All These Beans

I love to plant a garden in the spring and tend and admire the garden as it grows, but I want to nurture my love of garden harvest so I will actually go out there in the heat and face the itchy weeds, insects, and sunburn and pick the food!  It's pretty easy with foods that go straight to my mouth, like tomatoes and berries.  But with green foods, like beans, that require picking, stringing, breaking, and cooking or preserving I have to talk myself into the task.  Come on Rain, get out there and pick those beans!  

Saturday was the day I psyched myself up for a bean harvest.  The sweet potato vines look so pretty.  I hope they make a sweet potato. 

Look - a tomato!  

I thought for sure the cucumber vine wasn't going to fruit, but I think I just overlooked these three cukes hidden behind the beans.  They were whoppers!  

Sunflowers from when I would spread bird seed in the winter garden so the chickens would scratch up the weeds.  The bees are loving the flowers. 

Not a bad garden haul, huh?  The onions in the bag in the foreground are from those I harvested and dried in the greenhouse. 

I used some deer tenderloin given to us by our good neighbor, from a deer harvested near our house, plus the onions and green beans from the garden, and chicken stock from our own birds, and made a soup in the instant pot.   Those onions are potent!  My eyes were leaking like crazy as I peeled the onions.  The soup was delicious, which is good encouragement for using more beans.  

Sunday found me out at the wall of green bean plants, again, to harvest the last of the beans from the sunny side of the trellis.  I put three giant bags of green beans in the refrigerator, but I need to string and break them, and figure out how to preserve them.  Maybe I'll just eat them!  

Mustard Greens

This is a mustard green leaf.  This is the first season I've ever tried to grow and eat mustard greens, so I'm still intrigued by this vegetable.  Apparently, mustard greens count as a cruciferous vegetable, and are packed with nutrition.  Folks on the interweb are saying that of all the cruciferous vegetables, mustard greens might even have the most good stuff to prevent cancer.  Cool.   

We have been making slow progress to move the saturated bales of straw from around the house foundation.  Brandon put four or five bales in the greenhouse, and I used the little patties of wet and moldy straw to pave around the beds of greens.  They work wonders to smash down all the weeds and make a nice place to walk, although it's heavy work to move them.  I can only lift a thin wedge in each hand, so I have to make lots of trips to the bale and back.  

I like the way the mustard green leaves grow broad and flat, and they are easy to pick off of each plant.  

I swish them in water to make sure there isn't any gritty dirt on the leaves.  Gritty greens are the worst!

I can wad up a big bunch and sort of roll it into a tube, and slice the tub into thin strips with my knife.  This makes nice cut pieces to cook, so no one has to chew a whole leaf at one time.  Someone asked me if I really eat six cups of greens a day.  Yes, I try too.  I measured this mess of greens, and it was eight cups raw.  Brandon and I each ate half, so just for dinner we ate four cups each, and that's not even including the onion and radish that I cooked with it.  

The onions and radish cook for a while in the coconut oil before I add the chopped mustard greens, which take only moments to cook down. 

For this batch I added sea salt, onion and garlic powder, and big drizzle of Braggs liquid amino acids, which gives it a soy sauce flavor. 

My twelve year old self would have been disappointed with mustard greens, baked chicken, and sweet potato for dinner, but the middle aged me thinks its delicious!  

Naps, and Greens with Eggs

I caught Brandon and Wendigo taking a nap in the grass.  They share the ability to catch a nap just about anywhere.  Sometimes I forget how big Wendigo is, and then I see her with Brandon and realize that she is a huge dog!  

I'm pretty sure all my animals nap the whole time I'm at work, and then when they hear my car pull in the driveway they wake up and go into frantic for food mode.  If I didn't know better, I would think they were starving all day long and they barely made it until the evening without wasting away.  They give themselves away on the weekends, because I see them lounging in the sun and relaxing the day away instead of foraging for food.  Their stomachs are on timers, and they know when breakfast and dinner is served.  

The greenhouse greens grew beautifully, despite never being thinned.  I have dense rows of green leaves, and have been able to try cooked turnip greens, radish greens, and even mustard greens, plus lettuce salads with dill, onion, pea shoots, and radish.  

Some of the radishes split in the center, most likely from uneven watering.  The greenhouse gets so warm that the raised beds dry out easily, and then I soak them with the garden hose.  It's funny to me to water the garden while it's raining.  The beds on the side of the greenhouse get plenty of rain, but the bed in the center still needs me to water it.  

The bunching onions that Tamara shared with me have been making tasty small onions for months already.  I've been chopping them for the skillet or a salad.  Tamara, how do I save some bulbs for planting later? 

Isn't the green leaf lettuce pretty?  It's so tender it practically melts in my mouth.  Because the plants are so dense, the under leaves are pale and thin.  I've found a few snails lately, so I'm being aggressive with my harvest.  I don't want to share with the snails. 

My asparagus bed is a weedy mess, and most of the spears have grown into fronds, but I still manage to find a few to add to our garden harvest.  If I pick and prep the food, and have it ready in the refrigerator, we usually find a way to work it into our meals.  We have a health goal of eating six to eight cups of vegetables each day, so we really have to include vegetables in every meal to get it all in.  Breakfast salad is actually pretty good!  

