The Great Vegetable Pizza Adventure

My fellow vegetable farmer loves pizza. He claims he could eat it every night for supper.

“Every night?” I say, making a face. I like variety in my meals.

“Well, maybe every other night. We could have pasta in between,” he says, his eyes lighting up at this exciting meal plan.

“You should have been a pizza farmer. Or a pasta farmer. You could have amber waves of grain. What are you doing growing vegetables?”

My fellow grins and shrugs. “I'm halfway to pizza. Look at this.” He shows me a new seed catalog, where he's circled all the tomato varieties he wants to try next season. “See all these delicious tomatoes? They're practically pizza. And look here, onions, and peppers, and spinach and broccoli, for pizza toppings.”

I just laugh. “I'm the one who puts the vegetables on the pizza! You would be happy with cheese!”

“Nuh-uh,” he says. “I want lots of tomatoes, a nice thick sauce. Yum!” He circles some more tomato varieties, and falls into a January-vegetable-farmer-drooling-over-seed-catalogs daze. He is in a tomato-growing, pizza-eating dream.

I, however, am not thinking of pizza, at least not the kind of pizza my fellow dreams about. I am thinking of our root cellar full of vegetables and our freezer full of vegetables, stored for the winter. I am thinking how handy and thrifty and sustainable it is to be a vegeterian when one is a vegetable farmer. And I am also thinking of my digestive system, which seems considerably happier on a vegetable diet, rather than a pizza and pasta diet.

Thus I embark on the Great Vegetable Pizza Adventure. Long, long ago, when my digestive system was young and willing, and my zucchini harvest was overflowing, I tried a zucchini crusted-pizza, a recipe from our dog-eared copy of the Moosewood cookbook. Alas, my penciled notation read, “Yuk! Way too eggy.” The evolution of my tastes and diet is clear through my additional notes: the next one said, “I have learned to like this!” and the third one says, “Very good!”

The recipe calls for eggs, cheese, herbs, a little flour, and two cups of grated zucchini. It was easy to substitute yellow squash for zucchini when necessary, and cornmeal or rice flour for the wheat flour.

But one winter, I ran out of grated zucchini and grated yellow squash. I found another recipe, for a cauliflower pizza crust. Now, I love cauliflower, but let me say that a cauliflower pizza crust is nothing like a regular pizza crust, in my thinking. It really tastes like cauliflower, and cauliflower is not a subtle vegetable. Plus I had to eat it with a fork. “This is not a pizza!” I proclaimed. “This is a casserole!”

“It's a pretty good casserole, though,” said my nice fellow, trying a bite, between slices of his delicious homemade wheat crust regular pick-up-able pizza.

“Huh,” I said. “I'm going to try something else. I have a lot of beets. I'm going to make a beet crust. I love beets!”

And yes, I do love beets, but a beet crust pizza is almost unbelievably sweet. “This is not a pizza!” I said. “This is too sweet! Even if I can pick it up in a slice, and not by the forkful!”

But I did have plenty of carrots in the root cellar that year too. Carrots made a pretty good pizza crust. Carrots and beets mixed together made a pretty good pizza crust. And then last year, when the carrots and beets were all gone, I was reduced to the rutabaga. I hasten to add that I love rutabagas.

My fellow raised his eyebrows. “Rutabaga pizza?”

My dear daughter, who does not love rutabagas, politely turned her head away at the idea.

Undaunted, I fetched my rutabagas. I washed them, trimmed them, grated them, mixed them up with eggs, cheese, herbs, and cornmeal. I baked my rutabaga crust, topped it with tomato sauce, more cheese, onions, peppers. Then I waited.

Ding! Ding ! Ding! went the timer. At last! My rutabaga pizza! The most delicious vegetable pizza crust in the world! Slightly sweet, like a rutabaga, but not too strongly flavored, and it holds together nicely. I even let my fellow and my daughter try a bite. “That's pretty good,” they said, surprised.

“Yum,” I answered.

Now, when my fellow suggests pizza for supper every night, I agree, at least about once a week. The Great Vegetable Pizza Adventure continues: this year, stored in my root cellar, I have lots of daikon radishes, which surprised us very late in the season by their vigorous growth in the greenhouse.

Mmm. Doesn't that sound yummy? Daikon Radish Pizza!

Originally published in the Monadnock Shopper News, Jan 18 - Jan 24, 2017

Dizzy December on the Farm

 Honestly, there are few things sillier than a New England vegetable farmer in December. A December farmer is prone to tumultuous tears and loopy laughter, prone to giddy gales of glee and riotous roars of relief, prone to alarming amounts of alliteration and crazy columns.  

Why? Because another harvest season has been surmounted! We pulled it off again! Three months of pre-harvest work, followed by six months of harvest work: week after week, vegetable after vegetable, planted, watered, weeded, picked, sorted, washed, and distributed to CSA members and Farmer's Market customers. But now it's over!  

Every bad bug or dreadful drought or foul flood of the season is now in the past; every worrisome weed or irritating irrigation incident or determined deer forcing a fence is just a memory. Now is the time we get to rest and read and revel, wonder and write and wax eloquent (or weloquent, as the case may be).  

