Port Potager

We’ve had a bumper crop of small but serviceable Gala apples this year, but this is not a variety that stores for very long. That means we have to make a whole lot of applesauce and find other ways to eat them up before they become a fruit fly infested mess. Enter the apple cake: Last weekend Kirk made this cake courtesy of his friend Tressa’s recipe, and it is delicious. It’s like a nice, dense pound cake with layers of lightly spiced apples throughout: The photo above is of my breakfast leftover portion, but the original was also served with some vanilla custard poured over the top. It’s the perfect fall treat!  Tressa’s Apple Cake Ingredients: 2 tsp. cinnamon 5 Tbsp. sugar 3 cups flour 1 3/4 cups sugar 3/4 cup vegetable oil 3 large eggs 2 1/2 tsp. vanilla 3 tsp. baking powder 1/2 cup orange juice 4-5 large apples, peeled, cored and sliced Directions: Stir together cinnamon and 5 Tbsp. sugar. Sprinkle mixture over sliced apples and ...

The additional daylight in the spring means that the chickens begin laying again, after a sporadic winter of not doing very much. Martha and Rachel got the memo weeks ago and are going their jobs well: Sally is also a champ. But sometimes this happens: As you can see, Sally’s eggs has been pecked open and eaten. That blob on the floor of the nesting box shows that several eggs have been raided and destroyed over that past few days. This is not a protein or calcium issue, as they have plenty of extra seeds and oyster shells to eat. This seems to be about spite. I caught Abigail — who, it should be noted, hasn’t laid an egg in months — pecking away at one just the other day. jerk. Kirk and I were also talking just lat night about how Lizzy — the worst chicken — also hasn’t laid any eggs in recent memory, and how she’s generally not earning her keep at all .  And then today I found that she had, in fact laid an egg.  And it was eaten. Along with ...

Our chickens were all kinds of out of sorts this spring, pecking each other bare and refusing to lay. Though we tried several interventions to get them to stop, we gave up entirely a couple weeks ago and decided to leave them to their own devices. And we were rewarded: Here are Abigail, Rachel, and Martha, all squeezed into the nesting boxes trying to lay at the same time. We are suddenly back up to four eggs a day, though we don’t get them all unless we are very quick: That dark brown egg is one of Lizzy’s though it’s been pecked apart. I presume she does this herself, because she is (still) stupid and terrible. The other chickens seem to think so, too — just the other day I saw Louisa Catherine oh-so-casually reach over and pull a big beakful of fluff out of Lizzy’s behind and then spit it out with contempt.  Even with the loss of an egg every other day or so, we’re definitely back where we should always be at this time of year as far as production is conc...

Behold what we have been reduced to: These are boughten eggs.  We've only had one egg since putting the blinders on the chickens , and that was from Martha, who managed to get hers off within the first 24 hours. Since then, we haven't gotten one, and I'm assuming that having a piece of plastic wedged in your nostrils is so uncomfortable that it's kind of stressing them out. Or they might be doing a springtime mini-molt: Abigail always does this, but the others haven't ever stopped laying the spring for a mini-molt — they usually molt in the fall, as the daylight wanes. We may have triggered it by dialing their light back in an effort to ease their supposed stress as well, but who knows at this point. To recap this week in chickens: Lizzy is still inexplicably hateful towards only me, throwing herself against the walls of the run whenever I pass by. Kirk gets no such treatment, probably because he feeds them. Rachel's butt is still ...

In addition to making Christmas gifts during my blogging hiatus, we also had a birthday to celebrate. Kirk's birthday is just a few days after the New Year, a decidedly un-fun time of the year: Everyone is back to work and school, and the whole world is more interested in dieting and exercising than having even one more day filled with cake.  Still, we always celebrate Kirk's birthday with a special extra-creamy cheesecake, and this year was no exception. He's been having this since he was a kid when his mom made it for him, and it's the best cheesecake you will ever eat. It's super creamy and custardy rather than dry and cake-y like a New York-style cheesecake.  That's because it uses eggs instead of flour. With an assist from Rachel and Sally (pictured) and Louisa Catherine (hiding), I got three very fresh eggs to whip this up: These eggs turned out to have some incredibly orange yolks, so the finished product was more yellow than it...

