In Defense of Dirty Fingernails

What feature of yourself are you most proud of? Until recently, I wouldn’t have known how to answer such a question—far easier to say what bothers me, what I would change. After five months as a farmer, I now know: I am inordinately proud of my hands. My fingertips are pitted from the horse nettle thorns hiding among more innocuous weeds. The skin on the sides of my index fingers refuses to come clean—it is cracked and stained brown from winter and weeding. My fingernails have never been shorter, and yet somehow, when I think that they have no quick left, the dirt still finds a way beneath them. The skin on my left index finger has blistered away at one point from the sharp, taught line of the tomato trellising twine. My hands are callused, cut, never quite clean. They declare, more eloquently than I ever could, that they are useful.

My mother likes to call me her “over-educated farmer,” a reference to the assortment of degrees (none of which have the word “agriculture” anywhere on them) that I have accumulated. Academically speaking, I’m a love child of the humanities; I’ve studied literary analysis and anthropological theory, political science and economic history. Come my first day on the farm, however, I felt anything but overeducated. Where was the line between too wet and too dry? How did everyone else move so quickly from task to task? Why, despite detailed instructions and intense concentration, did I seem utterly incapable of filling the bucket of the front-end loader? Until then, the closest I’d come to farming was the semester of college spent wandering the cross country trails and identifying trees for a Dendrology class. I loved to hail the trees by their lyrical Latin names—Liriodendron tulipifera, Liquidamber styraciflua, Fagus grandifolia—but we learned little else. We never grew anything ourselves, used the wood, or even climbed the limbs. Before that, long ago, I had a children’s gardening book, narrated by friendly raccoons and mice, but I lacked suitable land in which to put theory into practice.

Juxtaposed like that, “theory into practice”, the two words seem like equals, or perhaps two parts of a single larger whole. Sadly, we have, in our rush to the city, to culture, to art, to have forgotten this most basic reality, that theory is meaningless without practical skill, just as action is often pointless without reasoned thought. We praise intellectualism as the pinnacle of success and assume that those who work with their hands for low pay couldn’t cut it in school. Tradespeople do not become wealthy, we learn, and wealth is the post-academic measure of worth. As for me, I’ve long since stopped measuring the significance of my days in dollars and cents; the satisfaction of a well-stocked market stand or the sight of new-hatched seedlings bridging the soil brings me more satisfaction than an extra $10 per hour. But I will argue fiercely that the physical skills of the farmer are as valuable as is the cerebral culture of the city. To privilege intellect over physicality is to ignore our bodies’ yearning desire for use. On my knees, feet bare, digging like a dog for potatoes, I feel a scale within myself moving toward balance after disproportionate years of sitting, thinking, reading (which, at the time, I reveled in as well).

Practice is a deep, intimate, integrated type of knowledge, so infinitely expansive that I sometimes feel as though I’m becoming lost within it. Even as my vision narrows to the 4 acres of Serenbe, the countless decisions constantly being weighed and tallied grow and grow, and I feel dizzy at the thought of even managing ten such acres. Let us seek this sort of narrative knowledge, information learned not by formula but by functioning in context.

That is why I, a theory-loving, textbook collecting, front-row-of-the-lecture-hall sitting school nerd, surrendered my desk and my number two pencils for a classroom that gets under my fingernails and between my toes. I’m learning farming as an apprentice rather than as a student, by imbedding the practice of it on my battered farmer hands.

The Signposts of Summer

For anyone who read about our massive tomato-transplanting day so many moons ago, it probably comes as no surprise that the prospect of our twice-weekly tomato harvest inspires in me more than a little dread. My tomato anxiety, however, has less to do with the epic proportions of our harvest (we pulled in slightly more than 450 pounds of salable tomatoes today, for example), and more to do with the number of culls that never make it out of the field. Tomatoes might just be the most finicky fruit* on the farm--they wither from disease, crack from too much rain, or wilt from underwatering. They're the petulant toddlers of the vegetable world: nothing but trouble to the folks who raise them, but to everyone else, the darling of the market stand.