Now is also the time when ordinarily vexing things (such as the excessive use of alliteration!) seem charming and delightful. Sink full of dirty dishes? Wow! That's fantastic! We have lots of time to wash them! Laundry room floor covered with dirty laundry! Wow! That's fantastic! We have lots of time to wash it! Bedroom floor covered with clean laundry? Wow! That's fantastic! We have lots of time to fold it and put it away!  

Email inbox overflowing with messages? No problem! We love sitting in front of the computer! School carpool drivers gone traveling? No problem! We'll take an extra shift! (Or hey! Too many exclamation points in one short Shopper column? No problem! We vegetable farmers get the Dizzy December Dispensation!)  

In the same vein, ordinarily agreeable things on the farm become even more pleasing once the harvest season has ended. For example, there are many times during the year when a farmer might come across a draft horse in urgent need of petting under the chin and scratching on the withers. In the gardening season, the petting and scratching is more likely to lead to full-on grooming, harnessing, and going out to the field to plow or disc or harrow.  

But in winter, pleasant petting and scratching just leads to more pleasant petting and scratching, which is satisfying to both petter and pettee, scratcher and scratchee. The horse are winter-warm and fuzzy, and smell so sweet, and they like a good massage very, very much. Especially when it's followed by munching hay out of the manger, which is followed by soaking up the sunshine.  

Sunshine, of course, is another one of the ordinarily agreeable things that are even more pleasing this time of chilly year. Weather, in general, is more pleasing in the winter, when a farmer is not trying to persuade vegetables to grow despite hail or drought or flood. In winter, there's only the snow to shovel from the greenhouses, and the wood to bring from the woodshed. Gosh, what's a howling snow storm or an inch of ice matter when you don't have any tender lettuce transplants or just germinated carrots struggling to survive?  

Darkness, too, is more enjoyable this season of the year. It is always kind of nice when it gets to be dusk in the summer: time to hang up the tools, time to lead the horses out to pasture, time to enjoy a quick salad supper and fall into bed. In December, since it's dusk in the middle of the afternoon, it's all kinds of nice in the dark: a leisurely meal, and a long evening in front of the fire, considering sewing repairs or tool repairs or inside-of-the-house-falling-apart repairs, but not actually doing them. Because it's only December! We've just finished the season! We have all winter! First let's have some fun!  

Even holidays are more vegetable farmer friendly in the winter. In the summer, the world always seem to be going on vacation or swimming or watching fireworks when there's hay to be cut and raked and picked up, or weeding to be done. But in the winter, that same world kindly offers millions of potlucks and parties and concerts and holiday fairs and festivities, just at the perfect time for a celebrating end-of-the-season vegetable farmer. And, as you can imagine, it's especially pleasing, and well-nigh irresistible to a silly, dizzy, wild December farmer, to send this alliterative greeting out to the world: Happy Holidays! Ho! Ho! Ho!

Originally published in the Monadnock Shopper News, Dec 21 - 27, 2016

Goodbye to Our Scratchy Bitey Farm Cat

November is a fine month on our vegetable farm. In November, both our Farmers' Market and our CSA harvest days are over for the season, and we revel in the feeling of so much time. Now we have time to finish putting up the last of the vegetables for winter eating, and time to put the machinery away, and time to return our draft horses to their winter paddock. We even have a little time to bask by the wood stove with our stripey kitty, Cricket, who stretches out on the rug and chirps occasionally at us. Cricket is a fine kitty, and we give her lots of pets, both for her own sake, and for the sake of other fine cats, such as our scratchy-bitey black kitty, who, at twenty years old, left us this past summer. It was the end of an era here on our farm. Our black kitty has been with us longer than our New Hampshire farm and our draft horses and our daughter. We, along with friends, relatives, neighbors, and CSA members, all have funny stories about our scratchy-bitey kitty. Most of them, of course, involve scratching and biting. Happily, as our kitty got on in years, he did mellow a bit, tending towards hissing, spitting and violent cursing rather than scratching and biting. He also developed several fine-old-kitty quirks. This last summer, for example, he only wanted to lie on hard surfaces, such as the table or the counter top or the pile of cucumbers we were getting ready to pickle. The day we found him curled up in the frying pan on the stove top was the day we instituted the spray bottle. Our black kitty did not like the spray bottle at all. He would glare balefully at the spray bottle and at the person waving it in his direction, and then leap down. In a few minutes he would be right back again, moving from counter top to stove to sink, looking for the ideal resting spot. He had a strong will, our kitty. In fact, as our kitty got older, he exerted his will on the household by refusing to drink out of any ordinary vessel, be it glass, ceramic, metal, wooden, or plastic. No, he wanted to drink out of the sink. Or he wanted to lick the tiny drops of water on newly washed supper vegetables. Or he wanted to drink from the shower floor, especially when a person was mid-shower, and didn't especially want a cat to hover in the shower curtain, letting the cold air in and the water out. But our black kitty's favorite was the water that he liberated by tipping over vases of flowers on the kitchen table. We tried various vase tricks, such as weighting the vases with rocks, or jamming several vases into a big basket to make them kitty-proof. With the determination of the strong-willed, our kitty knocked over the entire basket of many vases. Then he had a lot of water. We learned to enjoy our vases of flowers displayed on the top of the refrigerator. Our scratchy-bitey kitty was looking pretty rough his last few months, thin and bony, his coat a mess, despite our efforts with brush and comb, and despite many treats of eggs and nutritional yeast and other savories. Like many very old cats, he was partially blind, and completely deaf, and had an enormous howling yowl to express his opinions at odd moments. If it wasn't the crashing vases that woke us up at midnight, it was the ear-splitting yell, which he kept practicing until the end. We never could tell what he was saying, but he said it good and loud, as he made his way around and in and out of the house. His whole life, our black kitty spent a lot of time outdoors, and this last summer was no exception. Our daughter, who was born into the household of the Scratchy-Bitey Kitty, was the last to see him. “I gave him some cream,” she said, “and four different bowls of water, and he drank a little out of every one.” Sometime in the night our kitty let himself out of the screen door, a talent he had perfected. We think he must have found himself a good spot to die, in the woods or the fields, and we think of him often. We think of him, and are glad he lived with us, and glad for his help in our sustainable-farming-rodent-control program, and glad he had a good, long, healthy kitty life. We can keep our vases of flowers on the table again now. But we miss our scratchy-bitey kitty. He sure did love that rug in front of the wood stove on a cold November day. He defended it tooth and claw.   Originally published in the Monadnock Shopper News, Nov 23 - Nov 29, 2016

