At the Farmers’ Market
September 24, 2011 § 1 Comment
When I woke up this morning it was dark. The temperature was 45 degrees and my feet were cold, but a quick glance at weather.com warned me of a high of 85. Tank top underneath three-quarter-length underneath a fleece and out the door with a slice of bread-and-butter.
The sunrise on my way to the farm helps the morning to feel calm for ten minutes. It’s almost always orange, pink, sometimes hazy with blue and purple. How crazy what a difference fifteen minutes makes; most mornings I get to the farm at 7 but the sunrise is done by then. 6:45 and I catch the brilliant tail end.
We load the truck, my co-worker Adam and I, and get to the market to set up in the bright (and I mean bright) morning sun.
And then when we’re finally settled one of us gets Silver Canyon Coffee, and we get to talk and sell to the folks of Longmont and Boulder County. How fun to share the produce of Sol y Sombra Farm – the result of our week’s hard work!
As the day goes on we take turns taking breaks, wandering through to see what we want to buy from other vendors, what we might have for lunch or a mid-morning treat.
The market in Longmont isn’t as packed nor as renowned as the one in Boulder, but it has plenty going for it, including music, seriously remarkable face painting, prepared foods, and space, glorious space. Parking isn’t a headache and elbows aren’t so jostled here. Come see the spread of colorful vegetables, fresh-baked and gluten-free breads, handmade soaps, local flowers, grassfed beef and pastured poultry, pies and teas and roasted chili peppers. But you’d better come early if you want okra!
And the best part? Going home and looking at what you just got from your local farmers and producers. Today, for me (in addition to my usual share from the farm): apples and sourdough and this season’s first pie pumpkin.
Then there’s the fun of playing with ideas for what to make, and whom to share it with. It always makes me glad to see how creativity and community and seasonality come together here.
I’ve got to say thanks to all the vendors and staff at the Boulder County Farmers' Markets. And to those involved in farmers’ markets across the country, both bustling and just-getting-started . . . keep up the good work!
Pattypan chocolate chip bread
September 20, 2011 § 4 Comments
In case you aren’t familiar with this playfully-named vegetable, pattypan, or patty pan, is just another type of summer squash, and can be used pretty much like zucchini or crookneck. It comes in a handful of varieties and can be yellow, yellow and green, white, or greenish white. These squash look remarkably like spaceships. Or jellyfish. Or characters from Pac-Man. (Come on. Your kids have got to get into it.)
At the farm, our greenish-white variety, Benning's Green Tint, has been growing like crazy. So when we had some left at the end of a market day I got to take some home for myself. I made them into soup, stuffed them, tossed them in to sauté with some veggies, but I still had more and they kept sitting there on the counter asking me to do something with them before they went soft.
Since I’ve been craving chocolate – and since my sister’s zucchini chocolate chip bread wouldn’t get out of my head – I threw together what I had and out came this lovely moist bread. Just right when you feel the need for a bit of chocolate in the morning!
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RECIPE
Ingredients:
1.5 cups all-purpose flour
1.5 cups whole wheat flour
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup white sugar
1 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
1 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 tsp. nutmeg
1/4 tsp. ginger
2 tsp. vanilla
3 eggs
2 cups grated pattypan squash
2 sticks butter (you can reduce it to 1 or 1.5, but I like lots of moisture at this altitude)
10 oz. semi-sweet chocolate chips (again, you could reduce, but I like lots of chocolate!)
Directions:
Mix dry ingredients; mix wet ingredients. Add wet ingredients to dry and stir until everything is moistened. Add chocolate chips. Pour into a greased large loaf pan or two small loaf pans or a muffin tray. In the large loaf pan, bake at 350 degrees for about an hour. Reduce baking time for small loaf pans or muffins (I’d bake for about 30 and 20 minutes respectively). Serve warm with butter for breakfast, or at room-temp for an easy-to-grab afternoon snack.
Muck boot days and flower bouquets
September 16, 2011 § 2 Comments
Goodness gracious, has it been muddy! Three days of clouds and rain. Morning mists, and white wisps hovering around the mountains. It has felt like England. It has meant tea and toast with butter and jam.