Our older chickens molted early, and our younger ones finally figured out the whole egg-laying thing , so we are flush with eggs of many colors and sizes: Despite the short hours of daylight, we've been able to turn the light on for the girls , and now they're averaging about three eggs per day. We suddenly find ourselves with two dozen eggs in the fridge. This comes at a great time: Wednesday is Pie Day , and holiday baking will be in full force immediately thereafter.  In the meantime, quiche is one of the quickest ways to blow through a bunch of eggs, so that's what Kirk made for dinner. This was a Cheddar Bacon Broccoli Quiche, and it was outstanding: Cheddar Bacon Broccoli Quiche For the pastry: 6 Tbs. butter 2 Tbs. shortening 1 1/4 cup flour 1/2 tsp. salt 1/4 cup vodka For the filling: 4 strips of bacon 1 medium onion 1 cup chopped broccoli 4 eggs 1 cup half and half 1 cup milk 1 cup grated cheddar a pinch of thym...

At least two of our new chickens — Rachel, the Rhode Island Red; Lizzy, the Welsummer; and Louisa Catherine, the Gold-Laced Wyandotte — are laying now, and we’ve collected a dozen eggs so far:  This mis-matched set doesn’t include the four “seed eggs” that we put in the nesting boxes to help the girls figure out where to lay their eggs. Someone’s got it down, but someone else is still laying little eggs on the floor under the roosting bar. But who’s laying where, and which egg belongs to which bird?    All three of our older chickens are molting and appear to be done laying for the season. Martha and Abigail lay green eggs, so that’s not in question anyway. Sally lays light brownish-pink eggs, and you can see that we have three or four full-sized, light eggs in the box. We thought perhaps she was the one laying these big eggs in the box (despite the molt), but today I picked up an egg with a clue:  The downy feather left attached to this lig...

Just as I was about to give up on our young ladies giving us any eggs at all, there's this: The large egg is a normal-sized egg. The smaller one is maybe 2/3 the size — definitely a first attempt by one of the girls.  The mystery (unless you catch a hen in the nesting box) is always about figuring out which egg came from which bird. The big egg above looks like one of Sally's regular eggs, a sort of pinkish brown. It was also warm in the nesting box when I picked it up. Sally was nowhere near the henhouse, but Louisa Catherine (our Gold-Laced Wyandotte ) was standing on the ramp, looking slightly confused. Some quick research revealed that, yes indeedy, Wyandottes lay pinkish brown eggs.  Sally, by the way, is in the middle of a molt, and hasn't laid in a couple weeks (a sad fact that led us to buy an incredibly disappointing carton of eggs last week). Though she's a champion layer, I'd be surprised if she randomly popped out an egg in the mid...

It's the time of year again: zucchini is back in force! This one had a particular joie de vivre and would not be dragged down. It was growing straight up – something I hadn't seen before. I figured it would fall back to earth as it got too heavy, but no. This one was aiming for the heavens until we cut it. It was tasty, too. When zucchini is still small and tender (if you can manage to stay on top of it), you can totally eat it raw. We had this one in a shaved zucchini and fennel salad: Kirk just uses a sharp vegetable peeler to make long, thin strips. It's dressed simply with lemon juice, olive oil, salt and pepper. There's also some thin bits of fennel bulb thinnings and some fennel fronds as well. This was a rare occasion in which we cooked together. The other part of last night's dinner was an omelet I made with (obviously) eggs, baby broccoli (the side shoots are even better than the big heads !), tarragon, chives, scallions, and a mild...

November always strikes me as the end of something. The World Series is over and baseball is done for the year, despite my best efforts to hang on to summer. Halloween and its accompanying burst of creativity is past. Daylight Saving Time has finally ended, thrusting us headlong into the dark days. Temperatures have dipped below freezing, ending the active growing season and leaving us casting about for something to do in the garden besides peeking under the tunnels and raking up leaves. Although we haven't technically had a frost, we did have some snow yesterday, so our remaining summer fruits are dead and gone. This was our last harvest basket: Tonight we ate the very last fresh tomato (in salsa form). There are no more cucumbers, and the supply of peppers and jalapeños is dwindling. We still have some eggplant, but Saturday's eggplant parm luncheon had some bitter bites, and we had so much of it this year that I think we might just compost the last few on the c...