Some of our tomatoes are luscious, delectable specimens. Others have passed their prime or lost the war against bugs until all that remains is a pulpy mess of wrinkled skin and tomato splooge. I have no problem babying the first and discarding the second. What kills me, positively stops me in my tracks, are the single-fatal-flaw tomatoes, the tomatoes with a hairline crack that I know will soon become sploogy (but which hasn't't yet!); the tomatoes with a barely perceptible bruise, or a tiny tell-tale bug hole. Without fail, I pause and deliberate. Salvage it? Find it a good home, or at least the makings of a decent BLT? Reason usually triumphs (with 450 lbs of other, perfect tomatoes to chose from, who will want this one?), and I toss the rejected tomato to the paste-covered ground. But not before taking a bite.

This valedictory bite has become a compulsion for me. Particularly in the back field, where my absolute favorite tomatoes proliferate, I will not discard a tomato without affirming its value with my own personal taste test. So I work my way down the row, tomato juice dripping from my chin, carrying a faint but unmistakable tomato perfume, and leaving a twisted fairy tale trail of half-eaten tomatoes in my wake. Given the number of field-culls on any normal harvest day, I'm beginning to worry that lycopene may be replacing blood in my veins. At least I won't be catching scurvy any time soon...

*While tomatoes are, biologically speaking, a fruit (they bear seeds), in 1893 the Supreme Court ruled that they occupied a place in the meal customarily filled by a vegetable, and were therefore a vegetable in the eyes of the law. I'm holding my breath that they will soon rule as to the proper interpretation of such classic Southern "vegetable" dishes as baked apples, hushpuppies, and macaroni and cheese.

Let them eat chicken

It was a bit like a scene from Macbeth: thunder rolling in the background, a cauldron-like stockpot seething atop our grill, and across from me, Jack brandishing a shiny new chef knife.
It was chicken harvesting time.

Since out broilers first arrived, I’ve spent a good bit of time thinking about slaughter. Not that I relish the thought of killing and cleaning a chicken (far from it!), but I wanted to be mentally prepared to take a chicken’s life respectfully, cleanly, and without excessive girlish squealing. I knew that the last bit might prove difficult after the execution of a rat snake recently found hiding in the chicken coop provoked some very undignified noises. We’ve lost two of our Cornish Cross broilers recently, once to an animal attack and once to dehydration, and in each case I have looked at the carcass and wondered: “could I turn that into dinner?” It seemed an awfully large transition from that limp pile of feathers to fried chicken.

An unfortunate side effect of the Cornish Cross’s unparalleled ability to put on breast meat is that these hefty birds sometimes grow so fast that they break their own legs. A chicken with a broken leg is a sad little creature, and no amount of athletic tape and popsicle sticks is likely to send it back to pasture. Once we realized that we had one such chicken, we knew that it was our duty to kill it as quickly as possible. I decided to view the process as a test run for our first real chicken harvesting day, and I convinced Jack to help me, at least by providing moral support.

I began by reading everything that Joel Salatin’s Pastured Poultry Profit$ had to say about slaughter. Unfortunately, the pictures are rather grainy, and the anatomical descriptions are only helpful if you can tell the difference between a gizzard and an esophagus. Let’s just say it’s been a long time since freshman biology. I then began scouring the Internet for tutorials, home videos, or anything else related to cleaning a chicken. Alas, the closest I could find was a PETA video about factory farming (not what I wanted to model my harvest after) and various clips of people dancing the funky chicken at weddings and bar mitzvahs. On Wednesday night I discovered that Sandy, the manager of the Hil Restaurant, used to kill and process her own chickens, but while she was more than happy to offer advice, she was busy with the Hil for the next five days. It would be all me.

