Recipe review: Herb roasted chicken

This week has been brutal for allergies… I don’t remember years past being this bad. Everything is coated in a thick yellow layer of tree reproductive material, including the inside of my sinuses apparently. Thanks to that I haven’t written anything in the last week. Tonight the benedryl is really helping.

Since I do a lot of cooking I thought it’d be cool to start writing instructions/reviews of some of the stuff thats cookin’ around here. Tonight is a simple summery dinner of roast chicken, potatoes and greens to bring in the changing of the season. We picked up this chicken with our raw milk last week, so I’m assuming that it’s a pretty good anti-purdue type of pastured chicken, which should be delicious. And if I keep doing these recipe posts you’ll no doubt get to know this book: The River Cottage Meat Book by British cook Hugh Fearnly-Whittenstall. Best non-cookbook cookbook ever. You can read it like a book, yet its packed with all the essentials when it comes to cooking meat: how to roast it, cook it slow and low, or do it fast. And it goes over all the philosophy of what “good” meat really is. Highly recommend it to anyone who is a unrepentant omnivore. Vegetarians… don’t judge me.

Herb Roasted Chicken

Crank up the oven to 400.

Get together:

- One nice, preferably pastured, roasting chicken, 3-4lbs.
- A good slab of soft butter, maybe 4 tbsp.
- 2 garlic cloves, chopped
- Herbs. Anything out of the garden will work. Oregano, parsley, thyme, sage, majoram, rosemary, all good, just grab a heaping fistful.
- Salt and pepper
- One half glass of white wine
- Assorted veggies like carrots, onions, garlic cloves and potatoes to roast in the pan with the bird.

After setting out your room temp chicken in a roasting pan (breast side up!), roughly chop the herbs and put in a bowl with the butter and chopped garlic. Liberally season with salt and pepper. Get in there with your hands and mix…. its the most satisfying that way.

Shmear the herb butter all over every nook and cranny of the chicken, inside and out. Roughly chunk your veg up into pieces and scatter around the chicken.  Now into the oven it goes for 20 minutes, the “half-hour sizzle” adjusted for poultry that Fearnley-Whittenstall advises as a standard roasting procedure. After the timer goes off, baste the chicken in the juices that will have formed in the bottom of the pan if you wish, and pour in a half glass of wine. Set your timer for 30 minutes for a smallish bird, 40-45 for bigger ones and turn the oven down to 350. Know its done when you prick the place where the breast attaches to the thigh with a knife and the juices run clear. Or just use a meat thermometer in the same spot and shoot for 160-170. Remember the resting process actually will continue to cook the chicken, and even increase the temperature a few degrees. When you judge that its had enough, bring it out or simply turn off the oven and open the door. Leave it for 20 minutes to rest. Carve it up whatever way you wish, most people have their own methods. Serve it with the veggies from the pan and maybe a salad. Super easy and so extremely good, especially if you make the effort to get a quality, locally sourced chicken. This meal will impress the ladies.

Don’t forget to save the carcass and bones for stock the next day. More to come…

Gardening the Biointensive Way (pt. 3)

I’ve been agonizing somewhat over how to best plan our garden since reading How to Grow More Vegetables… due to the fact that the information in that book runs so deep and dense, and I have a habit of perfectionism I need to break (blog posts notwithstanding). Considering factors like when to buy, soak, and plant seeds, whether to do it in a 3″ flat, 6″ flat, or directly into the bed, plant spacing at sowing, first transplant, and second transplant, hardening off seedlings, protecting them from birds, planting/transplanting according to the phase of the moon, etc, each try to compete for my attention, neural connections juggling dates, times, sun location, weather patterns and temperatures, and the hungry desires of the chickens simultaneously. Attempting to use my right brain to visualize a holistic plan, such that no part is left without its proper role, is difficult to put it modestly, and is something that I believe has to be done gradually at least until you have enough experience to know every step in the dance. So I find myself constantly checking and rechecking the book to see what it says about the spacing requirements of kohlrabi, or the germination time for watermelons, always cross-referencing this information with the excel spreadsheet I use to keep track of what’s growing when and where. But, so far, nothing in the garden project has gone completely haywire (other than a small slug infestation in the brassicas – took care of that with some dry mulch and eggshells – at least for now), although it is a few weeks at least until we can begin harvesting our first crops of the spring – lettuce and radishes.