I like to chop a bit of everything...

and cook until tender in coconut oil in an iron skillet...

then add a giant bowl of chopped greens and cook just until it wilts.  I like the turnip greens, but they have stalky stems that I have to remove or Brandon accuses me of feeding him sticks.  The mustard greens don't have the stems, and make nice flat leaves that are easy to stack and chop.  The flavor of the mustard greens if more intense, but we like it.  When I served the first batch Brandon said, "These greens have the taste of the greens I remember hating when I was a kid."  Ha! 

And of course, the final touch is to add eggs and stir until done.  If we don't make a plan for dinner, then it's likely we are having greens and eggs.  Again.  

Freezer Eggs

We are getting a lot of eggs these days.  From my sixteen hens, we get a dozen eggs a day! 

The chickens are loose to roam during the day, and I feed them organic chicken feed and table scraps.   A forty pound bag of organic chicken pellets costs nearly twenty-five dollars, and lasts about a week, which means I've got at least three dollars and fifty cents invested in each dozen, just in chicken food.  

Brandon and I routinely eat three eggs each, for breakfast.  Plus, we cook with a few eggs every day and boil eggs for snacks.  Even with gifting eggs to friends on occasion, we have a surplus.  I've been encourage to sell my extras, but I would prefer to find a way to preserve the glut now, so that when the chickens take their annual winter break, we don't have to do without.  

I just started freezing the extra eggs.  I crack them into a bowl, mix them up, and pour them into a quart size freezer bag, and place them in the freezer.  My plan is to lay the bags flat, so they can stack easily in the freezer, like I do with chicken stock. 

I read that eggs frozen this way will last for a year.  I hope they will be tasty enough for our breakfast scrambles.  If I can manage to put a few bags of eggs in the freezer every week this spring, we may be able to have eggs all winter long!  

The Journey to Normal

It used to strike me as weird when someone would refer to their food journey.  Or their health journey.  But, when I reflect on this delicious homemade pepperoni pizza, I realize that I could say Brandon and I have been on a journey for our health.  This seems true to me because there is no universally understood route to get to health, and there are so many different directions given for a healthy lifestyle and diet, that it's a journey just to try them all and find one that works.  

This is a pizza crust made with cauliflower!  It's Dr. Berg's recipe, which is two cups of shredded cauliflower, two cups of shredded cheese, and two eggs.  It's pretty good, too!  

Brandon and I have journeyed from the standard american diet and various attempts at weight loss diets, to vegetable smoothies, then to juice fasting, super foods, an elimination diet, gluten and sugar free, low carbohydrate, and now we've stumbled into the realm of the ketogenic diet.  

This pizza turns out even better when cooked on parchment paper on a pizza stone, although we enjoyed scraping it out of a cast iron skillet and eating it with a fork several times before we invested in the right tools for the job.  

I think some of the pathways we took on this journey were not the right destination, ultimately, but they were important steps for us to take.  For instance, I think juice fasting was the thing that made us both realize that we could feel noticeably better by changing how we ate.  Sounds obvious, right?  But until you experience it, it's hard to understand.  It was probably the first time that I stopped eating my old favorites, and didn't have cravings and weakness.  I felt flush with life, and it helped me understand that my body has the potential to feel much better when crammed with vegetable nutrition.  Of course, you can't live on juice forever.  What to eat, then?   

The elimination diet was also a big step in this journey for us.  Not just because we systematically tested different foods, and eliminated foods that triggered uncomfortable feelings in our bodies, but because for two entire months we had to cook all of our own meals from scratch.  If you had asked me before the elimination diet, I would have said we cooked most of our own food, and we weren't eating convenience food very often.  Ha.  We get busy or in a hurry, just like everyone, but during the elimination diet we forced ourselves to plan ahead, and to turn down temptations.  It was good practice, and it's been easier ever since.  

So here we are now, making our own pizza crust with vegetables, scarfing salad by the box, and loading up on saturated fats.  This ketogenic diet approach has us eating unlimited vegetables plus lots of eggs, meat, cheese, avocados, olives, butter, and healthy oils.  We're trying to eat six to ten cups of greens a day!  We're avoiding most carbohydrates, including fruit and alcohol.  

Even though so many people tell me that eating saturated fat is good for me, it's still makes me wonder when I see so many government approved diet plans that say to avoid saturated fat.  But look at the results from my recent physical - I'm normal!  No one ever tells me I'm normal!  Actually, my triglycerides have never been lower, and my good HDL cholesterol has never been higher.  I've also lost nearly twenty pounds since I was at the doctor for my physical last year.  

When I went for an appointment for some new glasses last week (Brandon sat on mine!), they said my blood pressure was text book - 120 over 62.  The doctor bragged about how healthy my eyes were, and when I told him that years ago an eye doctor said there were little bubbles in my eyes that people who get diabetes have, this new doctor scoffed.  He said, "your eyes are perfectly healthy inside and out."  

It's much more fun to visit a doctor and be told I'm normal, text book, and perfectly healthy.  It's encouraging, and it makes me want to continue this journey.  

