An Egg-ceptional Project

When Marty tweeted at me and asked if we wanted to borrow some chickens for a week or two, I thought he was joking.  As it turns out...he was, by all means, serious...

A couple of hours later, these two ladies showed up in our yard...

They are part of a new experiment Marty thought of.  Since he was a little boy, Marty always wanted to have chickens.  His mom told him it was against regulations where they lived, but he could call the town and ask.  His mother, as often mothers are, was right, he was told they were against ordinance.  After a Summer full of a young boy rechecking the rules over and over, the town officer told him, that he thought actually, it would be OK, but if anyone complained, the chickens would have to go.  That wasn't enough for Marty, so he gave up on the chicken project until he was an adult himself.  Now, if you pay a visit to his farm, you will see an elaborate system of chicken runs all surround by some safeguards to keep the coyotes and other such creatures from having chicken for dinner, and many very happy chickens.  Marty and Carolyn raise the laying hens for eggs for themselves and for their CSA Members.  As a member I can tell you, this is one of our favorite parts of our weekly distributions.  We love the produce, flowers, etc., but there is no egg, like a farm fresh egg. 

Back to yesterday, and Marty's new idea.  Since they aren't selling these eggs, and are primarily doing this egg business to provide eggs in their distributions, Marty thought, "Why not loan out the chickens".  Apparently a couple of the girls had a vacation to Lackawanna recently.  This week there are a couple in Orchard Park.  We put their mini-chicken tractor in the back yard near the pond, so they could get to know their cousins, the ducks and geese who frequent our lawn. The kids are thrilled!!! 

Maybe we should make the chickens a little travel journal, a passport of where they've been?  Or compile a book of pictures of their adventures?  An AFS program of chicken exchange....

The next question is, after their vacation with the Gilmartin Family, who would like to get a chicken visit next?  Let us know!  Seriously.  Project Chicken is in full swing, and could be coming to a yard near you!

Cabbage, Cabbage, Cabbage!!

This week's farmthisway distribution was bountiful as ever.  We got 10 cucumbers, 2 clam shells of  heirloom tomatoes, 2 bunches of totally organic carrots, several heads of broccoli, a dozen fresh brown eggs, a quart of strawberries (which didn't even make it home), and 5 heads of cabbage.  My frequent question of the day when people were picking up their distributions was "What should I do with all of this cabbage".  I have a few suggestions....

1) Cole Slaw!  Quick and Easy.  Shred up a head of cole slaw and a bunch or two of carrots.  (I use my food processor).  Then, if you want to be really quick, use a jar of cole slaw dressing, my favorite is Marzetti's, or for a bit sweeter of a taste use a poppy seed dressing.  It's a neat switch up.  If you would like to go old school and make your own slaw dressing, you can use 3/4 cup of mayonnaise, 2 TBS of vinegar, and then salt, pepper and sugar to taste. 

2) Polish Stuffed Cabbage Rolls (Golabki) - Click here for recipe but in my family instead of beef stock, we cook these with tomato soup over the top.  Yum!  And you can substitute ground turkey or chicken for the beef and pork as well.  In a hurry?  You can always make lazy version.  Chop up the cabbage and onions and saute in one pan, saute your meat in another and mix them together with the tomato soup and put it over some rice.  Boil in the bag, easy rice is ready in 10 minutes!

3) COLCANNON!!!   This is one of my family's favorites.  I take a head of cabbage and saute it with some diced up bacon and sometimes onions.  Mix it in with some butter and mashed potatoes and you have a divine dish that my kids eat right up!

There are some relatively easy things to do with your cabbage.  As for some of  the other items, a nice salad is in order, toss your heirlooms and cukes, and carrots with your favorite lettuce and voila! And who doesn't love fresh cut broccoli that just came out of the field?!   Steamed and tossed with pasta and Parmesan Cheese.  YUM!   Enjoy your basket of goodies and let me know your great recipe ideas too!

Our lovely distribution basket for this week.  

What's for dinner?

Last week I chickened out on the Strawberry rhubarb pie.  I had my daughter do it.  She's 13 and excellent in the kitchen.  It was pretty good, though I think I prefer my strawberry pie a little more sweet than tart. 

This week will be the 5th week of our 24 week membership to our CSA with farmthisway .  A little birdie told me that it looks like this week's distribution will include more fresh strawberries, cucumbers, heirloom tomatoes and totally organic carrots and beet greens.  Don't forget the farm fresh brown eggs from those hard working chickens out on the farm. 

