Something new is blooming every day. It’s a great time of the year to be outdoors.
Month: May 2014
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Flowers, flowers, flowers
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How a Mother Hen Protects Her Chicks
One of the way a mother hen protects her chicks is by fluffing up and making herself look much larger. It’s almost comical watching these fluff-balls protecting their little ones.
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Spring Garlic with Chicken – True Paleo Fare
This is a simple recipe with just a few ingredients.
- One whole five-month old rooster which has been crowing for no more than a month and butchered within the last four days
- One bunch of green garlic freshly plucked out of the garden – to grow a bunch of garlic, leave whole bulbs of garlic in the ground the summer before. Each garlic bulb will shoot up a bunch of slender garlic, perfect for dishes like this.
- Some sprigs of freshly picked oregano
- Sake or white wine
Cut the rooster into drumsticks, thighs, and breasts. Save the wings and the rest of the carcass to make soup.
The breasts should be a nice rose color, the bones a shiny alabaster. The skin and meat should have a bright, translucent sheen. The fat should be a pleasing, lemon color. The thighs will be bright red.
Arrange the pieces of rooster in a heavy pot. Top with the garlic and oregano. Add some sake or white wine so there is a half inch to inch in the bottom of the pot. Cover the pot and put on a very low flame. Let it gently simmer for two hours.
Out will come tender, juicy, tasty meat. Dish up as whole pieces or cut up and serve. Sprinkle with salt if you like.
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Cream and Butter
It’s been awhile, but I made some butter this afternoon. We had run out of butter, but I had a quart of fresh cream from Jackie’s Jersey Milk I had bought yesterday, so I decided to make butter. Making butter is so simple, I wonder why I don’t make it more often.
With butter so easy to make, why are there so few brands of butter in the stores? And there are no butters made from raw cream. Shouldn’t there be hundreds of varieties from tiny, one of a kind dairies? Wouldn’t the butter from a dairy up in the mountains taste different than the butter from a dairy near the sea?
But when you look at the butters on the store shelves, they all come from dairies churning out the stuff by the ton. Any subtle differences in the milk from this pasture or that, or from this cow versus that cow, is obliterated, and everyone ends up eating the same butter.
It doesn’t have to be this way. We don’t all have to eat the same butter. And if you make your own, you will be the only one with that special butter.
Many decades ago when I was visiting a friend in Bavaria, her mother sent us out to buy some milk. They lived out in the country, and they purchased milk from a small dairy a short walk from their house. We walked ten minutes through the beautiful countryside, carrying a cute metal container. The milk we purchased was so fresh and delicious.
However, buying milk directly from a farmer is very difficult here. Many years ago, my uncle and aunt ran a small dairy farm in Kansas. Every few days, a milk truck came to their farm to pick up there milk and trucked it all the way to Texas. They weren’t allowed to sell their milk directly to consumers. But, they had a way around that. Neighbors would come by, “steal some milk”, and leave some money behind.
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May Evening
This is a season of endless flowers. This evening, some of the apple trees are in full bloom. Growing food keeps you surrounded with beauty.
The cherry blossom petals are blowing onto the pond, collecting like snow along its banks.
The chickens are making their last rounds before darkness settles in.
Tulips still dazzle. They last longer if you plant them in part shade. It also helps if you have gentle springs, not too hot, not too cold.
