Eating our Pig - Seared Pork Chops

You may recall our excitement when we purchased a half hog from a local producer, Crooked Gap Farm, back in January. We talked all about what cuts we were getting, what a great deal it was, and how important it is to us to be able to support a small farmer. Then we haven't mentioned it in over three months. Well, don't worry, we've been eating from our half hog, just not necessarily writing about it. That can end today as we document what turned out to be a delicious and mostly local meal.

To start, we thawed out a package of bone-in Iowa Chops. These are a really nice cut, but it sometimes feels like we're stuck in a rut when it comes to pork chops. For some reason we always default to a bare-bones salt and pepper seasoned chop with a plain pan gravy. With nice pork, this can be tasty, but we figured we ought to know enough about cooking to be able to jazz it up a bit.

With that in mind, we headed out to the garden to see if anything was close to ripe yet. In our lettuce/spinach/radishes box, we were met with this kind of growth.

Those guys in the middle are the radishes we first planted on March 10th. Some of them are almost there, but they're just not quite to size to pick. But, did you know you can eat radish greens, too? That meant we got to have...

Our FIRST HARVEST of the year!!!

With a pair of scissors,we snipped off a leaf or two from each of the biggest and healthiest looking plants. As you can see, this didn't exactly amount to much - 1 ounce altogether. That's fine, since these were always intended to be a garnish or a side, and not a main part of the meal. But keep in mind if you do try radish or any other kind of green that they do cook down a lot, so this one ounce got pretty small by time we ate.

Also, if you have a batch of radishes with their tops, you might feel the leaves and wonder how on earth anyone could eat them. They're very prickly, which would probably be painful to eat raw. Rest assured, once they're cooked, those little spines are no longer discernible, and the greens feel just like spinach or kale.

So we had a vision of pork chops with a small batch of radish greens on top. From there, we just brainstormed with what was available, and what we've enjoyed in the past to make our "recipe." We ended up making pan-seared rosemary pork chops with sauteed radish greens and a sherry demi glace on a garlic cauliflower puree. If we ever open a restaurant, we'll certainly need to shorten that name! But though it sounds complicated, each piece is very simple and better yet, adaptable. Once you've got a few basic methods down, you won't even need a formal recipe. Let's get started!

First we chopped up about a half head of cauliflower. It's a little early yet for these to be in season in Iowa (except maybe with the aid of greenhouses?), so it's from California. We also smashed a few garlic cloves with the side of a knife, which is always fun. And since we don't have any homemade stock at the moment, we used some good boxed stuff. We threw the pieces into a pot, poured in just enough of a stock and water mix to cover them, and simmered.

Like so (but covered), for about 10 minutes or until the cauliflower pieces felt soft when poked with a fork.

Meanwhile, we got the pork out of the fridge, and sprinkled it with salt, pepper, and a lot of dry rosemary. Sadly, our rosemary plant from last year didn't survive a winter of neglect indoors, otherwise we might have had fresh rosemary available. We'll have to hope we're more responsible this year.

 It's actually good to let meat get to room temperature before you cook it, so we kept these guys on the counter for a bit while we got the cauliflower up to a boil. Aren't they beautiful chops?

Next it was time for the main action of the meal - the searing. The concept behind searing is to cook the outsides of the meat at a pretty darn high temperature to seal the juices in, then finish the cooking process either in the oven, or in this case, on the cooktop. You can brown cuts of meat okay in a regular nonstick pan, but for a real sear, we love our All-Clad. Basically, you get your pan plenty hot and throw in some sort of fat/oil - in this case a tablespoon-sized pat of butter per side. When you put the chops in, you should hear a nice sizzle.

The chops will probably stick where they are initially, which might freak you out a bit if you've never used a "non-nonstick" pan before. Don't worry, once each side sears properly, it should release and allow you to flip it. Sometimes it will need a little nudge, but it shouldn't end up being stuck too badly. If memory serves, this took about 3-4 minutes on a side.

