Real Life CSA: winter share 9

Our final winter share from Penns Corner is full of pantry goodies as well as an extra treat from Wild Purveyors - mushrooms!

It always amazes me how farms/CSA groups can manage during a winter share to still give you something new in each share, even if you have repetitions during the season. It keeps that element of mystery that I love about subscribing to a CSA - you never really know what you're going to get! (At least until they send the email hipping you to that week's share!)

It's curious that I put the mushrooms and Schof Kase cheese together in the photo, because it occurs to me we'll likely eat these in tandem. I'm seeing a mushroom cream pasta in my future. And since the Schof Kase (sheep's milk cheese!) appears to be similar to a parmesan, I'm thinking it would be good in that dish. 

Potatoes and lettuce will be used up in the course of the week, like usual. (Who doesn't like potatoes? They are in a close running with pasta for my favorite food.)

We're just finishing our last jar of farmers market salsa, so this one probably won't last very long. I also might consolidate our syrups into one large mason jar to conserve space, since we have a few little ones. That and eat more pancakes, right?

The apple cider will go in the freezer, since we're still drinking the last one. And the tomatoes will join the others in the pantry, though they are in heavy rotation. (We eat a lot of homemade penne alla vodka in this house.)

The onion greens are pretty exciting. I actually think this is the first time we've ever had them from any CSA. Their positioning in this photo is giving me an idea - baked potato bar!

Also really excited about these peppers, because we like spicy foods in this house (the number of hot pepper seedlings we have going is also an indicator). Nacho bar? I'm sensing a theme here.  

So that's it for the winter share. Overall? Couldn't be happier with the variety and quality of produce and products we've had. Makes me crazy excited for the weather to keep getting better and spring to fully arrive. Our full share for the year will start in just a few weeks, so look for more Real Life CSA posts when that begins!

And if you're not signed up for a CSA, do it! Read this post on why a CSA in the first place, and then visit some of these local groups to see if what they offer is a good fit for your family. You won't be disappointed!

Penns Corner Farm Alliance
Clarion River Organics
Edible Earth Farm

Edible Allegheny/PASA 2014 CSA Guide

If you're not from the western Pennsylvania region, check out Local Harvest to see what's available near you.

Real Life CSA: winter share 8

This is our next to the last share for the winter. Which is only awesome in that it means spring is coming. Spring!

I am camera-less at the moment, waiting for my new body to arrive. (Nice part of having a DSLR is that you can replace just the body when it dies instead of the lenses too. Bad part? $$$ Allow me to complain for a bit that things don't last as long as they did "back in the day." You'd think a $500 camera would last for more than 2 years.) So that's why there's a phone photo of the stash this week that is less than stellar. Onward!

This share illustrates nicely one of the cool parts about a CSA. In the dead of winter, there's often a lack of fresh produce beyond what can be stored long-term, like the apples, carrots and garlic you see above. (The lettuce is grown hydroponically, so is fresh but not a traditional outdoor crop.) So it's nice that the CSA plans for that by diversifying what you receive when fresh vegetables and fruits are not bountiful - cheese, eggs, pasta and canned or dry goods are awesome additions.

We've liked all of the Penns Corner canned goods we've had so far. That tomatillo salsa is particularly flavorful, and it's nice because I rarely get my hands on enough tomatillos to make my own salsa from them. The fresh pastas are great - we throw them in the freezer when we receive the bag and they still taste fresh when we cook them.

I have never even heard of Bauernhof cheese, so I'm sure that will be an interesting adventure. Which illustrates yet another benefit of CSAs - that you try things you would never pick up in the store, not knowing what they are. I can also take honey off my shopping list for the week, now that I have some to use in my homemade granola.

Can't wait to see what's in the final share!

Real Life CSA: winter share 7

We're on share 7 of 9 for the winter CSA, and there's still something new to get excited about each week. This week? Fermented cabbage!

I am loving the canned goods/pantry in this CSA. It takes the "use it up!" urgency out of all of the items. Plus, these are things we'd eat anyway. The honey puffed spelt is like a snack, it's so delicious. 

Watermelon radishes are ones I haven't really found great uses for, but this week's CSA blog had a recipe for watermelon radish chips. And anything that sounds like a snack I can salt sounds good to me. Might give those a whirl. 

Onions are one of those pantry staples that no one lists in their favorite items of produce, but they are the backbone of tons of recipes, and we use a LOT of them at Next Gen House. Always happy to get a few solid onions in the share.

Lettuce will spruce up this week's salads, and potatoes will likely be a side dish. I'm thinking balsamic roasted. We will also need to check out this cheese and see what it's best suited for.

