Tag Archives: Garden

The Recipes

Armchair Farming

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This winter I am home-schooling myself—about farming. This started out as a light-hearted endeavor. I figured I’d brighten up the dark days of winter by reading memoirs; you know—funny, it-changed-my-life farming stories. Couples who fell in love on farms, worked 26 hours a day, and lived happily ever after. (Oh, and had a thriving, profitable, vegetable growing business at the same time!) Surprisingly, there are actually a few books like this out there. (Try this one.) Perhaps the authors are not being completely truthful, but they’re charming, nonetheless. After finishing these books, the expected wet-blanket effect did not occur. The whole farming idea seemed strangely more appealing, not less.

Next and just for fun, I bought myself this adorable book, Farm Anatomy. Julia Rothman is a New York illustrator married to a farm boy, and her colorful depictions of everything from how to shear a sheep or milk a cow to the history of the tractor and the basic steps of cheese-making are fascinating and easy to absorb. Eye candy and fun facts all in one. Did you know that a cow drinks 10 to 25 gallons of water a day? Or that there were so many different kinds of chicken combs? (See Rothman’s illustration, above, and for more great books about country living, visit Storey Publishing.)

But lately things have gotten serious (and so has my reading). At night Roy and I look at our expanded garden design for this coming season—our third already!—and talk about where things will go. (I’ve now ordered all my seeds and am working on the potato and onion orders.) Even with our plan to double the growing space to supply the farm stand, that’s not enough room for everything we want to do. Roy wants to grow gladiolus like he did two years ago, so my zinnia bed has now shrunk (on paper, at least). We’re slowly gathering the parts for a hoop house, and I’m beginning to think about when (and where) we’ll start all the seeds, and how much of a jump I might be able to get on lettuce and greens. My mind races ahead to the succession plan, too—what will fill the beds when early crops, like peas and spinach, are done.

Meanwhile, Roy has introduced the idea of getting (a lot) more laying hens and building a second, bigger coop. The goal, of course, would be to sell more eggs. But creating a viable egg business requires more than just extra space for the hens, so I’ve been on the phone with our friends at Free Bird Farm in upstate New York, talking with them about economics—everything from grain prices and pasturing hens (that’s one of their hen tractors in the photo at left) to the wisdom of buying pullets vs. baby chicks. And of course, all my chicken books are now strewn all over the living room floor.

And up on the couch lies my serious homework. I’ve started a self-designed Eliot Coleman tutorial that features a trio of his books—The New Organic Gardener, The Four-Season Harvest, and The Winter Harvest Handbook (thank you, West Tisbury Library!). This guy would drive me crazy (he’s so logical and efficient) except that he reminds me of my father, who I happen to like. Actually, his whole discussion of crop rotation reminds me of the IQ tests my father used to give me from Readers’ Digest when I was a little girl. Apparently I was much smarter then, because when Eliot Coleman starts in on the various permutations of crop rotation (which would number in the zillions if you let your brain go there), I freeze. I’m taking lots of notes, but clearly this is the kind of thing that only works into your bones with years of practice.

Which is why, as much fun as reading is, it is frustrating not to be able to act immediately on new-found knowledge. So this week I did the only thing I could do after reading A LOT about season extension—something I’m particularly interested in. (Having our own salad at Christmas dinner was awesome.) Eliot Coleman grows through the winter in unheated hoop houses by choosing cold-hearty crops and putting them under row cover within the hoop house. A gardener I know here on the Island uses this same double-insulating, heat-trapping idea, by placing cold-frames within her hoop house. All I have right now is the little cold frame Roy built for me, but it is situated over a patch of very rich soil in the garden, and currently radicchio and mustard are still limping along in it. (The arugula outside of the cold frame is still thriving too, thanks to the mild weather and a double-thickness of row cover.)

So I decided to experiment with the plants in the cold frame to see if I can get them through February and March using this layering principal. I surrounded the existing plants with hay and covered them with fabric row cover, then popped the glass back on the cold frame. It’s a very moist environment, so I don’t expect to have to water much, and we’ll see if they survive and grow slowly in the next few weeks.

If nothing else, this little project gave me something to do outside in the garden this week—other than cleaning the chicken coop. What the heck, learning about growing food is totally stimulating, both for the brain and the body. Works for me, anyway.

The Recipes

Hoop House Dreams and Chocolate Christmas Cookies

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All I want for Christmas is a hoop house. I’m not expecting Santa to fit one of these in my stocking or anything. I’m not even really thinking the UPS truck is going to trundle down the driveway with a big box from the Farm Tek catalogue. Mostly because we try very hard not to buy much that’s brand new. We do a lot of salvaging and recycling to save money and materials. This isn’t unusual on the Island—it’s amazing what gets traded around. Our next door neighbors just gave us a small fridge for our mudroom (what a boon!), and while they’ve been using it for years in their garage, someone else owned it before them and passed it along.