Our champion egg-layer, Dolley: She's my favorite chicken, and I think this photo gives a good sense of why. She's got a winning personality: friendly like a dog, curious like a cat. She was inspecting my shiny phone when I took this picture, and the cheeky monkey pecked right at the lens just a second later.   All that and a basket of eggs. Up until she molted this winter, Dolley could be counted on to lay an egg every day. She was a machine! But now she's not. The kids aren't even sure exactly when they last picked up an egg from Dolley (hers are the dark brown ones, and they are easy to tell apart from the rest). Usually, if you see anything at all in the nesting box, it looks like this: It would appear that Dolley has been eating her eggs before we can get to them. Even other birds' eggs in the nesting boxes have been pecked at, but not destroyed. This must be the downside of her otherwise lovable chicken-y curiosity: She pecks...

Now that things are growing in the warm sun, we are enjoying some seasonal delights at the dinner table. We have tulips from the cutting garden: Tulips rather notoriously lose steam after their first year, and ours are no exception. Many did not re-bloom, and the ones that did are smaller than they were last season. Still, we have enough to keep up a bouquet on the dining room table, and that's enough to brighten things up indoors. Asparagus season is in full swing! To keep it from getting out of hand, Kirk turned several large bunches into  Cream of Asparagus Soup 4-5 scallions, chopped 3-4 cloves garlic, minced 2 Tbs. olive oil 2-3 large bunches of asparagus, cut into 1-inch pieces 1/2 to 1 cup cream Salt and pepper to taste  fresh tarragon for garnish 1. In a large stock pot, sauté scallions and garlic in olive oil.   2. As you cut asparagus into pieces, add to the pot and allow to sauteé while you continue chopping.  3...

Last year we had some serious trouble hard-boiling our Easter eggs. They weren't finished in the center and were impossible  to peel without gouging out big pieces of egg white that stayed attached to the shells. This is because fresh eggs have a much stronger membrane (the part between the shell and the white), while store-bought eggs have been sitting around long enough to let the membrane separate a bit. (You can read a very thorough, more scientific explanation here .) This year, we vowed to do better. Although the internet is full of ideas about how to make fresh eggs easier to peel ( ice bath , pin prick , baking soda , steaming ), the varied comments left by others on each method led me to believe that there's no magic bullet here. You just have to plan ahead. And since planning is my strong suit, that's what we did. Back in March, we started a separate box to save our clean, unpecked eggs for Easter. It was full by the end of the month, and we left it...

Winter is finally (technically) over! I know that tonight it will probably snow again before all's said and done, and it will still be cold and windy for some time yet, but still. By this time tomorrow we will at least be reveling in the knowledge that the daylight has finally overcome the darkness, and will increase each day. The cold can't hold out much longer against those odds. Ahhh. Time to start thing about some seasonal eats. We have just eaten our last parsnips, and are down to our last couple leeks and squashes. I think we have a handful or two of potatoes, and a decent amount of garlic, plus some frozen beans. That's not a whole lot to get us through until the greens come up in the garden in force, considering that we were only able to sow the first round of them this past weekend . Spring has been so long in coming that we won't be having salads any time soon, thanks to the well-below average temperatures this month. So what kind of seasonal goodies ca...

Another day, another six or eight inches of snow. This brings our snow pack on the ground to somewhere around 18-20 inches, as you can see by looking at the roof of the chicken coop: It's more like 2-3 feet in the front yard, where every fruit tree's trunk is covered up to where it begins to branch out. It's a lot of snow, and I'm looking forward to the warm temperatures (almost 50 degrees? Bring it!) and melting we're supposed to get for the next few days. Since our coop is built better just about as well as a regular-people house, I'm not inclined to take a roof rake to it. The snow will actually help insulate it and keep the chickens a little warmer in there for the next couple of weeks.  And, despite what look to be frigid, wintery working conditions, the ladies are laying again! As I mentioned last week , Sally started on the first day we turned the light back on, and she hasn't missed a day since. Not far behind her was Abigail, who i...