Aside from the basic salads (I still have plenty of lettuce in my lettuce bowls!) that can be made from these fine offerings, I always like to think outside the box a little and do something neat with my weekly distribution.  The kids and I think it is fun to play with our food so to speak.  One thing I have never been real sure of what to do with is the abundance of greens.  I am familiar with lettuce, kale, cabbage and spinach, but beyond that, not so much.  Today I searched some things to do with my beet greens, and my favorite thing that I found sounds like what we will have for dinner tomorrow night.  I don't like anything I have to fuss with too much on a Wednesday, because I am at the Farmer's Market on Tuesdays until about 2 and then home to unload and process some of my weekly distribution.  That means dinner has to be quick, easy and not too messy.  And in my world, that does not mean take out...So, instead tomorrow I will make beet greens and bacon tossed with pasta.  I generally tend to avoid all things Martha Stewart, but she has a lovely quick recipe that looks great.  4 slices of bacon chopped (I bought extra slab bacon for Father's Day, so I have this in the fridge), 3 scallions chopped, which I will probably substitute with the Vidalia already in the fridge, greens from 3 beets , coarsely chopped, and salt and pepper to taste. recipe/instructions

It says to serve as a side dish or toss with pasta.  I will be tossing it with pasta, and pairing it with a nice salad made from our lettuce bowl lettuce, fresh organic carrots, cukes, and heirlooms.

Dinner is served.  Is it Wednesday yet?  

If I get creative later in the week, I may also try out a recipe for strawberry soup with cucumber and strawberry salad.   Stay tuned...

Pie time!

I heard that this week's distrubution from farmthisway will include rhubarb and strawberries...This combination leads most people to think of one thing.  PIE.  Now, I bake a lot.  For my own family and friends, and for others as well.  One thing I have never made is Strawberry Rhubarb Pie. I am not sure why that is.  Mostly I think, I just never really had rhubarb around and never thought, hey, this perfectly good strawberry pie needs some vegetables thrown in it. 

I look forward to trying something new this week though.  So, I will attempt my first ever Strawberry Rhubarb Pie.  I will have to follow up with how it turns out.  Usually, if I am unsure of how to make something, I always check with Alton Brown.  Well, with his recipes on foodnetwork.com anyhow, I don't have his direct line, though there are many occasions when that would come in very handy.  But, I searched and didn't come up with a single Alton Brown recipe for the fruit and veggie pie, so i went to my back up.  Emeril.  This is what I found Emeril's Strawberry Rhubarb Pie with Almond Crumb topping.  I am not going to be scared off by the "Difficult" rating.  And I love pie with a crumb top.  So, stay tuned and I will let you know if I pull it off! 

IT IS GROWING SEASON!!!!

YES!  I AM YELLING THAT!  Do you know why???  Because I ate the first of many Heirloom tomatoes from my CSA Membership with farmthisway this week.  I tossed them in a salad, which also included lettuce picked from my farmthisway lettuce bowl planter.  And I have patio tomatoes growing on my deck (that I haven't killed yet!).  And flowers!  LOTS of flowers!! 

We have had two distributions so far.  The first on May 22rd, included 2 beautiful large hanging flower baskets (we got to choose two from their wonderful selection), a patio tomato plant, a lettuce bowl planter, and 1/2 dozen brown eggs.

Week two, May 29th, included a dozen citronella geranium plants, 1 porch planter, a flat of annuals, a pint of delicious little heirloom tomatoes, a bunch of green onions, and another 1/2 dozen brown eggs. 

The hens haven't been cooperating too much, but  Marty is currently deep in negotiations with the chickens to get them to produce more eggs.   The hens haven't given their further demands yet, but I am confident an agreement will be reached soon. Click here to view Egg Negotiations in progress

I LOVE LOVE LOVE Wednesdays during the distribution season!    Now even more so as I get to help out by working at the Farmer's Market in Blasdell on Wednesdays to distribute the weekly bushels of happiness and meet some of the other CSA Members as well as those who just stop by the farmthisway tent to peruse the vast variety of flowers and soon produce that Marty and Carolyn work so hard to produce. 

Remembering Grandma with a Recipe

I don't think we ever understand the impact that losing someone in our life will have on us, until it has already happened.  Even if we know everyone is going to pass away some day, we are still never truly aware of the gap that will be left.  Recently, with Easter approaching, I was thinking of the beautiful magenta pickled beets and eggs that my Grandmother, Rozella Stewart Goss, used to make. I remember thinking how cool these were as a kid, even when I didn't love beets as much as I do today.  Just the vibrant color of the eggs seemed to make them a standout at the holidays at Gramma's house.