So I’ve put out the word that we’re looking for a hoop house. Hoop houses (sometimes called tunnels) are greenhouse-y kind of things—simple structures really, made by erecting a series of metal or plastic hoops, stretching a plastic film over them, and anchoring the whole thing with baseboards. Doors, ventilation, and sometimes fans are added at the ends, and the whole thing is a brilliant season-extender for vegetable and flower growers. Hoop houses come in all sizes; you could design your own and make it as small as you like, or buy a kit that can be anywhere from 14 to 30 feet wide and 24 to 96 feet long. (The big ones are big bucks, obviously.)

I’m not looking for anything monstrous like I see at Morning Glory Farm (photo at top of blog and above, top left) or the FARM Institute (photos above, top right and lower left), but I kind of fell in love with a slightly smaller hoop house that I happened to be in last weekend. Our local Slow Food chapter teamed up with farmers Caitlin Jones and Allen Healey at Mermaid Farm (just a skip up the road from me) to stage a Kale Festival on Sunday, and I was tagged to demo a few kale recipes—in a hoop house, no less. Very cool. I only got a pic (above, lower right) before the demo started, but you can see that the board-and-hay-bale benches fit nicely, and it was a perfect setting for the demo, considering the hoop house was nestled right next to the kale fields.

But while staging cooking demos in a hoop house would certainly be an added benefit, obviously that’s not the reason I want one. What we need is a place to start our vegetable seedlings. Doing it indoors again is not going to cut it; there’s not enough surface area—nor do we have enough growing lights—to handle the hundreds of plants we must start. Buying more growing lights isn’t practical either with the amount of energy they use. A hoop house would give us plenty of room to start everything we need—plus some to sell. We’d get our lettuce going earlier, too (last year I direct-seeded it all), so we’d be able to harvest for the farm stand much sooner. With a hoop house, we could even experiment with ripening tomatoes earlier or growing hotter peppers.

Practical reasons aside, I also just plain like the sensual pleasures of a hoop house. The quality of the diffused light is dreamy; the soaring, sweeping curves uplifting. For me, working in a hoop house is one step closer to the outdoors—a place I need to be at least part of every day. (Granted I have toiled in an under-ventilated hoop house in August, and it is not pleasant. But the extra warmth one provides in spring and late fall more than makes up for this.)

I have to be patient though, as this hoop house thing, I’ve come to realize, involves Builder Boy in a big way. (A hoop house is just not going to erect itself in our back yard.) And he happens to be very busy right now putting an addition on a house. And it’s not like we really need the hoop house for a couple of months. So I am occupying myself otherwise (both indoors and out) to keep my mind off the hoop house. Reading seed catalogues and farm memoirs (my favorite so far is The Seasons on Henry’s Farm), plotting out the new garden on poster board, sending in our soil test, turning over the remaining empty beds (arugula, kale, and lettuce still thriving, some in the cold frame), adding composted manure, planting the last of the winter rye.

Oh yeah, I’ve been in the kitchen, too, but not cooking nearly as many vegetables as I have been baking cookies. I’m on a tear this year since the universe has been handing me little windows of between-deadline free time. So I am indulging myself (and Builder Boy…and Farmer, who inevitably gets a nibble of everything Roy eats, except chocolate) and making a different cookie nearly every day. (Freezing for Christmas gifts, too.) The best so far is one from my very favorite baker, Abby Dodge. I couldn’t begin to count the recipes she’s created that have become a part of my regular repertoire. But I can tell you that if you love chocolate, you will absolutely not be sorry if you make these Dark Chocolate Crackles. I swear on my future hoop house.

Susie's sustainable writing, Sustain, The Recipes

My Gratitude List, Pink and Green Friday, 2011

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The whole Black Friday thing scares me. Just the name alone conjures up images of medieval plagues and stock market crashes. The next image that comes to mind is small children being trampled by greedy shoppers storming the gates of Made-In-China Chain Store [insert favorite name here] to procure the latest big screen TV sets for cheap.

A much better idea is Small Business Saturday, where people can support local entrepreneurs and actually return dollars to their own communities. And purchase something truly special.

But since it is still Friday, I’ve decided to rename today Pink and Green Friday. Just because. Yes, pink and green are my favorite colors, but happily, they also represent good causes—supporting breast cancer research and clean energy, for two. So maybe this is a better way to carry over our good feelings from Thanksgiving, to think about generosity and gratitude, instead of greed.

I admit, I am a day late expressing my thanks properly. I had an overwhelming feeling of gratitude all day yesterday, but that didn’t translate over to sitting down at the computer. And today I thought, well, it is good to be reminded of how healing gratitude is on any old day, especially something called Black (I mean Pink and Green) Friday.

So I went out in the garden and took random photos of small things I am grateful for. And decided I’d write a “snapshot” gratitude list. (A wise woman once gave me this idea—writing a gratitude list is an effective mood-switcher if you’re feeling off.) Figure you could do this any day, anywhere, any time of the day. (Yesterday my gratitude was all about chocolate cream pie. And making gravy with Roy…taking walks with Farmer…setting a pretty table…playing Scrabble…eating my own home-grown veggies…a lot of different things.)

