Peach Season is upon us!

When the air starts to feel heavy with sunshine and the days begin to shorten, I know that peach season is right around the corner.  Peaches in Northern Michigan can be found at farmer's markets and fruit stands for a few weeks, typically during the month of August. The small golden orbs require lots of golden sunshine to ripen. Then glorious summer of all summers, the wonderful sweet fruit makes its way to our tables in the form of fresh peaches, peach pie, peach crostinis, peach parfaits and one of my favorite recipes for my friends and family that require low sugar diets ( although all of us would benefit from lowering our sugar intake); peach butter.

 Natural and nourishing, this peach butter preserves the best of our warm summer fruits without the addition of sugar. The pure sweet taste of peaches is the star in this low calorie butter.

 Yum.

Peach butter always starts with fresh and nicely ripe peaches.  There are lots of places in Northern Michigan to pick your own peaches.  Jacobs Corn Maze on Hwy. 72 heading out to Empire has a U-Pick Peaches.
And, if you'd rather just buy your sweet beauties, then right across the street is Gallagher's Farm Market and Bakery.  They usually have at least two varieties of peaches along with lots of other local produce to fill your basket

 

 Peach Butter Recipe

Peach Butter is simple to prepare and rich in flavor with the addition of warm spices like cinnamon, nutmeg and allspice. Make sure that you are using only ripe peaches.

Ingredients

• 8 lbs. fresh, ripe peaches
• 1 1/2 T of cinnamon
• 1 t ground ginger
• 1/4 t nutmeg
• 1/4 t cloves
• 1/4 cardamom
• 1/4 allspice

Instructions

Mix all of the spices together in a separate bowl.
Parboil your peaches for one minute in a boiling water bath to remove the skin.  Immerse in a water bath immediately to stop the cooking of the peach.
Remove the pit.
Throw your peach sections into a food processor and blend until liquid and chunky.
Pour your peach puree into a dutch oven or thick bottomed pot and stir half of your mixed spices into your peach puree.
Taste and add additional spice mixture, or salt to taste.
Simmer your peach puree for approximately one hour on medium low heat.
Blend until smooth with an immersion blender and pour into pint-sized mason jars and refrigerate or can using the water bath method.

 Parboil your peaches for approximately one minute to loosen
the skin.

Place the peaches in a ice cold water bath after their parboil.

Peach butter is one of the easiest things to make from peaches.  The sweet fragrant peach is the star in this melody of flavors that includes some deep, warming spices.  This flavor, to me, slathered on some toasted and buttered 9 Bean Rows  sourdough   means the end of summer and yet,  the beginning of fall. 

Picnic at Sylvia's

what a lovely and enchanting night.
 i don't know if it was my new blue toenail polish or the garden party with queen anne chairs and wedge wood china that put me in such a lovely mood last night.

Oh, to be invited to a lovely and elegant picnic in the woods in the middle of summer... it is just a special thing...

So, we dined in quiet certitude that all was well
and then we waited for the moon to rise.

It is a special thing. To be invited to a Lewis Carrol
garden picnic and fall down into the hole and wake up
munching on cherries and lathers of blue cheese laid on blue crackers.


 Yum.

Sweet.

To be taken "away" during your experience/meal. To take leave of your sensibility. Not your senses... because your senses
are working over time, looking at this, admiring that,
savoring it all.

Well,
that is any hostess'  accomplishment...  to transport her guests
to an even lovelier place for a forest feast...and feed them
sumptuous fare.

After that sumptuous picnic dinner in the woods, i slept on cloud nine.  what a lovely dinner and lovely experience!!!

U Can Pick the Raspberries!

Up on the Mission, after you pass the blue bay on the right and the blue bay on the left, then up and over the big hill with the scenic turnout and then,  past  a mature orchard of sweet and tart cherries lies a little farm called "Shang-ri-La Too".  Lou and Irene manage this wonderful farm that multipurposes itself as a respite, a farm, a vineyard, an orchard, a b & b, an artist's studio and most likely a few other functions that i don't even know about.  I stumbled on this friendly place when i was looking for the last of the season's strawberries for one last shortcake recipe for some desperate friends from Texas. Irene and Lou happened to be having a garage sale but were out of strawberries. As luck would have it,  Linda my friend from Texas talked me into a ceramic cow with measuring spoons, a cylindrical orange mod a go-go vase and a retro copper tray. (No regrets!)  We chatted about fruit and they told me that what i REALLY wanted was to come back to their farm in a couple of weeks to pick raspberries.

So, i marked my calender and showed up one Thursday morning to pick my share of raspberries for some jam.  Irene took me out to her "patch" and Lou pointed me in the direction of the sweet and small raspberries that make fragrant jam.  In fact, Lou doesn't even like his raspberries that much, since they have the aroma of "perfume".
Well, that works for me.  I'll take perfumey raspberries any day. In fact, I wonder if lavender and raspberries would work. Hmpfh.  Well, I picked enough to almost make a batch of jam so Irene had to finish off my pints. 

