Topinambur and Turkey sex

No, don't let the title mislead you, this will not be a poultry porn post featuring certain knobbly roots...just I had planned the whole post this week around my newfound love for Jerusalem Artichokes (topinambur), (and that will come in following paragraphs), but the noble veg was bumped off the priority register by a fresh a miracle that happened only yesterday...

The turkeys had SEX!  and again today!  And maybe again tomorrow!  And for about a week now, we have been getting one turkey egg per day...that means that one of the turkey hens is laying, and one of them is getting laid.... Not sure if they are the same hen, (because only one of the hens has submitted so far) but just in case, Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter have all three earned a stay of execution.  If we can get them to reproduce, they will be worth feeding over the winter, and we will be able to produce our own turkeys year round instead of buying the chicks (turkey chicks cost about 10 euros each!)

According to Barbara Kingsolver (in "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle") turkey sex is supremely rare.  I think that may be just american turkeys, but nonetheless, even here the norm is for artificial insemination and mechanical incubation, which means the animals themselves just don't know how to 'do it'.  The big heavy meat birds actually physically can't do it, but our second round of turkeys are a local rustic breed and they seem to be managing just fine.  In fact so long as Natalina, the original turkey hen (a commercial meat hybrid) was around, nothing was happening.  She was too big for the cock and she didn't make eggs, even though she was 3 months older than the other hens.  Now Natalina is in the freezer, and they're getting jiggy every day!  Takes them about an hour too, to get it all over and done with, from dancing and displays to the actual deed.  Funny in comparison with the rooster, who takes never more than 2 seconds...hop on, hop off, hop on, hop off (karate kid cock!)   The video below Gab took to show to some geese experts, trying to figure out if our geese are boys or girls (more poultry sex, hmmm), but there are some nice shots of the turkey cock in the background showing off his stuff...



So now for the originally planned post -- Jerusalem artichokes are THE MOST AWESOME VEGETABLE ever!  We started harvesting them last week, and I started researching what they are and what to do with them...OK, a vegetable that

1) Grows all by itself, in just about every climate, produces up to 5kg of edible root per plant with no work at all, and the biggest challenge is keeping it to its appointed space because it will take over if you let it (now I know what it looks like, I see it wild everywhere)
2) is the highest vegetable source of iron known, and is also full of other essential vitamins an minerals
3) tastes more or less like potatoes, and is filling like a carb, can be roasted, mashed, fried, but also eaten raw and yet has a fraction of the calories of potatoes and other carbs.
4) has been implicated in prevention of diabetes, and directed towards even a cure -- it is a carb, but its sugar is in fructose and Inulin instead of starch, and humans can't digest inulin -- so you get carb satisfaction without any impact on blood sugar and without carb calories.  In fact, it also makes a lovely flour when dried and ground (made bread with it this week, delicious!)
5) IS DELICIOUS

What more can you ask for???  I just love delicious calories that come naturally and wildly, without too much intervention, and the Jerusalem artichoke is just that.  Its actually not an artichoke, and has nothing to do with Jerusalem -- its a type of sunflower, (girasole, and 'jerusalem' comes from that)  and you eat the roots.  Peeled, they can be eaten in any way you eat potatoes.  Long term and winter storage is best just in the ground, dig 'em up when you want to eat them, and they live right through the deepest freeze, so those you don't dig up make next year's crop.  For the deep freeze of winter, they can keep in boxes of damp sand in the cellar, or I read of one gardener that put them in buckets of mud by the back door -- still freezes, but easy to get through.

One warning though...all that undigestible inulin makes for some pretty world class farting!  So add to my list of positives about this veg 6) keeps you entertained for hours with family fart-offs! ("pull my finger Nina!") But don't eat lots before a long road trip...!

Major Milestone -- House plans are signed off

For more than a year now, I've been imagining all the possibilities for our new house. I've tried to think of all the little details that will make life easier, all the things I miss from Canadian houses (closets! Mudroom!)  all the things I love about italian houses (cellar, thick cement everything), and gone through about a million different designs, refining and getting better each time around, and finally we have our final drafts.