In the garden this morning, I was grateful for:

1. The beauty of the silvery, sparkly frost; the promise of changing seasons

2. Our compost pile (it worked!); adding yesterday’s scraps to the new pile

3. The cold frame—and the happy lettuce inside

4. The perky bed of arugula, still thriving under the row cover

5. The fact that I didn’t pull up all the Brussels sprouts, that the cold must finally have gotten the cabbage warms and that maybe we can eat some sprouts now

6. A sunny day to hang the clothes out on the line

7. Roy’s woodstove firing up in the barn

8. Happy chickens, colorful feathers radiant in the low morning light

9. Feeding Cocoa Bunny frosty kale leaves and breaking the thin layer of ice on her water bowl with warm water

10. Volunteer cilantro, flourishing parsley, sturdy rosemary, all still alive for the pickin’

11. Yes, those darn rutabagas—one the size of a football now

12. The view of the fields I never get tired of—especially looking out at the open space where the garden will grow into next year

13. A new garden shed donated by a neighbor; an old wheelbarrow salvaged; all our friends and neighbors who help make the garden possible

14. Leaves for Libby to jump in when she gets here

15. The blueberry bushes we planted for next year

16. That spunky baby bok choy plant that has survived all odds

17. All my little tools bundled up in the handsome trug Roy made

18. Tables set up all around the yard for me (by you know who) to arrange all the contents of the 32 boxes of books I retrieved from storage—cookbook sale tomorrow!

Less stuff, more vegetables. That’s my mantra for Pink and Green Friday.

side dishes, soups, The Garden, The Recipes

Best Roasted Brussels Sprouts + 10 Fave Thanksgiving Sides

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This time last year I was preparing to be on television the day before Thanksgiving. (The Martha Stewart Show—I cooked quick veggie sides from Fast, Fresh & Green.) A few years back I did a satellite media tour around this time to promote Fine Cooking’s book How To Cook A Turkey. The year before that, I did a radio blitz for most of November and December to promote all the holiday tips and recipes on Fine Cooking’s website (which, if you haven’t looked lately, is by far the best place to go to plan your Thanksgiving menu. Check out the cool interactive Create Your Own Menu Maker. But I’m not biased or anything.) Well, you can imagine how relieved I am not to be PR-ing this holiday season. I did in fact just record some radio spots for Fine Cooking that will soon air on WGBH (I’ll keep you posted); but they were a whole lot of fun to do—and they didn’t require a new wardrobe or an anxiety attack.

So we are free and clear to have a simple and quiet Thanksgiving at the farmette (yippee!). I still have squash, rutabagas, onions, kale, arugula, herbs, and salad greens from the garden, plus green beans, corn, and roasted tomatoes that I froze, so we will be able to make most of the meal über-local. I will wander across the street to the West Tisbury Winter Farmers’ Market on Saturday to see if I can get the rest of what I need.

Regardless of where you plan to get your goodies, most of you, I know, have this one thing on your mind: What kinds of dishes can I cook that are easy and delicious, that everyone likes, and that will serve a decent-sized crowd? To that end, I’ve gathered a list of ten of my own favorite side dish recipes that serve at least six people (below). Some of these recipes reside on sixburnersue.com, but several are ones I developed a few years back for an “updated classics” story on Thanksgiving sides for (you guessed it) Fine Cooking magazine. And I also threw in a “create your own” creamy veggie soup from another FC article I did years ago, in case yours is the kind of family that likes to start the meal with an elegant soup (or needs options for vegetarians).

But for the tenth recipe on the list, I couldn’t resist posting my Roasted Brussels Sprouts with Orange Butter Sauce. This is a recipe I originally created for Fast, Fresh & Green but that I tweaked last year for the TV gig so that it would feed more people. I just remade it this morning and am happy to confirm that it is not only delicious, but possibly one of the fastest and easiest Thanksgiving side dishes ever to make.

Here’s my list:

1. Green Beans with Crispy Pancetta, Mushrooms, and Shallots

2. Roasted Turnips with Maple and Cardamom

3. Pomegranate-Balsamic-Glazed Carrots

4. Bourbon Sweet Potato and Apple Casserole with a Pecan Crust

5. Creamy Baked Leeks with Garlic, Thyme, and Parmigiano

6. Mashed Yukon Gold Potatoes with Roasted Garlic

7. Thanksgiving Gratin of Butternut Squash, Corn & Leeks

8. Potato Galette with Fresh Rosemary & Two Cheeses

9. Creamy Vegetable Soup (Pick Your Own Veggie!)

10. Roasted Brussels Sprouts with Orange Butter Sauce (see below)


Roasted Brussels Sprouts with Orange Butter Sauce

I’ve roasted Brussels sprouts a few different ways, but you can’t beat this method for volume (large rimmed sheet pans hold a lot), quickness (16 to 18 minutes in a 475° oven), and great results (by halving the sprouts and roasting them cut-side down, the tops and bottoms brown but the interiors steam). The flavorful butter sauce gives the nutty roasted sprouts just the right touch of tangy-sweet richness to make this completely holiday-worthy.

