Peggy & Joan, Urban Chickies

Meet Peggy and Joan, brave and adventurous Urban Chickies. Can you figure out which is which? Here's a clue:

Yep, our chickies were named after Peggy & Joan from MadMen. It actually all started with the name Joan for the Rhode Island Red, but then we decided to name the White Leghorn Peggy to go with the theme. I suspect if we ever got a rooster (which we have absolutely no plans on doing), we would name him Don.

Joan is the friendlier of the two. When I saw them out front scratching around, I went outside to grab a few pictures. As I walked down my front steps, Joan came rushing over. "Hello human! Have you got any scratch for me?"

Peggy kept her distance.

We were about to leave, so we tossed them back over the fence where they could scratch in safety. I think these two chickies need their wings clipped! I love that they feel comfortable but am a bit scared for their safety sometimes.

Likes:
Scratch
Mike (Joan only)
Exploring
Their coop

Dislikes:
Bella
Neighbor cats
Being picked up (mostly Peggy)
When you accidentally peek in on them while they are laying eggs
Flying into the window

Michigan Sweet Corn

At the end of August, Mike and I took a few days to visit family in Michigan. And, because we timed our trip just right, we were able to bring home some of that yummy Michigan Sweet Corn! We stopped by the Cornmobile in Richmond and loaded up our car with five dozen ears of sweet corn.

Two dozen were for Cathie, a friend who knew Mike back when the both lived in MI, and the rest of the ears were to blanched, cut off the cob, and froze for future use. Except, of course, for a few to snack on. ;)

Last year, we brought home corn after a cousin's Labor Day weekend wedding. The frozen corn in the freezer lasted us until the spring. We used it in soups, chilis, and other yummy meals.

The TV fast

Summer is here, the garden is in bloom and theres lots to do. So Tiff and I decided to try something new this summer. We're going to not watch TV, play video games, or even watch TV online for the next two months. Our hope is this will be an opportunity to go to bed early, get up early, break bad living habits and start new healthy ones. I'm looking forward to getting my day started earlier and having time to read my Bible, exercise, and start the work day ahead rather than even at best.

We have so many exciting things we're a part of, its nice to trade a lesser joy for a greater joy. The first of September we'll reassess and decide what we want to do. I'll miss my Xbox friends, but this doesn't mean we can't hang out in real life!

Greenbrier Farms CSA: Weeks 7 and 8

Sorry for not posting for a couple weeks. Not that there's nothing to write about, actually quite the opposite. Lots of good food coming and going and lots of neat experiments and things we're learning about.

Week 7 of our CSA included cabbage, fennel, leeks, carrots, kale, cilantro, and fresh homemade pesto. The pesto used walnuts an economical substitute for the typical pine nuts. 

Week 8 or our CSA included cabbage, fennel, carrots, rainbow chard, green beans, beats, and pizza dough. 

The past month, we haven't been cooking as much as freezing, drying and canning. The hot summer is bringing the end of the green vegetables, so I bought more kale and have frozen about 20 servings. I take back everything bad I ever said about kale. But I still hate chard. We've also been freezing beans from the garden as well as leeks and green onions. 

We've canned salsa verde and dill pickles. Tried adding red pepper flakes to a couple jars to give them some kick. We also invested in a pressure canner and lots of pint-size canning jars.

The cilantro went to seed so now we have some dried coriander. Also cut the fronds off the fennel and dried those for a simple licorice tea. This rain has caused our herbs to grow like crazy, so we're drying and putting up for winter soups.

I've never done much with cabbage and we've had a steady supply through the CSA. So I'm trying several approaches to making sauerkraut. You can see how the color changes, the jar on the left is a few days old, the jar on the far right is two weeks. It all smells terrible, but I cooked a sample yesterday and it was good! In fact it'll probably need another week or two.

This week, I was surprised to learn that fermented foods are actually very good for you. Saurkraut in particular is good for you. I've been homebrewing this year as well, so its interesting to apply the same principles to preserving these kinds of foods. 

The garden is loving all this rain and I've picked my first tomatoes. These are supposed to be Roma, but as you can see they aren't getting much bigger than cherry tomatoes. This is my first time planting in this part of my yard, I guess the soil will need some work.

