Category Archives: Local Food

An Offally Good Lamb Pâté

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Friday morning was devoted to slaughtering an eleven-month-old ram lamb. And this morning we butchered it into a myriad of tasty cuts, reserving one leg to cure in the Norwegian fashion of a Fenalår. This will be the second lamb ham cured over the years. The first was left in the salt too long and yielded a rock-hard piece of salt with a somewhat muttony flavor profile. Yet there are high hopes this one yields a more palatable result.

One of the culinary pleasures of the slaughter is fresh offal. On the ten-point scale of adventurous eating I routinely score a 7.5. So, here is my offally good lamb pâté recipe as a challenge. Keep in mind that the amounts, to my way of cooking, are mere guides. You know what to do.

Ingredients

  • Lamb: trim 2 kidneys, 2 testicles, 1 liver, and 1 heart. Add 1 pound of ground pork and a quarter minced onion.
  • Grind twice. The first with a medium grind and the second with a fine grind.
  • Add two eggs, four minced cloves of garlic, a twist or two of nutmeg, a ¼ tsp each of ground ginger, ground clove, and red pepper flakes. Measure out a ¼ cup of bourbon and add to the mix. Feel free, depending on the time of day, to measure out more for yourself.
  • Mix thoroughly and fill up ramekins to a ¼ inch below the top. Place in a roasting pan and fill with water to ½ way up the ramekins. Bake at 350 degrees for an hour and half.
  • Remove from the oven (I then place a pat of butter on top of each) and place the individual containers on a towel to cool. Refrigerate for at least a day. Freeze any that you won’t eat within 5 days.

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Reading this weekend: Watching For The Wind (J. Edinger) and Book of Tripe and gizzards, kidneys, feet, brains and all the rest (S. Reynaud)

Lambing Season on a Small Farm (with a recipe)

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I could see her in the darkness at the far end of the outer corral, 50 yards from the barn. She was vigorously licking a small white something wriggling at her feet. It was 22 degrees that morning as I approached to inspect the newly born lamb, which even as I covered the distance stood up. The mother nudged her baby back to the business end, and it immediately began to nurse. The ewe clearly still had more lambs to come (and hopefully just one more) before I could coax her to the barn and into a lambing pen. I flashed my light across the other ewes in the heavily pregnant flock. None showed any signs of labor, so I headed back to the house for a first cup of coffee.

An hour later, around 6 a.m., I found the ewe still at the far edge of the outer corral, with two healthy ram lambs on their feet and nursing. I picked them both up and began the backward-crouch-and-walk familiar to all who have raised sheep. Both were covered in ice crystals in the cold predawn. I continued to hold the lambs in view of their mother, and she followed ever so slowly, chuckling to her babies softly, afraid she was leaving one or both behind. Eventually I made it to the barn door, managed to get it open with one hand while holding the two 8-pounders in the other, and ushered all three inside.

Already in the barn were 10 ewes and their 21 lambs. (All ewes so far this year have twinned, except one mother who had triplets.) The last few steps to the lambing pen were especially chaotic. If a ewe has trouble out in the open keeping track of her newborns, then a barn full of lambs running about, each calling loudly for its mom, is nothing if not sheer cacophonous confusion. With a little wrangling, though, the four of us managed the short trek and I closed the gate to the 24-hour maternity ward. A bucket of water, a block of fresh hay, and a small scoop of feed left with her, I returned to the house for my second coffee and the start of the day.

In the afternoon, Cindy headed the hour-plus to the processor’s to pick up packages of lamb. The previous week I had delivered 13 yearlings to be butchered. Four customers were coming to the farm for their meat, and one lamb was earmarked for our own freezer.

When she returned, I pulled a small shoulder roast from our packages and set it in the fridge to thaw for dinner the next night. I then checked on the sheep once again — a multiple-times-per-day activity in lambing season — making sure they had water and feed and that the lambs were doing well, before moving onto other tasks.

Late in the day, Cindy and I sat on a windy hill, enjoying the last of the sunshine and our newborn charges cavorting on the grass.

Those of you who farm or are longtime readers of this journal will see no contradiction in the joy we experience in raising lambs and the meals we create from the harvest. There is a beginning and there is an end to everything. What always matters, what only matters, is how we treat those in our care while they live … and after.