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2 lb. small Brussels sprouts, trimmed and halved lengthwise

1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil

1 tsp. kosher salt

1 Tbsp. plus 1 tsp. balsamic vinegar

2 Tbsp. pure maple syrup

2 Tbsp. fresh orange juice

1 tsp. finely grated orange zest or lemon zest

4 Tbsp. cold unsalted butter, cut into 16 pieces and kept chilled

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Preheat the oven to 475˚F. Line two large heavy-duty rimmed sheet pans with parchment paper. In a mixing bowl, toss the Brussels sprouts with the 1/4 cup olive oil and 1 tsp. of the salt. Divide the sprouts between the two sheet pans and arrange them, cut-side down. Roast until brown and tender, 16 to 18 minutes. (The tops will be dark brown and crispy and the sprouts should feel tender when pierced with a paring knife.) Transfer the sprouts to a mixing bowl.

Combine the balsamic vinegar, maple syrup, orange juice, and orange zest in a small saucepan. Heat the mixture over medium heat just until it’s hot (you will see a bit of steam), but not simmering. Remove the pan from the heat and add the cold butter, several pieces at a time, whisking constantly until the mixture is smooth and creamy. (Don’t reheat the mixture or the butter will break and the sauce won’t be creamy.) Pour the sauce over the sprouts and stir thoroughly but gently until most of the sauce has been absorbed. Transfer the sprouts and any remaining sauce to a serving platter and serve right away.

Serves  8

side dishes, The Garden, The Recipes

It Ain’t Over ‘Til It’s Over

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The farm stand fell over on Saturday. Tipped by a terrific gust from the nor’easter, it fell backwards, impaling itself on a small rock in the process. Just a little damage to the roof, no big deal. But it’s funny. Seems the farm stand somehow knew the season was over. Only an hour earlier, as the rain began to fall harder and colder, a customer in a small white station wagon pulled up, bought everything left on the stand (the last green beans, two bags of arugula, a dozen eggs, an onion and an eggplant) and neatly pushed the baskets to the back of the stand to keep them dry. (Thank you, whoever you were.) Seeing the car pull away, I dashed out and carried the cooler and baskets in. We were all in the living room playing Monopoly when we heard the bang.

I’ve been reluctant to say goodbye to the growing season, so maybe I needed a little encouragement from the universe. A day after the nor’easter, I got some more: The first heavy frost fell, turning the 5-foot tall zinnia plants, the bushy eggplants, the spindles of leafy pole beans—just about everything still green in the garden—into a ghastly scene from Beetlejuice. Frightful skeletons of their former selves, the plants said goodbye in a single night.

I should be so courageous, I thought, rummaging around the dead foliage, harvesting random peppers and eggplants that clung hopefully to the blackened vines. I was thinking about the daunting project that awaited me inside—a different kind of rummaging, this time through old memories.

We’d just hauled a load of cardboard boxes over from my storage unit—my goal to empty the thing out and quit paying the ridiculous $200 a month to store my tchotchkes. But our little farm house, charming as it is, can only hold so much. Built in 1895, it has no closets. We’ve turned an upstairs bedroom into a storage closet, but between clothes, linens, coolers, and extra pots and pans, there ain’t much more it can take. Time to lighten my load.

In the end, it was much easier than I thought to part with many of the old photographs and school reports and scrapbooks and diaries. (Being a 13-year old girl was hard enough—no need to relive it. All these many years later, and I still winced. I had to laugh, though—judging from the reams of notebooks, apparently I was highly verbal from a very young age!) The best memories drifted out of an old trunk my mother had packed up long ago with a few of my most precious toys and dolls and little-girl clothes. Raggedy Ann and Peter Rabbit—such good friends. I couldn’t let them go.

Why, I wondered, did letting go of the garden seem just as hard? (Or letting go of most of it—those darn rutabagas are alive and well, as are the kale plants—for now. And the lettuce and arugula we’ve protected under row cover and cold frame are thriving.) I think it’s only partly about how much I enjoy the gardening. The other part is that I seem to be extremely sensitive to two big issues these days: waste and expense. Why should we blithely ignore good food in our back yard, when we ourselves are on a tight budget, and the world at large—those who have enough to eat—is, too. Because despite the frost and the storm, every time I go out to the garden, I discover something else that’s still alive, still edible. Even the darn cherry tomatoes (hundreds of them) are still ripening. Inside, every surface in my office (while Roy puts new windows into the mudroom) is covered with trays of green tomatoes—rapidly turning red—that we picked during the last couple of weeks.

So I am hell-bent on still making our meals from the garden. (Not the whole meal, just some of it.) I made a delicious kale soup the other night, which I sold to Roy by including a good amount of andouille sausage and potatoes, along with some of those salvaged peppers, a late carrot, our stored onions, and plenty of garlic and spices. Sort of a Stone Soup with kale. I made a green tomato, gruyere, and leek gratin yesterday (good, but not the perfect match I was looking for with the tartness of green tomatoes).