I gave my original designs to the architect a few months ago, and he made his suggestions and adjustments, put in the necessary things in order to get the permissions through -- and this is not an easy thing because we are building what is considered highly sensitive parkland, so we are very very very restricted in what would be acceptable to build; in fact, we are only allowed to build at all because the area needs non-intensive farmers that will tend the land properly, and there aren't enough of those around these days, so we have special government dispensation to come in and take care.

And so now, finally, about 5kg of paper all organised into the appropriate folders for the appropriate bureaucrats have gone off the appropriate offices, and within 45-60 days we should have all our permissions set and be ready to build...of course, in 60 days it will be winter, and we can't do anything until spring anyway, but still....

So here are the floor plans -- a few essential things I really really wanted include the mudroom --  a place to sit on a bench and put on boots and hats and coats, with its own entrance and outside the mudroom door will be a bench, bootjack, and fountain for cleaning up before coming inside.  Also the easy access from the kitchen to the cellar.  In the original plans, I had a spiral staircase in the kitchen itself, and then i realised that was dumb...I just had to put the kitchen right by the backdoor staircase.  Imagining trying to navigate a spiral staircase with a crate of 30 jars of jam set me straight pretty quick on that.  Gab was smart enough to realise we would need ramp access to the cellar as well because even a regular staircase will be a pain to access with a 70kg wheelbarrow load of potatoes!

I also insisted on a huge dining space, within the kitchen.  Dining room separate from kitchen dining has just always been wasted space for us, but I need dining space big enough for entertaining, and we can have some biiiiiig parties, so the 10 seater table in the kitchen will have another 12 seater attachment that we will put in a "T" across the top when we have parties.  The sitting area in front of a big open kitchen fireplace was also an essential.  Of course, big kitchen space with sit in island, with all the cooking we'll be doing, that's essential.  Windows in the kitchen, lots and lots.  That's something very uncommon here, and in fact I had to fight for it...Gab and the architect will both see the benefit when its finally built!

A bonus that i love but had not even dared to put in the original design is the loft studio space above the dining area.  Because of the strict building restrictions, we can only have a ground floor, can't over 4m height as an average across the whole...however, there is a high ceiling space right across where its widest, and just enough for a loft comes out right in that space.  The loft will look down on the kitchen and the sitting area, and will have a lovely wooden bridge which will cross the entrance hallway, so you will see that when you look up from both the front and back doors.

5 big bedrooms, so everyone has their private space, and there is a very big linen/general walkin closet by the bathroom.  We only have one "main" bathroom because we're a "pee with the door open" kind of family, and always end up using the same bathroom anyway, so all our bestest bathroom resources will go into one single gigantic super wonderful bathroom, and the other two bathrooms will be just small useful things.  Oh, there's a fourth bathroom in the basement, but I don't think we'll be using that much -- its a just in caser...The laundry room, off the small guest bathroom, has a door directly onto the portico, so laundry will go straight from the washer outside onto the line without any carrying anywhere.  

And here are the computer renderings of the house placed into an actual photograph of the land where it will be built.  The hills in the background are on the other side of the river, the house backs onto a steep cliff down to the river, where will put a nice gazebo as a walking / lookout point.

First, below pictures of the front of the house.  Not shown, the barn would be just to your right as you look at the house in this direction. The house will built with antiseismic armoured cement -- the wooden panneling is just an aesthetic finish that the bureaucrat responsible for passing the externals is particularly partial too -- she has already pre-approved our first drafts, so we know she likes this finish. Also, the scan came out a bit too yellow, the colour of the stucco parts is more biscuit than lemon...

And here is a rendering of the house from the side. This is my favourite perspective, and its what we'll see as we come in from the garden and poultry areas.  The top pic you can see the back of the house and the portico, and the bottom pic is full-on side view, and you can see the barn in the background behind the house.