We also got a free issue of Edible Allegheny magazine in this share. I am a subscriber, so I will pass this copy on to someone else, but it's a great magazine if you're interested in local food. (I was even featured in it, way back when!)  

Two more winter shares left. That means spring is on the way, right? Right?

root cellar progress

I've spent a lot of time in the last two weeks in the basement, working on cleaning out the space to be used more efficiently. The primary goal is to create a space for a root cellar. (See creating a root cellar in a city basement for more details on the "roots" of this project.)

Mark ordered me a hygrometer, which reads temperature and humidity, so when it arrived I knew I needed to get moving on the basement project so I could put it to use.

Here's an idea of what the basement looked like before. (Yikes.)

See how far back that goes? This area has the previous owner's cabinets (filled with leftover paint and tiles) plus all the garbage you see on the floor, tubs of canning jars, Christmas decorations, a canning cabinet, shelf for alcohol, and piles of pet and garden stuff. And the top of those cabinets? That's been my "root cellar." Yeah.

Laundry side. Not as bad, but with a giant pile of cleaning stuff on the floor that hasn't moved in about a year.

This is the other side, from the far wall. On the left we have more patio cushions, and piles of junk lined up on the entire wall. The other side is Mark's "workshop." Which let's be honest, wasn't anything like a workshop. To my right in this photo is our chest freezer. To the left is this - the other work surfaces Mark has.

The treasure chest does not contain treasure. 

And last but not least, the shower space.

Two Saturdays, 8 lawn and leaf bags of garbage, 4 boxes of flattened cardboard, and a giant yard sale pile later, we have this. I'm calling it Stage 2.

(Sadly this second round of photos was taken with my phone with low light at 5 a.m., because my Canon seems to have bit the dust. While I try to bring it back to life, my phone must suffice.)

The speck on the floor is one of Stormy's toys. You can see things are stacked, there's no garbage on the floor, and the cabinets are gone.

More cat toys. And a laundry organizer, so that towels and yard clothes don't have to go in piles on the floor.

Probably the biggest change is on "Mark's side" in his work area. We repurposed the cabinets and moved them over to his side so he has another work surface, and got some utility shelving to house a lot of his tools and pieces that previously lived on the floor. (And I sorted through all the mounds of this and that which had accumulated for years.)

He's still working on the other side, but you can see that it's definitely a huge step up from before. (Can you find Stormy? He was my sidekick.)

Last but not least, the hygrometer is set up, and some styrofoam coolers are waiting in the shower. (Probably one of the most bizarre phrases I have ever typed.)

So cold, and so enlightening. The humidity is way too low for most vegetables to keep well. You'd think that wouldn't be true, but in the absence of mold, veggies at 26% humidity would shrivel up. 

I've got more work to do on the root cellar part, and a few other general basement things, like a kitchen reorganization, but this is huge progress. Makes me feel like I'll be ready for my makeshift root cellar this year after all!

Real Life CSA: winter share 6

If you follow me on Twitter, you might have read that I was pretty excited about one item in particular - Bloody Mary mix. Well, it has arrived.

Ironically, I'm not even really a Bloody Mary fan. I have only had one in my life, and it was on a golf course at a work event. So probably some cheap tomato juice and bottom shelf vodka. But ever since having brunch at Meat & Potatoes and seeing their Bloody Mary bar, I have wanted to try one. A good one. Somehow I don't think Clarion River Organics will disappoint.

So after that rapture, let's get to the other goodies.

Pea shoots are a great addition to salads, so they will spruce up the lettuce and other greens. Carrots are always a great addition to salads too, but we also use them for making stock and as sides. Garlic never goes to waste in this house.

Mutsu apples are also called Crispin apples - they will be snacks, most likely. Cabbage might make it in some soup or haluski - maybe with the recipe provided by Penn's Corner. 

We've also really enjoyed the other products outside of the realm of regular produce. The tomatillo salsa that we got a few shares ago was ah-mazing, so I'm pretty psyched to try this farmer's market version.

Another fun addition this week was the popcorn. I am my grandfather's granddaughter, and enjoy salty popcorn above most other snack foods. I especially like it cooked in coconut oil - Mark's specialty. 

We officially signed up for Penn's Corner's full spring/summer/fall CSA, too. We have loved being customers of Kretschmann's for several years, so we didn't switch for any other reasons than convenience of pick-up location and the desire to try other farms and their offerings. 

creating a root cellar in a city basement

Our basement has been a source of aggravation for me for awhile now. It's not finished, has a very low ceiling and a cement floor, and somehow, a full bathroom. It also contains a boat load of junk, enough cardboard to function as a shipping company, our laundry machines, chest freezer and other various house necessities, like the furnace and hot water.