This morning I messed around with fried green tomatoes. And, actually, fried red (and reddish-green) tomatoes. And realized again how powerful childhood memories are. Some of them will be forever with us, no matter how many trunks we lock up or boxes we throw away. Growing up, summers in Delaware, we ate fried red tomatoes (not green tomatoes) on a regular basis. (A regional thing, I guess.) Seasoned with lots of salt and pepper and dredged simply in flour, the big  cross-sections of beefsteaks cooked in butter or a little bacon fat took on a deep, umami-ish, almost stew-y flavor (with some sweetness, yes), and while I don’t remember absolutely loving them then, they were one of my Dad’s favorites. And tasting them this morning was a hugely familiar sensation, a reminder of my grandmother Honey and days at the beach. And I loved them. They’d be perfect with sausage and eggs for breakfast or sautéed flounder and garlicky spinach for dinner.

Turns out I don’t really love fried green tomatoes, though once I stopped being lazy (they require a commitment of several bowls—one for flour, one for egg, one for cornmeal and flour), I realized they are best with a crunchy coating, achieved by the three-part dredging. The cornmeal in the final coating is essential not only for texture and flavor, but also to help make an-extra firm coating that keeps steam inside while the green tomato fries. That steam, in turn, helps tenderize the green tomato and soften the tartness, too.

I tried the fried green tomatoes with a soy-lime-ginger dipping sauce like this one, thinking that would be a fun spin, sort of tempura-esque. But I wasn’t so crazy about that—even the little bit of lime was too much with the tartness of the green tomatoes. Because of the cornmeal, I also thought to try them simply drizzled with (you guessed it) maple syrup. Hmmm. Actually quite yummy. Well, I am predictable at least. I’ve had that sweet tooth all my life, too, and I don’t think it’s going away.

The Recipes

How To Get Rid of a Rutabaga

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Me and my big ideas. Take rutabagas. I thought it would be just nifty to plant a row of these, late in the season, to use in our winter kitchen. (You can keep them right in the soil—how handy!) They’d be exclusively for us, not for the farm stand. Like the onions. Yes, but onions are a tad more versatile than rutabagas, you might point out. Duh. There are only so many rutabagas one can eat. It’s not even November and Roy is already looking a little rutabaga-weary. And this despite the fact that miraculously, Roy, who is not a huge veggie lover, is not turnip-averse. (Rutabagas are basically big, purple-skinned, yellow-fleshed turnips.)

I guess I got all rutabaga-smug because I figured I knew a bunch of tasty ways to cook them. This week, in fact, I slipped some into a potato gratin, and that was a definite hit. (Couldn’t have had anything to do with the cream and cheese.) And one of my favorite techniques—slowly caramelizing root vegetables in a crowded pan—works wonders on rutabagas, so I’ve been using this trick frequently. And Fall Veggie Minestrone is another great destination for rutabagas. (Soup recipe coming in new book—sorry! …for gratin, click here; for slow sauté, click here. In the gratin, use half rutabaga/half potato in place of the celery root.)

But no matter what I do with my rutabagas, I always treat these assertive roots to a few soothing flavor pairings. They like something a little sweet (anything from caramelized onions to apples to maple syrup), something a little fresh (arugula, fall lettuces, fresh herbs), and something a little earthy (like gruyere cheese or sauteed mushrooms.) But what they really like is—something else altogether. By that I mean they are better as part of a mix-and-match kind of dish, rather than as a stand-alone. Which is why I am eating a lot of warm salads.

I don’t mind, really. Actually I love warm salads with roasted veggies, and this time of year, I could eat one every night for dinner if it weren’t for Protein Man. (We do actually wind up eating them for dinner “garnished” with a few roasted sausages or grilled chicken thighs. But I love them for lunch, too.) Happily, these warm salads give me a regular destination for the bits and pieces of rutabaga that seem to accumulate in my veggie bin. (They’re so huge that I never use a whole one.) I dice them up and roast them along with a mix of other diced fall veggies, like butternut squash, carrots, parsnips, all kinds of potatoes, and sweet potatoes, too. And, uh, honestly, sometimes I just go with the other veggies and leave the rutabagas out altogether.

I serve the roasted veggies warm over a mix of hearty, sturdy lettuces (always with a bit of arugula for flavor) dressed with a simple vinaigrette which I warm in a sauté pan. Depending on my mood, I embellish the salad with toasted nuts, dried cranberries or cherries, and/or a little creamy goat cheese or blue cheese. It’s a versatile, variable kind of thing, so in case you’re interested, here’s a basic recipe to follow for four substantial salad servings. (The photo at the top of the blog, was, of course, not a “substantial” serving of warm salad, but me playing around with roasted veggies and some arugula I had just picked from the garden. The photo below is the unfortunate flash-photography view of the salad I made tonight with no natural light in sight.)

Roasted Fall Veggie Warm Salad Master Recipe

For a printable version of this recipe, click here.

