Snapshots of Vermont

The Dorset Farmer's Market, where you will likely find us every Sunday morning for the duration of our stay in VT. I am so pleasantly surprised by both the variety and quality of the products here, this market didn't even exist when I last lived here!

It has been a busy few weeks since arriving back in Vermont! I have been meaning to share pictures and stories for days and days and days now but things keep popping up that pull me away from my computer. I've hardly had the chance to write or work on any of my projects lately, but I think things are finally starting to mellow out now that the chaos of this big transition back to the east coast is wearing off. My grandfather come's home tomorrow after nearly six weeks at the hospital and recovery care center in Rutland from a tick-born virus called Anaplasmosis, a rare disease that has recently been introduced to Vermont thanks to global warming making the past few winters in Vermont too mild to kill the tic population with the vigorous force it once did. So when we found this natural bug spray at the farmer's market and were told that it also repels tics, we grabbed a few bottles to pass around to family members. With all the gardening and berry picking we are doing, I'm glad we have this stuff around.

One hour of strawberry picking at Dutton's meant a good boost of vitamin D and a whole lot of fresh fruit for us.

Anyway, visiting my grandfather, and driving my grandmother to visit him has been an every-other-day occurrence since I arrived and it has meant a LOT of time in the car, especially when combined with all the other adventures we've embarked on. It's been worth it, though, to see my grandfather's face light up when he gets visitors and I'd happily continue to make the trip for as long as needed. He has been quite anxious, however, to get home and join us for many a meal cooked by Dylan, in fact he's been talking about Dylan's cooking nearly every other time we've come up to visit, in fact, I think it's been a sort of light at the end of the tunnel for him considering how abysmal the food is where he is staying. It baffles me how something designed to be a "recovery care center" can serve the exact food that likely landed many of the patients in it's care. How they expect to help anyone recover when they rarely serve fresh fruits and veggies and most meals come from a can or is cooked in the microwave is beyond me. So we snuck in some of the strawberries we picked at Dutton's pick-your-own berry field in Newfane, VT on our last visit.

My sister searching for the perfect strawberries to bring home for shortcakes, jam, ice cream, snacking, and yogurt...yum!

So many sweet, summer strawberries...

Since last time I posted, Dylan has returned to me in VT (hooray!) after a very long week away, and immediately got himself two interviews and subsequent job offers. Today he start's his first day cooking at the Reluctant Panther Inn and Restaurant in Manchester. He is excited to get back in the kitchen, although I'm still hoping he gets some day shifts so he's around for dinner at our house sometimes. We have all been enjoying Dylan's cooking at my mom's house since he's been back and are sad not to have him around as much at night time, but I am excited to go visit him at the Panther once he gets settled in. I've never been there are he said the just opened a new raw bar out on the patio and I checked out the menu, the cocktails sound quite tasty.

While Dylan was waiting for call backs after submitting his resume, we spent a lot of time in the kitchen together making all sorts of goodies. It's so nice to have him back, and not just for the upgrade to our home-dining experience, a week was a long time to go without him! My grandmother has joined us for dinner a lot lately, so she doesn't have to eat alone, and so we made her favorite, lamb, which we found farm-fresh and local at the Sunday Farmer's Market in Dorset, which Dylan served with a straight-from-our garden mint compote he made, alongside a bed of rice and sauteed kale. It was so delicious that I completely forgot to take a picture before devouring it. Luckily, at Dylan's next meal, I remembered to grab my camera before digging in to this tasty treat of fresh asparagus from the Someday Farmstand down the road topped with duck egg hollandaise next to tri-colored quinoa (my new favorite) and chopped maple sausage sauteed with carrots and onions. We have all been eating like queens since Dylan's return.