By this time the cauliflower was nice and soft, so we pureed it in the blender. We didn't use all of the stock from the pot - just poured in enough to get the right consistency, little by little. It didn't take much blending to get the cauliflower very smooth.

Keep in mind that hot liquids like to expand/splatter when you blend them, so be sure to hold down the top of the blender as you run it. We like to throw a towel over the lid, and hold down on that, so any escaping liquid gets the towel and not your hands (ouch!).

So, a sprinkle of salt and the cauliflower puree was all set; the chops had now been seared on both sides, but the insides were probably still a touch rare. We pulled them out of the pan and deglazed it with a little bit of sherry wine (maybe a quarter cup - it was whatever we had left in the bottle). Here it's nice to grab a whisk and mix in any of the little tasty browned bits from the searing process to get them into the sauce. We had some red onion handy so we minced that and added it, plus enough stock to create a nice amount of sauce.

With that made and mixed up, we put the chops back in and simmered them a bit longer.

Again, with the lid on, when we werent't taking pictures. This took about another 5 minutes maybe.

Then it was time for our garden contribution - the radish greens! These are so easy. Heat some olive oil in a pan, throw in your greens (we tore them a bit to get better sized pieces), and stir them around. But keep an eye on them! It will literally take less than a minute or so to get them cooked down, and then you need to get them out of the pan to keep them from shrinking down to nothing.

These looked about ready. The last step was to add a little bit of a cornstarch slurry (corn starch plus a bit of cold water) to our pan sauce to thicken it up. You can use roux (flour and butter) if you have it, to feel more chef-y, but either method yields the same result. Our sauce was just a touch too thin, so a very small amount was needed to keep it from running everywhere.

Then it was time to plate! We put a good-sized dollop of the cauliflower puree in the center of the plate, placed a pork chop on top, and arranged the greens on the chop. We tried to be a little artsy, drizzling the sauce around the edge of the plate rather than on top, but it all gets mixed up when you eat anyway.

By the end of the process (forgiving the amateur photographer), it looked pretty fancy!

And it tasted amazing! It helps when you start with great ingredients, like woodland pastured pork, and home grown garden greens, but what a tasty dinner! We had just enough garlic to kick up the cauliflower puree, the rosemary flavor had seared into the perfectly cooked pork chop, and the radish greens added a touch of earthiness and bite. The demi glace was phenomenal; adding a little sherry to a plain pan gravy sure added a depth of flavor we don't always see in our sauces. Paired with a tasty Four Vines Naked Chardonnay, it made one delicious meal.

And that's part of the fun with cooking with fresh ingredients. We had no idea what we were going to do with our chops to liven them up, so we played with what we had. A puree under a cut of meat is a bit of a modern cooking cliche, but hey, it works. We've done it with sweet potatoes or turnips before, under anything from salmon to chicken. Once you know how to sear a piece of meat and either finish it in the sauce or in the oven, you can make pretty much anything. If it's in season, fresh, or looks great, why not give it a try and see if you like the result. It might not always work out, but when it does, it can be a hit right out of the park!

Space Invaders!

By this point, we've become pretty familiar with most of the yard as we've dug it up, planted seeds in it, or maintained it in some way or another. But one place that we haven't much dealt with yet is our back fence. From afar it looks like an overgrown row of shrubs and small trees, and from up close, well, it doesn't look much better. So yesterday morning we were strolling along, trying to figure out what to do back there, when our neighbor's nephew (the horticulturist we've mentioned before) appeared.

"Are you trying to figure out what you've got back there?" he asked. We had pretty much identified the whole thing as a mess, but accepted his help. He listed off a few plants, including mulberries, maples and wild raspberries, when he concluded with a chilling statement. "That right there is a Tree of Heaven."