It was so much cheaper to pick my own raspberries! Two pints for $5.00. And not only that, but i got to visit their lovely farm. See their many farm animals. ( See wild, native owl at left).  And peek inside the B & B. 
For more information on picking raspberries, cherries or apples call Shangri-La Too at 231-499-0106.
And for information about their farm stay B&B ... well, call the farm number too!
oh! darn! i forgot to ask about the eggs!

Red Garlic Harvest at Meadowlark Farm

It's summer now and it's hot.  Lots of things are pouring in from the farmers markets. We're way past asparagus and rhubarb, even the strawberries are gone. Next up are the cherries, blueberries and raspberries in the fruit department. Onions, squash, carrots, broccoli, potatoes and every other kind of vegetable is grown here as well.  The flowers are so wonderful too and come in every color.  There are things going on behind the scenes too, and garlic harvest for Meadowlark Farms is in full swing.

Meadowlark Farm owned by Jon Watts and Jenny Tutlis,   has been growing and reseeding the same beautiful big red cloves of delicious garlic that originally came from a farm in Idaho for about 20 years now. Once the tops of the garlic plants start to die back, then you know it's time to harvest. Growing garlic is an act of faith, since you seed in the fall and then sit back and wait. And then all of the conditions merge for you (or not) and it is time to harvest garlic.
  I showed up late for garlic harvesting and much of the work was already underway.

First, a tractor pulls a "tool" through the field to undercut the garlic in the dry field so that it is easy to pull from the ground.  Then a crew of people walk along the row pulling and gathering the garlic, laying them in stacks so that the snipping crew that follows can find the bulbs and snip them from the green stalks. The bulbs are layered in black, breathable crates that get stacked and left in a barn to cure.  I never knew that garlic cured. Fresh garlic, Jen says, ..."is juicy, full of water and not as strong as it will be as it cures and dries and the pungent flavors condense."

I love garlic but I probably won't see these beautiful bulbs again until later in the season once they've had a chance to dry a bit and cure.
oh well...


Every harvest, especially on a hot day is accompanied by a refreshing snack and today at the farm was no exception.  Jenny prepared a smorgasborg of fresh items to snack on; watermelon, carrots from the farm, chips and salsa, some other dips and fresh made lemonaide.  Soon, hands were moving around the table gathering plates of snacks and jars of cool lemonaide. There was munching, laughing, spitting cherry seeds, swinging on swings and gulping fresh cool lemonaide.

This was my first Meadowlark garlic harvest and oh, what a joy to be part of the gathering, cleaning, snipping and layering of this famous Meadowlark Red Garlic...  Thankyou Jenny and Jon.
You can see more pictures on my facebook page;  https://www.facebook.com/pages/Traverse-City-Locavore

The End

Just like that, the puzzle project was over.
Silenced.

When i realized that the cat stepped onto the table and  pulled the puzzle off spilling it to the floor, i just couldn't believe it.  I knelt close to the floor and tried to pick up the pieces as carefully as i could.  To preserve the linkages.  To keep the integrity, somehow.  I retraced in my mind how this happened and how i could have prevented it.
But, i wasn't looking.  Not directly, anyway.

But it was no use.  Just like that, the puzzle spilled to the floor and it was over.

I thought about that, and i thought! What a great ending to my puzzle project blogpost.  How in an instant everything can change.  That's a great metaphor. Now you're married, now you're not.  Now you have it, now you don't.
Now you're alive, now you're not.
Whew. Big one.
But, we can all relate to that.  We all know that all too often something or someone slips away so elusively. We ruminate.  We fantasize about how it could have been different.  But, no conjuring up fantasies changes anything.

We simply have to accept the inevitable.

It's over.

The Puzzle Project ( a Christmas present)

The puzzle project was begun in earnest two days after Christmas.  2012.  That was the year that i gave my mom a 1000 piece Wasij puzzle for Christmas. 

At first we thought that we might be able to finish it if we worked diligently enough, that we could finish it by New Years Eve.  But, by Monday afternoon, that was the day that New Years Eve was in 2012, well, it was clear to me then, that it would take a few more days to finish.  Strike that.  It would take alot of additional hours since Mom was going home and I had sole possesion of the puzzle.

You see, being only afficionadoes of the amateur type, we didn't think to put our puzzle on a surface that we could move around, or  that was even in good light.  So we dumped the puzzle pieces on my dining room table complete with planks  burrows and  brought in excavated  table lamps with extension cords to make our puzzle mastery easier.

Of coarse, all along i thought that my mom was a puzzle maven and to her distress, i gave her a puzzle without a map!  A puzzle without a picture.  We had nothing to go on.  Only the picture on the box that "suggested" the possible outcome. 

So, this was difficult .  And captivating.  What was the picture?  What were we trying to put together? What was the message of the puzzle?

Mom said it was best to start at the edges.  Put the edges together and then you can figure out what fits inside.  It creates a boundry.  A side.  Definition.
Hmmmm.   Good idea.  Makes sense.  Most of us do need boundries.