Still Talking About Food

Brandon and I are well into our third week on the elimination diet.  It's been quite an adventure in eating.  We've had to let go of our old standby meals, and are learning a new way to cook and new foods to enjoy.  Instead of oatmeal and eggs for breakfast, we've started to look forward to quinoa and fruit, with some coconut oil and honey.  

Lunches are no longer sandwiches and soups, but things like salads, salmon, and sweet potato.  Luckily, we like lots of different foods, and we enjoys salads and vegetables, so eating the delicious foods we are allowed to have is not a challenge.  The challenge is planning for preparation of the foods.  It takes five minutes to throw together a sandwich, but it takes an hour to bake a sweet potato, make salad dressing, etc., so we can't wait until we are hungry or it's time to leave for work before we start to fix lunch.  We have to plan ahead.  Planning ahead is not my favorite thing, but I'm determined to do this.  

By the end of the second week of the diet, we were both feeling pretty good.  Our digestion was calm, the caffeine withdrawal symptoms had abated, and we both lost some weight, which feels good.  

We've been growing our own broccoli sprouts, and our good neighbor gave us bags of frozen fish that he caught while he was on vacation.

Our sweet tooth cravings have gone.  Actually, we don't crave anything really.  Sometimes I wish for cheese, of all things, but not in desperate way.  Brandon wants coffee in the afternoon, and I think it's the ritual of it that he misses more than the caffeine.

I made a variation on one of the desserts from the book.  The crust of these funny looking little green tarts is unsweetened coconut flakes, hemp seeds, dates, and salt mixed in the food processor, and the filling is avacado, coconut oil, honey, and lime juice blended.   The crust is smooshed into a cupcake paper, and then the filling is poured on, and it sets up in the freezer.  We really liked the crust, but the filling was just okay.  Still, it was nice to have a healthy dessert type snack waiting in the freezer for whenever we wanted one.  

We went to a cookout over the weekend, and it was our first foray into society with food restrictions.  We brought our own lamb burgers and salad, but couldn't enjoy the lovely barbecued pork ribs, home made cake, or even the special mixed drinks.  That was a bummer.  Also, we felt even more like weirdo's than we normally do, because you can't say no to all the food and drinks without some explanation.  Everyone seems like they are used to folks with food restrictions these days, but it does seem rude not to partake of the hosts food.  But, we don't want to miss out on the whole party, so we go, and we take our food, and we are those people.  At least for a few more weeks, anyway.        

Farm Food

Brandon and I find ourselves talking about food more these days.  Not just because we are trying to grow some of our own food, but also because the consequences of our food choices have more direct impact on us than in days past.  Do you remember the good ole days, when our internal organs ignored us as much as we ignored them?  These days, we're getting feedback from some of our organs, including a gall bladder that has decided to finally protest the years of being ignored.  Since this irritated gall bladder has limited language skills, we've been trying to guess what it's problem is, which hasn't been working very well.   The doctors, when asked, get a gleam in their eyes and start sharpening their surgical knives.  Eek!  It's time to get serious about this, so we're opting for an elimination diet in the hopes that we can calm it down, and figure out which foods are causing the upset.  I haven't read the book yet, but I get the feeling we're embarking on a two month food journey that's going to keep us busy in the kitchen.  

Thankfully, the elimination diet we've chosen to follow doesn't put garlic on the "no" list.  I harvested a whole basket full from our garden this week.  We also have plenty of kale and chard, and have green beans on the way.  When we saw that tomatoes are not on the list of foods that can be eaten during the second phase of the elimination diet, we laughed at the rows of beautiful tomato plants in our garden.  Oh well.  If you want to see the yes and no list of foods for the detox phase, click here.  

Unfortunately, we suspect one of the foods that gets the gall bladder riled up is eggs.  Doh!  Since Brandon hasn't been eating eggs, and I have ten laying hens, I had fun boiling a bunch and pickling them with salt, vinegar, onions, and dill.   They should be ready in a few weeks.  Not that we get to eat them...stupid gall bladder.

One food that we have produced on our little farm is chicken.  The frying pan special roosters are at the right age for harvest, and Brandon and I put six of them in the refrigerator recently, and have nine more to go.  

I spent more time butchering the meat into separate cuts this time, which makes it easier for meal planning when I don't have to cook an entire bird.  These birds were raised on half organic chicken food and half the regular, toxin coated kind.  The elimination diet encourages using all organic ingredients.  We've decided to eat our own chicken, but I'm encouraged to grow the next batch on all organic food.  I need to learn to grow my own chicken food, right? 

For the first time since we began learning how to grow our own meat, we were able to eat a chicken dinner on the same day we butchered.  I'm not sure what kind of progress we're making, but I think it's progress!  

Chard cooked with onions in a little coconut oil is one of my new favorite side dishes.  I have just a handful of plants growing in the greenhouse, but they've been very generous with their leaves.  

I consider the herb spiral garden that is right outside the back door a total success!  It's so much fun to step right out the door and pick a handful of herbs for our meals.  Thanks to generous friends and some success with starting my own plants from seeds, I've got basil and holy basil to spare, and even enough sage, thyme, and oregano to play with.