Vernal Equinox

It's the vernal equinox--or it was, on Friday. I got out the pots and the potting soil, and mixed it with a little topsoil. My seed-starting setup is almost ready. It seems fitting to plant seeds on the Vernal Equinox, even if that's technically a little late to begin. I'm not at all worried about that. It'll be fine. The best part was that the night air was in the high forties, so it felt reasonably warm outside while I mixed the soil, and the night air smelled wonderful. This year, there should be no chemical menace from either the neighbors or the Boy Scouts of America. It's spring, and it's time for a fresh start.

Free Seeds and a Natural Root Cellar

It's that time of year again; time to start the new seedlings. Actually, I probably should have started them sooner, but I think I jumped the gun just a little last year. It seemed like it took so long before I could finally get the seedlings into the ground last year that this year, I just felt like waiting a little longer before starting them. I'll be doing that this weekend, so I need to make sure I have all my pots ready and my whole setup ready for them. I'll need to buy a new gooseneck lamp to hold the sunlight bulb, because the other one fell or something and broke. Not looking forward to spending the money for a new lamp, but since we don't have any south-facing windows and the best window to start plants in is an east-facing one, I don't see another choice. I'll just get the cheapest one I can find that will do the job.

The younger daughter is going to help me plan and care for the garden this year, and she'll be helping plan local produce meals as well. We sat down one night and picked out which varieties of heirloom tomatoes we'd try this year, and sent off for some free tomato seeds from a wonderful website called www.wintersown.org. All it cost us was printing and filling out a form, and sending it to them with a SASE included. In return we got a decent number of tomato seeds of different varieties, and if even most of them sprout, that will be fantastic. With money as tight as it is right now, I'm just glad we already had so many seeds left over from last year. I needed to spend as little as possible on seed this year. Spinach seed, at least, is not a problem, as I saved seed from last year's plants and it comes up beautifully. I was also able to save a little winter kale seed and some radish seed. I had a couple different varieties of spinach seed and a couple different types of radishes, but I don't really care if the seed turns out to be a hybrid between the two varieties. It's all good, and it's naturally pollinated, not Frankenseed.

Also, I just pulled out several good carrots from the garden spot. They're perfect; no problem from having been kept in the ground all winter. So the problem of how to store carrots all winter isn't really a problem at all--I just have to get them whenever the ground is soft enough to dig them out without damage to them and the garden implements. Yesterday, they came out of the ground with just a smidge of wiggling, and I'm really looking forward to some of that good carrot/dill soup. There aren't any tops to speak of, but that's okay. It'll still be great.

Chicken Followup

Not a huge lot to tell here. I took it out of its package. I rinsed it with water. I winced at the way it felt in my hands and the way watery blood poured out of it along with with the water, but I got it into its roasting pan and sprinkled it with salt, pepper, sage, rosemary, garlic, and onion powder. The kids laughed at my antics, especially when the lid didn't want to sit down on the pot because the leg bones were sticking up--just like that scene in Overboard. But at least the chicken was already plucked and didn't have feet--because that would have been really gross. I cooked it for about 2 1/2 hours total, and it seems completely done and tender. It looks a lot less like a raw, dead carcass, thank goodness. But I still haven't cut it apart. I'll just let people carve things off it until the Huz comes home and decides to de-bone it. He'll only be gone another two days, so since it's cooked, it'll keep that long. I'm sure this won't be the only time I'll have to deal with dead poultry, and I'm sure I can do better, given time. It's just that the more time goes by, the less animal protein appeals to me. It tastes good, but it comes with too much baggage. Or maybe that's just me. Oh, well, I never claimed to be the perfect omnivore.

And then for some reason I just had to watch a vampire movie on HBO tonight. (Shakes head.)

I can't wait to plant the vegetable garden. Even so, it's just weird that no matter what, if we want to eat and live, something has to die, even if it's just a carrot. I think I prefer fruit; the apple might be consumed, but unless something went horribly wrong, the apple tree is still alive when we're done.

Go Cook a Chicken

Oh. My. Goodness. I am forty-two years old and have almost zero experience in cooking whole poultry. As in, plucked, hollow, sans head and feet, and frozen. Well, thawed, now. I can't remember ever cooking a whole chicken before, and the one time I tried to cook a turkey, it wasn't pretty. I'm used to cooking them after they've been cut up (by someone else, obviously) into their various parts. I have next to no idea what to do with a whole chicken carcass. I like my meat pre-cut, skinned, and pre-packaged. The easier to pretend is isn't really meat, my dear. I do not like this idea of handling and cutting apart a dead chicken carcass. It's disturbing me on so many levels. Maybe I should become a vegetarian. Except that I can't be a vegetarian--my body seems to crave meat protein on a regular basis; I just don't like to be reminded that what I'm eating was once a live bird or animal. I'm stressing out right now about this dead chicken. And it was even a free-range chicken, humanely processed. It just wasn't quite processed enough for me. All of my married life, I either bought pre-cut and skinned chicken, or the Huz cut it up and cooked it while I tried not to watch. But the Huz isn't at home right now, and will be away until the end of the week. He thawed out this chicken on Saturday and left it for me to deal with...and I've got...stage fright, or something. I'm pathetic. And the really sad thing is, I know I'm not alone. I know that many of my fellow Americans are likewise ignorant of such a basic thing as how to cut up a chicken carcass.