In case you haven't met this beast, let us assure you, the Tree of Heaven, or Ailanthus, is nowhere near as pleasant as it sounds. Here's a description from the National Parks Service (link)

Tree-of-heaven is a fast-growing tree and a prolific seeder, that  can  take over sites, replacing native plants and forming dense thickets. Ailanthus  also produces chemicals that prevent the establishment of other plant species nearby. Its root system may be extensive and has been known to cause damage to sewers and foundations.

Also lovingly nicknamed the Ghetto Palm, this is an invasive species, not native to the US, and it has a history of choking out indigenous or desired plants. Oh, and if you cut into it, it gives off a smell of rancid peanut butter. Quite a charmer, really. And we had a major infestation of it.

We certainly didn't want to harbor an invasive fugitive on our half-acre, so our first thought was to cut it all down. Fortunately we did a little research online before we took action, because Tree of Heaven, again from the NPS, "resprouts vigorously from cut stumps and root fragments." If we'd taken our shears to it all, it would have just returned with a vengeance. That meant it was time to go nuclear.

You know we don't like chemicals in our garden or even in our lawn really.We're trying to garden organically, building up the soil with natural compost. But in a case like this, where the invader literally could pose a threat to all our plants, we had to take drastic measures.

Concentrated Glyphosate. You probably know it better as RoundUp, the herbicide that will kill almost any plant it touches. This particular product is 41% the actual herbicide, and in nearly any application, it would be significantly diluted. This was no ordinary application, however.

We needed to kill this tree dead and then some. So we weren't interested in just spraying the poison at the base or on the bark of the tree. We needed a direct route to the roots, and the best way there is through the plant's own phloem and xylem. So we did end up using our pruning shears...

Followed immediately by a thorough application of the herbicide. Notice the use of protective gloves to keep this dangerous poison off our hands. If you ever are forced to use this stuff, be very careful!

The brush method worked well for all the smaller shoots and suckers, but unless we killed the parent tree, there would continue to be more. This became complicated because of two factors. 1) The parent tree was about 8 inches in diameter so the loppers couldn't possibly cut through it. And 2) It was literally growing through the fenceline, so ownership of the tree is a bit of a gray area. We opted to go for the hack-and-squirt method from the safety of our side of the fence.

We drilled a row of holes with the biggest drill bit we had, deep into the center of the tree. We angled these slightly down to ensure that they could be filled.

With the holes neatly drilled, we then proceeded to pour the concentrated glyphosate into each until they couldn't hold any more. This is a pretty big tree, and it's possible one dose won't do it in, so we also left plenty of room for a return attack. Hopefully this process is successful, and we can rid ourselves once and for all of this stinking (literally), invasive pest.

Keep in mind, this was truly a desperate effort, and our hand was forced into using chemical means by the vicious nature of the invader. We were loath to buy an herbicide, but truly felt we had no other choice to protect our homestead and the surrounding ecosystem. We won't make a habit of using this stuff, so don't expect to see much more written about it here. We'll be back to organics by our next post - promise!

Planting the Perrenials!

One of our favorite things arrived the other day. Greg came home from work, and there it was, leaning against the porch. A brown paper package, tied up with, well, staples. But close enough! This package had Miller Nurseries printed on the outside, which led to even more excitement, because that meant our perrenials had arrived.

Most of the plants we're growing in our garden are annuals; that is, they grow over the course of one year, produce leaves/fruits/roots/whatever over that time, then go to seed to propagate new plants the following year. With the first frosts of winter, these plants typically die off, relying on the seeds to carry on. Perrenials, on the other hand, can survive winters, and keep producing food from the same plant for many years. Like annuals, many perrenials can also be grown from seed, but this takes time. Many of these plants require several years to mature to a harvestable state, so buying plants already started gives you a major head start.

We unwrapped our package to find a giant tangle of roots, consisting of some of the most popular perrenials you can grow in our climate. We'd ordered some of everything, including strawberries, rhubarb, asparagus, and raspberries.