We also try to store food down there - not just our canning preserves and a few shelves of alcohol - but produce like squash, onions and garlic. Since we have lived in this house, we've just put the produce downstairs, thinking it was a cool, dark place and that it would just miraculously function as a root cellar, preserving the veggies for a long time.

Well, it hasn't done that. We lose a decent amount of produce to the compost pile - squishy squash and soft, moldy onions. Something isn't right down there when it comes to the storage of veggies. So I made two goals:

1. Finish the simplifying project I started last fall by finally doing a complete overhaul of the basement's contents as well as a new layout that optimizes the space and gives us room for food storage, laundry, general storage and a work area for Mark. 

2. Figure out what the heck is stopping us from being able to use the basement for storage of whole vegetables and rectify it. (Is it the produce? It is something I'm doing? Is it the temperature or humidity or light?)

I ordered a book from the library called Root Cellaring: Natural Cold Storage of Fruits and Vegetables by Mike and Nancy Bubel, which seems to be the go-to text in the world of root cellaring and homesteading. It's comprehensive enough that I'll probably purchase a copy myself.

It covers everything from digging an actual classic root cellar into a hillside to modifying small spaces and awkward city basements. I am considering the option of turning our unused basement shower into a makeshift root cellar/cold storage for produce. (For the record, I would not remove any of the functionality of the shower for any future owners of this house, since I'm banking on the dream of having land of our own some day.) There are other options, such as building cold boxes to surround basement windows and using the steps between the basement and the dorothy doors out to the yard. Once I see what kind of space we're working with when the extraneous crap gets removed, we'll know better what option works for us.

I also realized that I need a hygrometer as well as a thermometer to determine what the humidity levels are in the areas where I'm going to store produce. Since the authors correctly point out that produce is always changing and undergoing its biological processes, heading toward rot and decay, it's important to make sure the environment around the vegetables does everything to retard that process that it can.

I'll probably also use this book as a guide for exactly how to store what type of vegetable or fruit. I think one of my big mistakes is grouping everything together, when each item has an optimal storage method, etc. I will also look into using those white styrofoam picnic coolers to create sand boxes, essentially, for some of the foods. Might be kind of fun to go down to the basement in the dead of winter with a little sand shovel and go digging for a turnip.

Have you ever experimented with cold storage of produce or root cellaring? If you've got any tips, share them in the comments. I can use all the help I can get!

backyard chickens in winter

If you live anywhere that sees the change of seasons, you've been having a rough winter. (Come to think of it, some people have had a rough winter who never see snow. I still feel bad for people in Atlanta sleeping in CVS.)

When we've had the polar vortex days and the heavy snow fall and the ice storms, a lot of people ask "how are the chickens handling the snow?" 

Well, in short, just fine.

(One of the black australorps, the laying champions of the world.) 

We went through a period in the late fall/early winter where molting and the reduction of the daylight hours made all four stop laying - we got only a few eggs over that time. This seemed to be happening to a lot of people this year.

Thankfully, one of our black australorps is a laying champion and she started up again, even during the short winter days. Both black australorps are back at it, and just recently we got our first green egg in months, from one of the americaunas.

As far as water, we use a heater system that Mark rigged up, which uses one of those holiday cookie tins with a light kit attached to the side. The light bulb warms the tin and keeps the water from freezing. We just use Chinese takeout containers for their water in the winter since they are easily refillable and seem to help the water stay in liquid form. 

However, they do like to knock it around from time to time, and one day this winter found me in my dress clothes on the way to work, crawling into the coop to recover it. 

Way to stick your face in her butt just as I snapped the photo, lady.

As far as snow, they aren't big fans. We try to keep areas of the backyard shoveled so they can walk around a bit without being up to their beaks in snow. We usually have a path from the coop to the deck, where they like to hide for a wind break and to be close to the house, which gives off some warmth. Their feet are sensitive to cold, so they prefer to stay out of the snow, but I've seen tracks around, so I know they aren't completely averse. 

Now ice? That's another story. The ice storm we had recently had them going nuts, clucking away and making all kinds of noises because they were irritated that they couldn't walk well. I had to bring hot water outside to de-ice their coop (and took a spill myself) to even get the door open, so when they realized that they couldn't step outside and get any traction, they made an unholy racket.  

In the cold, they huddled together a lot and hung out under the deck to get a wind break. We give them extra scratch when it's going to be a very cold night so they have food to be digesting while they roost. 

They'll be happier when they can poop all over the yard and get back on top of the compost pile, but they're doing fine. I think I'm more sick of the winter than they are. But who isn't?

Real Life CSA: winter share 4

More variety in our fourth share this week, as well as some regular favorites.