Braised Lamb Shoulder in Citrus

In a Dutch oven (ceramic-coated or stainless steel pot), sweat 3-4 carrots and celery and an onion in a bit of butter or olive oil until soft.

Braised lamb in citrus (first steps).

Add a cup of canned tomatoes, minus most of the juice, the zest and juice from a lemon, 4-5 cloves of minced garlic, some dried oregano, a cup of stock (I use beef), and half a bottle of white wine or dry mead. Bring to a boil, and reduce to simmer.

Meanwhile, salt and pepper the lamb shoulder. Then, in a cast iron skillet, brown both sides in a little oil on medium high heat. Nestle the lamb in the broth mixture and cover.

Place the pot in the oven for 2.5 hours at 250°. Salt and pepper to taste along the way. Shred the tender meat in a separate dish. Ladle the juice and veggies over mashed potatoes, rice, or couscous, and top with the shredded lamb.

Enjoy.

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Reading this weekend: The Holy Earth (Liberty Hyde Bailey). This is a reread of the short classic.

A Garden Worth Celebrating

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Crape Myrtle in the morning light

Holding two white-egg turnips with attached greens in my right hand, I fold the harvest knife with my left and slide it into my pocket. Walking back to the house from the garden, I mutter, “Take that, Monty Don, you pompous twit.”

Why waste my breath on Monty (real name: Montagu Denis Wyatt Don), you might ask? After all, here is a man I had not even heard of until a video of him showing off his spectacular two acres of British gardens went viral this summer. (Yes, I did share the video with a handful of fellow gardeners.) Could it be envy?

Casting stones from a glass house whose library contains books on the impossibly out of touch gardens of Prince Charles is a dangerous activity. Yet, stay with me as I pick up a hefty rock, throw my arthritic arm back into pitching position, and let it fly.

We need to share less garden porn from the Monty Dons and P. Allen Smiths and more stories and videos celebrating real working people and their gardens. Here in our valley, in that slanting patch of land between narrow ridges, people fed themselves long before the current crisis. They grew okra and beans and tomatoes and potatoes. They did not make a fuss, indeed, might even have been insulted if you called attention to their plot, as if you thought them incapable of creating a garden both tidy and productive.

Gardens in our valley are not for show. They are not tended by armies but by single soldiers. Yet there is a utility and a beauty to them, nestled against a barn or tucked away behind a pig paddock. They exist to feed the families who maintain them. But it is also clear that the caretakers take pride in their weed-free plots and find immense satisfaction in preserving their harvest, whether it be canning tomatoes, shelling beans, or salting cabbage into crocks.

The sight of a well-maintained vegetable garden next to a humble trailer or small clapboard house is both beautiful and inspiring. Far more impressive than the celebrity showplace is the garden with neat rows of beans cultivated by the man who works third shift to keep our modern lives running. Let us share that story, help that video go viral, hold that gardener up as worthy of celebration and emulation.

Highway 36 (revisited)

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Has anything changed? One might wonder if a trip down highway 36 this spring, in the midst of a pandemic, would yield a garden or two? Inquiring minds…. This piece was written in May of 2014.

storms building in the north

I spent a couple of days in the heartland this week. I flew into the Indianapolis airport and took the two lane highway 36, from Indiana into the heart of Illinois. A drive, straight as an arrow, that takes you though some of the richest agricultural land in this country. Small towns were planted every five to ten miles, even an oddly placed suburb in what seemed the middle of nowhere, and vast oceans of farmland.

Having nothing better to do with my time, I counted vegetable gardens. I counted as I drove through towns on the highway. I counted as I passed subdivisions. I counted as I passed farms by the dozens. Finishing the trip two and half hours later with a grand total of zero vegetable plots spotted. My recent digs at neighbors for not planting gardens now seem misplaced, because well over half of the homes in our valley have some sort of vegetable garden. But zero? 

Now we can assume I missed plenty. But I was diligent in looking and even a casual survey should have turned up the odd patch of tilled ground behind a house or two. But I also didn’t see any small orchards or vines. Most homes in our valley sport at least a pear tree or two in the front yard. 