The nursery we ordered from (and many others) made a point to ship our plants at the proper time to plant in our hardiness zone, so once we'd opened the bag, we knew we were ready to get them in the ground. They also shipped the plants with damp roots and some moist packing material but even so, it's still a good idea to soak the roots before planting. We filled up a couple old 5-gallon buckets with water, and submerged the roots for up to an hour to get them ready.

From there, there's really not much to it. If you've got a plant, you basically need to dig a hole, put the plant in the hole, and fill in the hole. Most of ours went into raised beds like we've shown before, ones that had been prepped for these plants. We filled our boxes with a mix of topsoil, coconut coir and compost to create a healthy, fluffy soil mixture. That's especially important with perrenials because this is the only opportunity to work up the soil. Once they start growing, they're staying where they are.

The asparagus crowns were planted the deepest (as recommended by the nursery). Here's how they all looked lined up in a trench in the raised bed.

Up close, they look even cooler. A touch reminiscent of the face-hugger from Alien, no?

The only plants that didn't get the raised bed treatment were the raspberries. Raspberries grow rather tall, so they might shade the garden. Also, they like to send out "runners" - shoots that grow from the existing canes, which leads to a dense berry patch that we didn't want to invade the rest of the garden. We situated the berries just beyond the garden itself. First we had to tear out a long narrow patch of sod where we eventually want our berry hedge to grow.

Then it's back to digging holes and putting plants into them. Raspberries are to be buried an inch or two deeper than they were grown at the nursery.

When you're finished, you end up with a row of twigs sticking out of the ground. Trimming these off to a height of 3-4" above the ground is supposed to help stimulate fresh growth. We'll probably also want to put down some mulch between the canes to help discourage weed growth. Cuz as you can see, we have a lot of them back there.

 And that's all there is to it, in a blog post anyway. In real life, this was a pretty solid days work of digging, placing and watering. But with any luck we'll eventually be rewarded with crops of raspberries, strawberries, rhubarb and asparagus. And now that the hard work's been done, these crops should keep coming back, year after year.

We Have Met the Enemy...

And he is some kind of jerk, honestly.

(Ed. Note: Stacia is away this week on a work-related non-vacation, so we are temporarily the all-Greg show. We apologize for this and will be back to our regular staff by the weekend.)

So this afternoon I set off into the backyard to putter around the garden for a bit, and couldn't help but notice the lovely carpet of light purple flowers that had recently sprung up. As we may have noted in the past, the portion of the backyard nearest to the house is very well shaded, to the point that grass can barely grow there. Great, I thought, some sort of ground cover to fill in for the grass. It looked a bit like this.

A little while later, I was weeding and was naturally closer to the ground. As I came upon one of these plants, I decided to take a closer look.

A few purple flowers, but then I noticed those kind of fluted, bugle-shaped leaves. A bit of a shudder came over me, for I had just finished weeding a particularly weed-infested bed, and I was pretty sure I recognized this guy. As we had turned the soil over in these beds and busted things up, a lot of weeds had gotten buried and were only now starting to poke up through. Some, with very similar looking leaves, would almost always snap off at the stem rather than giving up any roots. To get the whole weed, you had to really dig down crazy deep. How deep? Well, here's one from the soon-to-be broccoli bed.

Not too bad, right? No flowers yet, and truly much more compact.Well, take a look at the monster root structure on this beast, and check out the size of the hole it took to remove it.

Yowza. I had never met this creature before, but it seems to be something comparable to the aptly named creeping charlie. Its leaves aren't quite a match (per some internet research), but it shares those similar flowers and the unpleasant ability to reroot or regrow from pieces of root. In any case, I double-checked, and we've got the regular creeping charlie too.

(Ed. Note: They're actually wild violets, as friend Discknits pointed out in the comments. Thanks!)

