A Week of Blueberries

I tend to like to write about the animals on the farmette and not what occupies the vast majority of my time come July: THE GARDEN.

The garden is not cute or furry or funny.  It does not melt my heart with its big brown eyes.  It is just a bitch.   It is either too rainy and cool or too hot and dry or too much of a pain in my ass with the squash beetles and the cabbage worms and the Japanese beetles.  I have turned into Carl Spackler and the cabbage moth is my gopher.

The one thing I do have in abundance right now, besides eggs, are blueberries.  In celebration of this wondrous summer berry I have decided to post a blueberry recipe every day this week.  Please excuse the photos.  I don't like anyone in the kitchen with me while I am cooking with the exception of my favorite NPR personalities and it is hard to cook and take photos at the same time.  Plus, my kitchen is a mess when I cook and I definitely don't clean as I go.  I am still trying to master the Martha Stewart illusion.

Day 1: Blueberry Tart

When I was 19, I went to Paris to visit my sister who was living and working there at the time.  I highly recommend sending your teenager to another country for a month or so.  I quickly realized that while I thought I was a worldly sophisticated college student, I was actually a hick with a wicked Boston accent.

Still to this day, ten years later, remember the first meal I ate in my favorite city.  My main course was a grilled whole fish which the waiter deboned for me right at the table. YUM!  I am pretty sure the only fish I had eaten up until that point had been dipped in batter and deep fried, so this was quite an adventure for me.   Dessert was equally amazing:  A beautiful little custard tart topped with fresh raspberries.  Sitting at our outdoor table, my first bite of the sweet, creamy, fruity tart was made all the more sublime due to an infusion of the sights and smells of Paris.  There were lots of cute boys there too.

I am not sure if I can conjure the same magic from my own blueberry tart, but there is something magical about cooking food you grow and the farmette looks and smells pretty great this time of year.

This is the perfect farmette recipe  because in addition to the blueberries, it requires eggs.

This is what you will need:

Crust:
1C all purpose flour
1C almond flour
2T powdered sugar
1/2 cup (1 stick) butter
1 egg
pinch of salt

Créme Pâtissiére:
1C granulated sugar
5 egg yolks
1C half and half
1C heavy cream
a squeeze of fresh lemon
1/2T vanilla extract or almond extract

Crust:
In electric mixer with paddle attachment, beat sugar and butter until combined.  Mix in egg.  Add flour and salt while mixer still running on low.

Turn dough out onto work surface and flatten into disk.  Press dough evenly into tart pan (no need to grease) and refrigerate for 1/2 hour.  Bake in 375 degree oven for  20 minutes or until slightly browned.

Créme Pâtissiére (adapted from Mastering the Art of French Cooking):

Beat egg yolks and sugar until mixture is pale yellow (about 2-3 minutes).

In heavy saucepan, heat half and half, cream, lemon and extract until almost boiling.  Ladle into yolk mixture and stir after each ladle full. 

Pour prepared Créme Pâtissiére into tart shell and bake in 325 degree oven for about 40 minutes or until center of tart is almost firm. (Remember to put cookie sheet or large pan under the tart pan because the liquid will ooze.  I made this mistake and had to open all the doors and windows to let out the smoke.)

Once tart is slightly cooled, top with fresh blueberries and dust with powdered sugar.

Since I had a little left over créme, I decided to make a blueberry custard pie as well.  This time I used a saltine cracker crust I had heard about on...you guessed it, NPR.  It tasted just as good as the tart crust, but not quite as elegantly French.  Here is the recipe for that crust:

Pulse 1 and 1/2 sleeves of saltine crackers in food processor with a stick of butter and 2T sugar.  Press into pie pan and bake at 400 degrees for 20 minutes.  Add créme Pâtissiére and bake just as you would the tart.

Enjoy!

Case Solved?

Goran made an arrest in the chicken stalker case.  He did it while fully clothed using a well camouflaged Have a Heart trap baited with turkey meat.

Could this little stink pot be the perp or will the case be thrown out of court as police entrapment?  Skunks do like turkey meat.

We will never know since the suspect was escorted out of town and told never to come back.

Love in the Time of Bovine Artificial Insemination

I am not sure what is more difficult to accept: The fact that our little girl is ready to have a baby or the fact that we will never again be able to go on vacation because we are about to be the proud owners of a dairy cow.

