While I was in Washington, I also got to visit my cousin’s chickens. She has four girls total and they will be egg laying hens when they get old enough – not meat birds. In this picture, they are hanging out in their chicken tractor, which moves around the property. The chickens really help nourish the earth with their pecking and pooping.
It got me thinking about possibly having chickens of my own backyard. “City chickens” are becoming more and more common in NYC, believe it or not. At this point, I’ve joined Just Food’s City Chicken Meetup group to learn more about keeping chickens in the city!
I’m a big fan of lacto-fermented foods, and I especially like lacto-fermented vegetables. I love sauerkraut but I especially love fermented root vegetables. I fell in love with them after the fermentation workshop I took with Andrew Faust a few years ago. There is just something magical about how all vegetables change in the fermentation process.
Of course, lacto-fermentation shoots up the nutritional value of what is fermenting, especially the vitamin C levels. Natural probiotics and beneficial enzymes also flourish. This is yet another reason to consume such foods.
When I got back from Washington, I looked in the fridge and saw that I had some CSA carrots and radishes left over. I thought fermenting them would be a great way to preserve them. The carrots were tiny, so grating them would have been a pain (perhaps even literally, as I was using a box grater), so I decided to slice them thinly into rounds, just as I was slicing the radishes. Then I figured that onions and garlic would be a nice addition.
Finally, I wanted to make them spicy. I didn’t have any fresh peppers on hand but I did have a bunch of dried ones. I love smoky and tangy together, so I chose to use a few of my dried chipotles.
I also wanted to use a brine with a smaller percentage of salt. More salt means the food with ferment faster, but lately I’ve been dissatisfied with the saltiness of the end product. I’d been using this brine: 1 tbs of salt to 1 cup of water. I referred to Sandor Katz’s Wild Fermentation, and saw that he uses a weaker brine for some things: 3 tbs salt to 4 cups water. I decided to try it out, though I did halve it, as I wasn’t making a huge batch of vegetables.
I am very happy with the results of this ferment! It took a little longer to get to where I wanted, but I love the salt level, flavor-wise. But I love how it’s turned out – it’s not overly salty at all, it’s smoky, spicy, and tangy. Perfect!
Carrot Radish Chipotle Ferment
1 pound carrots, cleaned and thinly sliced (do not peel)
1 pound radishes, thinly sliced
1/4 white onion, sliced
4 cloves garlic, peeled and cut in half
3 chipotle peppers, softened in warm water
1.5 tbs sea salt
2 cups warm water
Combine carrots, radishes, onion, and garlic in a large bowl.
After the chipotles have softened a bit, slice into four pieces, stem to blossom end. Add to the vegetables.
Mix the sea salt and water until the salt dissolves. Add it to the vegetables.
Scoop vegetable mixture into washed, sterilized mason jars – either two pint jars or one quart jar. Top off with remaining liquid.
Tighten lid – but not too tight – and store in a warm, dark area for 3-5 days. Check after a few days and see if you like it. Leave a little longer if you don’t. Check each day, and when it is to your liking, store it in the refrigerator.
Makes 4 cups.
This post is participating in Real Food Wednesday, hosted by Kelly the Kitchen Kop.
I have no idea what I’ll do with the bitter melon. It is a mystery to me. The tomatoes are gone, eaten in part with the cucumber. I think I’ll pickle the peppers. The eggplant was made into baba ghanoush – quite garlicky this time around.
I made the peaches into peach cobbler on Sunday, and it is quite tasty! The sprouted flour gives it a bit of a crunch. I may make this instead of crisp topping in the future, as I can get around the need to soak grains this way, plus it’s much less sweet. It’s sweetened with sucanat, which goes great with the peaches. It’s so far my favorite recipe in which to use sucanat.
I’ve been eating the apples out of hand. Sadly, the plums bit the dust after sitting out too long. Our plums this year have been a bit problematic, arriving over ripe to begin with. Still, the ones I’ve been able to eat have been fabulous.
My cousin also grows these “walking onions”. These onions have a thin stalk relative to the size of their head, which breaks out into multiple cloves, reminiscent of tiny red onions. At one point the stalk will fall over and then, if the soil is right, they’ll set up in the dirt and create a new onion! This was another plant I hadn’t heard of before. I loved learning about these new-to-me plants.
Now that it’s August, the tomato plants have really started producing. This is what I collected over a few days. There are Stupice, Blondköpfchen, Tommy Toe, Silver Fir, and Mexican Midget tomatoes in this bowl. Everything has been delicious. I’ll likely make some of this into jam. Lacto fermented salsa is on the schedule once more of the larger tomatoes ripen (or I purchase a tomato share from my CSA).
While I was in Washington State, I got to visit the Dungeness Valley Creamery. This is the farm on the Olympic Peninsula that produces the raw milk I drink when I’m out there. I’ve always enjoyed its richness and flavor, and I was itching to visit the farm – last time I tried to do that it was this past Thanksgiving and we were totally snowed in. Freak snowstorm – there was no way we would be venturing out to Sequim at that point.
Thankfully, this time we had good weather – it was much cooler than I was used to (and I was glad it was cooler) – so we made our way to Sequim.
We were greeted by a bunch of calves hanging out in little one room hotel pens.
They were all in good spirits and were happy to nuzzle and lick our hands or whatever was in their way. Really sweet and friendly little (that’s relative) creatures. It was fun to interact with them.
There were some adult cows nearby, too.
They were a bit more nonchalant and content to hang out and observe us. But then at one point, they really wanted to lick my hand while I was petting them, and it was then and there that I realized just how huge cow tongues are.
I was also interested to see where the cows are pastured, and we found the pasture out on the other side of the entrance.
The cows were just hanging out there, relaxing. It was nice to see them out in the fresh air and not confined. The grass is really green and grows in thick rounds – I’m sure it looks delicious to the cows.
In the wintertime they eat hay from the Leitz family Hay Company in Sequim, who gets their hay from eastern Washington. They also feed their cows a little bit of grain, but no soy or corn, only a mixture of wheat, barley, oats, molasses, and minerals. They do not give their cows antibiotics, hormones, cottonseed – not even corn or canola oil! Thank goodness. Their website FAQ explains a bit more as to why they include grains in the cow’s diet. I’ve personally never had a negative reaction to their milk.
I stopped at the little farm store and bought some raw cheddar (“Jewel”) and a bar of goat milk soap, which smells like roses. So pretty – I do love the way goat milk soap feels on my skin, and this stuff smells amazing, too.
I’m really glad I was able to check out the Dungeness Valley Creamery. It’s so awesome to see where our food comes from – I hope to do more of this here in NY, too.
This is the share we got a couple of weeks ago, on August 2. This was the day before I left for Washington, so I left most of it for our housesitter. So, we got:
1 head of lettuce
1 bunch radishes
2 pounds mixed of summer squash and cucumber
2 bell peppers
1 pound white peaches
1 pound plums
1 pound donut peaches
I ate half the tomatoes the night before I left. I took a few donut peaches and plums with me on the airplane, and they were a welcome change from the starchy snacks I was offered there.
I ended up fermenting the radishes with carrots from the week prior, and am excited to see how this mixture comes out. The white peaches ended up going into peach thyme jam this weekend.
The following week, Week 9, will not be documented, for a variety of logistical reasons. Week 10 is this week, though!
