First Strawberries

tossed with fresh ground pepper, piled high on toast spread generously with mild goat cheese, and drizzled with sweet rose syrup....(honey would work too)

Seasonal re-reading

signs of spring.....at the community garden & in the backyard

the view from my community garden plot one day last month

onion seedlings planted

the view of newly formed beds in my community garden plot and on down the row 

red tipped romaine growing right along

look carefully for 6-10 spears of asparagus growing straight up 

repurposed tool belt hanging planter

a few of the chickens prefer this night time roost, just over the compost bins.

spring...rolls

New Crop of Honeybees

Most of my hives died between late fall and winter.  About a week ago I installed three packages of bees in my backyard apiary and am excited to return to daily observations of my hives.

Within the hives the honeybees are building new comb, bringing in nectar from the early blooming trees, and collecting pollen which they transform by a form of fermentation into "bee bread" - a protein rich food for very young bee larvae.

here is a honeybee in my backyard enjoying the blue pollen on the anthers of this Scilla flower....note the blue pollen in the pollen basket on the rear leg

Here's what I see when I sit outside and watch the bees.  This top bar hive has an observation window. Watch them come and go under the lid and watch them inside clustered together communicating and taking care of bee business.

More Signs of Spring....Eggs

My 7 hens are laying 2-3 dozen eggs a week now....

soft boiled (3 minutes) with toast and coffee (pea shoots optional)

corned beef hash with kale & eggs

 karpas - eggs, veggies and spring herb dip for the Seder table

Perfect Hard Cooked Eggs

Place eggs of approx the same size in a pan large enough to hold them when covered with 1 inch or so of water, but not too much larger than that or they may bounce around when boiling.   Add water to cover by an inch or so.  Add a large pinch of salt.  Bring the water to a boil.   Immediately cover pan and reduce heat to simmer for 1 minute.  Turn off heat, keep covered, and let sit for 11 minutes.  If my eggs are very small or very large I add or subtract a minute.

Drain and cool under very cold running water or drain and cool in a bowl of iced water.

I use my "older" (1 week after laying or so) eggs for hard boiled eggs, as the skin on fresher eggs is very very hard to peel cleanly.

To peel.  Roll egg gently on a hard surface to crack.  Peel carefully under slowly running water.

Sure signs of spring

Already planted fava beans outside.  Lot's of seedlings in the basement under lights.  Getting ready to plant peas as soon as the rain stops, and thinking about Passover meals.   Spring must be around the corner.

The following article was published (edited) last year in the Philadelphia Inquirer - since you can't find it on their web-site I reprinted it here.

The trees are leafing out, the days are lengthening,  and the first few greens and lettuces are arriving from  local farms and gardens.  While we now take for granted a year round abundance of fresh fruits and vegetable,  grains, beans, meat, eggs, and cheese it wasn’t so long ago that early Spring meant eating from the bottom of our barrels, grateful for  shoots of dandelion greens or a few eggs.

The return each year of Spring sunlight and its promise of renewal and warmth  - the promise of plenty -  was cause for celebration in every culture we have historical information about.   As a sure sign of  rebirth, a natural wonder, the egg become an important symbol of this happiness and joy that heralds Spring’s arrival. Many of the food and other cultural traditions we have woven into our modern lives were forged during these times when cycles of abundance and scarcity ruled our tables.   

Eggs have been colored, blessed, exchanged and eaten as part of the rites of spring for countless centuries.   Long before Jewish families placed a symbolic roasted egg on their Seder plate during the Spring holiday of Passover,  and well before the Christian era of Easter eggs in every form,  the Chinese, Persians, Egyptians and Greeks had Spring rituals and celebrations featuring eggs.    Modern Chinese parents still present red eggs to  relatives and friends  a month after the arrival of a new child, continuing a tradition that dates back millennia.

For several hundred years, in our modern era,  eggs were among the foods forbidden by the church during the weeks before Easter known as Lent.  It was therefore a special treat for these Christians, to include eggs in their Easter meals.  These traditions now include cooking and baking with eggs, decorating and coloring and placing them in Easter Baskets, Egg Hunts and Egg Centered Activities such as the annual Easter Egg Roll on the White House lawn. 

Russian Easter traditions feature baking and gifting an egg-rich fruit and nut bread – kulich.  In Italy, Greece, Poland there are variations on recipes for sweet egg-rich breads braided around decorative colored eggs.  Many Scandinavians eat as many eggs as they can on Easter morning.  A more secular food tradition is, of course,  to find uses for hard cooked eggs in the days after the Spring egg filled holidays.

Eggs may represent the unbroken chain of life,  but as we  know  -  you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs!

Eggs are arguably the most useful culinary staple.  Soft scrambled for breakfast with toast, or with smoked salmon or caviar later in the day.   They are easily poached into a rich chicken broth or creamy tomato sauce for supper.  With a little flair they can be separated and the whites whisked into clouds with sugar to bake, broil  or poach for dessert.   In a cake, stuffing or sauce eggs  bind and emulsify, creating texture and complexity in countless dishes.  An egg is a delicacy on its own,  and a workhorse in the kitchen.

Chickens will start laying eggs when they are 4-5 months old.   The first eggs a hen lays are small, officially graded as “pee-wees.  The process takes place in stages over a 24 hours inside the oviduct – a tube along which the various egg components form around the central yolk.  The clear-white albumen, a membrane, and  finally the shell and outer shell coating (or bloom) is formed, and then the egg continues on to be laid.   Within a half hour she starts the process all over again. 

When an egg is laid, the protective “bloom” seals the many pores in the eggshell and prevents microbial contamination of the contents and preserves the freshness by preventing moisture loss.    Commercial farms are required to wash eggs, which removes this coating,  and many packers attempt to replace the protections with a spray coating of mineral oil.  Owners of small or backyard flocks will generally leave this bloom unwashed,  to benefit from the natural protection provided by nature.