So today the spreadsheet informed me that the amaranth I seeded 2 weeks ago was a week overdue for its ‘pricking out’ and transplanting into a new flat. I had put it off because until now I had thought the tiny seedlings were nowhere near strong enough to withstand a transplanting. Turns out HTGMV illustrates the pricking out of seedlings with only their first set of true leaves… exactly the size of many of our seedlings right now. Whatever the book says right? I put together a quick picture-tutorial of what pricking out involves.

How to prick out seedlings into a new flat:

Start with the seedlings, the new flat filled with good flat soil (a 50/50 mix of compost and garden soil), either a real pricker-outer (they actually make these) or a butterknife will do, and that’s it.

Notice how young these amaranth seedlings are

We have no more flats so I had to scrounge around for these buckets. I only filled the bucket about halfway up, which is equal to the 6″ depth HTGMV recommends for the second flat depth. The tall walls of the bucket might serve to keep some moisture inside once the plants get big enough, a plus. Since we don’t have any finished compost on hand I used store-bought stuff mixed with potting soil.

Pick out a good looking specimen and use the knife to dig under the seedling pretty far, as I found the roots go further down into the soil than the leaves go into the air at this stage. Be very gentle so that as many of the roots stay intact as possible. Let any clinging dirt remain with the roots.

Stick the knife into the new flat where you want the seedling to go, and pull back so you open up a hole deep enough to accommodate the roots. Place the seedling in and let the dirt fall back into the hole around the stem. Pretty much as simple as it sounds, except with seedlings so small you have to work very gingerly and gently which is hard at first. Definitely a job for people with a lot of patience. I got a lot better at it after I did about 20 or so.

Make sure the soil is up to the first leaves of the plant so that it grows a strong stem and does not bend over when it becomes top heavy. At the same time, don’t bury it either. Plant it right up to about the top of my thumb in the last picture.

Arrange the seedlings according to the proper spacing requirements… these amaranth planted into their second flat require 1.5″ spacing in a hexagonal pattern. They ended up spiraling around the bucket into the center as I finished. All in all that was about 50 seedlings that will turn into huge 6ft tall Love-lies-bleeding amaranth with cascading red flowers. They’re gonna be inter-planted with sunflowers for a cool effect. Can’t wait.

I hope all this extra TLC will really pay off later this summer… I have a feeling it will.

Peace!

Introducing a (theoretical) Bottomless Pit into the System

I’ll admit it, I made somewhat of an impulsive purchase the other day. It was between morning Java 1 class and my afternoon Calculus class at the community college, and I had some downtime to surf the web, and my newly printed bank card in my pocket. Bad combination. I shopped around to at least ten different websites offering one pound of what I wanted, anywhere from 25$ to 40$, plus shipping. Cautioning me were the tales of excited buyers, who upon finally receiving their packages only found a bunch of dirt, but no product. What I was in search of was my own herd of eisenia foetida, commonly known as the red wiggler worm, composter extraordinaire. I ended up finding them for the cheapest off of where else but Amazon.com. The bunnies have been here for a little over a week, and believe me the manure has really been piling up in the catch bins (plus the straw and coffee grounds I add to keep the urine smell down). Time to start turning this resource into black gold!

A small box showed up in the mailbox yesterday, bearing the label “LIVE CONTENTS, PERISHABLE”. Inside was a bio-degradable bag filled with a fist-sized knot of undulating worms and dry coir bedding. They were fairly lively after being put through the wringer of the US Postal service. I rehydrated them with a half-cup of water and took them right to their new abode.