A storm had been building all of Thursday afternoon when I finally set an enormous cauldron of water on the grill. While the pot heated up, Jack helped me do the deed. Beheaded chickens tend to flap, flutter, and inflict psychic scarring on all parties involved, so Jack and I decided to approximate the killing cones that most small-scale producers prefer. With killing cones, the chicken is inverted (for some reason this calms them) and its head pushed through a small hole at the bottom of a large cone (in our case, an old plastic flower pot). While I help the pot and the chicken’s feet, Jack cut our chicken’s jugular vein and we let it bleed out. From what I’ve read, the chicken dies instantly, though the heart continues to beat long enough to flush most of the blood out. Thanks to the cone, our bird did not do a grisly chicken death dance, though it did flutter enough for me to yell at Jack “are you sure you did that right?” One look, however, confirmed that our chicken was indeed going gently into that good night.

I checked that the water had reached 140°, then, once confident that the chicken was unquestionably dead, I dunked it repeatedly to loosen the feathers. Then, to my amazement, our chicken became dinner table fare. The feathers came off easily in soggy white clumps, and I was left with a slightly puny version of a grocery chicken. I finished the job that Jack had begun by removing the head, then I chopped off the feet. Now came the real challenge, the sprint before home plate—eviscerating the chicken. I had worried that I would find this inherently gruesome process both appetite destroying and just plain hard. By then, however, I was in full dissection mode. My curiosity kicked in, and I stopped carrying that an animal was becoming food in a setting reminiscent of Frankenstein’s laboratory.

I can’t watch the medical drama House without becoming squeamish; gory horror films still give me the creeps, yet there I was, with a smile on my face, happily studying the body cavity of a chicken to be sure that I hadn’t missed anything. I guess that’s how you know you’re a farmer.

Smothered Chicken with Mushrooms

According to my cookbook, Country Tastes: Best Recipes from America’s Kitchens, “Sunday chicken dinner on the farm was often prepared this way.” With an endorsement like that (and an abundance of shitakes in the fridge), I was an easy sell on this recipe. The sauce cooked up thick and mushroom-mellow and tasted far richer than it actually was.

1 frying chicken, cut up
salt and pepper, to taste
1 T butter
2 T vegetable oil
1 small onion, chopped
½ pound mushrooms, sliced
3 T flour
1 ½ cup chicken broth
½ cup cream or milk
shredded Parmesan cheese (optional)
chopped fresh parsley, to garnish

Preheat oven to 350. Wash the chicken and pat dry. Sprinkle chicken pieces with salt and pepper.

In a heavy skillet heat the butter and oil over high heat. Add the chicken, skin-side down. Brown on one side, then turn over and repeat. Remove the chicken to a casserole dish and cover the bottom of the dish in a single layer.

Pour off all by 2 T of any fat in the skillet. Now add the onions and mushrooms and sauté over medium heat 5 minutes, stirring occasionally. Stir in the flour, then the broth, whisking until the sauce thickens. Add the milk or cream and remove from heat. Pour the sauce over the chicken. Cover with the cheese, if desired.

Cover the casserole dish and bake for 20 minutes, then remove the cover and bake for 30 minutes more, until the chicken is tender but not falling apart. Sprinkle with parsley and serve with mashed potatoes.

Good to the Last Drop

When I was in college, my friend Laura gained a reputation as the best free food scavenger on campus. Once clear of the mandatory freshman meal plan, Laura seemingly never paid for food again, instead managing to show up with uncannily perfect timing and large quantities of Tupperware wherever food was being given away. On occasion, this made her diet a bit monotonous (one particularly massive haul of peanut butter mouse seemed like it would never end and became the inspiration for many pranks), but on the whole, she and many of her fortunate friends ate well off the would-be-wasted food of campus.

We Americans have become accustomed to cheap food, readily accessible 24 hours per day. As a result, many people don’t think in terms of making due with what’s available or finding uses for leftover food. This habit of disconnecting our meals one from the next is merely a symptom of our aimless American diet, disengaged from the seasons and guided by fashion or supermarket specials. Rather than letting what we have suggest what we should next consume, we take the path of least resistance, throw out leftovers and eat whatever is easy and familiar. Keeping a household compost pile is a simple way to decrease food wastage, but I’m a “whole hog” kind of girl, preferring to find uses for every edible part of anything in my kitchen.