The best place for eggs to be stored is in cartons.   Cartons protect delicate eggs from breakage, loss of moisture, and from absorbing undesirable refrigerator flavors.   According to the American Egg Board fresh uncooked eggs in their shell can be kept refrigerated for at least five weeks beyond the pack date.  I know many who keep small to medium flocks and store unwashed eggs safely for 3-4 months in cartons at cool temperatures.

It was once common for homeowners –even in cities - to keep a few hens for meals, and to sell to neighbors for a little extra “egg money.”   There are still plenty of urban and suburban backyard chickens, but most people do now buy their eggs at the market.  

Given that 75 billion (yes billion) eggs are sold in the United States each year, it should not surprise any of us that many are produced and packed  in very large commercial facilities.  Many of these facilities feature rows and rows of chickens packed in small cages with barely room to turn around, let alone scratch and peck the earth.    These hapless birds are fed a premixed diet to ensure optimal production, and have no access to the sunshine, no matter the season.  These crowded conditions have, in large part, been the cause of most egg related illness in humans, and many questionable environmental impacts. 

Chickens allowed to range on pasture, supplemented with organic grain and corn,  have been shown to have significantly lower levels of cholesterol, and higher levels of important vitamins, nutrients, and omega three fatty acids.  All eggs are a complete protein, so complete that eggs are the standard by which  dieticians measure other proteins.  Whole egg protein is rated higher than milk, fish, beef, soybeans.  In fact,  after mother’s milk, an egg contains the highest quality food protein known. 

Such a valuable resource in such a primal yet elegant package.

I am proponent of supporting ecological farming practices with every dollar I spend on the foods I serve and eat,  so seek out small local producers or grow my own.    Farm fresh eggs, fed organic grain and allowed to roam on pasture. are available in many markets and farm stands in and around the Delaware Valley.  These eggs do cost a bit more, but are still a great value.

There are quite a  farms selling their eggs as Free Roaming, and Free Ranging.  These terms are neither regulated nor consistently defined, so buyer beware.   The conditions on many of these poultry farms are much improved from the largest commercial egg companies, but there is no guarantee about the quality of the food the chickens are fed, or their access to outdoors and fresh forage which lead to the most nutritious eggs.   Eggs labeled Certified Organic mean that the production methods must comply with the USDA National Organic Program, including organic vegetarian feed, no antibiotics and no cages.  On many organic farms poultry do run free, but on others they may (quite legally) have access only to a large concrete yard.  If you want to know more about the conditions at a particular farm,  ask the store where you shop to provide this information, or talk to the farmer directly at a farm market. 

I have kept at least a few laying hens for the last eight years, and so have cooked with and eaten many, many freshly laid eggs,  I can confidently state that the flavor difference between eggs  from hens who roam, peck, and grub for insects and weeds, is worth  a premium price.  The color of the yolk is deep orange and firm, which gives cakes, custards and pasta a buttery yellow color and fresh flavor.  When poached these fresh eggs hold their shape without any mold.   My only complaint is that these eggs are so fresh they are hard to peel once hardboiled.  

Urban egg farming is easy enough.   A great start for information on this topic is COOP -Chicken Owners Outside (and in) Philadelphia www.chickenowners.com or backyardchickens.com.  

There is also a new facebook page, Philadelphia Backyard Chickens,  whose purpose is to both share information and to advocate to again make backyard flocks legal in Philadelphia.  

Whether your eggs are coming from a big farm, a  small flock, or your backyard henhouse,  if you want to make soufflé this Spring,  it is time get cracking.

slow rise honey oat bread

I realize I must be the last person in these United States who has never even tried to make no-knead bread, let alone integrate the process into my weekly repertoire.    What have I been waiting for?

Yesterday I was confronted with a pot full of leftover oatmeal.    Not being one who worries much about leftovers -if I can imagine them transforming into another meal they do,  and more often than not end up as snacks for my chickens.  Somewhere in the back of my mind I had recalled a suggestion to  use leftover cooked grains in bread dough.  I always liked the texture of oatmeal bread, and have a surfeit of honey from last year's harvest, so honey-oat slow rise bread it would be.

I stirred a gloppy mixture of yeast, whole wheat and white flour, a heaping spoonful of honey and smaller spoonful of salt in with the cooked oats until it looked like I imagined a wet dough needed to look and left it on the kitchen counter overnight.   This morning I turned this dough onto a well floured cloth and it pretty much formed itself into a rounded loaf.   An hour and a half later I preheated my oven with a cast iron dutch oven inside until the oven was at 450.     I gently plopped the dough into the hot cast iron pot and closed the lid.    After baking covered for 25 minutes I uncovered the pot and cooked the bread for another 30 minutes.    Crisp crusted, soft crumbed, a delight with a thick schmear of butter.

Prakas and more about stuffed cabbage

My feature piece in today's Inquirer Food Section

stuffed cabbage, part 1

My late winter garden has quite a few cabbage plants that never quite made "heads," nor have they died.   The leaves seemed well suited for stuffing.   

I was never a fan of the Eastern European style sweet and sour meat and rice stuffed cabbage rolls (parakes -) that many of my clan seems enamored of.   I was determined to find some filling combinations of  that were more to my taste.   

Today's version features spicy sauteed lamb and bulghur,  heavily seasoned with dried Turkish Urfa pepper,  lot's of minced garlic,  cumin and coridander, cilantro, raisins, and  minced candied ginger   rolled in blanched cabbage leaves, slow cooked with creamy tomato sauce and a few white beans

Tomorrow's version will featured shredded chicken and rice with shitaake mushrooms, scallions in chicken broth