The Good Taste of No Waste

It's potato season here on our New Hampshire vegetable farm. Most everybody loves potatoes, and our CSA members are no exception. They head for the potato crate with glee. Members study the contents of the crate, finding the perfect potato size for the menu that week – big bakers, medium or small size boilers.

“Look at this,” a member might laugh, holding up a potato the size of a marble between two fingers. “You don't waste anything!”

We farmers laugh too. Heck, no, we don't want to waste a thing, especially the produce that we've labored over these many months. And if no CSA member is energized by the idea of picking out, weighing, and cooking up their weekly fall potato share in the form of marble size potatoes, why, the marbles will find their way into the farm kitchen, and the farmers will cook them up. Potatoes are so darned good, why waste one?

Of course, the same holds true for the many other vegetables we grow. We can't bear to waste any, whether they are perfect specimens or a little troubled. There's always a few tomatoes with small troubles or the odd squash that's grown too large, so we pile them up in our Surplus and Sharing Tray.

The tray is primarily for CSA members to trade vegetables and customize their shares. But we also put our troubled vegetables there, and any member with time or inclination is welcome to scoop up some and take 'em home, along with the regular share of trouble-free vegetables. And if any vegetables are left at the end of the CSA pick-up? There's always the farm kitchen, and hungry farmers to feed.

Recently, the hungry farmers took a break from the farm and the farm kitchen to visit another farm, one of the largest retail and wholesale fruit and vegetable growers in New Hampshire. While not a huge farm by national standards, the place was giant compared to our little acreage. As we drove around (drove, not walked!) the fields, we were taken aback, for example, by the “finished” squash and cucumber section. To our tiny-farm eyes, there were mountains of vegetables still left in the beds, sadly overripe by then. We asked the farmer, and he told us that at some point, when a crop has passed its peak, it's no longer efficient to send in the labor to harvest the rest.

Huh. We mulled that over. It makes sense on one level, but all that wasted food! It was painful to see. We came away from our visit and the extensive acres, irrigation, buildings, machinery, and many employees, feeling very clear indeed that our tiny farm was just what we wanted.

We like our little walkable fields. We like our four draft horses. We like the fellow farmers on our Mom and Pop farm. We like our CSA members, and knowing their names and where they live and if their grandchildren are visiting or their toddler just sampled her first winter squash, grown on our farm. And we love not wasting food, and harvesting every possible edible vegetable from a crop.

This year, though the summer drought gave us beautiful and abundant broccoli and beet greens, it also meant we couldn't germinate the fall turnips, carrots, and rutabagas, despite valiant attempts at irrigation. We are also theorizing that the drought, followed at last by rain, caused many of our fall cabbages to split. What does a non-wasting, use everything, eat everything tiny-farm farmer do with twenty or thirty split cabbages?

Well, we dithered. We like to give out the loveliest of vegetables to our CSA members. But we might not have enough heads of cabbage for everyone without the split heads. And even an ambitious farm kitchen can't absorb that much cabbage, despite how well cabbage pairs with marble size potatoes. Plus the cabbage is perfectly delicious, even though it won't store well.

In the end we decided to give out the split cabbage heads to our fine, flexible, good-natured CSA members. We couldn't stand the thought all of that fresh, local, sustainably raised food going to waste. Our members took up the split cabbage challenge willingly, entering fully into the spirit of non-wasteful farming. No waste here: just good food, gobbled up. Now that leaves a good taste in a vegetable farmer's mouth.
 

Originally published in the Monadnock Shopper News, Oct 26 - Nov 1, 2016