Since there’s so much room to customize in this recipe, it’s a great place to try out new vinaigrettes. My friend Joannie Jenkinson, a great cook and our town’s Animal Control Officer, stopped by in her bright green Honda Element the other day with a goodie bag for me—a Spanish olive oil from Fiddlehead Farm’s end of season sale and a Black Cherry-Balsamic Vinegar from Le Roux kitchen store. I made a delicious warm vinaigrette with these two, but you can use your imagination and your favorite pantry staples.

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For the veggies:
2 pounds winter root veggies (carrots, parsnips, potatoes, rutabagas, turnips, sweet potatoes) and/or fall squash (such as butternut) weighed after peeling (no need to peel sweet potatoes or turnips), cut into 1/2-inch dice, about 7 cups
5 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
kosher salt

For the greens and vinaigrette:
8 cups mix of hearty lettuces (such as frisée or inner leaves of escarole, radicchio, endive, baby kale or Swiss chard, along with some romaine or other crisp lettuce), torn into bite-size pieces (5 to 6 oz.)
3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1/2 teaspoon minced fresh garlic
1 tablespoon flavorful vinegar
1 1/2 teaspoons maple syrup
1/2 teaspoon Dijon mustard
freshly ground pepper
2 tablespoons dried cranberries or cherries, coarsely chopped (optional)
2 tablespoons chopped toasted pecans, almonds or walnuts (optional)
2 to 3 tablespoons crumbled goat cheese or blue cheese (optional)

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Preheat the oven to 450 degrees F. Line two large heavy-duty rimmed sheet pans with parchment paper. In a large mixing bowl, toss the diced vegetables with the 5 tablespoons olive oil and 1 1/4 teaspoons salt to thoroughly coat. Spread the vegetables in one layer on both sheet pans. Roast for 18 minutes; rotate the sheet pans onto opposite racks and use a flat spatula to flip some of the veggies over for more even browning if you like. Roast for about 15 to 17 minutes more, or until all the veggies are tender and nicely browned in places, a total of 33 to 35 minutes.

Meanwhile, set four dinner plates on your counter. Put the greens in a large heat-proof shallow bowl and sprinkle with a big pinch of kosher salt.

When the veggies are almost finished cooking, heat the 3 tablespoons olive oil in a small nonstick skillet over medium-low heat. Add the garlic and cook until fragrant and sizzling (but not brown), about 1 to 2 minutes. Remove from heat. Add the vinegar, maple syrup, mustard, 1/4 teaspoon kosher salt, and several grinds of fresh pepper to the pan. Whisk well to combine.

Drizzle half of the dressing over the greens and toss well with tongs to combine. Arrange the greens in equal portions over each plate. Arrange equal amounts of the roasted veggies over and around the greens and garnish with dried fruit and nuts if using. Drizzle a little of the remaining dressing over the vegetables and finish the salads with a sprinkle of cheese, if using. Serve warm.

Alternatively, you can add the warm vegetables, the fruit, and the nuts to the bowl of greens. Dress, toss gently, and serve. Garnish with the cheese.

Serves 4

The Recipes

Finding My Place (and Peace) in the October Landscape

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There’s a reason I don’t work in an office any more. It’s called October. Something to do with the sun on my face and the warm breeze at my back as I hike through the swaying grasses and the prickly scrub across the stone-splattered fields behind my house. Up to the spent cornfield I go, watching a thousand geese lift off in unison, honking like so many commuters in Time Square at 5 o’clock. Only it’s not Time Square or I-95 or even somewhere that has stoplights. It’s West Tisbury, where more of my neighbors are sheep than people.

By day, the strange silver light of fall sparkles through the still-green leafy maples and bounces off the crimson spokes of sumac leaves crisscrossing the meadow; by night, the man in the full moon winks, and the lights go on—an inky football field of black sky suddenly punch-holed with bright stars and planets that are mine to gaze at for as long as I like. Without city lights for miles, the Vineyard sky is unblemished by artificial luminescence. By dawn, I know the October kaleidoscope will shift again, this time turning a firey, blood-red sunrise into a gauzy grey-blue morning where the fog hovers just over the edge of the horizon, leaving you to guess what lies beyond.

In the garden, I am fascinated by the will to live. Plants are withered and brittle, their leaves brown and dropping, and still they flower and set fruit. Amazing. I gather up all kinds of imperfect vegetables and I love them even more for their struggles. I know the garden is slowly dying, and I accept that, because I know what spring will bring. And yet we drag the cold frame in and snuggle lettuce seedlings into it—hoping in a way to defy nature and have something fresh in the midst of frost.

There is palpable power in this October landscape, in the beauty, the errant stillness, the juxtaposition of life and death. It’s as if all of the elements of nature have conspired to bring us fully into the present, to be aware and observant and respectful.  Our job is not to do anything right at this moment but be a part of the place.

The Recipes

Still Harvesting After All These Months

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Slugs have snarfed most of my fall lettuce seedlings. Cabbage worms are devouring my Brussels sprouts, leaving behind their attractive green poop in the process. Lovely, huh? I should be having a fit; something’s gone wrong with the latest batch of turnips I planted, too, and an unsightly brown-spotting, leaf-withering plague is covering my baby bok choy. But I’m not upset.

