The Urban Farmer's Almanac

I planned to swing by Skillet Diner and pick up a jar of Bacon Jam for my brother Alex’s stocking, but I realized that I could probably make it cheaper, and then I would have more to give away. A quick search got me this recipe, which looked pretty good, and I was off and running. It is basically equal parts bacon and onions, cooked down for hours and hours with garlic, coffee, brown sugar, maple syrup, and vinegar to round out the flavors.

So how does bacon jam taste, you may want to know. I won’t resort to the superlatives that the other blog did about this stuff, but I will say it’s pretty tasty. It won’t change your life, but it would definitely improve a burger. When it finished cooking at midnight or so, I decided to test it with an egg poached in plastic wrap (testing a breakfast I was planning for the family getaway) and it definitely satisfied that late-night fat- and salt-tooth that I could really do without. Alicia said it was sweeter than she expected, but it is called jam, after all.

A personal note and disclaimer on bacon: I am not usually one to want to wrap everything I see in bacon. We do have a freezer full of it from buying half a pig earlier this year, though, so access isn’t a problem. However, this month I not only made bacon jam as a stocking stuffer, I also brought bacon-chocolate-chip-pecan cookies to a Cookie Exchange Party. And when I noticed that I was almost out of Bacon Salt (a stocking stuffer I received – and secretly mocked – last year), I thought, “I wouldn’t mind more of that.” Hmmmm…. I may need to re-examine the cool distance I try to maintain from bacon-obsessed dudes who are weaving bacon baskets to hold a dozen pigs sculpted in foie gras (or other ridiculous things…).

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In a good year, we have time to braid our garlic. Last year it all got dumped in a box and didn’t hold up very well. This year, I’ve settled for the messy bun approach in lieu of braiding. Not as pretty, but hopefully effective.

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Our garlic is looking happy and healthy in the ground for next fall’s crop.  This is the only successful propagating we have done so far this year (or ever).  We used last year’s garlic to plant this year’s and so had no need to buy anything to get another crop.  Having a self propagating garden is our sustainable dream, but apparently reading one library book on the subject did not give us enough understanding to pull it off.  Hopefully this year we can choose better varieties and see if anything sprouts next spring.

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Last October we put some cloves of garlic in the ground and wondered what would happen. They sprouted, endured a massive winter storm, and made it to July, which was my harvest date (that’s what I remember reading in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, anyway.) Alicia was dying to pull it out of the ground, so I finally relented and let her dig it all up. It was pretty amazing… tons of huge heads of garlic; each one grown from a single clove put in the ground 8 months ago.

Like any good farmer’s wife, Alicia decided the next thing to do was braid them together, so now we’ve got enough garlic to last us through the year, looking like a million bucks. Plus, not to get too Ominvore’s Dilemma on you, but a recent pack of garlic we bought was grown in China. Really? This batch should get us through the year, I’d imagine, hopefully with enough to plant next year’s in the fall.

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Our fall crop of garlic was well-established, so back in February I decided to do a second planting of garlic, and I thought I’d try some shallots too. There were a few funny plants in the back yard when we moved in that seemed to keep coming back, and I dug them up, and one turned out to be a garlic plant. So I bought a couple heads of garlic and some shallots at Madison Market, and I also planted the volunteer garlic cloves. The volunteer garlic came up immediately and began to grow leaves. However, it took almost two months for the store-bought ones to sprout, but they have finally started coming up.

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