Today I took to shredding some newspaper after reading that red wigglers love it as a bedding material. Many worm farmers tend to stay away from straw, although it will work, you’ll still see pieces of it in the finished worm castings. Castings being the rich, black organic fertilizer par excellence which worm farmers are after. Luckily rabbit droppings are like a gourmet treat to these guys. One thing I’ll tell you is make sure whatever you put your worms in has plenty of bedding, whether its shredded cardboard, newspaper, straw, or brown leaves. Carbon material in other words. Feed your worms some ‘green’ material like kitchen scraps a little at a time. Too much green material will cause your bin to warm up considerably, resulting in mass worm death. Place pockets of greens around the bin and the worms will migrate over to feast. We’ll see what we end up with a few months from now. Hopefully a thriving population producing plenty of poop.

Chickens on the Loose

So much for trying to keep it a secret. After adding the 3ft high plastic chicken netting to the run, we quickly discovered how effortlessly our chickens can just fly right over. So much for that.

The other day we spotted one of them in the shade garden, scratching away merrily. I went out there to try to grab it/corral it back into the pen, but being a chicken, it had the quickness and change-of-direction agility equal to an NFL running back. Needless to say I couldn’t so much as touch it before it decided to get far, far away from me. Next thing I knew I was in my neighbors yard trying to get my chicken out from under their trampoline. After several attempts at capture she decided to hell with this, and runs off further into another neighbors side yard. Convinced that we just lost a chicken to the neighborhood dogs, or worse, the chicken-police, I return home at least relived that it isn’t my problem anymore. Let the cruelty of nature deal with her, and see how she likes that.

Later that day while out in town I get a call from my brother, Jeremy. He says he and a friend caught the chicken. Amazing. I come home and he tells me all about how he heard the chicken squawking loudly at a cat from his bedroom, proceeded to run outside and meet a friend just in the nick of time, and managed to capture the chicken in a thicket of thorn bushes and poison ivy. Excellent work on his part, I never would have gone that far to get the thing, although I’m sure he enjoyed it.

But that’s not the end of the story. Jeremy let Moe our partridge rock out into the pen and locked the escapee in the coop. I bet you can guess what happened. A few hours later there’s Moe, scratching away in the shade garden. Oh joy. This time it was like, just let the creature be a chicken and do its thing and we’ll see if she’ll return to the coop at dusk.

The hours went by and we had a good time sitting on the deck watching her poke around through the freshly mulched beds, looking for worms and grubs and all sorts of things. I made sure the other chicken had gone to roost inside, and went to open up the coop door so that Moe could go back home for the night. We were all extremely skeptical that she would, more or less convinced of the fact that we would have to wrangle her up and put her inside. Around 7:30 just as the light began to fade away she made a meandering, chicken-like stroll towards the coop door, right through the precipice and up the ramp into the inside of the shed. GOAL! That had to be one of the most awesome moments I’ve seen with an animal. Such instinct and awareness of where her home and safety is. And here we were all nervous that she would try to roost in a tree. She sure showed us wrong.

So the next day Mom sees the chickens pacing in the cage looking frantically for the exits. Being a mom and wanting to take care of things she of course let them right out. So they got to spend the entire day scratching up the garden beds, just happier than ever. The two of them typically fight each other but when they had free range out of the coop they hung out and stuck together. And again last night the big event was to watch the chickens voluntarily retire to the coop. Much laughing, high-fives and celebration followed.

I guess from now on we might let them roam freely a couple of hours every afternoon. I’m thinking about letting them out around 5 or 6 so they’ll get at least 2-3 hours of worm hunting, then back into the coop. Not quite enough time for them to find the road and be seen by someone walking their dog. I’ll have to put up some netting around the veg garden before they discover that too. I wonder if floating row covers are enough to keep chickens from being interested? We’ll see.

NY Times article on the growing popularity of rabbit meat.