It has also meant sliding around in the paddocks with high-strung horses, horses even more eager (read: demanding) to have their food. It has meant mud-caked shoes and wisely switching to muck boots, or wellies. Wellies are great, and it makes me happy when I get to wear mine. But you have to walk rather differently in them, especially when they are heavy with mud on the bottom, and after doing that – while pulling wheelbarrows full of hay or toting buckets full of flowers – for a solid day or so you will end up sore in muscles you didn’t know you had, or at least had forgotten about.
And then you get to go inside and sink into a bath, or stretch out by the fireplace, and let the cold and wet sort of seep out of you. Fleece and wool, sweaters and thick socks. It is only September and yet the rain means I get to drag out and use these favorite things!
I don’t know why what some would call “bad weather” is so often a favorite thing for me. I am completely aware that it means more work. I know it means having to worry about things you otherwise might not. I definitely know it makes more laundry! And it surely upsets the comfort and efficiency of routine.
But isn’t it a relief to have routine upset sometimes? There is just something about having to work around the weather – about having the ordinary course of things thrown off – that I can’t help finding amusing, interesting, and honestly quite satisfying. I suppose some thanks should go to parents who taught my siblings and me to laugh at difficulty and work with the unexpected. After all, that makes it more fun to plow through, if one must plow.
As I write, though, the three days of clouds and water have just passed. After a cold, foggy, coat-hat-and-mittens morning at the farm today, with plenty of sniffling and even a change of socks, I settled with the flowers into the shed to make bouquets, and the sun came out once again. The mountains could be seen blue to the west. The other farm hands and I had slowly been shedding layers all morning; I had to grin a little at going from fleece-lined softshell jacket to tanktop and ponytail in only a few hours. Now in the shade of the shed I was still sweating. Still, at least I had the shade, right?
These Fridays are my flower days, and happily full of color. So many flowers just exude optimism. Others seem more serious, or romantic, or even melancholy, and these can be nice to put together. Cosmos, snapdragons, zinnias, pincushion flowers, bachelor’s buttons, amaranth, love-lies-bleeding, sweet annie, and black-eyed susans have all been gathered into pretty bundles to greet people at the market in the morning. And I’ll be there, too – hopefully with a mug of coffee in hand and a smile more noticeable than my sleepy eyes.
A book to read in fall
September 14, 2011 § Leave a comment
A slim little paperback of 20 poems by Robert Bly, one of my beloved Minnesota poets: The Urge to Travel Long Distances.
The geese in flight reminded me of the cover of this book, a book I dig out this time of year for a good re-read. Here are poems to enjoy by the season’s first fires, with mugs of cider in your hands.
A favorite book on a favorite subject
September 5, 2011 § Leave a comment
As I was writing the previous post, and thinking about good words in the world, I happened to remember this book. It is the book that made me want to try my hand at nonfiction when I was adamantly going to be a young adult fiction writer. I am so glad. This book is written in a way that reminds you of snow falling in a dark night. There is something quietly powerful, quietly beautiful. Read it.
The Rural Life by Verlyn Klinkenborg
Problem solving
August 30, 2011 § Leave a comment
I’m starting to think about what’s next after the farm season is over. It’s scary. I’ll figure it out has been my most-used phrase lately – lately being the last several years or so.
It seems like I always need more experience. And experience can be hard to get. But one of the things I feel like I can do, and ought to be doing, is look for ways to educate myself. I have to admit that I don’t read the way I used to, before college hit. Blogs and facebook keep me far too entertained these days. Whatever happened to books?
As I scroll through job possibilities and think about the things I want to do and the things I need to know better, I can’t help noticing the gaps in my education. Or, perhaps more accurately, the misdirection of some – not all – of my education. It’s troubling and yet not something that can’t be remedied in its way. It’s just up to me to fill in the blanks, since I didn’t realize a major in agroecology would have been a good partner to my major in English until too late. Fortunately, one thing college does for you is teach you how to learn. If you want to learn something, find the resources and get down and do it!
So. I’ve got a copy of Rodale’s Ultimate Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening (which is very long and chock full of information) and a copy of Rodale’s Vegetable Garden Problem Solver (which is acceptably thick, but not overwhelmingly). The goal I’m setting for my not-fully-educated, not-reading-enough self is to read this second book cover to cover, and to have it completed by the end of September. In addition to paging through the Ultimate Encyclopedia a little each day. I suspect I’ll share excerpts and discoveries along the way, so for those of you blog-oriented readers like me with even a small interest in gardening, you might consider this your SparkNotes!