Greenbrier Farms CSA: Week 6

Hard to believe it's already week six of our CSA. It's a been a cool experience and this week we got a couple new vegetables. This week we received a couple kinds of salad, arugula, rainbow chard, cabbage, carrots, leeks, cauliflower, and fennel.

We've gotten into the routine of consuming a large amount of salad every week. Finishing the carrots is no problem. The arugula will go into a stir fry and the leeks will go into the freezer for soup later this year. I'll fry the chard with some garlic and I've already used the cabbage for my second batch of sauerkraut. I'm going to try roasting the cauliflower and fennel.

Tonight's dinner was an epic fail. I tried making chicken butter masala with some spices from the Indian store. They were burn through your stomach hot. So this was our back-up plan, and it was so good...

Greenbrier Farms CSA: Week 5

Life has been busy, busy, busy, but here's a belated updated for this past week.

This week in our CSA we received carrots, greens, green onions, leeks, kale, two heads of cabbage and some tasty raisin bread. The bread was perfect toasted with a little butter, it is long gone. I finally took all our green onions and leeks and froze them for later. Carrots and greens for salads. And kale was blanched and frozen along with peas and beans from our garden. After two years, I finally went under the house and hooked up the ice maker on the fridge so no more going to gas station to buy ice!

Removing the stems, prepping to freeze

I wasn't too sure what to do with the cabbage, so I'm trying my hand at making sauerkraut. It sounds simple enough, we'll see how it turns out. Tiff won't eat it, but I'll find an evening when she has other plans and stink the whole house up with it.

Improvised weight to press the cabbage down

The freezer is slowly filling up with things for the rest of the year. I've frozen a lot of strawberries, kale, green onions and leeks, some broccoli, beans and peas. I boil and freeze batches of beans as we go through them. I'll keep adding as the growing season progresses. Our grocery budget is $400/month. We've been spending more than that, but will save later in the year. 

Trying to start two businesses and our neighborhood association, I haven't time to cook much new. I made some mediocre salmon the other day. And I improved on our saag paneer this week. My basil needed to be topped off and I had some left-over parmesan so I made pesto. Mixed with pasta, it makes a nice early summer meal. Or spread on some rye bread and made into a grilled cheese. I plan on making a bunch and freezing it before summer's over.

The garden is doing well, though we're having a serious lack of rain. My beans and tomatoes are both fighting some bacterial thing (early blight?), so I'm treating them with selectively placed fungicide. We have a perfectly good growing area along a fence, so I built 3 new 1 x 4 foot raised boxes and planted more peas and pole beans. I also had the opportunity to be a part of the community garden up the street so I planted a 4 x 12 foot section of corn and quinoa. 

Artisphere & Saturday Market

So, in the summer months, there is a Farmers Market that takes up a few blocks of Downtown Greenville's Main Street. The first Saturday it was open, it just happened to coincide with Artisphere. One of our annual art festivals. I'm not sure if this is a regular happening or if it was just a coincidence, but it was nice to hit both events in one stop.


The Saturday Market is usually pretty crowded. Add in Artisphere and there are even more people milling about! The two events wove pretty seamlessly together separated by maybe one block. I don't really remember.

We decided we would walk all the way down through the market to Artisphere first. Check out the veggies and their prices as we walked, but wait until we came back through to buy any as to not have to lug bags of kale up and down Main Street.


My favorite part of Artisphere were the demonstrators. Glass Blower Ryan Gothrup from Virginia made a beautiful drinking glass which was promptly recycled for the next demonstration.


Ryan Calloway is a local blacksmith who had some amazing work on display. He was making curlicues for another piece.


I didn't get the name of this artist, they were giving away free prints! You would pick which one you wanted and they'd make the print right then. Pretty cool, eh?


On our way back through the market, we stopped at Parson's Produce for a couple bunches of kale.


They also had some other pretty produce that we didn't purchase, but I just loved their set up I had to grab a few photos!




We also bought some broccoli from a vendor whose name I committed to memory but now cannot drudge up. It was delicious, though!




And fresh peaches from Watsonia! I love getting peaches from these people because their tee shirts say "Peaches make you sexy!" Haha. :)