The Urban Farmer's Almanac

I have a favorite route home when I’m coming south on I-5 that is not the fastest way to get here. It involves getting off a couple miles early and taking a winding road through Interlaken Park, which is down the hill from our old apartment. I have very vivid memories of riding my bike through the park our first fall back in Seattle, listening to the new Iron and Wine album on my iPod, and heading off to teach color theory at SPU.

I was taking the same route home the other day, and the road through was blocked off. Something strange came over me, and instead of taking the detour, I parked the car and hopped out to take a look around, wondering if there had been a big landslide. I also had an ulterior motive in the back of my mind – I’ve been reading Langdon Cook’s book about foraging around Seattle called “Fat of the Land” (I know, another blogger with a book that I’m obsessed with), and I’m on the lookout for a nettle patch. As I was walking around, I didn’t find any nettles, but another topic from his book came to mind. Fiddlehead ferns. After a little investigation, I figured out what types of ferns produced fiddleheads and which didn’t, and after that, it was easy to find them.

I took a couple heads from each newly blooming fern (do ferns bloom?), because apparently if you take them all, well, there won’t be a fern there next year, and gathered a handful. Tonight I got around to cooking them up (blanched for a couple minutes, then sauteed in butter), and they were nice and tasty, kind of like asparagus, and apparently full of beta carotene. Plus, I had a little bit of nettle pesto left over from Zack and family’s recent visit mixed into some homemade pasta from the other night to pile them on. Not to brag.

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We planted beets right before our big family vacation last June, and they straggled and struggled along all summer. I never got around to using them in the fall, and actively began ignoring them come winter. They survived some significant week-long freezes, and a couple good snows to boot.

I finally decided to pull them up and see if there was anything worth saving, and it turns out that beets are pretty darn tough in the ground. We cooked up a batch of golden beets for a salad a few weeks ago, and today I pulled out the fancy candy-cane striped Chioggos to roast for Robbie’s 3rd birthday party. After paring off the gnarly skin from the tops, they look as good as new.

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I know in some circles I’m the last train to leave this station, but I recently ran into the blog Orangette. Fabulous photos, the perfect tone with the writing. (Which is why it’s super well-known, and she’s written an even more awesome book that I read half of last night, and why I’m kind of beating a dead horse here.) But to the point… I ran into a recipe for overnight yeasted waffles. A couple posts back I wasn’t necessarily blown away by the cheese I made… it was as it should be, at least, but nothing beyond that. Not so with these waffles. They were unlike anything I’ve ever had; in a normal waffle maker (not a Belgian one) they crisp up and almost entirely and dissolve in your mouth. And the kids cleaned their plates at breakfast, which has not been a pattern of late.

They may not be for everyone – Alicia prefers a cakier waffle and thought these were more like a croissant than a waffle, but said they were good (in that way that meant “good for you to make for you and the kids when I am not at home”). And I am thinking that they would be good with sourdough starter instead of regular yeast (Zack, can I have some more? I killed the last batch.) But seriously, try these, you won’t regret it.

Marion Cunningham's Raised Waffles via Orangette with blueberry syrup from last summer.

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My mom wanted to make cheese for her birthday, but the day of the party she took ill so everything was called off. That didn’t change the fact that I still had 2 gallons of milk in the refrigerator (one of which was fancy raw milk from Vashon, which seemed like it might go bad at any moment, since I bought it with bright orange $2.00 off stickers on each half-gallon. Which still meant it was $5.99 / half gallon by the way. Yikes.)

Anyway, I got to the task a couple days later, and followed the instructions from this website. It all went relatively smoothly (despite the fact that yes, that is a thermometer for people, not cheese, normally), and it took close to 3 hours start-to-finish. I was pretty impressed with the final product, arrived at through a combination of kneading curds and microwaving them for short bursts. The finished ball of cheese bears an uncanny resemblance to pizza dough.

However, it is only partially satisfying when you basically make something that tastes like what it’s supposed to taste like… I wasn’t expecting transcendent cheese, but for all the effort it too, it should be something special. It tasted good, and it’s going to make awesome pizza, but I don’t see putting this project into the weekly rotation.

I ended up cutting it up in chunks and putting in a container with some of the leftover whey to keep it fresh. I’m not sure if you’re supposed to do that, but it seemed to make sense.

The bonus was that you could boil the leftover whey at the end (which looked like about 90% of the volume I started with) and strain that to make a small quantity of ricotta. And I mean small… maybe a 1/2 cup. But something’s better than nothing.

Some postscript notes:

1. It turned out that storing the cheese in the whey was a bad idea; it just got soggy. I’m not sure what the difference between that and the little balls of mozzarella they sell in the store packed in liquid, but I think it may have to do with the fact that it was cut up, rather than formed into a ball.

2. The preferred method of storage after the initial soggy cheese debacle was to wrap them in a slightly damp rag and store them in a ziplock bag. They stayed at a nice consistency that way until I got around to making some tasty enchiladas.

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The potatoes in the drawer have been getting a little out of hand, but since we grew them ourselves last year, it seemed like a shame to throw them out. So they are back in the ground as of this afternoon, long, scary tendrils and all. I used the same containers I made last year (a garbage can cut in half) and the old glass recycling bin that used to hold herbs. I did one container of purple potatoes from our drawer, one of Yukon Golds from our drawer, and one bag of seed potatoes from Lowe’s. We’ll see how each type does.

The technique I’m using for growing them is something I read awhile back – you plant them in a shallow bit of soil, and as the plants grow, you keep adding dirt to bury them more and more. It seemed to work OK last year, though toward the end it got a little hard to add dirt with all the leaves growing on the plants.

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