Food – Page 40 – Into the Woods

Chickens and grass

Every morning when I let the chickens out, they head straight for the grass and start grazing. I had never really thought of chickens as pasture-loving grazing animals — they’re scratchers. But they love to graze.

I tried to do some research on chickens and grass to try to understand how they can digest grass and what part grass plays in a natural chicken diet. Authoritative sources were scarce, but one source says that chickens will eat up to 30 percent of their calories in grass. They cannot, apparently, digest the cellulose in grass the way cows and other ruminants can. But if the grass is young enough and tender enough, then the chickens can get a lot of food value out of it. Obviously their gizzards grind the grass very effectively and their digestive systems break it down, because there is no sign of grass in the chicken poop.

Grass has a lot to do, it seems, with the nutritional superiority of eggs from pastured hens vs. commercial factory hens. According to Mother Earth News, eggs from pastured hens have much more vitamin D, 1/3 less cholesterol, twice as much omega-3, 2/3 more vitamin A, 1/4 less saturated fat, and 7 times more beta carotene.

I’m hoping that the winter rye grass I planted as a cover crop for the garden will supply the hens with greens for most of the winter.

Part of the miracle of farm ecology is the way farm animals can make human food out of things that are inedible by humans — cows make milk from grass, for example. But chickens, as long as they can run free, can work this magic as well. It’s nice to think about how some of the energy and nutrition in my eggs comes from the grass growing up the hill and not just from laying mash bought at the mill. Even in December, the chickens are still finding plenty of their own food inside the fence around the garden and orchard — about 10,000 square feet. Right now they eat only about half as much laying mash as they do if they’re kept in the coop. During the summer, when bugs were plentiful, the hens’ mash consumption dropped by probably three quarters. Clearly they’ll eat what they can find first and resort to laying mash only as necessary.

Chocolate applesauce cake

For more than 50 years, this has been my favorite cake. My mother first started making it when I was in grade school. I’ve had it as a birthday cake more times than I’d care to count. But since today is Thanksgiving and tomorrow is my birthday, that seemed like occasion enough to make a particularly sinful version of the cake.

I’ve found that this cake loves to have nutmeg, or cherries, or both, in the icing. So to the plain white icing (butter, powdered sugar, vanilla, and soy milk) I added nutmeg. I also threw in some chocolate-covered cherry cordials and let the mixer chop the cherries and chocolate into the icing.

The remarkable thing about the cake itself is that it contains no eggs. The only liquid ingredient is applesauce. This makes a dense, hearty cake that stays moist for a long time and keeps well. My recipe is written in pencil on a very old piece of notebook paper. Here is the bare bones recipe. Experienced cooks will know what to do with it.

Cream together 1 cup of sugar and 1/2 cup of butter (I use olive oil instead of butter). Add half a cup of cocoa and mix well. Then add 1 and 1/2 cups of applesauce and mix again. In a separate bowl, sift together two cups plain flour, 2 teaspoons of baking soda, some cinnamon, and some nutmeg. Fold the flour mixture into the other ingredients.

Put the batter into two 9-inch cake pans that have been buttered and dusted with flour. Bake at 350 degrees for 15 to 18 minutes, until a toothpick stuck into the center of the cake comes out clean.

Many years ago, in Sausalito across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco, I won a Valentine’s Day chocolate contest with this cake. For the icing on that cake, I chopped lots of maraschino cherries into the icing and made the icing pink.

It’s also a vegan cake if you substitute olive oil for the butter. I’ve never tried it, but you probably could substitute coconut oil for the butter in the icing.

Kedgeree

I’ve mentioned before on this blog how much I’ve enjoyed the Two Fat Ladies cooking show, which I’ve been watching on DVD. Mostly their cooking is far too meaty and too heart-stoppingly rich for me to want to cook or eat. But I watch them for inspiration, and for insight into the roots of American cookery, much of which comes from the British Isles. The show also is a good travelogue, and good comedy. Their joy in cooking, and the cultural experience they bring to it, make the series a must-see, in my opinion.

They were in Yorkshire on one show, and they made kedgeree using smoked haddock bought in a village fish shop. The kedgeree actually looked quite good to me. I’ll not find smoked haddock around here, but those of us who live inland and who often use canned fish are always looking for new ways to use canned fish other than salmon cakes or tuna salad. In particular, now that we know that sardines are very good for us, it occurred to me that sardines would work nicely in kedgeree. There are a jillion ways to make kedgeree, but the defining ingredients are rice, smoked fish, onions, something green (such as fresh herbs) and boiled eggs. I left out the boiled eggs, having had an egg for breakfast. Chopped celery was the handiest green vegetable I had. I used lots of garlic.

The kedgeree was excellent. Those strong flavors love each other.

Sardines, onions, garlic, celery, and leftover rice

Black Twig apples

Black Twig apples straight from the orchard

I was watching an episode of the Two Fat Ladies cooking show last week (I’ve been working my way through the entire series on DVD), and they were making a dish with apples. One of the ladies said, “But don’t use Golden Delicious. They have no flavor.” Then they had a little discussion about how Americans don’t know much about apples.

I couldn’t agree more. I make the same complaint all the time, especially when I pass the apples in the grocery store. I’ve probably said it a thousand times. Apples must be ugly. “Pretty” apples are bred for grocery stores.

Some people also would be afraid to buy an apple with a name they haven’t heard of. They want the mass-market varieties — Golden Delicious, Winesap, Granny Smith, etc. They’ve forgotten the names of the old home-orchard varieties.