Several weeks ago I purchased 3 gallons of raw milk with grand intentions of a home dairying bonanza of ice cream, yogurt, and mozzarella cheese. Alas, as I stood poised above the stove, I realized, much to my chagrin, that citric acid and lemon juice are not the same thing. I toyed with the idea of fudging it, came to my senses after considering the cost of milk, and turned my attention to ice cream instead. A few days later my roommate Ben informed me that the remaining milk had gone sour.

Now I was really annoyed--had I just thrown $6 and a gallon of delicious milk down the drain? I turned to the modern magic eight ball of Google. "What can you do with sour milk?" I queried. As it turns out, plenty, particularly since my milk was unpasteurized. Pasteurized milk tastes spoiled when the microscopic carcasses of all the zapped bacteria (both good and bad) begin decomposing. Ewww. In raw milk, on the other hand, beneficial bacteria eventually begin converting the sugars in milk into lactic acid—effectively turning your milk into buttermilk or yogurt.

All milk has naturally occurring bacteria in it, which are harmless or even beneficial. If, however, a milking parlor is not meticulously hygienic, nasty bacterial beasties can sneak into the raw milk and make any ensuing milk drinkers sick. Fears of contaminated milk, sparked by the deaths of children from food poisoning, led scientists in the early 20th century first to the creation of evaporated milk (clean, cheap, and easily stored for long periods), then to pasteurization, where a flash heating process kills all bacteria, both beneficial and harmful. Though a few diehards held out on the benefits of raw milk, pasteurization quickly gained a monopoly on consumer confidence and within a few years many states had made pasteurization mandatory and the sale of raw milk illegal. While pasteurization renders unclean milk safe for consumption (yay?), it also decreases the vitamin content and denatures various enzymes that facilitate digestion. This is why people with mild lactose intolerance often find that they can drink raw milk while pasteurized milk will make them sick.

As I was saying, my milk was not spoiled, only soured. As long as your milk has only begun to turn, you can still use it for all sorts of culinary experiments. On this particular evening I was feeling like Indian food, so I decided to make paneer cheese, a staple dairy item of India often made with slightly soured milk.

A favorite Indian dish of mine is palak paneer, which features cubes of paneer in a thick, pureed spinach sauce. Unfortunately, spinach has not been seen on our farm since summer reared its sunny head. We do, however, have an abundant supply of lambs quarters, a native weed that volunteers in any bed we forget to weed for more than a week. Lambs quarters is incredibly nutritious and tastes, at least to me, quite similar to spinach. I decided to try a substitution. The resulting dish was green and lumpy (both positive qualities in Indian cuisine) and tasted like sweet success. I like to think that Laura would have been proud.

Mock Palak Paneer

1 t chopped fresh ginger
1 fresh green chili, seeded and minced
1 t ground coriander
1/2 t sweet paprika
1/2 t ground cumin
1/2 turmeric
2 t ghee (if you have it) or oil (I didn't)
2 large bunches lambs quarters (err...I just grabbed a solid handful of stems)
4 T cream or whole milk
paneer cheese, cut into 1/2 inch cubes
1/2 t garam masala
salt to taste

Strip the leaves of the quarters from the stem, wash, and drain them. Steam the lambs quarters with some water for 4-5 minutes, until it becomes soft and cooks down.

Blend the lambs quarters in a food processor or blender until smooth. Set aside.

Blend the ginger and chili in the food processor or blender with a few teaspoons of water. Add the coriander, paprika, cumin, and tumeric and blend to form a paste. Set aside.

Heat the ghee or oil in a large saucepan over medium-high heat. Add the spice mix and fry for 2-3 minutes until the paste is aromatic and starts to sticl. Fold in the pureed lamsquarters. Cook over full heat for 2-4 minutes.

Fold in the cream, paneer cubes, garam masala, and salt. Cook for an additional 5 minutes and serve hot.

Word of the Day

My fellow farmers like to tease me about my eclectic vocabulary. I collect words the way my older brother used to collect Star Wars figures: greedily, giddily, and very, very geekishly. (ok, so maybe he wasn't giddy. But geekish? You decide.) For example, when the Oxford English Dictionary crowned "locavore" the word of the year in 2007, I was among those who not only noticed, but also became rather excited.