And here is the rendering of the barn -- the top pic is what you see from the house, and the bottom pic is what you see from the road, and the side the animals access from.  The top doors are hay storage and the bottom is the circuit for the goats -- they go in the small door on the right one at a time to be hooked up to the milking machine in the milking room, then exit the milking room in to the main barn area from inside, then exit the barn from the main double doors in the middle.  Not shown, just around the corner where the wooden panneling is, is the big garage and storage area, and on the "short" side of the barn (so the window on the right side of the top picture) will be my mosaic studio and materials storage area.

Now we just have to wait for all the permissions to come back, and we are set to go!  But first there's a baby that needs to be born (first things first, right! Priorities priorities!)...only a few more weeks now before Ernesto Elia joins us, and I am quite ready...he's getting awfully heavy!!

Everything you ever wanted to know about Chestnuts, and probably a bit more

Chestnuts Chestnuts Chestnuts Chestnuts Chestnuts...for the next few weeks, that's all I'll be seeing in my waking hours and in my dreams...

Chestnuts are an awesome food, though -- they are roughly the nutritional equal to rice (so treat as a carb, not a nut!), and can provide a carbohydrate staple in the diet.  Different from other carbs, though, is that they grow on trees, renewed every year without any special care or special demands on the soil.

All our other carbs, rice, annual grains, corn, soya, are extremely demanding on the environment in so many ways -- they take loads of irrigating, which means salination of the soil as well as draining and ruination of wetlands. They take loads of nutrients from the soil, which means loads of petrolium  based fertilizers in order to use the same fields year after year  -- and without that petrolium based fertilizer, all those beautiful amber waves of grain are absolutely sterile (yeah, bio fuel my ass...hate to break it to the bio fuel believers out there, but the biomass doesn't grow in sufficient quantity without the petrolium based fertilisers...bit of a catch 22 there) They take loads of heavy machinery (also oil dependant) to sow, to harvest, and to process.  Grains on a large scale are simply not sustainable without oil, and as it starts to run out, we will have to learn to do with fewer annual grains and standard carbs in our diet.

But not so for chestnuts.  They just fall from the trees.  You can prune them a bit if you want, and it doesn't hurt to give them a bit of manure around the base, but whether you do or not, they will still make lots of yummy carbolicious fruit, which makes a flour usable like wheat flour (though the bread is not so nice and fluffy).  The problem with chestnuts is in the processing.  They are super yummy and delicious, but their shell and skin is a total PITA to remove. (Mind you, its not a piece of cake to thresh, separate and grind wheat by hand either, and so!)

I've been experimenting and researching all over the internet for other people's experiences and advice, and have tried about 16 million different methods so far (well, maybe 5 or 6...) and still, it takes at least an hour per kilo to prepare and shell chestnuts.  The best method I've found so far is to make a good long cut across the fat belly of the chestnut, then roast in a super hot oven for about 15-20 minutes.  The outside shell gets crackly and peels off easily. The inside skin, if not removed with the shell, comes off easily if you rub and roll the nut around between your hands.  To get just the pulp, rather than the full chestnuts, out its easiest to boil them for a good 40 minutes, without any precuts in the skin, and with a good dollop of oil in the water, then use the sharp tip of a carrot or potato peeler to breach the skin and swirl around/scrape out the pulp.  If you want the chestnuts free, whole, and uncooked (like for making Marrons Glacées), make a cut horizontally all the way around the chestnut, then steam for about 15 minutes.  Still a major pain in the butt, though!

Recipe for Chestnut Pudding: Made this with the first batch, and it is oh oh oh so yummy...
boil 500g of chestnut puree (boil chestnuts, squeeze out the pulp with the carrot peeler, squish any bigger pieces) in 500g of milk.  When it is good and pudding/porridge consistency (about 10-15 minutes i guess), take off the fire and add 150g of icing sugar, a sprinkle of cinnamon and a sprinkle of nutmeg.  Serve warm as a pudding, or save in a jar in the fridge to eat as is or use for a doughnut or crepe filling.

