Pastured Poultry Preservation

Recently, preparing to leave Massachusetts for a sojourn in the sunny south, I surveyed my winter stockpile of provisions with a critical eye. I needed stock. Chicken stock. Lots of chicken stock. What, after all, is a cold winter’s day without a pot of soup steaming on the stovetop and a mug of cocoa reanimating my frosted fingers? Admittedly, homemade stock has never been my strongpoint—for an embarrassingly long time I suffered under the illusion that one chicken’s worth of bones, if simmered long enough, could magically transform an entire pot of water into a rich, fragrant base for soups. This is patently untrue, as a succession of “subtle” (read: watery) stocks demonstrated. With vegetable stocks I had equally unfortunate results, primarily because I could never bring myself to sacrifice a sufficient quantity of perfectly good veggies to the stockpot. (The one time I did manage to achieve vegetable broth nirvana, as part of an over-ambitious soup-in-a-pumpkin spectacle, I ran a tab of about $50. For soup. Never again, Whole Foods).

But this time around I had several secret weapons: The River Cottage Meat Book, the most scrumptious treatise on carnivory ever composed, 75 lbs of chicken backs and too-small-for-sale birds, and a knowledgeable assistant. OK, so maybe Andrew was actually in charge. He spent the season working at Polyface Farm, our source for stock birds and a perfect stopping point in my seasonal migration from north to south. When I learned that we could borrow a kitchen and two pressure canners in return for one night of feeding the crew, I decided that it was time to purchase additional canning jars, and perhaps buy stock in the Ball company.

Do not be deceived by my history of failure: making a good stock is fantastically simple. As long as you avoid the two great sins of stock-making—overboiling and underpacking—you cannot fail. First, you must pack the pot tightly with your bones and/or meat and add only enough water to cover everything. Second, you must maintain your pot at the most tremulous of simmers for 3-6 hours. We added a few carrots, some celery stalks, and several quartered onions to our brew, but eschewed the addition of any salt. While “salt to taste” seems to be the directive that commercial stock companies cook by (check out the sodium content on that Campbell’s soup!), we wanted to save the salting step for the distant day when we use our stock. Besides, our stock was so flavorful that we didn’t need salt in order to taste the chicken-y goodness.

Several hours later, with the afternoon sun streaming into the kitchen, we began to decant our stocks one by one, first pulling out whole birds, necks, and backs, then carefully straining the broth through a fine sieve. Internet sleuthing had revealed that the fat in our stock could interfere with a proper canning seal or cause the stock to go rancid, so we covered the pots, stashed them in my cat-proof car to chill for the night, and made plans to regroup in the morning. Chicken as air freshener—I think it will really catch on.

Then we cooked dinner for 12 hungry farmers.

Morning found us in the kitchen again, skimming off the risen fat and preparing the safe-like pressure canner for duty. Low acid foods like stock require the high heat of a pressure canner for safe home canning. Please don’t ever use a water bath and call it even—it isn’t. You can, of course, freeze your stock and store it for at least a year, but with our freezer bursting from 130 lbs of veal, we felt that canning made the most sense. We saved the chicken fat (schmaltz) for matzoh balls, stir-fries, and spreading on bread, and we canned our eighteen quarts of stock in just a few hours.

Coming soon: What We Did While the Stock (tremulously) Simmered or In Defense of Fat or Why “Lard-Bucket” is Really a Term of Endearment

The Decline and Fall of Western Civilization

Lacking Visigoths banging at the gates, we must look for subtler clues that our civilization is in decline. I found one yesterday, much to my chagrin, on the packaging of mason jar replacement lids. The title of the recipe read: Enjoy Mild Fiesta Salsa Year-Round!

Sounds good, right? A recipe for home canners? About that... The recipe calls for 5 cans of diced tomatoes, 1 package of "Mild Fiesta Salsa Mix," and canning jars. So basically you take the tomatoes out of the can, add salsa mix, and re-can them.

Let me first say that I have nothing against store bought salsa. Many a Superbowl party would not exist were it not for the good people of Tostitos and Green Mountain Gringo. They make good stuff. And I'm not even going to complain about salsa mix, even though it wouldn't be my first choice. I do have a weakness for cream cheese and onion dip mix, after all. What appalls me is the absurdity of combining canned tomatoes and premade salsa mix and canning the results! It flies in the face of the whole ethos of canning. It would be like bringing a McDonald's apple pie to a bake sale and calling it your grandmother's secret recipe. Canning is, to me, a labor of love. It is about saving energy (rather than shipping something around the globe and then preserving it not once but twice). It is a call for authenticity and traceability in food.