So if you're not willing to poison your yard or garden courtesy of Monsanto (and we're not), you're left with two options, apparently. Use borax, which is "natural" but still really toxic, or just weed really well, making sure to get the whole root. Today I did the latter in the broccoli bed, and I'll have to check back in a few days to see if any of them have grown back, like a plant version of Reptilicus (awesome movie, by the way). We intend to eat out of this soil in the future, so we're really hesitant to put down any herbicides, natural or otherwise. We shall see in a few days just how much of a pain this plant is going to be. I am hopeful, but I'm bracing myself for the possibility of a drawn out battle.

But not all our flowers are bad! Just this week, some other "volunteer" plants sprung up in the front beds, apparently put in place by one of the former owners of our house. This one's even prettier, and I'm pretty sure I won't have to fight with it. :)

Have you had creeping charlie? Can we beat it, or are we doomed to a future of pretty flowers that are determined to destroy our garden?

March (Gardening) Madness

As you may recall from our last post, we said our farm has been growing in more than one way. And while it's hard to top the excitement of seeing plants sprouting up where you've sown a few tiny seeds, recent developments come pretty darn close. We've been working like crazy the past few weekends to take advantage of the mild weather and get most of our garden beds prepped for the upcoming season. But to truly appreciate the magnitude of where we are, we had to take a look back at where we came from.

Our first garden bed, built and placed last October. The former owner's playset is still standing in our way. We took that down late last year to make way for more garden.

Last weekend - the previously mentioned garlic bed and cold frame have been joined by four more raised beds.

At the end of the day today, we've got a grand total of 11 raised beds for a whopping 336 square feet of plantable space! And we're not even finished yet! There's still a chicken coop to be added, and four more vegetable beds. By the time we're done, we'll have almost as much square footage of garden as we had living space in our first apartment. So, yeah, we've definitely been doing some growing.

Right now most of these beds are empty, but we've already got crops planted in three of them. There's the garlic we started last fall, the cool-season vegetables we planted last weekend in the cold frame, and just today we filled a box with onion sets. Onion sets are mini onion bulbs that have been started from seed by a nursery company (in our case Earl May). As a gardener, the only thing you need to do is put them in the ground and keep them watered. By the end of the season, each set will have grown into a full size, home-grown onion. This is a great project for the beginner gardener.

Another really fun plant for beginners and veterans alike is one we have in the cold frame: radishes! Radishes may have a love-them or hate-them flavor, but almost everyone loves to grow them for one particular reason. We started ours last week, and now...

Almost every last one of them has sprouted! Radishes are great because they're traditionally the first vegetable to plant outdoors, first to sprout, and first to harvest. These little guys will be ready for us to enjoy in less than a month. And whether you can't get enough of that peppery flavor, or just can't stand it, radishes signal that the gardening season has begun in earnest. And that makes the hard work of the past few weekends worth it.

We're Off And Growing!

That's right, our urban farm is really starting to show signs of growth. And in more ways than one. Let's just say that it was a very busy and active weekend; so much so that it's taken til Tuesday night to find time to write about it! To start with, we headed back to our garden area and found these beautiful green shoots coming up out of the ground.

Those are from the garlic we planted last fall. We planted two varieties, and so far every single clove of Georgian Crystal has some leaves poking up through the mulch. Strangely, not one of the Chesnook Reds has appeared yet, but different types of a plant can have different times to germinate. No need to panic yet, and if nothing else, we're looking at 25 heads of garlic minimum, if we can get them through the growing season. They don't need any maintenance so far, but it won't be too long before they generate long stalks (scapes) that we'll have to trim back. For now, we just wait.

Next we headed over to the cold frame we built, for our cold season crops. It's been a weirdly warm spring so far, so it was over 65 degrees outside when we lifted up a glass pane to check the temperature within.

