spring time veggies

one of the many luxuries of living out here in the country is being able to have a v. v. big garden. well, we actually have many raised beds in a big bit of land (mainly dug by the family workhorse, a.k.a. dedicated gardener, alnis) because the soil is a bit cruddy, mostly clay, very wet, in need of major TLC.

watermelon starting to vine

in the fall before we had realized that we weren't going to be able to just have a big ole' garden, clay and i rented a rototiller and dug up the designated area in a bit of a rush since we were already late to plant our 4 (or 5?) varieties of hardneck garlic. fortunately the garlic made it in in the nick of time and now we are delighting in the consumption of millions & zillions of garlic scapes. more like dozens but almost too many to eat, that is for sure. scapes are the immature "flower" (apparently they aren't actually the flower but they look like they would be) stalks that are removed to encourage the plant to focus energy on the bulb. they are a bit milder than regular garlic & you can eat them raw or cooked. i think they're seriously delicious.

there are still many more to be harvested. holy scapetown batman. 

i had some last year from the farmers market and under liz's influence made these smitten kitchen biscuits using cheddar + scapes instead of blue cheese + scallions. really really delicious. i've really gotten into experimenting this year because we have so many. i've been making the salad dressing from this recipe from sarah b. using scapes instead of cloves, made pesto with almonds & parmesan, chopped them up into scrambled eggs for my pals post-party, and yesterday sauteed them in their all their curled glory to find that not only does the flavour mellow considerably with cooking, their taste & texture becomes a little like green beans!

my homegrown breaky. check out the colour of our ladies' yolks! 

pesto is not that glamourous to look at

making "sweetie mint" (or mint syrup)

our landlord came by a few weeks ago and wasn't cool with the grey gardens-esque look of the property, so i committed to weeding all of the flower beds. so far i've been a bit overwhelmed by the task and have only completed the beds around the back deck (gout weed anyone?). at this point, the front garden has completely grown over the ornamental piece of antique farm equipment in the centre. i thought i'd start by cutting back some of the mint and making a mint syrup for iced tea, lemonade and mint juleps. add bourbon and crushed ice to this concoction, and you have yourself a delicious summer bevvie. there are lots of ways to use your garden mint - emily sent me this post that has a mint pesto recipe that i'm going to try this weekend. booyahkasha!

preserving the harvest

been doing a bit more preserving. my mom, sister and i picked up a flat of strawberries and a basket filled with asparagus (split between the two of us) at a farmer's market in london last week. i turned half of the strawberries into jam early this week with leah's help and brooke did the same with the rest later on, with some black pepper added.

jam was new territory to me but it went pretty smoothly. i mean, i'm pretty sure strawberry jam is almost a no-fail, especially when you're making the over-sugared, pectin filled variety straight out of the Bernadin book of home preserving. the asparagus however...a bit of a nightmare. because my mom and i had split the basket, i didn't have quite enough for the recipe, but i thought no big deal! this isn't a jelly, these are PICKLES. no problem! very wrong. i'm still a bit confused about what happened but somehow i ended up with not enough liquid to fill the jars and so have just these two measly jars of pickled asparagus and a tupperware filled with some much less pickled & unpreserved.

oh well. this was once again from the Bernadin cookbook and though i haven't cracked either one of these puppies open, the ones in the tupperware taste like they will be a little sweet for my liking. they did have some good tips though, like putting your asparagus into the jar floret side down so that you don't make a mess of them trying to get a spear out to snack on. we had spicy pickled asparagus from Hy Hope a couple of weeks ago (the inspiration for this undertaking, actually) that were head side up and they were so delicate that they pretty much disintegrated when jostled by a fork or someone's finger (mostly alnis's fingers...).

 if anyone reads this and has a recommendation for a great preserving cookbooks, please pass it on :)

spring foraging + preserving

brooke and i have a goal of making at least one preserve a week, all summer long. this may prove to be difficult because we're trying to do without buying what needs to be preserved and we aren't sure what we have access to that we can preserve this week. have you found any patches of wild asparagus lately that we could get our hands on? or rhubarb? 

last week we tried violet jelly and lilac jelly, both firsts for the two of us...and neither of them set. wah wah. granted, i made a mistake with the violet jelly (too much liquid...not paying attention. bah!) but what happened to the lilac one is a mystery. now we have two delicious floral syrups which fortunately taste delicious with lemon juice, vodka and ice - mmm. 

ah well, we're beginners. if i can nose out some more lilacs with esker later on today, we'll try again and this time be more careful with boiling times. 

for the lilac "jelly" we used this recipe. i looked at a lot of different recipes and they were all very similar. i chose this one because we only had one package of certo and the other ones were for bigger batches. the lilac syrup really has that strong floral perfume-like quality of the flower.

for the violet recipe i used this one. the violet flavour isn't very strong though the colour is beautiful!

brooke made some labels for the lilac "drink mix" using the 'water-slide decal' technique in christine schmidt's (of yellow owl workshop) AWESOME book Print Workshop. we're going to have to get some jars unadorned by raised designs because the sticker obviously doesn't mold very well over all the bumps and ridges, but no matter. i cannot wait to do more of the projects in this book, they look incroyable. yup. 

happenings

garlic

brassicas and lots of seeds yet to sprout

under construction wigwam/sauna

rain barrels in the chicken coop

so much going on at sauce farm! we moved here in october and have waited very patiently through a long, cold winter to have the opportunity to start making this place somewhat of a hobby farm. we're on the way! 8 chickens in the coop, 9 eggs & counting in our bellies, a long weekend in the garden, a coldframe that is literally overflowing with plants and 7 happy friends cohabitating. things are good.