It is not a call for Mild Fiesta Salsa.

Economies of Scale

Under normal circumstances, I'm not one to advocate for economies of scale. They have their place and purpose, I know, but I'm of the opinion that we Americans are a bit over-attached to the concept, to the detriment of both our food system and our waistlines. But when you need to make enough tomatillo salsa to feed a hungry crew of farmers all through the winter and spring, you're going to need some very large pots.

Since we arrived in April, we've gone through gallons of the glorious, spicy stuff--its the perfect accompaniment to any meal with even a hint of the Southwest. As a result, our pantry has lately been overflowing with empty mason jars, and the canned good stash beneath the stairs has begun to run low. The time had come to replenish the larder, to fill the hungry jars with a long winter's worth of applesauce, dilly beans, and tomatillo salsa.

We began by husking, washing, and weighing the 25-ish gallons of tomatilloes we had harvest the day before. Tomatilloes are, after all, the limiting factor in our salsa operation. Once we had a tally on our tomatillo total, we began scaling up the rest of the recipe to match: 4 cloves of garlic became 256, 1 teaspoon of salt became 1 1/3 cups. It tried the limits of my conversion skills to translate pounds into bushels, teaspoons into shovel-fulls, but eventually we assembled all of our ingredients (they occupied every bowl in the house, as well as most of the pots) and began the laborious process of peeling garlic, washing cilantro, and prepping onions and peppers. We roasted the tomatilloes, jalapenos, onions, and garlic in the bakery oven, then pureed our potion in batches, with a hand blender.

Don and Bridget are the lucky owners of an Amish waterbath canner--a deep, rectangular tub that covers two burners on the stove and easily holds 15 quart jars at a time. I actively fantasize about the day when I can call one of the babies my own. We cranked up the stove, sloshed the massive canner atop, and pressed on. At long, long last, we pulled the final jar out to cool. The lids popped loudly into an airtight seal, and we stepped back to admire our handiwork.

That was two weeks ago. Last weekend we had our first frost, a wake up call for me to finish my own canning projects or forever hold my peace. I wanted to put up my own small stash of salsa, but our epic process seemed a bit daunting for my own purposes. So I scoured the Internet and found the ideal salsa recipe for someone slightly less ambitious that our Caretaker army. It calls for a pressure canner (fun new skill!) but is very, very simple, and it scales up by 10 (my style) or 64 (if you want to feed farmers, a la Caretaker)

For your canning pleasure (many thanks to food blog Doris and Jilly Cook!):

Tomatillo Salsa

1 lb tomatilloes, husked and washed
water to cover
1 onion
2 jalapeno peppers
cilantro to yield 1/4 cup cilantro, chopped
salt

Put the tomatilloes in a pot with just enough water to cover them and bring to a boil. Cook for 10 minutes, until the tomatilloes change color and become squishy.

Remove about half of the water, but save it, in case you want to thin your salsa at a later stage.

While the tomatilloes are cooking, chop the onion in a food processor. Chop the jalapeno. Chop the cilantro. It is simplest if you chop each ingredient separately, as they all have different textures.

Puree the tomatilloes with a hand blender, then add the other ingredients and blend everything with the hand blender. Salt to taste.

Process in a pressure canner at 10 lbs pressure for 5 minutes (pints) or 10 minutes (quarts).

You Can Take the Girl Out of Georgia...

When I first came to Caretaker to interview, Don warned me of the brutal heat of a Berkshire summer. "There will be about a week in the 90's," he said seriously. "Only one week?" I asked incredulously, "I think I can handle that."

That week, in all of its sun-baked glory finally arrived last Friday, and I have spent every sweaty moment since in a heat-addled bliss. It is finally hot enough to swim.

Water, as I have noted, is abundant in the Berkshires (this summer in particular). Long-ago glaciers gouged ponds in the earth; streams bisect the valleys and trip mellifluously one into the next. Frankly, I'm not sure why farmers in these parts even both to establish irrigation systems. Unfortunately, most of this water is frigid, a shock to the system on all but the warmest of days. If I'm to cool off at 6 pm, when I get off work, by jumping in a swimming hole, it had better be a scorcher of a day. I've gone swimming for five days running now, and I couldn't be happier.