As if chopping all those strawberries wasn't enough, on Friday night we also whipped up an amazing quiche with the egg whites left over from hollandaise (and about 6 more whole eggs) and the rest of our maple sausage, which Dylan de-cased and crumbled, sauteing it with a handful of fresh tarragon and thyme from the garden and steamed spinach, also from the garden. We topped it with West River Creamery's Farmhouse Jack cheese, courtesy of our favorite Sunday market. I'm sorry to say I also forgot to photograph the quiche, but take my word for it, this was the best quiche ever. We didn't stop with the quiche either, Dylan also boiled up some beets he found laying around in the fridge and we enjoyed them chopped and placed atop a bed of our own garden-fresh arugula with just a touch of salt and pepper and a good coating of olive oil. Once we were done with that, we moved on to jam making. Dylan had chopped and sugared a bunch of rhubarb from the garden earlier in the week so we decided to finally put it to use and combine it with strawberries for a batch of jam. We ended up with 12 jars of deliciously sweet strawberry rhubarb jam which I have since put on everything, including the strawberry oat pancakes my mom made all weekend.

I love when the moon shines bright in the late afternoon sun.

In addition to all the food related activities, we also managed to get out and explore the Stratton snow-making pond, a favorite swimming spot from my late adolescent years which my sister has also been frequenting. Dylan had never been so after our first failed attempt at strawberry picking (our (no-longer) usual spot was closed), we headed out for a swim. The sky was beautiful, the air was warm, and the water was cold. I didn't swim but Anna and Dylan went in for a dip while I took lots of pictures so I could share this beautiful swimming spot with all of you out there wherever you are. We walked around the path circling the pond three or four times, breathing in the mountain air, listening and watching for the bull frogs near the lily fronds and filling our hearts with Southern Vermont. It was a lovely way to greet the evening and we followed it with a quick stop at our favorite local take-out spot, Cilantro's, for delicious and quality burritos which we devoured ravenously the moment we got home.

Snapshots of April

My favorite monkey pod tree near Ho' Okena beach park.

April has been a busy month for us. A lot has happened and there are still 9 days left before May, our last month here. Hard to believe. Anyway, let me see if I can catch you up on what we've been up to out here in hot, hot Hawaii while spring is starting to take over back east. First of all, we booked our flight home, leaving here on Thursday, May 30th and arriving in Boston on Tuesday morning bright and early after a red-eye flight from Seattle. Long lay over, huh? Well we decided that since it was actually cheaper to stop over in Seattle, we'd make a 5 day layover in the city we called home just a few months ago. Be prepared Seattle folks, we are so excited to see everyone again before heading back east for good!

Anyway, our friend Jodi who lives in the pole house is a much better photographer than I am and she captured a few great moments from Dylan's birthday celebration that I'd like to share with you:

Dylan serves a few of our younger guests up at the pole house bar while I help little K take a peek at the French onion soup.

Toasting Dylan's birthday with Brenna, whose living room we occupy for our potluck gatherings, and a few other friends. That's Ali next to her husband Pete and their little one Phoenix who welcomed a new baby boy to the farm family earlier this week. Paul and Heather, our gracious and wonderful hosts are the heads you see in the bottom right corner of the picture.

Dylan and Daniel modeling their new aprons :) Daniel, Brenna's husband, is our resident farm fermenting fanatic and made the most delicious mango wine vinegar recently. He makes awesome kimchi and pro-biotic packed fermented hot sauce.

 In other news, Dylan tried his hand at surfing last week! He loved it but despite the massive amounts of sunscreen and surf shirt, he ended up looking like a lobster again, had sore muscles for days, and scraped the skin off a few of his toes from crashing into the rocks. He learned that surfing is a lot harder than it looks, requires a LOT of arm and core strength just to get out to the waves, let alone hop up and balance on the board. He had a great time though and I had a blast watching from the beach. Luckily I managed to snap a few pictures to share with you:

Dylan gets ready to paddle out with Daniel for his first ever surf lesson!

Riding the wave back to shore, Dylan said he was not at all prepared for how much surfing hurts your ribs. Looks fun to me!

Not a bad spot to set up camp, huh?

Just a week after this group outing to Pine Trees, a poorly named beach since it features exactly zero pine trees, the whole farm crew decided to gather here once again for a weekend of surfing and camping on the beach. This was my kind of camping. Most people backed their trucks up to the sand and slept set up camp in the beds of their vehicles, using big pole tents to shade all the food and beer. The air was warm with a light breeze, there was a gorgeous sunset and the moon lit up the beach beautifully. Dylan and I walked up and down the sand with no flashlight needed, the moon a more than sufficient nightlight. I dipped my toes in the midnight waters of the Pacific Ocean while Dylan watched the red-eye flights take off from Kona International Airport just a few miles up the beach. We fell asleep to the sound of the waves and slept on a soft bed of sand, mattress pads, and 2 fluffy comforters with a single top sheet providing all the warmth we needed. Car camping on the beach is my kind of camping. I could do that every weekend. Oh and did I forget to mention the two whales playing and leaping in the setting sun just off shore? Amazing.