Getting a cow pregnant seems like an easy enough process.  There are quite a few dairy cows in the world who manage to do it.  How difficult could it be?  Plenty difficult when you don't have a bull I have learned. There are no bovine bars where bulls can pick up tipsy young heifers. There is also no cowmatch.com, but there probably should be.  My own experience with the mammalian mating ritual does me no good when it comes to Noelle.

We could walk her down the hill to visit with our neighbors' boys and let nature take its course, but Noelle is 3/4 Jersey and since she is smaller than many other breeds, she might have difficulty calving the first time around if she is bred with a much larger bull. Jersey Cows also produce milk with a greater buttermilk content than most breeds, thus making it the ideal milk for cheese.  Since making cheese was the reason I agreed to move up to the farmette full-time, I have my heart set on another Jersey girl.

So with no Jersey bull nearby, the other option is Artificial Insemination.  Our friend Jim, who is much more knowledgeable of all things farming than the husband and I are, told us that there are a plethora of AI technicians who will come impregnate our cow with any breed of bull semen, we just need to figure out when she is in heat.  "How?" I ask.  "There should be a noticeable discharge from her vulva."

Now, I consider myself a fairly intelligent person, I was accepted into Harvard; a fact I like to drop into conversation whenever possible such as now, but I was thoroughly and embarrassingly stumped by Jim's direction.

Where the hell is her vulva? I know where the pee comes out and I certainly know where the poop comes out because she shows me that several times a day, but her vulva? No idea.  Not wanting to seem like a complete idiot, I nod in agreement, like checking her vulva discharge is something I do every day. That evening I go online to look for diagrams of a cow's anatomy.  FYI, a cow's vulva is just below the rectum.

So now that I know where I am checking, I have to figure out how I am going to check.  Noelle is kind of a spoiled princess.  If she sees me or the husband, she comes running and wants lots of praise  and ear scratching; not vulva inspection.  Having her stand still long enough so I can check her backside seems like a daunting task.  There must be another way to tell if she is in heat.

One website suggests that I go sit in the pasture and watch my cow's behavior.  If she seems especially randy, that is a good indicator of heat.  Since we don't have any other cattle it is just me and our little horse to attract Noelle's amorous advances.  I have seen her mount little Cody Bear before, so I don't think I want to be sitting down when Noelle is in heat.

Lots of mooing is supposedly another indicator of heat.  Now we are getting somewhere!  She was doing a lot of bellowing a couple of days ago and come to think of it, she was getting a little too close behind me when I was walking up the hill to the garden.  I quickly mark the date on the calendar, in hopes that I have cracked this estrous riddle .  Since her cycle is about every 21 days, I will have to watch her closely in a few weeks to see if I notice the behavior again.  There is a very small window (about 12 hours after first sign of heat) when AI will work.

If I get this right, I may hire myself out as the heat seeking cow maven to the stars.  I am sure backyard cows are going to be the next hot commodity after backyard chickens.

My Secret Messy Garden

While the vegetables in the garden are struggling with heat, drought, floods, flea beetles (*@%$) and a host of other far from perfect growing conditions, the greenhouse has exploded.  I really packed it tight this year with basil, onions, carrots, tomatoes, cucumbers, melons, what I thought were also melons but apparently are pumpkins, and sunflowers to attract the bees.  It is far from organized, kind of like my life, but it is thriving and beautiful in its wildness.

 squash flower

 8ft sunflower

 flowering carrots for seeds

 my first melon!

 Surprise!  It is a pumpkin and not a cantaloupe.

 basil and cucumber battling it out

 Hold on tight.

Night Stalker

In NewYork's war on crime, the worst criminal offenders are pursued by the detectives of the Major Case Squad.  These are their stories. (Insert Law & Order sound effect here.)

Actually, the following story is more CSI than Law & Order Criminal Intent but since I spent the better part of a year sitting on my couch nursing baby Prince while watching every rerun of Law & Order shown on TNT, I have much more affinity for the L&O franchise than the CSI franchise.

I had been feeling pretty proud that we managed to get through the brutal winter without losing a single chicken to a hungry desperate predator, but that luck ran out a couple of weeks ago in the middle of a warm weekend, night when the husband and I were woken by the panicky sounds of a lone chicken in the front yard.