Of course, the ironic counterpoint to my love affair with cold water is that these hot days also send me into the kitchen to slave over a cauldron of hot water canning jams, pickles, salsas and just plain fruit. Rutabagas will only carry me so far through winter. Alas, my dreams of a pantry red with tomatoes is not to be, nor the "tomaisins" (sun dried cherry tomatoes) I had so eagerly anticipated. I'll replace them with pickled beets, dilly beans, and tomatillo salsa.

And peaches. Just as it wouldn't be summer unless I immerse myself in water, nor would the season seem complete until I have consumed and canned at least a bushel of peaches. Katie was kind enough to bring me back two bags of gargantuan Pennsylvania peaches when she returned from vacation, so I spent Tuesday night racing to can many of them before they crossed the fine line from ripe into rotten. I've improved since my first marathon cannings last year, when I managed to sully almost every pot in the house over the course of far too many hours. This year I'm avoiding the newbie mistakes: I started my canning bath water first--though after I had ensured that my pot was deep enough to hold my jars. So I skinned and I chopped and I pitted and I boiled, until the dust settled and I was left with 5 quarts of peaches in a light honey syrup just waiting for the winter doldrums to strike.

How To Can Your Own Peaches

First and foremost, set a large pot of water to boil--this will be your hot water bath. Place some sort of rack in the bottom of the pot, so that jars will not rattle against the bottom of the pot when processing.

Set a second, smaller pot to boil, and fill a small bowl with ice water. Cut a shallow "x" in the bottom of each peach, and when the second pot comes to a boil, immerse the peaches one at a time for between 30 and 60 seconds to loosen the skin. When you remove a peach from the hot water, immediately plunge it into the ice water (the goal is not to cook the peaches.) If the peaches are ripe, the skin will slide right off.

In the meantime, in a small saucepan, bring 1 quart of water and a scant 1 cup of honey or sugar to a simmer. This will be your canning syrup. The sweetness of your syrup is a matter of taste--my recipe is considered "light". Depending on how many peaches you can, and how full you pack your jars, you may need more or less syrup. I made 5 quarts of peaches with 1 batch of syrup.

Once all the peaches are peeled, cut them into halves or slices. Pack your (very clean!) jars with the peaches and pour the canning syrup over the peaches until it comes up to the bottom of the neck of the jar. Poke and prod the peaches to release any air trapped at the bottom. Screw canning lids on your jars--they should be sealed, but you don't need to really jam them down: the processing will do the real sealing.

Carefully lower the filled jars into the first and largest pot of boiling water. Water needs to cover the lids completely. Once the peaches have been processed 25 minutes in boiling water, remove them from the pot and allow them to cool on a counter. Store in a cool place for up to one year.

A Matter of Perspective

Growing weather; enough rain;
the cow's udder tight with milk;
the peach tree bent with its yield;
honey golden in the white comb;

the pastures deep in clover and grass,
enough, and more than enough;

the ground, new worked, moist
and yielding underfoot, the feet
comfortable in it as roots;

the early garden: potatoes, onions,
peas, lettuce, spinach, cabbage carrots,
radishes, marking their straight rows
with green, before the trees are leafed;

raspberries ripe and heavy amid their foliage,
currants shining red in clusters amid their foliage,
strawberries red ripe with the white
flowers still on the vines--picked
with the dew on them, before breakfast...

from The Satisfactions of the Mad Farmer, by Wendell Berry

This evening, after an afternoon of long anticipated food experimentation (chronicled below--hooray for the return of recipes to The Raw and the Cook!) I was finally set loose in the strawberries. We had a rain yesterday morning as we harvested for CSA, and as a result, any ripe berries will rot on the vine if they aren't harvested quickly. We handed out quart containers to our Saturday shareholders and let them pick away, but as the steady stream of members slowed to a trickle red berries still winked from the patch.

I've been eyeing these tantelizing morsels for about a week now, with only the occasional indulgence when Don and Bridget's kids harvested the first few to share. We all ate those first berries with the exquisite slowness of folks who don't know when they'll get their next. Shareholders come first, afterall, even if farmers do get to glean.