Heather and Paul's VW van transformed into the heart of the whole car camping adventure, that thing has EVERYTHING!

My camera wasn't powerful enough to catch the dark deep pink shade of the sun as it touched the water, but it definitely did justice to the warm yellow sky as it began to drop toward the waves.

Can you see why we were so tempted to stay on for another year? It is going to be mighty difficult to say good-bye to HI.

Just a regular afternoon harvest from the garden

In addition to all the fun and adventures as of late the farm has been keeping us awfully busy, though I can hardly complain because it means we also get to be busy in the kitchen. This week we tasted our ginger-turmeric beer, which was disappointingly unfizzy and the turmeric overpower the ginger a bit too much. All in all, it was a good learning experience and I know we'll get it right with the next batch. In other news, we made another delicious batch of flour wraps and I actually made the dough this time! Dylan told me I earned my "we" in this story and I don't want to brag or anything, but we made a beautiful, soft, and basically perfect batch of 1 dozen wraps. If only I had taken a picture... oh well, I do have pictures of some recent harvests.

Since everyone was at the beach this weekend we came home to a very full garden. This is just what I harvested today, there are still plenty more where these came from. The garden has been booming the past few weeks, there is so much food!

Gecko wants some kimchi!

The beets started popping out of the ground this week, giving us more than enough to make a few bags of baked beet chips (I'll share the recipe when we make them, gotta test it out first). Dylan was busy putting the eggplants to use in another batch of caponata, stewed and canned two big jars of tomatoes, and loaded the Marlin Ceviche for this week's South American themed potluck with these beautiful red chilies. We've been snacking on beautiful watermelon radishes and Baba Ganoush all week and made the most epic and entirely farm-made breakfast wraps. We started another batch of kimchi, which is quickly becoming a beloved staple food in our diet, and I bought Dylan another Kalama's burger since he spent all day yesterday working down at the beach for our friends who own a  surf shop with kayak tours. Naturally he didn't pack himself a lunch so I grabbed burgers (Ahi again for me) and walked down to surprise him with some food and company. Turns out, the walk down to the bay is a lot shorter and a lot less steep than I thought and I'm mad at myself for being scared off my warnings of the heat. At least there are still 5 weeks to take advantage!

Let's hope mama duck Sasha can adequately protect her little duckling!

In other news, our lady duck, Sasha hatched a duckling and it is so cute and fluffy! We are hoping the baby survives the next few days around the male duck, apparently the males eat the ducklings and the mama ducks aren't always very good at preventing it. Talk about harvesting the male duck this week has begun and Dylan has been asked if he's interested in taking part so he can learn how to do it. More updates on that whole ordeal next time. In the mean time, how cute is this little duckling? Here's hoping we get to the big duck before he get's to the baby!

The Real Garden Burger

This week we brought some new life to the main garden. A bunch of the brassicas were taken over by aphids so we harvested and pulled all the broccoli and cauliflower plants and bunch of the kale so we could replenish the soil with nutrients. Because so many of the same family of veggies had been planted in the same beds they attracted too many of the same kinds of bugs. All the plants began to suffer save for a few very strong kale plants which we kept. So once all the old plants were ripped out we did a bit of soil repair. About two weeks ago we all got together and planted a bunch of starts, so once the soil was ready we added them to the ground along with some radishes and carrots which needed to be planted directly in the beds.

In a few short weeks we will have tons of delicious new veggies, and because we planted them in alternating bunches we can hopefully avoid the same infestation problem. Anyway, while this means new foods to cook with in the future (I am especially looking forward to the radishes which only have a three week growing period), this means that we will have a much more limited selection of produce to work with until the new plants come in. Since we rely on the garden for the majority of our food each week, this means we are going to have to get creative with what we do have. Luckily, our hosts provide us with a bunch of bulk staple ingredients, such as brown rice, oils and vinegars, salt and pepper, red lentils, dried black and red beans, flour, and some canned tomatoes and tuna, along with a few other items.