I snatched this link to an NYTimes article from a great blog, The Natural Convert. Basically the article states that in places like NY and San Francisco, Rabbit as a food option is growing in popularity and becoming trendy among foodies. While rabbit was always a staple of French cuisine, Americans tend to suffer from cognitive dissonance when it comes to eating “the Easter bunny”. I for one hope people can overcome this mini-taboo. Perhaps some of the restaurants in Annapolis would like a source of pastured rabbit…. I doubt it for many of them. I mean what do we have here, Chilis and an Outback? There are some new restaurants downtown and in the behemoth ‘town center’ that could be interested. I’ll have to follow up on that once Butters and Mr. Kitty start poppin’ em out.

Gardening the Biointensive Way (pt. 2)

Oh yes. I think I’m still full from Easter Sunday dinner last night.. Lamb chops on the grill, glazed carrots, mushrooms in creme fraiche sauce, potatoes in duck fat with a little goat cheese… holy mother of god. Not trying to make anyone envious here but that was delicious.

Anyhow I was up early this morning feeding the buns and letting the chickens loose and decided that it was time to plant the potatoes I just got. Cranberry Red and Red Sangre varieties from Seeds of Change. Look those guys up, they have good stuff.

While I was at it I thought that I might as well turn it into a How To on double-digging, one of the trademark methods of GROW BIOINTENSIVE.

So here it is folks, how to double-dig your bed for full aeration and loosening of the soil (and plant some potatoes in the process.)

You may want to spread a 1/2-1 inch layer of compost over the bed beforehand if your soil is lacking in organic matter.

Tools needed: a good English garden fork, a shovel, a bed to dig

1. Starting at one end of the bed, dig a trench one shovel-width and one shovel head deep (~1ft.). Save this dirt in a wheelbarrow or similar.
2. Jam the fork into the compacted soil at the bottom of your trench until the tines of the fork are as deep as they’ll go.



3. Pull back on the handle as far as you can so that the dirt gets pushed up and loosened on the tines.
4. Do this the length of the trench.
5. (Optional) place potatoes in the trench at staggered 9-inch centers.



6. Move one shovel head over and dig another trench, this time putting the displaced soil into the previous trench.
7. Repeat the process ad infinitum until you’ve done the whole bed. The soil you put in the wheelbarrow in the beginning goes in the final trench. Rake & level and you’re done.

I’ve been doing a lot of double digging this spring and I’ll tell you its not as difficult as some people would lead you to believe. Although the raised beds were filled last year with compost and top soil, making for super-soft soil, the side bed where we’re going to grow some corn, beans, squash and melons was dug in unbroken clayey ex-forest soil which was a minor pain. It’s worth it though for a weekend of work. Allowing the roots to grow nearly 2 feet down into easy, soft soil really will make for hardier plants. Just don’t step on the beds once you’ve dug them, because compaction of the soil is what you’ve just worked to get rid of. If you must stand on a bed to plant or dig, use a piece of plywood to stand on so that your weight will be distributed.

Stay tuned for more tutorials as they happen..

Making Kefir this Morning

Some of you may have had the bottled yogurt-like drink from a Whole Foods or some other high end grocer, some of you may have even had the real thing. Let me tell you there is a huge difference between the two. The real thing is more like a cross between cottage cheese, buttermilk, and yogurt all with a slightly fizzy tangy zizzle. Its like a chunky milk soda. Sounds appetizing doesn’t it? I think its good. Plus the health benefits are off the charts in terms of probiotic intake. Lactose-intolerant people can even drink it.

We make our kefir using raw milk, which is the best thing to use. Barring that you can still use pasteurized milk, skim milk, or even goats milk. Visit Dom’s Kefir Insite for the best information on the net about making kefir. Obtaining grains can be difficult, I recommend looking through kefir groups on yahoo, or buying from Dom himself. Most people who regularly make kefir have extra grains they would be willing to give up.. ask around!

Oh and kefir is cultured by a colony of bacteria and yeast that make up what’s called “grains”, small probiotic jewels from the Caucasus region in Russia.

Try it out sometime!