a nice company dinner! (Now I want to go doublecheck the other five.)

2nd UPDATE: This morning I woke up with the cock's crow. Literally. It's another week or two until slaughter time; I hope my neighbors don't lynch me first.

Quick Pics

Just a picture-post to facilitate the catchup.

First, last night I made a grassfed pot roast for dinner, for no apparent reason other than the fact that they had the beef at the farmers' market and roast was (obviously) the cheapest cut. I simmered the roast in the crock pot all day. To go with it, I smashed some purple and red new potatoes with parsley and paprika, and made a salad of speckled lettuce, snow peas, and fried squash flowers. Mighty tasty. I didn't get a picture of it because my friend and I devoured it while watching Chungking Express.

Pineapple would've been the perfect dessert to go with that movie, but alas I was out of fruit (I'm always out of fruit because I eat it all the day I buy it). So I took an empty pint basket and jogged across the street, where an abandoned house sits behind a chainlink fence that supports a massive blackberry bush. The blackberries there are still slightly underripe and tart, just the way I like them best! So I filled my little pint basket for free, listening to the music from my own windows in my bare feet, and trotted back home to wash and dry my dessert.



I've also gotten some tasty bounty from my own yard. Out of my five blueberry bushes, three are an early-season variety and two are a late-season variety. So those two are still covered in little green blueberries, but the other three have been producing extremely well for their small size and young age. Let me tell you, if you've never had blueberries freshly picked and still warm from the sun, you've never had blueberries, period!



And a final picture that I got the other day, when I caught Lana and Lucy working on my breakfast. Keep up the good work, ladies!



Speaking of chickens, the seven chicks were 14 weeks old yesterday. I'm calling tomorrow about renting processing equipment, and it looks like that date they have with the sharp knife is fast approaching. Stay tuned!

Indeed, Mr. Williams.

so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

- William Carlos Williams



I know a lot depends on MY red wheelbarrow, even though my chickens aren't white. What you see in the picture there is five cubic yards of four-way dirt; this is a mix of topsoil, peat, cow manure, and sand, blended into the perfect "black gold" you need for raised garden beds. Given the crappy nature of our soil in the back yard, we have to install raised beds and bring in dirt, and our first dirt delivery arrived on Friday.

Keith built the big raised bed a few months ago, but we didn't have the money to fill it until now. The bottom of the bed was lined with newspapers (to kill the grass) and covered with the mucked-out litter from the chicken coop (pine shavings and chicken doody, great for the garden). And once the dirt got here...

I started shoveling.

Yep, I've been moving that dirt, one shovelful at a time. And I'm not done yet.

Five cubic yards of dirt doesn't sound like much, but it's enough to fill a raised bed that is about 140 sq ft, by more than a foot deep. I'd be done now, except for a snag I hit when a couple of screws turned out not to be long enough, and part of the bed buckled under the weight of the dirt. So I have to fix that and then move the rest of the dirt in.

But I'm almost done! There's only a small pile of dirt left in the front now. Tomorrow I have to go to work, and then it looks like my Fourth of July evening is going to be spent moving the rest of this dirt into the back so I can get something planted in it finally. Better late than never.

And thank heaven for that red wheelbarrow.

What a difference a century makes.

(Click the picture to see a bigger version and read the text.)

Remember when hard times and war meant we LIMITED our consumption, and did more for ourselves? When we had a patriotic duty to learn to be self-sufficient, frugal, and creative with the things we had? When the government encouraged people to be independent?

Yeah, I don't either. I'm too young. But I've read about it, and every so often I stumble across something like this, and it makes me wonder when we lost our way... and if we can ever collectively find it again.

We're Home! (A Very Portland Weekend.)

Oh man, am I exhausted! But it's the good kind.

We made it from L.A. to Portland in one 18-hour day, including a stop for lunch at a decent little pizzeria in Northern California, and a trip to a kitchen goods outlet store, which is a dangerous place for us to be but we scored a great deal on a salad spinner I really wanted and a very nice ice cream maker at half the retail price. Yay for homemade ice cream! We've really wanted an ice cream maker for some time now so that we can make our own deliciousness out of raw milk/cream and good organic fruits and herbs. Coincidentally we also scored ten bananas for fifty cents at our little produce market here in Portland yesterday, so it looks like banana ice cream is first up (though more on that later)!

Anyway, we also made the obligatory stop in Central Point, Oregon, for Rogue Creamery cheese and Lillie Belle chocolates, plus a very pleasant wine tasting. So we weren't in the car for the full 18 hours. But we were still pretty exhausted by the time we got in, about 10:30 pm. We loved on the cats some and passed out.

Since then it's been a flurry of catching up. Portland has suffered through a pretty massive rain in our absence, yesterday being the last day of a twenty-day run of straight rain. This is typical of winter around here but not summer, and no one knows why it happened. The most noticeable effect of it all was evident even as we pulled into our driveway in the dark: an explosion of roses, and knee-high weedy grass. Oops.