What could account for a food desert in this landscape? Was this the curse of rich land and commodity prices? Or was it that I was simply looking at 200 miles of an industrial park disguised as an agrarian landscape. A bit like those fake Hollywood towns of yore, looks the look at first glance but nothing supporting it. 

It was odd to see old farmhouses with the corn and soybeans tilled and planted up to the driveways. The houses bobbing on the landscape like lost boats at sea. Gone were the outbuildings and barns of the past, now replaced with corrugated buildings housing supplies and gargantuan equipment. No room in this landscape for the personal or something as humble as a vegetable patch or fruit tree. No need for the homestead pig or grapevine, the message is clear, this is valuable land. 

Yet what explained the absence in towns of vegetable gardens? As is my wont, I’m no doubt guilty of reading too much into this simple lack of observable gardens. But vegetable gardens, a few chickens and a fruit tree or two make a statement. And their absence in our rich heartland is a statement, something darker, a yielding of ones will or culture. 

Perhaps it is better to farm or garden on land that requires a bit more struggle?

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Reading this weekend: Living in the Long Emergency (Kunstler). The just published update to his 2005 bestseller. A concise overview of “where we are”. Although, since the work was written just before the pandemic, one imagines the author wishes to have been able to add an addendum.

Still Missing the Sweetwater Fruit Market

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Nothing is duller than a prepackaged seed packet. What started in January with the hopeful perusal of vegetable catalogs ends in February with the arrival of parsimonious clutches of lonely seeds, each variety sprinkled into the bottom of a small envelope. Like the childhood prize in a box of Cracker Jacks, the reward is always less than one had hoped for.

It was usually in late March, in coastal Louisiana, that my brother and I would accompany our father to the local hardware store to buy our annual garden seed. The store was an old-fashioned place. Galvanized washtubs and spring-jawed animal traps hung in jumbled confusion over open bins of seed. The bins were mounted on boards and sawhorses, side by side, and filled the entire middle aisle.

The seed choices seemed unlimited. Beans of every color and pattern. Pole beans, bush beans, butter beans, crowders, and cowpeas. Kentucky Wonder, Grandma Rose’s Italian, Rattlesnake. Fungicide-treated corn dyed shocking pink and labeled with quaint names like Country Gentleman and Golden Bantam. Collards and turnips, and, of course, mustard greens, the lovely regional belle courted by all.

At each bin awaited a scoop and a stack of brown paper bags in small, medium, and “I’m going to feed the world” large. Even today, I can conjure the sound and feel of running my hands through the bins, allowing handfuls of pole beans or okra to cascade through my fingers.

Preassembled seed packets are, at best, for the social isolate. They are the paint swatches to the painted wall, a meager sample of a promised result. They are the anti-community.

Yes, yes, yes, I buy seeds in packages. And yes, commercial seeds have been mailed out for at least a century and a half. And yes, the commerce of the mailbox differs but in kind to the commerce of the bricks and mortar. Except, except (and unless you have had the pleasure of buying seeds in the old-fashioned way, you can’t understand this) … when your father tells you to grab a scoop and get a half-pound of Romano-type bush beans, something tangible happens. You have become part of a membership.

When you carry your paper sack up to the front of the small hardware store and place it on the scarred wooden counter next to the seeds your dad and brother have selected, and the owner says, “Good afternoon, Mr. Bill, who we do have here?” and your father replies, “These are my sons, Keith and Brian” — well, that is not just a packet of seeds arriving in the mail or bought off the rack at the big box. It’s not just a purchase, in fact. It is the seed of something more, something needed, something that provides for so much more than a mundane meal.

(the title refers to an older post, called Habitat Loss)

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Reading this weekend: The Earl of Louisiana (Liebling). It has been 38 years since I read this classic. There just really isn’t anything else like Louisiana politics, even in these tamer days. But, if you want the full flavor of our northern most banana republic, then Liebling’s account of Earl Long’s last race for governor is not to be missed. Political corruption as sport and excellent writing are served in equal measures. “As it was, it made a perfect waiting room-a place in which boredom began in the first ten seconds.”

Enjoy.