Today was another very productive day -- the inventory of the day is: 3kg of chestnuts roasted peeled and in the freezer for addition to winter soups and such, 5 apple pies (4 in the freezer and 1 on the table), 2 loaves of bread, one big batch of pumpkin soup, half for the table half for the freezer, and a bunch of meatballs...was almost too pooped to come and write the blog, but i figured that binning the first sunday after promising to write every sunday was just too pathetic, so found my second wind and here I am!

The work of the farmer's wife

So Gab spends the day out hoeing and raking and weeding and digging and chopping and sowing and cutting and picking and pruning etc etc etc.  But when his work is done, mine is just beginning.  Its my job to cook and stew and jam and pack and boil and sterilize and dehydrate and blanch and freeze and and and...And I Love It!  Really, I do!  I was worried it would be overwhelming, too much to do and all within a limited timeframe because otherwise everything rots and all Gab's work will have been for nought.  But its not overwhelming, its actually very relaxing and calming.  There's tons to do and the only way to get through it is to do it, so its very zen in that way -- just go with the flow, pick those beans and pod those peas and skin those tomatoes until there are none left to do.  Its even more fun with company, and I really think we have lost something grand when we stopped sitting on the front porch with all the neighbours gossiping and shelling peas.

Anyway, so here is a quick run down of all the cooking and putting away I've done over the last few months with links to the best recipes I've discovered in the process...in order of appearance...

First came the cherries.  About 10kg of black cherries was made into abou 10 jars of jam and 2 pies.  Then 40kgs of sour cherries was made into 10 traditional lattice cherry pies (in the freezer)...the BEST cherry pie recipe ever: http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Classic-Sour-Cherry-Pie-with-Lattice-Crust-242514, and I mean EVER...even better than the cherry pah from the Matawa café..., then I burned about 30 jars of cherry jam.  Damn Damn Damn...took about 6 hours to pit the cherries for that batch of jam (even with my awesome cherry pitter machine: http://www.chefscatalog.com/product/93600-leifheit-cherry-stoner.aspx), and I BURNED it.  URG!!!  And the last 15kg went into a fermentation vat, and produced approximately 12 litres of sour cherry grappa...mmmmmmmmm

Then came the peas and beans -- peas were not nearly enough, and we ate them as they arrived, and we know to plant more next year and to treat them differently as well, because they should have been much more productive.  But the beans though...they started giving in June, and still haven't really stopped yet.  I have about 5 big jars of spicy pickled beans put away (bring vinegar to boil with a spice bag with cinnamon stick, mustard seeds, corriander seeds, black pepper corns, and some spicy chillis, blanch beans in vinegar, jar up, cover with boiling vinegar, and seal), and about 20kg of blanched green beans in the freezer for use throughout the winter.  And we eat fresh beans at least three times a week...yum yum yum....

The borlotti we pulled up when they were full and hung the plants to dry, and then once dry, shelled them all, and we have about 3kg of dried borlottis away in glass jars -- that was ALOT of work for not many calories. But they are gooood calories, though, and Mia helped me -- we had fun picking away at them all day long.

Then the along came the plums...from one little teensy Santa Rosa tree we got about 90kg of plums. They were quite literally coming out of my ears.  I made about 60 jars of plum jam, in three different batches and variations, sliced and froze about 5kg, and hot packed whole another 20 jars.  And we still had flats upon crates upon boxes of plums...time to visit the neighbours!  Everybody got the gift of plums this year...Then about 2 weeks after the santa rosa's finished, the damsons came.  With these I made another 20 some jars of jam, some with fresh ginger, and about 18 jars of a FANTASTIC plum ketchup: http://www.food.com/recipe/plum-ketchup-64525 -- excellent as a barbecue sauce, a marinade, and a stir frying sauce, as well as just as ketchup.