So we had mowing and weeding and staking roses to get through, plus unpacking, laundry, straightening up, restocking chick feed, restocking people feed, marveling over the chicks' incredible growth, and otherwise restoring the balance. We've been hard at work and still aren't done yet. I hope to finish tomorrow.

But today was Saturday, so we went to Sauvie Island for the afternoon. We made a stop at Kruger's Farm for fresh-picked, candy-sweet roasted corn, then headed for the beach, where we waded through thigh-high flooding to get to a narrow strip of sand along the swollen, fast-moving river. After so much rain ending in a sunny warm Saturday, all of Portland was out enjoying the weather today, but our strip of beach wasn't too crowded and we soaked up some vitamin D and relaxed for awhile. Eventually we headed back to Kruger's Farm to pick ourselves five pints of strawberries.

We got home sun-tired and woozy, but hungry, so I quickly seared and roasted a fresh salmon filet we bought yesterday (with fresh rosemary from the yard), and served it up atop a lovely salad of red lettuce, green onions, red turnips, sunflower seeds, and smoked bleu cheese. A lemon vinaigrette held it together nicely, made with a lemon from Keith's father's lemon tree (that tree makes the sweetest, juiciest, tastiest lemons I've ever had). The salmon was so perfectly moist and flaky, and went so nicely with the smoked bleu cheese, that we both just sat at the table quietly licking our lips like cats for several minutes before Keith got up to do the dishes.

I was going to make the banana ice cream tonight, but I'm just too freaking tired right now to skim the cream off the three half-gallons of raw milk we have in the fridge, much less cook up the custard and make ice cream. So I'll save that for tomorrow. It'll be a good day for it, since tomorrow is the first day of the Lents International Farmers Market (our favorite market in Portland, and also our closest one)! We'll have to celebrate with strawberry-banana ice cream now since we picked all those strawberries. Maybe we got too many, but they were so brilliantly red and sweet, still warm from the sun - I could've picked the whole field and brought it home.

They grow up so fast...

Our awesome friends are watching the house, cats, and chickens while we're gone, and they just sent me pics of the baby chicks. They're not babies anymore! LOOK at how they've grown and they're only a month old!



Can you believe it?!



Teenager chickens!!

Still in LA-LA-Land.

Just an update since I've been working ridiculous hours and haven't posted in awhile. We're still in L.A., working hard, enjoying the work and definitely enjoying the job - this is the friendliest crew and the most mannerly group of actors I've worked with in a long while. The weather is hot and sunny after a few days of clouds and what Los Angeles considers rain.

I hear my baby chicks are not so much baby chicks anymore, and I hear Lana is back to laying eggs already! Our friends who are taking care of the cats and chooks collected two Lana eggs yesterday - I am so impressed! I thought she'd wait until the babies were grown. But nope, only a month into motherhood and she's back to work. What a trooper.

Our friends said they'd take pictures of the chicks so I could see how big they're getting. Apparently I guessed right, we have a frizzle! How fun to have a frizzle hen with wild curly messy feathers. Still not sure whether the Australorp is a boy or a girl, but I guess we'll see when we get back. By then they should be full-on chickens (if small ones) and Lana will start rejecting them, pecking and squawking for them to move out, get a job.

When I see pics, I'll share them here. But I sure am missing my little farm today! I can't wait to get back and do my summer planting finally!

A Pleasant Little Mini-Break (but first: Pie!)

I'm cross-posting today because I'm so proud of myself for finally hitting upon the PERFECT pie crust recipe. Came up with it myself! I figured I'd try and develop another gluten-free recipe to see if it would work, and it really did. There's a how-to, with the recipe, over at Nothing But An Apron (the homemaking blog I cowrite with my friend).

It was ridiculously easy to work with, too. Sometimes pie crust can be a real pain in the ass. This crust was smooth, perfectly malleable, and delicious. You can't overwork it, after all - it's gluten-free, and not going to glutenize like wheat does! And it was a lot more forgiving with the water; it didn't get all sticky like pie crust sometimes does. Seriously, anyone can make this pie crust, it was so easy. I'm really proud of it.

EDIT: I hadn't realized I already posted about the pie a couple days before I posted this. Haha. Oops. I guess you can tell I really was proud. This is me, blushing. Anyway...

Had a nice weekend, if a bit rushed. We went to the farmers' market on Saturday and got myself some groceries for the week; the strawberries are finally in and OHHHHH MAN, are they delicious. We ate the whole pint (okay, I ate about ¾ of it) on the way down to Ashland on Saturday afternoon. It was a gorgeous day for a road trip, sunny but not too hot, and we stopped on the way at the Rogue Creamery and Lillie Belle Farms for incredible bleu cheese sampling and chocolate truffles.