Getting creative with food is a favorite activity of ours so naturally we welcomed the challenge. Like I so often do, I immediately turned to my Pinterest food board for ideas and stumbled upon a recipe for brown rice and black bean burgers. We have both of these things! I shouted, thrilled at the idea of anything burger-like, and tapped Dylan repeatedly on the arm until he turned to check out the recipe. After being with me for close to six years now, Dylan has become a fan of veggie burgers and right away he was on board with the recipe. We both agreed that this would make quite the nice addition to our weekly menu.

Dylan works the ingredients into a dough

From there we let our imaginations run wild at the thought of burgers and began to piece together Saturday’s adventure in the kitchen. With so many tomatillos on hand from the recent harvest (those also got torn out and replaced this week), we decided that we could turn some of them into ketchup to go with our burgers. Mayo goes great with veggie burgers too, and when we decided we wanted to treat ourselves Dylan shocked me by offering to make it since we have an unlimited supply of farm fresh eggs and olive oil from our hosts. Normally Dylan hates making emulsions, but since we’re trying not to spend any money and attempting to make everything from scratch with what we have, even he had a hard time justifying spending the almost 5$ it would cost us to buy a jar of the stuff.

We don’t have a working oven, just a two burner propane range until the oven gets repaired, so we had decided that we would buy the hamburger buns. Then our hosts decided to head out of town for the weekend and offered up their beautiful kitchen while they were away. We took full advantage. Dylan was so excited to test out some of the recipes we have been reading about in The River Cottage Bread Handbook and finally get some baking in. The stars were aligned this weekend we spent a marvelous day in the kitchen making the best veggie burger dinner we’ve had in a long time. Dylan got right to work when we returned from picking up some extra flour, yeast, and onions from the store. He started making English Muffin dough for Sunday morning (and the rest of the week’s) breakfast, along with another batch of dough for hamburger buns. Both doughs, the first simply water, salt, yeast, and flour, and the second requiring the same ingredients plus eggs and butter, were beautiful and we admired them as they proofed, rising at a visible rate in the humid Hawaiian heat.

With the doughs growing in the kitchen, we headed out to de-husk all the tomatillos so we could make our ketchup. Daniel, who lives in the other house on the property came down to dry the cocoa beans he had harvested at a friend’s farm and chat with us while we worked. It took close to an hour to husk many pounds of those purple and green things and Sasha the duck waddled over to see what we were up to just as we were finishing. While the tomatillos soaked in a vinegar water bath, Sasha followed us over to the chicken pen as she always does for the afternoon feeding. We got the ladies all fed in their coop, collected the day’s eleven eggs, and headed back to the kitchen to continue our work. The dough for the muffins, much lighter than without the egg and butter of the hamburger buns had more than doubled in size and was silky soft to the touch. Dylan rolled it out, cut it into squares, rounded the edges, and set them aside to proof again before being tossed onto the hot cast iron skillet just waiting to turn them into the beautiful and perfect treats they later became.

The hamburger buns were up next and went through the very same process. I rinsed off the tomatillos and loaded them up on a baking pan so we could roast them in the oven, the first step in our ketchup making endeavor. Dylan began chopping up the onions and roasted a few green chilies, also destined to join the tomatillos in a big pot to stew and become ketchup. Amidst all this, as if we didn’t already have our hands full, Dylan decided that one of the cauliflowers in the garden was so big that it needed to be picked right away. He headed out to grab it while I was instructed to research a marinated cauliflower recipe, so we could have it later in the week. I came up with this recipe courtesy of Martha Stewart and headed out to grab the parsley from the garden it required, along with an eggplant since we didn’t have the zucchini the veggie burger recipe called for. I also grabbed a few leaves of lettuce to go on our burgers and checked in on the black beans that we put in the crock pot that morning morning.