Lettuce and microgreens will supplement our salads this week, like usual. I know I'm a vegetable geek, but lettuce looks so cool in its spiral.

This Ivory lace cheese from Hidden Hills Dairy is supposed to be a havarti-style cheese good for sandwiches. We'll never say no to cheese.

The banana fingerling potatoes are adorably petite and will make a great side of some sort. 

I will likely do some baking this weekend with the fuji apples, since we still have some braeburn apples from the last share for snacking. I've been enjoying making muffins or scones from the King Arthur Whole Grains baking book, so I will probably dig up a recipe there.

Each year we can tomatoes, and we use them sparingly since they are the equivalent of gold when it comes to pantry items. So getting an extra jar of home canned tomatoes is pretty awesome.

Also exciting is tomatillo salsa - we ate it on tacos last night and it was delicious. We both love tomatillos but rarely buy them because they are expensive in the grocery store and hard to find at a lot of the farmers markets we go to. So this is a treat!

Getting canned goods like these makes me even more anxious for garden season to come around. This winter weather doesn't help, either!

Real Life CSA: winter share 3

After a brief holiday break, we got our third winter share. I might have actually squeed out loud a bit when I got the email saying what we were getting this week. Cheese, pasta and honey puffed corn in the same week? Heaven!

Here's what we got!

The eggs (Heritage Farm) are a great supplement for us, since our chickens aren't producing at the rates they do in the seasons with lots of daylight.

Garlic (Blue Goose Farm, certified naturally grown) and squash (Kistaco Farm) will go down in the basement to stay cold for awhile. I'm thinking of making some muffins with the apples (Dawson's Orchards).

This cheese (Riverview Dairy) will be great to try. It looks similar to a hard cheese like parmesan, but who knows if that's how it will taste.

I never liked real maple syrup as a child, even though my dad kept telling me how good it was. Now I wouldn't touch Aunt Jemima with a 10 foot pole. Give me the real stuff! (This syrup is from Weeping Willow Farm.)

In addition to the cheese, I'm most excited about the honey puffed corn (Clarion River Organics, organic) and pasta (Fontana Pasta). The pasta is fresh, so I froze it right away since we already have our meals planned out for the week. You can boil pasta straight from frozen.

The honey puffed corn is just like corn pops, but without all the crap and chemicals. I could eat this stuff like candy.

The lettuce is hydroponic (Harmony Grove) and has been great in the other shares. The other green wasn't specifically identified, but I think they look just like baby bok choy, so that's what I'm going with (Goose Creek Farms, certified naturally grown). I have a great recipe for sauteed bok choy with great Asian flavors, so this might end up in a side.

My favorite part about this share with Penn's Corner so far is the great variety. It's so much more than just root vegetables and squash - the things you can easily store over winter. For a season that is usually pretty dreary in the fresh food department, this share has been wonderful. Can't wait til share #4!

Side note: For more info about certified naturally grown and what that means, check out this post.

Real Life CSA: winter share 1

This week we received our first winter CSA share! This is our first year with Penn's Corner Farm Alliance. (Just for the record, we switched for winter due to pickup locations - not because we have complaints about our spring/summer/fall CSA.) Penn's Corner is a 30-member farm cooperative in southwestern PA - their members use sustainable farming practices and have a huge variety of food items available. (They even run an online farm stand with various pickup locations around the city!)

So here's what we got for the first share!

We get an email with details before each share, but Penn's Corner also posts even more information on their blog. It includes recipes and a list of where each item came from, since they aren't all from the same farm. 

I am psyched to see honey from Bedillion Honey Farm, which is an essential ingredient in the homemade granola I make for breakfasts. 

It's amazing that even after being a produce CSA subscriber for years, we still get things that we've never had before. (Oh the wonder of not limiting your vegetables to the ones in the grocery store!) The giant rock of a vegetable above is a black radish from Nu Way Farm, which happens to be very close to where I grew up, in Mercer County. (For those of you locals, Fredonia!) 

I absolutely adore brussels sprouts, so these ones from Clarion River Organics will be roasted with the shallots we got in this share from Crighton's Farm.

It comes in really handy for us that we also got a dozen eggs, since our chickens have been going through a decently long period of not laying, with the time change and lack of light, plus molting at the same time. Only within the last week did one of them (Ensign Ricky the champ, we think) start laying again, so our egg supply has dwindled significantly. These eggs are from Heritage Farm. 

All of the great greens will be eaten up in salad, including the hydroponic bib lettuce. The pears will make great snacks too! Definitely thrilled with the selection and quality of this first share - and can't wait until we get to discover the next one in two weeks!