I’m just so happy to be back in my garden after too many hours, too many days away in recent weeks. Here I am in my comfort zone, coffee cup in one hand, scissors in the other, snipping cranberry beans in the early morning fog, the air so wet that moisture beads up on my stainless steel bowls. I can hear Sugar clucking—she’s about to lay her daily blue egg; and another swirl of honking geese swoops noisily overhead, the surest sign of fall I know.

True, the  fall garden may not be as productive as the summer garden, but it is amazing how tenacious some vegetables are. In addition to those pest-resisting cranberry beans (of the crazy-beautiful pink speckled color), our bush beans are still yielding several pounds of green beans every couple of days. And these are the same plants we started harvesting the second week of July! And no one has told the tomato plants to hibernate; not only are we still picking cherry tomatoes and beefsteaks, but the plants are still flowering. The pole beans are going nuts, a few butternuts are ripening, and I have a nice patch of arugula. But I think maybe the best part about the fall garden is all the overgrown bits—so romantic. The runaway marigolds and unstoppable nasturtiums have run ramshod over pots, tables, gates and (unfortunately) other plants, making the kind of accidental landscape no gardener can plan. I will never, ever, have a garden without nasturtiums as they are simply the most beguiling flowery vines I know.

Today marks four months exactly since we opened the farm stand. Amazing that we are still harvesting—and folks are still coming down the driveway. Now, we get to think about next year. This patch of green behind the current garden (below) may be just the place to double our planting area. A little slopey, but we’ll make it work. Can’t wait.

The Recipes

Droppers, Splitters, Honkers & Roasters

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It has come to our attention that our hens are, ahem, robust. Not fat or anything. Just happy and healthy—and, okay, a tad bit bigger than the rest of the birds that arrived at the post office together last April. (We split a day-old-chick order with friends, as the hatchery ships a minimum of 25 chicks.) Our friend Mary told us the other day that Perky, our Sicilian Buttercup, is at least 50 percent bigger than the other Buttercups in the batch. This is probably why our ladies have started laying eggs a little earlier than expected. So far only Sugar (the Aracauna) and Chippy (one of the Partridge Rocks) are making regular appearances in the nesting boxes, but we have a nice clutch of little blue and brown eggs to show for it. (The hens will be laying full-size eggs in a few weeks.)

So the question is, what gives? Maybe since they’re only eight of them and they have lots of room to move around, the hens are just spreading their wings. But more likely it’s something they’re eating (or drinking—one theory is that maybe it’s our mineral-heavy well water). I think it’s the garden compost we give them—especially the Droppers and Splitters (left). These are the cherry tomatoes we can’t sell because they fall off the plants or split with too much moisture (like after a good rain—ugh.) I once had a black Lab who loved cherry tomatoes so much that he would stand on his puppy tippy-toes (or tippy-paws) to snarf the fruit off the plants through the garden fence. But I think these hens have Scout beat. They love those darn cherry tomatoes—especially the pulpy, seedy insides. Libby collects the Droppers from the garden and tosses them to the girls, who peck them open. And this week, alas, I’ve had more Splitters than I’d like to admit. We also feed the hens Honkers – the gangly green beans we find lurking in the shadows, beans that have grown so scary big that they look like witches’ fingers.

It makes me feel good that these tomatoes and beans don’t get wasted. In fact, since we collect the chicken manure for the compost pile, the hens are doing us a great favor by processing all this stuff. (Same goes for Cocoa Bunny, who is a greens-eating machine. Someone nicknamed her The Shredder for the way she eats leaves. The hens won’t touch mustard greens or kale, but Cocoa will devour them. And we collect her manure, too, so it’s all good. This whole circle of life thing makes me very happy. In fact, I just wrote an essay about it for Martha’s Vineyard Magazine.)

Don’t get me wrong, we also eat a lot of the funky vegetables. I slice the Honkers very thinly crosswise and stir-fry them. I pop the Splitters in my mouth while I’m harvesting. And then of course we also have to eat the veggies that have languished on the farm stand (thankfully, not so much). For instance, I’ve had trouble getting people to cozy up to the little baby plum tomatoes I’m growing (left). The variety is called Principe Borghese, and apparently it is used in Italy for sundried tomatoes. So I decided to try oven-drying them (or very slowly roasting them at low temps to approximate sun-drying), both to preserve some and to get a method down on paper to pass along at the farm stand.

They came out well—very intensely flavored and sort of semi-dried, still with a bit of moisture.  (Everyone knows I am stupidly crazy about oven-roasting tomatoes, so I will just say right out, it wouldn’t be summer if I didn’t roast some sort of tomato! Click here for quick-roasted (“caramelized”) plum tomatoes or here for slow-roasted beefsteak tomatoes.)

The problem was, in my attempt to sell these “Roasters”, I wrote up a little index card with directions for the oven-drying method and tucked it into a pint of the tomatoes on the farm stand. Only I suggested a six-hour cooking time instead of four hours. One of my friends took the bait, bought the tomatoes, cooked ‘em for six hours and found them to be very brittle! Oops. I screwed up. Should have been four hours. I did another batch to make sure and liked the four-hour result.