The husband ran out the door with his 22, clad only in his underwear and a headlamp.  Within a few minutes I heard, "Pow... Pow.. Pow. PowPowPowPow."  Apparently, it is not easy to look through a scope while wearing a bright light on your forehead, so the first couple of shots did nothing but piss off the skunk that was trying to steal our chicken.  The skunk charged the near naked marksman causing him to go Rambo on the stinker.  The skunk dropped the chicken and ran across the street.  I was shocked.  I thought skunks were harmless little herbivores who occasionally woo black cats with white paint spilt down their backs; not vicious chicken killers.

Unfortunately, the chicken was pretty beaten up and the only thing we could do was put her down.  She was one of our sweet but stupid Faverolle aunties and though she was supposed to be one of the victims of the bipedal chicken killers last Fall, she had received a Presidential pardon when it got too cold too quickly for butchering chickens outdoors.

Since the husband managed to hit the skunk, we felt confident the threat was gone.

A few days later, we were woken again by the frantic cries of a chicken and we again ran out in our skivvies with flashlights and weapons.  Something black ran across the street and we scanned the yard for signs of a struggle.  My flashlight caught sight of a chicken lying  feet up in a pile of feathers.  Her little legs were pumping up and down in rhythm with her heavy breathing.  I was sure she was a goner and for a moment I even thought she was headless, but when the Husband approached her from behind she jumped up and ran across the coop. I scooped her up and saw that all of the feathers on her belly had been ripped out, but she didn't have a scratch on her.  It was a pretty impressive plucking job. A professional waxing couldn't have produced better results.

I put the chicken in the chicken house and we went back to bed.  Two hours later, we were woken again.  This time another hen was wandering around the yard, feathers intact and there was no sign of her attacker.

To set the record straight, not all of our hens go in the chicken house at night.  Quite a few prefer to spend their nights high in the trees cooled by an evening breeze.  When the first bird was taken by the skunk, I figured she couldn't make it into the tree, but I knew the two who had just ended up on the ground were strong flyers and always slept on the upper branches.  I channeled my inner Eames and deduced that our perp was either a black cat or a Fisher, since whatever was going after our birds was a deft climber.

The husband decided on a stakeout as a way to catch the brazen villain.  If there is one thing we have learned from our obsessive viewing of Law and Order Criminal Intent, it is that the suspect always gets cocky and falls right into Eames and Goren's  trap.

Unfortunately, our phantom menace was a little too slick for our detective work and managed to evade the husband's night watch. Opting against another go at the chickens, it decided on duck hunting instead.  Mad quacking ensued but the smart ducks headed straight for the security of the pond and the assailant again vanished.

The next day, we turned from L&O to another favorite show, "The Profiler." Though my hair is not quite as awesome as my heroine, Sam's, I think she would be proud of how we reviewed the case to come up with a reasonable profile for our suspect:

Dark fur
7-12 lbs
Excellent night vision
Fast
Stealth
Good climber
Non-swimmer
Lover of poultry

Most likely the culprit is a black cat down the road the boys and I watched stalk and intimidate a small fox when we were coming home from school one afternoon, but a Fisher sounds much more mysterious and sexy.  In fact, I think I will go with escaped Black Panther.  That sounds really dangerous.

Whatever it is, it has not returned in over a week. My guess is it's probably casing the joint; waiting for us to let our guard down.  Little does it know, it is dealing with the detectives of the major case squad at the Petite Farmette.  We will be ready and waiting in our underwear, 22 under the mattress  and new batteries in our headlamps.

My Father the Hero

There's not much my kids agree on.  I am often scrambling in the mornings to make three different breakfasts and three different lunches in an attempt to get something nutritious into each of them. I am pretty sure Scrappy stopped liking waffles just to be difficult. And the battle over who controls the car radio means we don't ever really listen to music.

There are a few things they CAN all agree on though, including their love of cereal as an after school snack, video games, superheroes and the drive-in. Needless to say, everyone was on board for going to see the new "Spiderman" movie during the opening weekend of the Unadilla Drive-In.  As for me, I realized a while ago that my days of watching Godard films at the Film Forum are long gone and I have learned to appreciate men in spandex costumes performing acts of heroism.

We decided to make it a full fledged Americana weekend with baseball practice on Friday night followed by pizza at a local honky tonk in addition to the Saturday night drive-in.  It was actually just a pizzeria, but honky tonk sounds much more Americana.