Also. If you haven’t heard of The Rodale Institute, you might want to check them out. They are responsible for lots of research, information-sharing, publications, and general forward-movement of all things organic and sustainable. They also have festivals – the next is an Organic Apple Festival on September 17, complete with apple picking, farm tours, and apple cider floats. Don’t I wish I could go! You know how I love a good farm event. Muy bien!
Smoke, rails, and hay bales
August 27, 2011 § Leave a comment
I got my first kinda-close look at Wyoming last week on my jaunt to and from the Black Hills. And I liked it. A lot. Most Coloradoans I’ve met rather rag on Wyoming, as Minnesotans often do of Iowa, and so I had prepared myself for a dull drive.
It wasn’t dull. The landscape, with its few scattered homes and ranches and acres and acres of wide open, felt like peace. Like a rest for thought. Like those yoga-moments of focused breathing. I looked around and watched as the mountains disappeared and reappeared briefly off to the left, as the landscape stretched out flat and rolled into hills and sometimes rocks, caught sight of windmills and hay fields and felt so happy that there are still places where you can be alone, surrounded by so much earth.
At one point I had to go to the bathroom so badly it couldn’t wait for wherever the next town might be. I left my car idling on the side of the road and stepped carefully down into the ditch.
The wind. The sound of it covered the idling of the engine and yet it seemed like a version of quiet. It tossed my hair towards me in a way that is both pushy and comforting, like a friend giving you a playful shove on the arm or slap on the back. Hello, a greeting, familiarity.
I found a sort-of hill and grasses to hide behind, but still I had an audience of red Herefords and black-baldies, two small herds on either side of the road. I laughed. “I bet you don’t see people out here much.”
It’s such a funny feeling to go from that wild quiet expanse back into the car, where you have the radio and your iPod and your cell phone. These things connect you to the wider world and yet at the same time shut out the much wider one immediately around you. For awhile I pulled out my earbuds so I could just be in this place while I drove. It wasn’t quite enough. I needed to be walking through those yellow grasses, climbing the rocks and bluffs, riding on horseback over the roll of the land.
So that is where I was. A place traveled through, not known well. Yet. Perhaps. I often think about places and if I could live there, and how I would live there. In Wyoming, I imagine a worn-wood horse barn, dusty boots and leather gloves, and a pot of herbs on a kitchen windowsill.
But that is imagination. Real sights: Smoke from, maybe, a wildfire. A slow-moving train. A small town where, at the gas station, a well-dressed man walking by asked about my license plate and if I was familiar with a certain place he’d been in Iowa. Crooked fences, dirt roads. Hay bales against the horizon.
Height of summer lamb stew
August 11, 2011 § 2 Comments
Around here, everyone is getting ready for school to start. Most elementary and high schools started this week or will start next week, and the colleges commence their fall semesters soon after. This suggests that summer is over, and it feels like it as families scramble for a few last weekends in the mountains and kids schedule final playdates at the pool. According to the calendar, though, we still have another good month. And in the vegetable farming world, we are hitting peak season. This is not the end but rather the middle of things, and now tomatoes and peppers and summer squash and beans are coming into full production. Pumpkins and winter squash are putting on some color. Second plantings of peas and lettuces are going in the ground. There is still plenty – plenty to be eaten, plenty of time.
I’ve been craving meat these days, and my grocery bill shows it. Even on hot summer days, you sometimes want something hearty. I have been getting so much Swiss chard from the farm, so I decided some lamb stew meat and chard and onions and crooked neck squash might simmer well together.
Garlic and butter make so many things taste richer. I dug the garlic, and also snipped rosemary and basil from the farm last week. Came home smelling like a soup sachet.
I frequently worry about broth tasting dull, and wondered as I threw things together if I ought to have used vegetable stock. It turns out that I needn’t have worried. I immensely enjoy a good broth and it turns out I can make one, too!
The stew was exactly what I had been craving. This morning I woke up next to an open window, and I felt – gasp – cold! Nights have been hot in the apartment but now and then a good rain cools things down and there is the slightest briskness of fall in the air. A summer stew becomes just the thing.