Bob Marley and the Wailers blasted from the speakers as we cooked away the afternoon. Dylan was quite busy with the ketchup and breads and my marinade was just waiting for the cauliflower to get a quick blanching, so I started wandering around the internet at the kitchen bar. Every time he bakes, Dylan gets this serious intensity about him, not in a “this is so stressful” kind of way, more of an “I am in the baking zone” and he remembers just how much he loves it. Back in Seattle when he was getting ready to leave the Confectional and was looking for a new job, we talked a lot about the idea of working for a bakery and though Dylan was all about it, there were no jobs available at the time. He did however end up at Ballard Pizza Co. which involved working with dough and this I think seemed to strengthen his interest in baking.

So as he worked with the dough we once again revisited the idea of Dylan as a baker. He handles the dough with such expert care and has just as much fun with the process as I have watching him work. So as we chatted, I did what I always do and began researching bakeries in our future home city after all of our travels and temporary housing is over this fall. I found a few interesting ones, including Big Sky Bread Company that grinds their own wheat, something that Dylan was super excited about, especially when I told him they use a stone grinder. Though I have no idea how that is different from whatever else is used to grind wheat, he seemed very impressed. We’ll definitely be practicing our bread making a lot more now and we will definitely be making a Portland trip or two to scope out the scene this summer while we’re living at my mom’s house in Vermont. It would be lovely to have Dylan home for dinner on a regular basis rather than at a restaurant most nights like in Seattle, so if any of you readers have baking connections in Portland, Maine keep us in mind!

Anyway, back to the kitchen. Where did I leave off? Oh yeah, blanching the cauliflower. At this point it was already six o’clock and the beans were not ready yet, the rice wasn’t even on the stove, and the ketchup had just begun to stew. We were starting to think we were never going to eat. At least the English Muffins were done and they were a work of art. I still cannot get over how perfectly they smelled, felt, and looked; just like the Thomas’s I’d always eaten when I was a kid, except better, of course, because Dylan made them. I immediately fell in love with these little round bready delights and my mouth watered at the thought of them tomorrow all grilled up and slathered with butter and the orange marmalade we made last week. When I finally did get to eat them for breakfast they were even better than expected. I had one with marmalade and one with maple butter and it tasted like the best maple doughnut I had ever had. We will certainly be making those again!

Back in the kitchen, our culinary adventure quickly kicked into high gear and in a matter of 30 minutes we had the rice simmering, another batch of onions diced and getting a quick saute along with the diced eggplant. I had the cauliflower dressed and packaged up, ready to chill in the fridge for the night, and was on to folding the laundry. Did I mention that we also were doing a few loads of laundry while all this was going on? I told you it was an epic day. So once the onions and eggplant had browned adequately, the black beans were added to the mix and the whole thing cooked some more. They needed a bit of salt and pepper but were otherwise turning out out to have quite a nice flavor already. We had high hopes for these veggie burgers.

While all this was happening on the stove-top, Dylan had the burger buns baking in the oven. They didn’t end up fluffing up as much as we had expected, perhaps they got a bit too much kneading or maybe the dough sat for too long, but either way it turned out to be a blessing in disguise. The buns were perfectly light and fluffy but thin enough so we didn’t end up with over-sized burgers and strong enough so they didn’t fall apart at all. Yet another baking success added to Dylan’s tally and another recipe to keep in our regular repertoire. Once the beans, onions and eggplant mixture was finished cooking, 2/3s of it went into the blender to form the sticky binding that would hold the rest of the ingredients together enough to form patties out of it all. Once they went through that final process and were all round and veggie burger like, Dylan fried them up crispy and they were ready to be dressed and enjoyed.

At this point it was about 8:30, the latest we have eaten dinner since we got here as Dylan is usually ready to fall asleep by then. We gave up on the idea of making mayo, saving that project for later day, and the ketchup still needed more time on the stove followed by a trip through the food processor and then the strainer so we gave up on having that with our first batch of burgers out of sheer hunger. Luckily, our hosts happened to have some ketchup and mustard on hand in the fridge so we used those to dress our homemade burgers and buns, added a little green leaf lettuce from the garden and admired our beautiful dinner and a full day’s worth of work in the kitchen. It was well worth the effort though because the burgers, though they didn’t hold together quite as well as the pre-packaged kind, were absolutely delicious. We still have plenty of burgers and buns left over and eventually we will get to the mayo and finish the ketchup and further enjoy our handmade meal. 
 
Now what else can we do with rice and beans while the new veggies grow, anyone out there have any ideas?