Well, to back up a bit . . . I'd like to share some photos from the CSA bean planting last month, taken by the lovely Alice Flood Posner, who works down at the New England Small Farm Institute.
This is farmer Adam Dole, loading the bean seeds.
And here's the John Deere, getting ready. Does the tractor look like it's seen a few seasons of work? That's because farmer Arnie Voranger collects and restores antique tractors (pre-1950s). As Adam says, there is a lot of embodied energy in these machines - we're not using the latest "greatest" machines for a reason.
Thanks again for sharing these, Alice! I, for one, can't wait to eat some of these delicious beans come harvest time, and all through the winter.
Which brings us to a cooking secret. A two-part secret. Number one, rehydrated dried beans rock. If you've never tried it, trust me. I always used to get canned beans because it seemed so easy. But once I began picturing the mountain of cans that a lifetime of bean eating might produce, I decided to give it a try. Luckily for me, I had a copy of Cooking from Quilt Country, a really cool Amish cookbook that has a great baked beans (from scratch) recipe. The recipe contains this secret, which makes cooking dried beans go quickly and smoothly. Soak your beans overnight, drain, cover generously with water and add a pinch of baking soda. Then bring to a boil, skim off foam (and, oh my, there will be foam), simmer until ready. Delicious beans, way more quickly. The baking soda changes something chemically that allows the beans to absorb the water more readily.
And for flashback number two, this was the scene in our kitchen a few weeks ago (photos by lovely WOOFer and talented photographer Jeanine Dargis):
Local Hadley grass is too good to have only one month of the year. So for the first time, we made pickled asparagus. Now it's on the shelf in our pantry, waiting to bring us some yummy green in the dead of winter. We're very blessed to have this pressure cooker, which was my great-grandmother's. You can't really see them in this photo, but is has wooden handles (actually incredibly useful - they don't get hot!). I've ordered a new sealing ring, but other than that I think all the parts are original, and we have the original manual/recipe book. I love love love using this cooker, which my grandmother brought to me last summer, just a few weeks before she passed away.
We also have a new vegetarian lunch option at Wheatberry these days - this delicious lentil brown rice salad. We kept making (and devouring) this at home, and we're always searching for delicious vegetarian options to bring to the bakery.
And I finally gritted my teeth and patched up our quilt. I was being pretty silly, really. It's been our main quilt for years (with two large dogs on the bed), and was really in need of patching. I was worried that it was going to look, well, patched . . . But once I decided to think of the patches as adding to the quilt, not flawing it (because those holes looked so great, right?), I got into it. Especially since I have a big pile of really little scraps, only useful for projects like this. I even got to use a homeless little quilt patch my grandmother had made.
And last but certianly not least . . . this envelope might look plain, but it contains the checks to pay for the mill!! Hooray! Delivery estimate is about a month (we are ordering this custom made from Germany). We are super excited, although it won't seem totally real until it arrives.
Some folks had questions about how to leave comments. If you go to the post you want to comment on, at the bottom in somewhat small letter should be a link that says "Comments." If you click on it, it will show you everyone else's comments, and give you a box where you can leave your own! Happy commenting, and have a great weekend everyone!
The beans in our garden are all up, now! It's so exciting to be growing our own beans. Of course, we'll have beans coming out our ears when the CSA share arrives. But that's okay!
Posted by: Seth | 06/20/2009 at 05:51 PM