Once in Ashland, we visited my favorite sushi place in the whole wide world - yes, I, She Who Will Not Eat Raw Fish, have a favorite sushi place. It's called Kobe, and it's got a beautiful patio overlooking a wooded stream running through downtown Ashland, and it's my favorite sushi place because they have incredible beef tataki. It's so hard to find beef tataki, but I absolutely love it - steak marinated in ginger and miso, very lightly seared but left mostly raw, sliced thin and served over a bed of watercress. Keith got his raw fish on, so we were both happy, and after dinner we walked up the street and shared a cup of all-natural handmade ginger ice cream with chunks of candied ginger all throughout. It was the perfect dessert to complement the sushi.

At this point Keith had a speaking engagement, so we went to that, and even though he was sick he was on point with his trademark sharp wit. Afterwards we joined some of his associates at a local wine bar for a lovely glass of vino, and then he and I had to get some sleep.

We were up at 2:45 a.m. to head into California. It was right at 3 a.m. when we turned onto Siskiyou Blvd., Ashland's main drag, and had to brake for two unusual pedestrians: a pair of deer, both does, strolling across the crosswalk just like they were shopping downtown! (Jaywalking, however. Though in the crosswalk, they were crossing against the green light. Tsk, tsk.)

It was still dark when we pulled into Dunsmuir, California, a tiny town hidden so deep in the woods that you can't see it from the expressway even though it's right there. We only had to wait for a few minutes; the train pulled up right on time, so I kissed Keith goodbye and boarded while he continued on to L.A. I left Dunsmuir promptly at 5:04 a.m. and got myself settled comfortably in the lounge car to watch the sunrise. It came as we crossed the state line back into Oregon. The train tracks are way back in the mountains there, with no other visible signs of civilization, so the view was so incredible I don't even have a word for it. Deep wooded valleys, sharp mountains dolloped with snow, and every shade of orange and pink in that sunrise. I dozed off watching that and napped for awhile.

Spent the rest of the day on Amtrak enjoying the view and writing. I took a break for lunch in the dining car, where a vegetarian chipotle bean burger actually impressed me with how good it was. After lunch I went back to the lounge car for a cayenne pepper caramel truffle from Lillie Belle Farms, and about 3:30 p.m. we were back in Portland. I caught the light rail across town to the bus that took me home, and I was back in the house by 4:45 to feed the chickens and cats.

None too soon for the chicks in the garage - they are growing like government and eating us out of house and home! I filled their feeder yesterday about 5 p.m. and when I got up this morning at 8 it was empty again. I should get some pictures today; their wings have feathered out and they've reached that awkward in-between stage when they look all gangly and fuzzy. Later this week I think I'll be moving them outside. It wouldn't be warm enough for them if they didn't have Lana, but they do, and it'll be good for them to have access to grass and bugs so they won't eat so much feed. They've been in the garage long enough that the sunshine and outdoors will be good for them.

In the meantime today I'll be doing some gardening. We bought more strawberry starts at the farmers' market, and a friend gave me two more blueberry bushes, and another friend gave me a young bay leaf tree and a green tea tree. Off to do the planting in between the sporadic rain showers we've been getting today...

Whew. I'm beat.

Busy busy weekend! Yesterday we started out at the farmers' market - find of the day, the season's first strawberries, all sweet like candy, and a lovely vanilla caramel made from goats' milk. Yum! Then we went to a meeting for Delia Lopez's Congressional campaign, and then home for yard work. TONS of weeding and Keith cut the grass for the first time since we bought this house in August - haha, it was awful. Then we scrubbed the house top to bottom and collapsed exhausted by the fire after our showers.

This morning I was up at 6:30 to get ready for the pancake party. I made all seven pancake mixes, got dressed, whipped up some raw cream; Keith made a lovely banana-strawberry compote topping and we set out maple syrup and butter. Our guests arrived at 10 a.m. to see the baby chicks while Keith got started on pancakes and waffles.

SEVEN FLAVORS of pancakes AND waffles. We were stuffed by halfway through! But I got a lot of great feedback. It looks like Ginger Chai Spice is going to be my biggest hit. I have comment cards to work from and I'll be tweaking the recipes and having another party very soon.

But now Keith and I are off to finally relax. We're taking the paper and some mimosas outside to the backyard, where we will spend the afternoon in the sunshine, reading the news and doing the crossword together, sipping mimosas and finally - FINALLY - relaxing.

RIP, Doris.

After several weeks of decline, Doris fell yesterday evening and never got up. This morning she was still lying there, looking dead, but still breathing slightly... so Keith ended her suffering and she's gone on to wherever the good chickens go.

She was as friendly as she was beautiful, always the first one to come over and say hello when we went outside, and even on the last evening of her life she was eager to enjoy a kitchen treat or a handful of scratch. We still don't know what was wrong with her, but the other hens are fine so apparently it wasn't contagious.

So safe travels, Doris. You'll be missed.