Of course, if you had a very low oven setting (or even better, a solar dehydrator), you could fully dry these tomatoes out and store them at room temp. With the  method I used (below), you’ll need to refrigerate or freeze them. One sheet tray (which holds a couple pounds) gets you a nice stash, though, and I’ve been using them in everything from soups and pastas to salads and even the pot roast I’ve got in the oven right now. I think this method would also work well with large cherry tomatoes, though the cooking time would need to be shortened somewhat. I haven’t yet tried the bigger plum tomatoes this way. (Though next year I will grow them instead of these boutique-y things!)

Here’s the method for Oven “Semi-Dried” Baby Plum Tomatoes: With a serrated knife, cut the tomatoes in half lengthwise. Place them, cut-side-up, on a parchment-lined heavy-duty baking sheet. Cook in a 250-degree oven for about 4 to 4 1/2 hours, or until they are shrunken and intensely colored. They will have lost most, but not all, of their moisture. They will collapse a bit more when you get them out of the oven.  Let cool and refrigerate or freeze.

The Recipes

The 50-Pound Onion Harvest and The Mystery Egg

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Fortunately, we did not have to move the hens into the mudroom during the hurricane.

Aside from the obvious drawbacks to this plan, there simply wouldn’t have been room, what with the hundreds of tomatoes and the 50 pounds of onions hanging around. With the storm coming, we did harvest just a wee bit more than we normally would have. But even on an ordinary day, the house is overrun with vegetables for the farm stand at this point.

As it turns out, moving the hens anywhere away from their coop might have been particularly upsetting just about now. They’ve been clucking like crazy lately and we thought maybe it was the change in barometric pressure. Apparently, it’s pressure of a whole different sort that’s bothering them, because we found our first egg on Wednesday morning. We’re very proud of the mama (whoever she is), because she got pretty close to the nesting box. We found the little brown egg lying in the hay in a dark corner of the coop. Yesterday, our hen-whisperer friend Katherine gave us some fake eggs to put in the nesting boxes, so hopefully the next mama will actually lay in one of the boxes. We thought for sure the first layer must be Sugar (below), who’s been making the loudest fuss lately. But since she’s our only Aracauna, and they are supposed to lay blue or green eggs, it wasn’t her. She must still be working on her first. Probably it was Martha, who’s all-business and, after all, Chief Hen. I can see her dropping her first egg like it’s no big deal.

We feel really lucky that the animals and the vegetables got through Hurricane Irene unscathed. I am a little worried though that we are due to get nailed at some point. (A farm stand customer just stopped in to tell me that another tropical storm is headed our way next week.) Because for some reason, the Island just hasn’t been in the path of the worst of this year’s storms—from the bad snows this winter to the recent deluge that soaked the rest of New England.

There is something delicious about this post-hurricane weather, though. Crystal blue days and piercing late summer sunshine are giving me just the window I need to get the garden beds replanted (more arugula, turnips, lettuce, and bok choy) for the next two months of Indian summer we get out there, thanks to the warm ocean air. It’s also the perfect weather for drying out those 50 pounds of onions. At one point during the storm, they were in my office—on top of and underneath my desk. I didn’t mind so much as I am totally tickled by how great they came out. They were easy to grow and over the last several weeks, they bulbed up into bodacious plump beauties. This week I’ve had them outside during the sunlight hours to finish the drying process. (Top photos.) The stems need to wither from perky green to brittle brown, and a few nice layers of golden onion skin will assure they keep for many months. (Final destination: the barn. See photo at bottom.)

The whole idea behind the onions was to supply my kitchen for the winter (and not to sell them at the farm stand). But I’ve lost a dozen or so already to begging farm stand customers who’ve seen them in the yard spread out everywhere over tables and chairs. Who’d have thought people would want to buy onions at a farm stand? But then again, I had no idea how beautiful the harvest would be. These are some of the best things about tending the farmette—the little surprises, like a freshly laid egg or a beautiful heap of onions. (I’ve been snapping shots of my turnips and fennel, too. I can’t get over how gorgeous they are straight out of the ground, with all their greens and roots attached. So different from the grocery store.)

People ask me what I’m going to do with all those onions, and I just smile. I use onions in everything. We’ve already been grilling them (last night for fajitas), including them in roasted and slow-sautéed veggies (with those turnips and some of our carrots and potatoes, too), and this weekend I hope to make one my summer gratins or “tians” with our tomatoes and zucchini. If you’ve never made one of these summer gratins, you simply must. Everyone loves them. If you’ve got a copy of Fast, Fresh & Green (and if you don’t, ahem!, you should), turn to p. 201 and make the Summer Vegetable and Tomato Tian with Parmesan Bread Crumbs. Or, you can find one of my very first tian recipes over at finecooking.com. Next up for the onions and fennel and tomatoes and kale: Hurricane Soup!