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RECIPE (loosely, as I really did toss things together as I pleased):
Ingredients:
Lamb stew meat (approx a pound)
1-2 Tbs. olive oil
1 stick butter
1-2 yellow or crooked neck squash
1 large or two small red onions
15 leaves Swiss chard
several cloves of garlic
2-3 bay leaves
1-2 sticks rosemary
7-10 leaves of fresh basil
1-2 tsp. of cumin, to taste
1/2 lemon
salt & pepper to taste
water
Directions:
Brown the lamb in olive oil with several cloves of garlic, in a skillet on medium heat. Meanwhile, place butter, onions (sliced into rings), and minced or crushed garlic in a large pot and bring to simmer; heat until onions become clear. Add meat to butter and onions, add about six cups of water, and add rosemary, bay leaves, salt, pepper, and cumin. Add more garlic if you wish – minced, crushed or whole cloves. Let simmer for about 30 minutes. Slice the Swiss chard into 1-inch strips. Add the chard, squash, and basil, and squeeze in the juice from the half lemon. Let simmer until the chard and squash have softened and the meat is tender. I’d recommend tasting the broth periodically and adjusting seasonings as you wish – I found I liked quite a bit of salt and pepper in mine. This would also be good with potatoes added.
Along the gravel drive
August 9, 2011 § Leave a comment
Just about every week I drive to a little town between Boulder and Longmont to pick up my milk, from a small farm where I have a share in the herd. I am obsessed with this milk. The icing on the cake (cream on the top?) is that in order to obtain it I get to go out to a farm and smell that dairy smell, see new kittens lingering the doorways with their dewy glassy eyes, say hello to the curious gray goat, and watch the hens pecking around and making feed bags crinkle.
The last two times I’ve gone to the farm, I’ve gotten some additional glimpses of the good ol’ country life in this state of Colorado. (Something I am always glad to see persisting despite the influx of wealthy outdoor adventurers and trendy corporate professionals.) Two weeks ago (I missed a week between), as I was pulling around a corner to go out the long gravel drive, there in front of me were two girls on horseback. They were probably in their early teens, on chestnut horses, just ambling down the way and laughing with each other. Such a scene I’ve imagined or read about so many times I can’t count. Every horse-crazy girl imagines long rides on horseback with her best of friends and her best of horses. It made me happy to realize that this does still happen, in real life, not just in the imagination. Despite the blur of speeding-up technology and speeding-up society, and also the speeding-up of growing up, there can still be these slowed-down, timeless, quiet, enjoying-childhood moments.
I wanted to wish those girls all the good that life can hold. It’s strange to be older now, a real grown-up, not living on so much hope of the future as you used to, having fulfilled some dreams and abandoned others, having reworked perspectives, having come through difficulty and sought after strength. It’s strange to see these young ladies in the thick of girlhood and to remember how that was, to rather miss it, to hope that their choices and experiences are as good as some of yours, and much better than others.
Then, today, as I drove away from the little shed with my half-gallon jars full of whole milk, down that same drive, I saw to my left that a horse camp or group riding lesson was happening. There is a small paddock on the farm, just past the shed where I pick up the milk, and I’ve noticed before that it seems the farmer’s wife or some other relative must regularly offer riding lessons there. Today a collection of probably 8 – 10 year olds were lined up with their horses – mainly chestnuts and bays, all prettily matching – and they watched as one after another worked at circling barrels. I laughed – I did – I couldn’t help it. Cowgirls and cowboys are not the same, quite, as they used to be back in the height of the Wild West and all the myths that surround it, but they are still alive and well out here, a new version based on the old prototypes. They hold onto certain passions, practices, and, to some extent, a set of values. Cowboy boots and hats and Wranglers are worn shamelessly, even proudly. Just the other day I made a new acquaintance who has a seven-week-old baby girl. She said to me, while nursing her daughter in the seat of her pickup, “When we were naming her we went with Kylie Rose over Kylie Grace, because my husband says it’s a better cowgirl name.”
Oh. It’s just too good. And my little-girl dreams of being a Colorado cowgirl have never been so close. I was a wishful, pining dreamer, and to think all this time God had this up his sleeve. Life is incredibly interesting. And even when I’m broke and trying to figure out the next step and wondering if I’m wasting my talent and am yet still so full of ambition, there is so much to be grateful for, amused by, and celebrated.
Right now, I am especially thankful for this cup of coffee, bacon in the fridge, a swimmed-out sleeping dog, several articles to be written and published, the best sister in the world, and the likelihood of riding lessons in the near future.
Kinds of Honey 