Gulp. I'm going to go do what the Huz said. I'm going to rinse it with water, put it in a roaster pan, sprinkle some salt, pepper and herbs on it and put it in a 350 degree oven for two-plus hours. Forget this cut-apart-the-carcass business! Yech. I'm being a total chicken about cutting up this poor dead chicken. But I can't waste it; it's food, and it cost money. Ahhhh.... Well, everyone has their quirks, I guess. Shudder.

Seeds

Wow, Heirloom Seeds is already closed for Spring orders! Last year, I bought seeds in...February, I think. Or maybe January. This year I was trying to wait a little and not be quite so anxious, since last year I had to keep my little plants in peat pots for so long waiting for the weather to be warm enough to plant them outside. This year, I thought I'd let another couple of weeks go by before starting my seeds inside, but...I should have ordered seeds before now. I am excited that so many people want heirloom seeds, though. And I just checked over my supply of seeds from last year and I have almost everything I need for this year. I just need to choose which main variety of tomato I'm going to grow this time, and find a new variety of green cucumber. Last year, I used a hybrid called Spacemaster, and it did not do as well as I hoped, even in the shade of my apple tree. The heirloom variety that Baker Seed sent me for free with an order, Lemon Cucumber, did extremely well and even tried climbing up the apple tree as a support. So I think I'll order them on purpose this time, and pick a new green cuke to satisfy the Huz, who likes his pickles mean and green.

Winter Greens

Okay, so I admit that the title of this post is mostly there for the play-on-words factor. But I really did use some greens to cook with tonight. It was frozen spinach with barley, rice, and tomato juice, cooked into a soup with chopped leftover beef. I'd have put in some carrot but the ground was frozen again.

So what do a broke locavore's pantry shelves look like at the end of January? Not too bad, yet. We still have some pickles (both cucumber and asparagus), peaches, assorted jams and jellies, green beans, a little canned tomato juice, frozen spinach, frozen asparagus, frozen beef and chicken, and two or three squashes and mini pumpkins. And then there's all those dried beans, rice, and barley. We still have whole spelt grain that we bought a big bag of several years ago, and it was in a bucket tightly sealed enough that it didn't go rancid, so we are still able to grind it and use it. We're still able to buy local potatoes, winter squashes and onions, and I don't think the local apples have run out, either. We're just having to get creative as to what we make, how often, and with what supplies. But it does make me extremely grateful that we preserved food last year. I'm not sure what we'd do without it--unless the answer is to eat yet more dried beans.

Now I need to start soaking more seeds for sprouts. If I can do enough varieties at once, we can make sprout salad later this week.

Not Quite Guinness

I've now made Irish soda bread several times, and while I have no idea how great it is by Irish standards, by my family's standards, it's delicious. But it's definitely better when you use the buttermilk you get from churning butter instead of the thicker, creamy cultured stuff in the jug at the supermarket. Whatever that stuff is, it's not buttermilk. The bread comes out okay, but...just okay. Having made it both ways, I kid you not--there's a difference. So I guess we get soda bread just twice a month, since that's how often I churn butter, and it only yields enough buttermilk for one loaf of soda bread and a tiny bit left to put in pancake mix in the morning.

My daughter commented last week that our pantry looks empty compared to how it used to look. She's right. I recently reorganized it, and there's a lot less of certain things, such as commercially produced cans of food. There are more bags of beans, some flour, jams and jellies the Huz and I processed...things like that. But a lot less of the ready-made food that the kids were wont to eat for their lunches. I can't remember when we last had a can of Campbell's soup. We've been making all our own soup for weeks or even months now. It's mostly bean soup, but there is also the occasional treat, like the carrot soup I made last night after digging up a few of the carrots out in the garden. It's the perfect root cellar. When the ground's frozen solid, you can't get them out without great damage to trowel and carrot. But when it hovers just around the freezing point or a little above, then the earth loosens its grip and you can tease the carrots out. Last night I got a big fat orange one I didn't know was there--it hadn't much top left, but the root was pretty hefty. That and the larger of the white ones I dug last time made the soup. I watered it down some and then added more onion, garlic and dill to flavor it, and ended up with just enough soup for each person to have two bowls. Needless to say, the soup did not last the night, so today, everyone was hungry again with no ready-made food available. And I haven't had time to make any bread but the soda bread, so I need to bake regular whole-wheat bread tonight.

It's hard to look into the fridge and not see much food there. But we had a bit of stew meat thawed out in the meat drawer, and a few smaller carrots left over from my garden foraging the day before, so again I turned to my Irish cookbook. There's a stew recipe that you make from stew meat chunks and carrot chunks, and it fit perfectly the materials I had available. I had one onion left, since I haven't been anywhere to buy onions over the past couple of weeks, but that and some garlic went into the stew. And then we needed a can of Guinness. A can of Guinness! Not something we happened to have sitting around--like my homemade meatloaf, they don't tend to hang around in the house long on the rare occasions we have them. But there was some other kind of beer that hadn't been gotten into for months--not quite what was wanted, but reasonable. So we used it in the recipe in place of the Guinness. It'll probably be great. Anyway, once again we're about to have a feast made from almost nothing. Oh, and I do have a small crock pot of beans cooking, so we can make more of those burritos we liked.

When I look at that near-empty fridge, I have to remember that there's actually more food than it looks like--it's just that we have to cook almost everything from scratch now, so there's fewer of the ready-made things that we used to take for granted. And it might also be that the from-scratch food is so much more delicious that it's just getting decimated where before, leftovers used to sit for a week or more. Now they get eaten up within a couple of days. Just a couple of days in the life of a family on a tight budget and a couple of kids on growth spurts.