And then peppers -- the sweet lombards are pickled and away in jars together with the spicy ones -- I didn't know they were different at the first fruiting, and put them in together...eee, spicy!!  And then loads chopped up in the freezer, and loads pan fried for dinner.  There are about 5kg of classic bell peppers, green and red, in chunks in the freezer waiting for winter stir fries.

In the midst of all this, the herbs are coming and going, so we have bags and bags of parsley, mint, sage, basil and dill chopped and frozen, ready to use.  The basil has come to harvest strength five times this summer, each time we've taken about 2 or 3 crates full -- each crate makes about 1.5kg of pesto (and about 100g of pesto will do for pasta for 4 or 5 people), so I have about 10kg of pesto in the freezer along with tons of just plain chopped basil ready to use, and we gave tons of both basil and parsely to Angelo and his restaurant.  My fave is pesto with walnuts instead of pine nuts.mmmmm

Tomatoes went through 4 proper harvests, but the beefeaters and cherries didn't do so great.  The first beefeater crop was nice, but it didn't do anything afterwards. The Principe borghese were our king crop of tomatoes, and with these (about 10-15kg per harvest) I have put away about 30litres of tomato purée, about 10 litres of tomato sauce, about 8 bottles of whole canned cherry tomatoes, and about 12 bottles of tomato ketchup (super duper yummy -- it will actually run out soon because we go through about a bottle every 2 weeks, and when it does, I don't know how we'll go back to the store bought kind).  Next year we need more tomatoes, and bigger saucier ones.

And in the meantime, we are getting a really generous crop of aubergines (eggplants) which neither of us actually like very much, so what to do with them all?? First we gave away tons, then I learned an awesome recipe for chutney, and made an aubergine apple and fig chutney that is to die for.  Have about 8 jars of that.  Then I pickled a bunch with sweetened spicy vinegar, about 6 jars of that.  And the rest we made into soups and rattatouille to eat right away -- changed my mind about aubergines, and now I'm kind of sad they are almost finished.  I'll put the last of them away in the freezer so we can bring them out for soups and stews in the winter.

The zukes made TONS but we ate them ALL as tiny babies as soon as they were ready -- worried about the classic "too many zucchinis and nobody wants them" problem, we solved this by eating TONS of zucchini flowers, and loads of grilled and stir fried zuchinis picked when they were no bigger than 10cm.  Sweeeeeet.

Also overloaded with potatoes, from the earlies to the maincrops -- we've given away loads, eaten loads, and have about 40kg in the cellar and still another 2 or 3 rows still in the garden.  And that was after wild boards made off with about half the potato crop.  They made off with ALL of our sweet corn, so the potatoes should count themselves lucky.

Phewff -- its almost more work to talk about all the stuff we've harvested and put away than it was to do it in the first place...I'm getting kind of tired of this post, and I still haven't mentioned the figs (40 jars jam), the pumpkins (puree in freezer, pieces in freezer, and 13 pumpkins in dry storage), the apples (20 jars apple sauce, 4 crates in dry storage, 3 cakes in freezer, and chutney still to come), the pears (10 jars pear sauce, just like apple sauce), peaches (12 jars jam, 8kg pieces in freezer, 2 cobblers in freezer), blackberries...so much work to pick, so little yield...all in freezer...

And now the chestnuts begin...made chestnut jam last week and just the thought of it makes my knees weak...mmmm...but they are so HARD to peel and prep.  Hours and hours and hours of work for a kilo or two of pulp.  UGH.

OK, enough enough already...I'm tired, its lunchtime, and today there are another 5kg of chestnuts to go through and the apple chutney to get underway....

Inspired by Ken & Nicole Barker's blog (http://barkersfarm.wordpress.com) on their newly started organic farm experience, i am from here on going to be more regular and less exhaustive with the posts -- they are blogging every sunday, and I think that's a great idea!  So from now on, every sunday I'll try and post, whatever has happened that week!