Pillow Road

Nancy made this pie from fresh strawberries and rhubarb from the garden. It was everything you want in a pie -- tart and sweet but blended together. The homemade crust was perfect; the top had a nice bumpy, browned texture, reminding me of moguls.

A dream pie, really.



Nancy made the pie for a dinner we enjoyed just before I left for Maker Faire.

I picked iris recently and this cauliflower, which also had a purple tint. They just seemed to go together.

I seem to have a patriotic bunch of sweet peas, fragrant as can be.

This weekend brings spring rain showers, a bit late in the season but very welcome. It reminds me of the kind of ample rain you get in the East Coast in the spring. Everything in the garden is soaking it up. Peas are doing well, and the pea blossoms are beautiful. Many spring flowers seem to pop against the gray sky.

On Saturday, I picked leeks, carrots, onions, chard, mustard greens and spinach for Easter dinner on Sunday. My Easter basket was full.



For Easter Sunday, Nancy made a Daffodil punch and I made Sangria.



Sunday's dinner was beef brisket cooked with leeks, carrots and a jar of canned tomatoes. The full dish was very colorful heading into the oven. The brisket was slow cooked about four hours, (and could have used more time). Then I pureed the vegetables and combined with the liquid from the pan to create a rich, red sauce (like a ragout) that was served with polenta.



I made a spinach salad mixed with red merlot lettuce, grapefruit and strawberries tossed with a citrus dressing. I had two loaves of homemade bread -- the boule recipe from "Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day."



Nancy's excellent Bundt Cake was served for dessert. A fine dinner and a great day, with lots of sun and poppies out in bloom.



More pictures on Flickr.

Labels: dinner, Easter, leeks, tomatoes

Experimenting with vuvox.com

It is sunny today and the lamb and *his* mother have come outside, affording me the opportunity to take some good photos.

Labels: lamb, sheep

I came home to a new lamb. The ewe had given birth to a single lamb during the previous night. Katie found the lamb this morning and she says it's a female. Glenda's not sure. I didn't pick it up yet.



Last year, we had two lambs and both were black. This year's lamb is speckled, but mostly white with a black head, like the ram. She looks a bit bigger than the either of the lambs from last year.

Beautiful and wondrous!

Labels: lamb, sheep

When I came home from three days in San Jose, I collected six duck eggs. That's three times the total number of eggs I collected from my ducks to date. Now, ducks don't lay eggs in one place like chickens do -- at least not this group

-- ok, I bothered to look up what you call a group of ducks on Wikipedia:

And I found a dopping of ducks (diving), a plump of ducks (flying), a paddling of ducks (on water) and otherwise a badling, a flush, a raft, a sord, a team, or a brace of ducks. Who would have thought that there was such an extensive menu of options? I'm going to go with "badling", which is not meant to be pejorative -- my ducks behave nicely and now they are productive.

But I was saying also that you don't find duck eggs gathered in one spot, which is how a peep of chickens lay their eggs. Duck eggs are not evenly distributed either. They are simply spread about and you have to hunt for them. I felt like a kid at Easter placing one egg in a basket and going to search for another.

These duck eggs were covered in mud and grass; they needed some cleaning to look as good as they do in the photo above. One delight is the soft pastel colors of the shells, some tinted pink and others a light green. Duck eggs are bigger than chicken eggs, and so are the yolks with a deeper, darker yellow. Roughly they taste the same but I will be trying them out in different recipes.

To conclude, some words from Arthur Conan Doyle's "Sir Nigel", which seems to play with peasant/pheasant speech:

"Nay, nay, lad, it is indeed sad to see how little you know. Your hands, Nigel, were always better than your head. No man of gentle birth would speak of a herd of swine; that is the peasant speech. If you drive them it is a herd. If you hunt them it is other. What call you them, then, Edith?"

"Nay, I know not," said the girl listlessly. A crumpled note brought in by a varlet was clinched in her right hand and her blue eyes looked afar into the deep shadows of the roof.

"But you can tell us, Mary?"

"Surely, sweet sir, one talks of a sounder of swine."

The old Knight laughed exultantly. "Here is a pupil who never brings me shame!" he cried. "Be it lore - of chivalry or heraldry or woodcraft or what you will, I can always turn to Mary. Many a man can she put to the blush."

"Myself among them," said Nigel.

"Ah, lad, you are a Solomon to some of them. Hark ye! only last week that jack-fool, the young Lord of Brocas, was here talking of having seen a covey of pheasants in the wood. One such speech would have been the ruin of a young Squire at the court. How would you have said it, Nigel?"

"Surely, fair sir, it should be a nye of pheasants."

"Good, Nigel - a nye of pheasants, even as it is a gaggle of geese or a badling of ducks, a fall of woodcock or a wisp of snipe.

Labels: ducks, eggs

Speaking of shaggy, the roots of the leek that I pulled this morning sure looked like the head of a mop.

