The Urban Farmer’s Almanac

What do you do when everything is buried under snow and ice? We’ve got a farming blog to keep going, and there isn’t a whole lot of farming going on. A little bit of home improvement happening, but that’s not so blog-worthy. I did take some pictures of my plum mead when I made it awhile back, and I’m sipping on a little bit of it tonight, wondering what direction it is going, so I thought I’d post a little something about that.

The tree in our front yard turned out to be a plum tree, which was very exciting to us, not having the benefit of talking to the previous owner when we bought the place. I made a big 5-gallon batch of ginger plum wine in September, and it is coming right along. It’s my first batch of wine, so I don’t really know how to judge it. I suppose if I can drink it, that’s a start.

Mead is a more elegant art, a family trade passed down by my dad to my brother Alex, and now to me. Captain Shafer and I went to a mead and cider clinic at Larry’s Homebrew down in Kent this fall, and it was a good overview of the process, replete with mysterious contradictions and a sense of reverence toward the conversion of honey to alcohol. Standard clover honey was bashed, so I went with a blackberry honey from Madison Market, plus a few bags of plums we had in the freezer.

All in all, it seems like it’s on the way. It’s still a little sweet, which tells me the fermentation might be stuck, but I’m OK with that for now. I’m going to leave it in the carboy and just see what happens in the next month or so. Maybe add a little honey and see if anything happens.

Plus, I was out of acid, so there is no added tartness in the recipe so far. I’m not really missing it too much, but I might throw in a lemon or two. And it’s pretty murky, especially compared to the ginger plum wine. Hopefully it will clear up eventually.

Frozen Chicken

We got snow in Seattle last night, in the usual on-again off-again, is-it-going-to-stick-or-is-it-just-going-to-tease-us fashion. It was looking pretty slushy when we went to bed, but I woke up early in the morning and peeked out the window, just like I used to do when I was a kid, to discover a decent snowfall had stuck around, and even covered the road. But this post isn’t just about the snow, it is about chickens in the snow.

I was really curious how they would do in freezing cold weather. When I was researching heat lamps for them online, I read about people in Indiana and other ridiculously cold winter climates who didn’t feel the need to heat their coops, so I backed off my initial plans of supplying the ladies with a warm red light on all night for them. Anyway, they all snuggle together to sleep, and they can also puff up their feathers to make a nice downy layer of insulation.

This morning when I let them out of their coop they ran right through the snow to their bowl of food, but that didn’t last long. A half an hour later I looked out and they were nowhere in sight — they were back in the chicken house where it was, if not warm, at least not freezing cold on their toes (feet? talons? claws?) I didn’t see them outside all day, even after the snow melted back a little bit. So today the chickens and the humans ended up sticking to the same plan — hang out in the house and wait for things to get back to normal outside.

Dan and I have discovered a new technique in bread making that may revolutionize our baking lives.  First a little background:  I make our basic sandwich/toast bread and I believe it turns out well and works for sandwiches and everyday stuff.  I also have a good recipe for quick focaccia bread that we often use for dinner.  Both of these are satisfactory, but we also have been searching for the right way to re-create artisan bread loaves (like you buy at the market) at home. Dan spent months refining his technique with sour dough, but eventually decided  he wasn’t really accomplishing what he wanted.

Now we have found this new book (Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois) which may be what we are looking for.  Basically you make a large batch of basic, but really wet dough (a 2:1 ratio of flour to water) and let it rise for a couple of hours and then leave it in the fridge (apparently for up to two weeks — though our first batch only lasted a few days).  When you want to bake a loaf pull off a chunk of whatever size you want, quickly shape a loose loaf on a peel and let it sit for 40 minutes.  Lastly, bake on a stone with steam for 30 minutes.  We’ve had great success.  With other doughs this wet I got very frustrated with the handling and many rises. I once even had to stay up late into the night to bake my bread because I had missed a 3rd rise when reading over the recipe and didn’t leave enough time.  (that bread involved a couple of swear words if I remember correctly).  So far the only tricky part has been baking time since the loaf size varies, but we’ve both been impressed with the crumb and crust and think it may be our best approximation of artisan bread.

I would highly recommend the book.  They have recipes for brioche and other doughs as well, which I may try.  Seattle Public Library has it for those local readers.  And for any aspiring bakers it is a great resource to make artisan baking a little more realistic for the novice.

There have been some questions as to what ever became of that box of green tomatoes we put away awhile back. They were all very hard and green when they went into the box, wrapped with newspaper, and when we checked a few weeks later (almost three weeks later, according to the timestamp on the photo) we had some turning red. At that point we had to do some editing, because some were also going moldy.

Well, the nice thing about a box of green tomatoes is that eventually you forget about it. Another few weeks passed, and we opened the box and found that they were all red and ready to eat. Not a nice fire-engine, candy apple, fresh from the vine in August red, but red enough to call it a tomato, look it in the eye, and maybe cook it in a sauce with some pasta or throw it on a pizza (which is what we did).

Thanksgiving came and went, and this pile of semi-red tomatoes wasn’t going anywhere, and they were starting to get dangerously soft. I had just read in Barbara Kingsolver’s book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle that they dried a lot of their tomato crop, so I turned to the internet to learn about oven-drying them (as there is no sun to be found these days.)

Turns out it was a pretty easy process. I sliced the tomatoes down to about 1″ wedges, and then (with Hannah’s enthusiastic help) squeezed out the excess liquid and seeds. They were lined up on a cookie sheet and put in a warm oven (180° is as low as ours goes) for about 10 hours one day. I turned off the oven at bedtime and removed a few that were done at that point. The next morning it took another couple hours to finish the drying, getting to about the dryness of a raisin. Now I have them in a paper bag, distributing the excess moisture and drying out a little more. I think I’ll keep them in a jar of oil in the fridge.