I may have found a new favorite, however, one which could give "locavore" a run for its money: "eth•i•cu•re•an n. (also adj.) Someone who seeks out tasty things that are also sustainable, organic, local, and/or ethical — SOLE food, for short." Be still, my heart, there's a whole blog devoted to this wonderful new word!

In writing about the psychological and cultural roots of totemic animals in many tribal cultures, anthropologist Claude Levi Strauss* noted that human beings found animals "good to think" as well as "good to eat." By that, he meant that tribal society used individual and tribal totems as metaphors for the internal differences within human culture. Animals were more than just dinner--the idea of a bear or an otter could represent something abstract and, in fact, intrinsically human. In a way, ethicurianism (If we can go ahead and make this word an -ism already) is our new totemism. It makes our food "good to think" on a number of levels. At its simplest, it is a statement of values served up with a sides of raw milk cheese and fair trade organic coffee. More than that, however, ethicurianism is a metaphor for how we want to live our lives: consciously engaging with the wider ramifications of our most fundamental decisions, from "what shall I have for dinner?" to "what should I do with my life?" I can usually figure out the first one; I'm mulling over the second.

Sometimes, when it's 1 in the morning and I'm still poring over cookbooks or fishing the last jar of jam out of the water bath, I worry that I might be taking this whole food business too far. What value am I adding, really, in following a process from start to finish when I could easily pick up in the middle? But then I realize that I do it because it gives me joy to present a ratatouille the contents of which I have nurtured from seed to table. And I realize that the food I consume represents the values I have come to cherish (the listing of which I borrow from Barbara Kingsolver): honesty, cooperativeness, thrift, mental curiosity, and physical competence. Make my totem an onion.

*Levi Strauss is also remembered for his (perhaps familiar sounding?) volume, The Raw and the Cooked. When I finally get hold of a copy, rest assured that I'll blog it...

Just Call Me Granny, Y'all

Whatever personal conflicts I may have with my heritage, deep down, I'm ever so glad that I'm southern. True, I start shivering when the mercury drops below 50. Yes, I insert "y'all" in my emails and conversations with reckless abandon. But let's remember--y'all--just why the south, for all its peccadilloes, is a glorious place to call home: the symphonic evening swell of cicadas from April through August, torrential afternoon thunderstorms that leave the asphalt steaming, a literary legacy of characters so three dimensional you'd swear that they were your neighbors, and of course SOUTHERN FOOD. Watermelons, peaches, grits, fried chicken, pot likker, biscuits, pecan pie, and my new obsession, pickled everything.

My curiosity for pickling and canning was piqued last Thanksgiving. For the first time in recorded history, we celebrated that most delicious of days in Atlanta, rather than in Alabama, where my grandmother lives. Left to her own devices, my mother was suddenly free to tweak the menu to suit her tastes. She immediately began rummaging in our fridge (notorious for harboring quantities of food that make Mary Poppins' traveling bag seem amateurish) and making noises along the lines of "back in my day." I wandered into the kitchen shortly thereafter to discover an appetizer plate populated by several unfamiliar but aromatic items: pickled okra and pickled watermelon rind, she informed me. Having never been a huge fan of sweet "bread and butter" pickles, I was skeptical.

"These were from your great-grandmother Bess," my mother recalled fondly as she munched.

"You mean this was her recipe?" I volunteered.

"No, no," mom corrected me, "she used to can these and give them away."

"This being before she passed away nine years ago?" I queried, eying the plate with even greater distrust.

My mother airily dismissed my concerns. If it was pickled and canned, she insisted, I had nothing to fear.

I took a cautious nibble, and was immediately overwhelmed by the desire to buy pickling vinegar in bulk quantities.