Our ewe is expecting. We should have lambs soon. Her coat is a bit soggy and shaggy from the week of rain.

Starting sometime in February, we begin to see mustard flowering everywhere, its yellow blossoms covering entire fields or found in patches between rows of vines or nearby apple trees. However, what is most noticeable about mustard is the subtle, very delicate scent that comes as such a surprise this time of year. It seems to be the only thing in the air and it carries the promise of Spring.

Before moving to Sebastopol, my wife and I came from Boston to visit in February 1989. I remember mostly identifying this sweet scent in the air. I didn't know what it was then, but this scent still makes California seem fresh and inviting, a counterpoint to the winter weather in the East where February often seems like the longest month of the year.

I have mustard growing in the yard.



I have mustard greens growing in the garden. Mustard is a brassica, related to broccoli, cauliflower and kale, which also grow well this time of year. Some mustard greens have very large purplish leaves and a sharply bitter taste that I like, a bit like a moment of horseradish. I was also growing mizuna as a salad green. It went to seed in February and its smaller yellow flowers have such a nice scent that I cut off the tops and put them in a vase in the kitchen.

Labels: mustard

"When the moon meets the sky, like a big pizza pie, that's amore."

I made pizza the other night and I can't help thinking of the song that Dean Martin made famous.

For pizza dough, I followed the recipe in Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day. Any recipe will do really. What I like about this book's approach is that you throw together the ingredients for the dough in advance and let it sit in the refrigerator until you need it -- up to two weeks. I made the dough in the morning and let it sit out for a few hours and then put it in the refrigerator until I was ready to make pizza. Thus, you can think of making pizza as a two-step process, and since one step can done in advance, the actual making of pizza takes less than half an hour.

This dough had about two cups of whole wheat flour, about 1/3 of the total. I rolled it out to about a ten-inch pie.

I used a jar of tomato sauce that I canned last fall, which with a little salt and oregano had a nice consistency. I added a few toppings such as mushrooms and onions, then topped it with mozzarella cheese. I preheated the oven for twenty minutes to as high as it would go -- over 500 degrees. Inside was a pizza stone and I was ready to bake a pizza.



About eight minutes later, my pizza was done. The crust was firm and bumpy, having risen during baking. The biggest problem with homemade pizza is a soggy center portion of crust, caused by too much sauce or a crust that's too thin. This crust was somewhere between thin and thick.



I placed the pizza in the oven and pulled it out using a "pizza peel", a flat surface connected to a long handle. I bought a pizza peel because when I was baking bread, I had trouble transferring the dough from a bread board to the baking stone. If you don't get the dough off the board cleanly, it folds in on itself, and collapses. It's not a fatal problem but the loaf suffers.

Last weekend, I went to a kitchen store to look for a pizza peel and I struck up a conversation with an older woman who recommended a metal pizza peel over a wooden one. It's much lighter, she said. She also told me to use a lot of cornmeal on the peel to prevent sticking. I wasn't using enough. She said that she was baking bread and making pizza using this great new book, "Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day." "So am I," I said proudly, as excited as she was. (Moments like these are rare in shops, but you don't get them at all shopping online.)

Here's a half-white, half-wheat loaf that I baked, a six-inch free form round from 1 pound of dough.

Yesterday, before the rains started, I saw blossoms emerging on the plum trees. This one holds its cup-like shape.

My friend, DC, was asking recently about raising your own chickens. He wondered if you could tell the difference in the quality of the eggs: taste, color, or texture. "No, not really," I said to him. Although I've heard people rave about the differences, I've thought the claims to be exaggerated. I haven't found my own eggs to be dramatically different from good quality eggs in our market. However, some groceries have cheap "factory-fresh eggs", and the yolks lack the color and size of what I've seen from our own chickens.

I was reminded of the conversation this morning when I fetched eggs from the chicken house. When I cracked open the eggs into a bowl, I really noticed the yolks, and how big and bright they were. So for today, I can say that the eggs from my chickens are unbeatable.



But not so unbeatable that I couldn't proceed to do just that with a whisk. With a handful of spinach from the garden, I made a spinach and cheese omlette for two. That plate made me truly grateful that I have chickens. Vive le difference!

Labels: Chickens, eggs, spinach

A few weeks ago, I visited a friend's house in Freestone, an off-the-grid home powered by solar. Walking the grounds, I admired a beautiful, vigorous artichoke plant that I wished was in my yard. (I have smaller plants which are frequently attacked by gophers.) This picture makes the artichoke look even bigger, as I shot from below, looking up the hill at it.



They also had a small stone-walled pond near their house. Inside it were clusters of frog eggs, so called frogspawn (look it up in wikipedia). You can see them near the center bottom of the photo below. It won't be long before there are tadpoles swimming in the pond.



The tadpoles will develop into night-singing Pacific Tree Frogs.

Labels: animals, artichokes, eggs, frogs