It might be a little hard to see on the photo, but that's our thermometer reading nearly 100 degrees! It was actually 110 when we first looked, but we lost a little bit of temperature while taking the picture. And honestly, that's fine. 110 degrees is way warmer than we needed for our first few veggies of the year, so we took one of the panes off to vent a little bit. Since it's going to be in the mid-to-high 70s all this week, we'll keep that panel off so we don't cook our seeds. If it were a more typical spring, we'd probably need the glass to capture some heat during the day so things don't freeze overnight.

Even though it's unseasonably warm, we're still starting with cold-hardy crops. It's March in the Midwest; for all we know it could still snow again! For that reason, we stuck with the early season basics in our cold frame.

Spinach, from Burpee, an old packet from the year we first started gardening. Some radishes we nabbed at a bigbox store a few years back. And that guy in the middle is a newcomer. Mache, also known as corn salad, is a supremely hardy salad green that you can supposedly grow well into the winter. Neither of us has ever eaten it before but it really sounded like a good option to try. And we found seeds from Botanical Interests, a neat family owned seed company that prominently refuses to use genetically modified plants. We're eager to see how they turn out.

We planted these seeds into a third of the cold frame box and gave them a good drink of water. The idea is to wait a week or two before planting the next third, and so on for the final portion. If all goes as planned, the harvest times should then be staggered as well, and we'll have a longer window in which to eat all our produce.

So there you have it. We're now up to five types of vegetables that have either sprouted or at least been planted. Garlic, broccoli, spinach, radishes and mache. That sounds like the start to a pretty tasty meal, and it was a good accomplishment for the weekend to get it all going. But believe it or not, that wasn't our main task of the past few days. There was also quite a bit of construction going on. Stay tuned later this week for an update on some pretty significant groundbreaking. Being an urban farmer sure keeps you busy, but it should all be worth it as our plants (and plans) continue to grow!

Shedding Some Light on our Seedlings

Once again, our broccoli seeds didn't need near the 7-10 days predicted on the seed packet to sprout. Within about 3-4 days of planting, several of them had already popped up out of the starting medium. When that happened, we turned off the heat mat and needed to add light. There is a window nearby, but at this time of year in Iowa there isn't near enough sunlight. When that happens, the seedlings literally have to reach for the light, growing tall and spindly.To augment the natural light, we decided to rebuild our grow light from last year.

If you haven't already seen it, the grow light we built is a simple PVC pipe structure. Anyone can build one just like it with minimal tools and a few dollars expenditure of pipe. Here are all the pieces laid out on the floor.

We have three pieces of 1" PVC pipe that are just a bit longer than our light fixture, vertical pieces a few feet long to suspend the light, and two side assemblies that gave us enough width to accommodate seed-starting trays. Those were just made of two shorter pieces joined at a T-fitting. The only slightly tricky part was cutting the pipe; we borrowed a special pipe cutting tool from a friend, but it could have been done with a saw, too.

Here's the grow light frame all put together. We simply pushed the lengths of pipe into fittings (6 elbows and 2 tees) so it can easily disassemble for storage. The top piece of pipe has a couple hooks screwed into it at the right spacing to match the chains from the light fixture.

Our light fixture is a regular 4 foot T8 fluorescent hanging shop light. It holds two light bulbs, and if you really wanted to go nuts, you could buy special (i.e. expensive) full spectrum bulbs designed for growing plants. But you can achieve almost the same effect by using one "warm" and one "cool" white light bulb. This gives the plants nearly all of the light spectrum that they actually use, and doesn't cost a fortune. For just starting seeds, it's a good way to go.

The light should be hung just above the plants, again to prevent them from having to reach for it. Since our light is on a chain, we can raise or lower it by hooking different links to the top bar. These babies need a lot of light, so rather than relying on our memories to turn the light on and off, we've got it plugged into a basic timer to provide 16 hours of light a day. All that leaves us to do is keep the little broccoli plants well watered and they should be fine until we need to transplant them.

For now, the plants seem to be doing pretty well! It's a long way from edible, but it's a start!