With our next distribution not until Tuesday, however, the berries in the field this evening were now fair game. I danced down the pathway with a basket and an empty stomach. In the silvery late afternoon light, I crouched by the bed and hunted for the maroon-ripe berries. As I tasted my way from plant to plant, Wendell Berry sprang to mind, and I let gratitude for all of the blessings of the season settle into my soul. I could not think of anything I would rather be doing, or any place I would rather be, than right there, with juicy fingers and a heavy basket of fruit.

And yet. Soon after, another reference to strawberries sprang to mind, from Eric Schlosser's excellent book Reefer Madness. In Reefer Madness, Schlosser explores the workings of America's three largest illegal enterprises: marajuana, pronography, and illegal immigrant labor. As a case study for the labor chapter, Schlosser takes a closer look at the strawberry fields of California, where, more often than not, illegal immigrants--rather than excited shareholders-- are the people picking the strawberries. There, strawberries are commonly nicknamed "the fruit of the devil" for the intensity of their cultivation, the physicality of their harvest, and the low associated wages. Even as I am in my personal heaven, I can already feel a crick in my back from bending over and looking beneath the leaves, and I've only be out for about 30 minutes. Additionally, I'm harvesting in the pleasant temperatures of dusk, rather than the brutal sun of a California afternoon.

Schlosser reports that there are better and worse strawberry companies (a job picking for Driscoll is reported to be the most desireable, by far), but even so, conventional strawberries are one of the most pesticide laden crops on the market. Strawberries' thin skins absorb any chemicals with which they come into contact.

Sitting in the field and eating berries is an immenently simple pleasure for me. And yet these little fruits are are part of something far from simple, anything but pleasureable. The stories that bring us our food are not often so straight forward as mine was this afternoon, and we are not the only ones who stand to loose from this obscurity.

As I mentioned, it was an afternoon of culinary adventuring, and I am happy to share the results with any other daring eaters. From the excellent traditional American cookbook Country Tastes (Beatrice Ojakangas) I found a recipe for Rhubarb Marmelade, and from my fantastic soup cookbook, Soup (Pippa Cuthbert and Lindsay Cameron Wilson) the instructions for Rhubarb, Mango, and Jasmine Soup. Admittedly, I should have made the soup in Colombia, when I actually had local access to both mangoes and rhubarb. But I didn't. So I did today. And, if you believe in labels at least, it was a fairly traded mango. My guilt is mostly assuaged.

Rhubarb Marmalade

8 cups sliced rhubarb
1/4 cup orange juice
1/4 cup lemon juice
2 T chopped fresh ginger
2 1/4 cups sugar
1 T grated orange peel
2 t grated lemon peel
2 oranges, peeled, seeded, sectioned
21 lemon, peeled, seeded, sectioned
1 1/2 cups walnut halves

In a enamel or stainless steel pot, combine the rhubarb, orange juice, lemon juice, and ginger. (There will not be much liquid initially, but once the heat gets going the rhubarb will basically juice itself). Bring to a boil and cover to keep the steam in. Reduce heat and simmer for 30 minutes, until the rhubarb is soft.

Stir in the sugar and return to a boil. Boil rapidly for 5 minutes, stirring constantly.

Add the peels and orange and lemon sections. Return to a boil, then promptly remove from heat. Add the walnuts.

Pour into hot sterilized pint jars and cap with sterilized lids and rings. Process in a boiling water bath fpr 15 minutes.

Rhubarb, Mango, and Jasmine Soup
(this is a dessert soup if ever there was one. Exotic and sweet, but certainly not suitable for a main course! My apologies for the weight measurements--my cookbook is British)

800 mL water
3 jasmine tea bags OR 3 T loose jasmine tea leaves, in a strainer (I used a Teavana mixture of Jasmine and Tropical Rooibus tea.)
750 g rhubarb, chopped
750 g mango, chopped (about two mangoes)
250 g sugar (you can cut this back without hurting anything.)
2 T finely chopped ginger
1 vanilla pod (or you can just add a bit of vanilla extract)
250 mL yogurt

Bring the water to a boil and add the tea. Let it steep for 15 minutes. Discard the tea leaves and add the rhubarb, mango, sugar, and ginger.

If you are using the vanilla pod, slit it to get the seeds and add the seeds and pod to the pot. Bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer until the fruit is tender, about 20 minutes. If you are using vanilla extract, add it after the fruit has simmered.

Remove from heat and cook slightly, Puree until smooth, then whisk in the yogurt, and chill until ready to serve.