Since Thanksgiving, I've become ever-more intrigued by the idea of preserving the harvest: jamming, saucing, freezing, drying, and especially pickling. The summertime glut of produce brings out the hoarding hibernator in me, and all I want to do is put up the surplus for the coming lean times. (Never mind that I am yet to experience truly lean times--ever--I need to find ways to save it all!) Unsurprisingly for those of you who've been reading since March, my first pickling experiment involved our bountiful beets. They were a smashing purple success, though as I didn't can them, I was forced to consume them in a matter of days. The harvest continued to roll in, and two weekends ago I stepped it up a notch with two gallons of dill pickles, one small jar of dilly beans, summer peach and caramelized onion jam, and several pints of zucchini relish. Finally, this weekend, Nature obliged me when a barely ripe watermelon split in the field. We retrieved the wounded soldier, set the flesh aside for watermelon lemonade (best new beverage of the year, by the way), and I set to work brewing up a brine for the rind.

Later, when I lined up my various conquests to admire them, Turtle couldn't help but laugh, "You're turning into a grandmother!"


Left to right: pickled watermelon rind, summer peach and caramelized onion jam, zucchini relish, dilly beans, and dill pickles in the back

Pickled Watermelon Rind
The best watermelons for pickling are the not yet fully ripe ones, which still have a good inch or so of white between the outer skin and the pink flesh. They can be hard to find at your local grocery--you may have better luck at a farmer's market if you ask around. As for the multiple straining steps recommended by Epicurious (source of this delightful recipe), I only strained and boiled the brine once, before I poured everything into jars to be processed in a water bath.

1 4-pound piece watermelon, quartered
8 cups water
2 tablespoons plus 2 teaspoons coarse salt

2 cups sugar
1 1/4 cups apple cider vinegar
8 whole cloves
8 whole black peppercorns
2 cinnamon sticks
1/2 teaspoon pickling spice
1/4 teaspoon ground allspice
1/4 teaspoon ground ginger

Cut watermelon pulp from rind, leaving thin layer of pink on rind (reserve pulp for another use, like watermelon lemonade). Cut green outer skin from rind; discard. Cut enough rind into 1 x 1/2-inch pieces to measure 4 cups (I had closer to 6 cups, and there was plenty of brine to cover it all). Combine 8 cups water and 2 tablespoons salt in large pot; bring to boil. Add rind pieces and boil until tender, about 5 minutes. Strain. Transfer rinds to large metal bowl.

Combine remaining 2 teaspoons salt, sugar and next 7 ingredients in heavy large saucepan. Bring to boil, stirring until sugar dissolves. Pour over watermelon rinds in bowl. Place plate atop rinds to keep rinds submerged in pickling liquid. Cover and refrigerate at least 8 hours or overnight.

Strain liquid from rinds into saucepan; bring to boil. Pour over rinds. Cover and refrigerate overnight. Repeat straining and boiling of liquid and pour over rinds 1 more time. Pack the pickles into jam jars and pour the brine over them so that the rinds are covered. Close the jars tightly and process them in a boiling water bath for 15 minutes.

Summer Reading

If you could pose a question to a former president, what would you ask? In my pre-farmer days, I interned at the peace-waging, disease-fighting Carter Center, where I was fortunate to be given just such an opportunity. I asked President Carter for advice about peanut farming.

Before entering politics and eventually founding the Carter Center, President Carter began life as a farm child . I took the opposite track (sans the political interlude), interning at the Carter Center before I became a farmer. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, I kind of idolize President Carter. Most folks probably associate his name with the presidency, public health work in Africa, or the Middle East peace process. All well and good. But pick up a copy of his memoir An Hour Before Daylight and you will discover that he is also an eloquent source for information about life in rural Georgia during the Great Depression.

President Carter grew up in an era when mules were tractors, children were cheap labor, and everyone was, by default, a locavore. Meandering through his hometown of Plains and his father's fields in nearby Archery, the memoir is both candid and detailed. The Georgia of his childhood seems infinitely distant, but still tethered to the present by small habits: breaking in a field with a watermelon crop, eating boiled peanuts, and walking barefoot through newly plowed fields. I would give my eye teeth (if I knew what they are) for the chance to walk a parcel of farm land with him.

In the meantime, I will think of my former "boss" and his farming advice as I tend to our small peanut patch.