I bought my apple trees from Century Farm Orchards in Caswell County, North Carolina. I had to make a trip there today to pick up two apple trees I had ordered — two two-year-old Arkansas Black trees to replace two young trees that died during the summer. Century Farm specializes in old Southern varieties of apple trees. I have 10 apple trees in my little orchard, and they’re a mix of old Southern varieties: Arkansas Black, Limbertwig, Kinnaird’s Choice, Mary Reid, Smokehouse, Summer Banana, William’s Favorite and Yellow June. I also have a Pumblee pear tree from Century Farms. The trees were planted in 2008. I’m not expecting the trees to be mature enough to bear apples for probably two more years.

Time to make sauerkraut

You need cabbage, crocks, a scale, a shredder, and the right kind of salt

Making sauerkraut is not my favorite chore. Shredding the cabbage is tedious, and bits of cabbage go everywhere. I did the job out on the deck to keep the mess out of the kitchen. I use Harsch crocks, which are made in Germany especially for making sauerkraut. The Prago cabbage shredder requires a lot of manual work, but it does the job and gets the cabbage exactly the right thickness for sauerkraut.

I made 15 pounds of sauerkraut today, from cabbage bought in Virginia. I used a little more salt than last time — 3 tablespoons per 10 pounds of cabbage. Next spring I hope to make sauerkraut from my own homegrown organic cabbage.

The first tasting should be in early December.

Shredded and in the crock

I keep the crocks under a table near the kitchen

Sweet potato harvest

Spread out to dry on the deck

I had not really planned to grow sweet potatoes this year, but back in late July or early August I came across some sweet potato sets in a produce shop at Walnut Cove. I bought a pack of the sets.

Ken then made a sweet potato bed about 6 feet square by turning a spot of garden with a mattock and heaping on lots of compost. The sweet potatoes flourished (in spite a few raids by Mr. Groundhog) until the frost bit the vines yesterday morning. Today I composted the vines and dug up the potatoes. That 6-by-6 plot yielded a large grocery bag full of potatoes.

Restaurant china

New soup bowls made by Buffalo china

I have long had a great fondness for restaurant china. It’s heavy and durable, and it’s relatively inexpensive. I bought eight soup bowls on eBay that arrived today. Somehow I have to find room for them in the cabinets with the Victor “truck driver” mugs and the Buffalo cups and saucers. They don’t match? No problem, at least to me.

A while back, I wrote about how the right mugs and cups help to get coffee to the right temperature for drinking and keep it there. With soup, something similar is going on. Serving soup from deep, narrow cereal bowls just doesn’t work for me. The soup won’t cool properly. In my opinion, soup should be served very hot, and in small servings. The hot soup should go into a wide, narrow bowl, where it will cool quickly to the right temperature for eating it. The shapes and sizes of the bowls, plates, cups and mugs that we all use reflect a cultural consensus on how food should be served. Consensus changes. For example, these days there seems to be a growing consensus that coffee should be served in something gigantic. I object.

The makers of institutional china, at least in previous decades, got it about right, in my opinion. These bowls are new old stock, probably made in the 1980s. Buffalo china is still being made. Buffalo is now owned by Oneida.

Buttermilk

One of my disappointments when I moved back to North Carolina from California was the poor quality of dairy products in this region of the country. I very rarely drink milk, but I do use butter and a bit of cheese, and I like having buttermilk in the refrigerator. It was almost impossible to find buttermilk that wasn’t somehow adulterated — thickened with tapioca or emulsified with diglycerides. Not only that, but finding milk here from cows that are not given hormones is almost impossible, unless you go to Whole Foods, which is a 50-mile roundtrip for me. In San Francisco, there were fantastic boutique dairies nearby, such as the Strauss Family Creamery in Marin County, north of San Francisco.

But last week, at the Ingle’s grocery store at Walnut Cove, I stopped at the dairy case (I usually speed by) and found proper buttermilk. It has the no-hormones label, and it contains nothing but milk, salt, vitamin A and vitamin D.

My favorite way to use buttermilk is to just drink it. The bacteria that is used to culture buttermilk is different from the bacteria used to culture yogurt, but, like yogurt, buttermilk is good for the digestive system. Buttermilk also is easier to digest than regular milk, because the bacteria break down the lactose and turn it into lactic acid.

The label on this milk even says where it came from — Asheville, North Carolina. That’s good cow country.

On how to wash eggs

I wish I had known a year ago that there are guides from the experts on how to wash eggs from backyard chickens. I had been doing it wrong. For one, I had assumed that cold water was better, to avoid heating the egg. Wrong.

If you Google for egg-washing, you’ll find lots of often contradictory opinions. There are many people who say that you shouldn’t wash eggs at all. However, I think I’ll go with the university people on this. The University of Nebraska has published a guide meant particularly for people with backyard chickens. There’s also a PDF version of the guide.

Hot water (90F to 120F) is best because eggs are porous (that’s how the chicks get air before they hatch). Cold water causes the contents of the egg to contract, potentially pulling in microbes through the pores. Hot water causes the contents of the egg to expand, pushing microbes out of the pores. The eggs should not be soaked. They should be kept in the water only for the time it takes to wash them. And yes, it’s OK to use a weak bleach solution to sanitize the egg, as I had been doing.

Another brilliant idea that I learned from Googling: Use a pencil to write the date on each egg. Though I’ve always rotated my eggs, it’s a very good thing to have dates on the eggs.

Shepherd's pie

James-Michael, who returns to California tomorrow after a 10-day visit to the abbey, cooked tonight’s supper. It’s shepherd’s pie. This kind of all-in-one dish makes great sense for working people like James-Michael. Make the dish on the weekend, and the leftovers will help get you through the week.