Since Friday was a warm day and the stench of water fowl in the bathtub had become unbearable, the Husband decided to introduce the ducklings to the pond.  He set up the chicken tractor down by the pond with the prerequisite blue tarp he seems to incorporate into every barnyard contraption he builds.  He is sort of the Robert Moses of animal tenements.

The ducks took to water like, well, ducks.  It was so cute to watch them maneuver through the pond like synchronized swimmers.  It was even cuter to watch them follow the Husband around the yard like he was their Mama. A word of advice gentlemen, forget walking around with babies or puppies to gain amorous attention. There is nothing more attractive than a man leading a parade of fuzzy little ducklings.

Pizza took a little longer than anticipated Friday night and the Husband was anxious to get home to check on his flock.  Luckily we left our Great Pyrenes outside to babysit.  Upon meeting the ducklings for the first time, the 100lb Pepper rolled over in submission to let the ducklings climb all over him, so we were confident that he would take his job as duckling protector very seriously.

When we got home it was well after dark and unlike chickens who go into their house or high up in a tree at dusk, the ducks do not seem to have the same sense of self preservation.  The five of us each grabbed a flashlight and headed to the pond to coax the six fluffy quackers into their sanctuary.  They wanted no part of their new home and seemed quite content to hang out in the tall grass surrounding the pond.  While they would allow the husband to come just out of arm's reach before they waddled into the water, they immediately made a beeline when they saw me or the boys approaching.

The Husband instructed the boys to go behind the chicken tractor where the knelt in silence with their flashlights unwaveringly aimed at the unfolding drama.  As I watched the boys through the glow of our spotlights it reminded me of the drive-in:  the sound of peepers chirping and the swaths of light dancing around in the night sky.  But this was better.  We all know Spiderman is not going to die.  Sure, he is going to get pretty beaten up, but in the end he will defeat the villain and save the city.  There was no such guarantee at this performance.  This was a real nail biter and best of all, Dad was the hero; the one who had to protect the innocent.  He was the one we were routing for as the ducklings came closer to him and closer to the safety of their house.  Our hearts raced with the knowledge that if the ducklings didn't go in, they may fall prey to one of the countless carnivores that hunt at night.

It took about a half hour before the ducklings were finally locked safely away for the night.  We all returned to the house for an episode of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" satisfied that this thriller had a happy ending thanks to the duckling whisperer.

The weather didn't cooperate with our plans for the real drive-in the following night and we ended up going to the movie theater to see "Spiderman." The boys seemed to enjoy it, but my guess is that ten or twenty years from now, the memory of how their Dad saved the ducks on a warm May night will be a lot more vivid than how Spiderman saved New York City.

The day after I wrote this it snowed.

Well, it is that time of year again when happiness returns to our lives.  After months of wondering why the hell we live in upstate New York,* Spring has returned.  No more dealing with frozen water or frigid barns, though the fact that I have transplanted tomato seedlings and brought out the hammock is a guarantee for snow within the week.

I now know why the dwarves whistled while they worked:  It was warm!  Clean out the two feet of hay that has accumulated in the cow's stall before she just steps over the railing?  "Yes please!" Shovel the compost into the garden?  "Sounds like fun!"  Watch the chickens rip up all of the grass from  under the lilac tree?  "Aww.  Aren't they cute!"  Listen to Scrappy Doo scream because his brother just body slammed him on the trampoline?  "I just love the sounds of the children playing together!"  Spring is definitely this mother's little helper.

In a week we have cleaned stalls and coops, tilled the garden, pruned the blueberry bushes, cleaned out the flower bed, cut back the raspberry canes, planted trees, planted and transplanted seedlings, mulched the beds in the greenhouse, composted the manure, bought six ducklings to add to the avian free for all and mended the garden fence so Noelle can no longer be my garden apprentice.

  

I guess farming in upstate New York is kind of like child birth.  Once the pain and suffering of winter is over and the Earth gives birth to that first beautiful Spring spinach, you think, "That wasn't so bad.  I could do that again." And chances are you will, unless of course,  you smarten up, invest in some birth control and move South.

*Technically we live in Central New York, but for New York City folk, "upstate" is anything north of the Tappan Zee Bridge.