I wish that I had her recipe, that I could call her up and ask her, but sadly, it has been more than 10 years now that she is gone.  It occurred to me after I searched the internet for a recipe and made them, that perhaps my mom or one of her sisters has the recipe. But, I made them anyhow.

I paid a visit to our farmer friends at farmthisway out in Brant, and picked up some eggs last week (among other goodies).  Some of them got hard boiled to make these.  When beets are in season, I will also can my own to use in this recipe, but for now, I used canned, store bought beets.

The recipe was pretty simple.

2 - 15 oz cans of beets (with juice reserved)1 dozen hard boiled eggs, 1 cup of apple cider vinegar, 1 cup of water, and 1 cup of sugar.  There were other recipes that called for onion as well, but I don't remember there being onion in my grandma's recipe so I didn't use one of those.  


I spread the eggs and beets between 2 1 Quart glass jars, and then everything else went into a pot on the stove.  Bring it to a boil, pour it in the jar over the eggs and beets, cool, then cover and refrigerate for at least 24 hours.

I just had some for breakfast this morning, after they sat for about a day and a half, and for a moment, I closed my eyes and imagined I was sitting in the kitchen of my grandparents' farm house in Pennsylvania.  It is funny how simple things can take us back to happy memories.

Thanks for the memories, Gramma.


**And before I close this post, I will let you know that I LOVE social media!  Before I started this post, I put this picture below on Facebook.  I said that I wished I had my Grandmother's recipe, but these would have to do.  Before I could finish typing this blog post, a cousin of mine had messaged me to say that she had our Grandmother's recipe and sent it to me!  Thanks Michele!!!  Next time I will use her recipe.  =)

Pickled beets and eggs bring me back to childhood visits to my grandparents' farm in Pennsylvania.

Spring Is In The Air

This may sound like a strange statement if you step outside of your door in Western NY today.  It was 27 degrees when I drove my two oldest to school early this morning for chorus rehearsals.  However, when I check out the farm page on farmthisway 's website, I see recent videos of hens laying eggs, of cabbage being seeded and of our favorite farmers, Marty and Carolyn out working this past weekend at the Health Expo at the Hamburg Fair Grounds.  It makes me think of Spring.  It reminds me that just about a year ago, at Hamburg Middle School's Health Fair, we met Marty and Carolyn, coincidentally, a day after my husband, Tom, and I had decided to start looking for a farm share or CSA program.  We tasted some of the goodies they had brought along, and we chatted with them for quite a while about the program, about farming and about why we felt we needed to make the switch to farm fresh for our family.

The seeding of early cabbage video makes me think of the many recipes I used last summer.   A favorite here in our house is Colcannon.  It is a pretty basic Irish dish and tasty.  All 5 of us enjoy this greatly, which is saying something, since before we signed up for the farmthisway CSA we really didn't eat a lot of cabbage.  But, mix that cabbage in with some ham or bacon, mashed potatoes and scallions?  Divine!  I even ventured into making and canning homemade sauerkraut, which we served on New Year's Day with our pork roast.

A couple of weeks ago, we paid a visit to the farm to renew our 24 week membership for this year.  The kids got to meet the hens (who were only 4 weeks old at the time) who will be laying our eggs for the season.  We saw Carolyn doling out a whole lot of dirt in the greenhouse and the kids got to pick some young radishes and carrots there in the greenhouse as well.  It all smelled like Spring to me.  Now don't get me wrong, I love a good Winter as well.  The ice skating, the sledding, the skiing, the snowmen and snowball fights.  But being out at the farm got my brain thinking Spring.  It is kind of hard not to think Spring when you see cute little baby chicks and smell the moist dirt.

So with 24 weeks of great stuff coming our way starting in May, I am already thinking of new ways to use our fresh veggies.  My kids help me seek out recipes on the internet and by watching cooking shows on TV and tell me what they think would taste great.  They look forward to our rides out to Brant to pick up our weekly distribution, and they often help with the preparing of the foods as well.  Somehow the food is far more exciting when they know where it comes from.

So, while I still have a lawn patchy with snow and a frozen pond in the backyard, and while there are still several large patches of ice in my driveway, I am feeling the Spring in the air!

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If you are interested in checking out the options for membership at farmthisway click here to see their 10, 15 and 24 week membership options.  farmthisway CSA membership offerings  or check this link out to see the OUR BUSHEL page and see a selection of their offerings.