The funny thing is, the puzzle started talking to me even before Mom left.  Like one day, sitting at the dining room table, mulling about the pieces,  the puzzle whispered to me that if i didn't think too hard about finding the RIGHT piece , that it would just somehow jump out all on their own... "when i was ready to see them". So, i practiced that.  I thought that if i could just gaze over the pieces, that i would find them more readily. If i noticed the nuance of the colors, that my brain would fit the pieces together.  And, sure enough, that was true.  If i stopped searching for something so succintly, and  I just looked for similarities, then the right piece would jump out.  Like it was looking for me.
That made me think of how I try to fit things together in my own life. I think that what i need is a 4x6 piece of wood that will fit inside this doorway- when what i have is a portal.  And i need a compass and something more round.

Hmmm.  Maybe this puzzle was more than just a pretty picture.  

Happy New Year!!!

End of Summer

It's bounty time here in Traverse City and I find myself busy, busy, busy.  I've been shucking corn, boiling tomatos, slicing cucumbers, picking blueberries, peaches and everything else that I can possibly find.  It's a bit of a mad house, in a way.  There is so much fresh food that is coming into season, that it is hard to find time for other things... like bathing! Like taking care of the doggie... oh well... winter is for that!

So, my sister and her daughter were up last weekend and we picked some peaches.  Okay, we picked a half bushel of white peaches and red havens. It took all of 20 minutes and our bushel was full of firm and luscious orangey peaches...  It was fun.  These gals should be farm hands...

 

I'm thinking of peach compote, peach pie, maybe peach and raspberry crisp... peach butter...

oh my...Here is a beautiful poem about the summer harvest...

From Blossoms

From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

- Li-Young Lee

Happy Eggster

I know, I know- I haven't been around… I've been hibernating.  That's what one does in the winter… and by the looks of it, I should still be sleeping away.  I can't believe it is April 20th and snowing!  Yes, the snow is beautiful... BUT IT DOESN'T BELONG HERE ANYMORE!

Oh well, I don't think anyone is listening. So, let's just forget about that for the moment.  In the mean time, in the spirit of spring, let's dye some Easter Eggs the old fashioned way. 
Natural dyes make for some lovely colors. Since there is so much talk about color additives causing more health concerns than we ever realized, I thought that it was time to experiment with food based colors.  I looked around on the internet and found a lot of suggestions for making colors, like purple from wine or grape juice and blue from blueberries.  My favorite, until i blew the egg up in the microwave while sitting in beet juice, is beet juice. But, based on the color of the inside of my microwave-the color is beautiful- it really can't be improved upon for magenta.  Unfortunately, I don't have a good example of the magenta...

Every color that I have here, is from a natural source.  (except for the luscious blue egg in the rear of the basket- I just had to have a beautiful blue-I am a photographer, first and foremost!)
I mashed about a cup of blueberries into a small glass with two tablespoons of vinegar and about 1/2 of a cup of water.  The blue is a nice dusty grey blue.  The uneven color and mottling on the egg is because of my leaving the blueberry pulp in the glass. Vinegar allows the color to set.  It will probably also flavor your egg if you leave the egg in the color long enough.

I was able to get a luscious yellow by using 2 Tablespoons of Turmeric in about 1 cup of water.  The yellow will deepen the longer you leave the egg in the solution.  Wow!  Really beautiful...

The  warm brown was the result of using coffee grounds in 1 cup of deeply brewed coffee... I love the mottling that occurred because of the grounds rubbing up against the shell of the egg.

Anyway, it's loads of fun to be creative with your dyes. 

In a Pickle, In the Jam!

Oh my... summer is here and the fresh food is rolling in.  First up on my plate is the strawberry.  The most luscious, delicate and reddest of fruits. Can you think of a better way to enjoy them than to pick them yourself?   Thankyou Urka Farm in Traverse City.

There are a million things that you can do with strawberries, and I like to eat them fresh, first and foremost.  But, when you've tired of strawberries on your cereal, your ice cream, your smoothies and your shortcakes, and you've picked 20 lbs. and you have 18 left over and you find yourself in "quite the pickle", the obvious solution is fresh, homemade strawberry jam, withOUT packaged pectin.  Having failed previously at my attempts to make a natural pectin jam, I decided to consult the books and the blogs again, to see if I could solve my problem.  I found a wonderful discussion about Strawberry Jam without boxed pectin from MothersKitchen.  I also found a simple remedy in a book about preserved foods called Preserved written by Nick Sandler and Johnny Acton.

So, I sat down on a rainy Saturday morning and came up with my own recipe.  I made the jam in the simplest way that I could.  I made a natural pectin from 5 chopped up granny smith apples combined with 1 large lemon also cut up into little pieces.  I boiled this concoction for about 15 minutes, until the fruit turned to mush. This was the technique noted in MothersKitchen.
In the mean time, i LIGHTLY boiled 16 cups of whole fruit strawberries with the juice of one large lemon.  In Preserved, the authors contend that the juice of the lemon extracts the pectin from the seeds of the strawberries. I boiled twice as many  strawberries with the juice of one lemon  for one hour (very light boil).
In the mean time, I pushed the apple and lemon pulp mixture through a sieve in order to have 2 cups of this mixture that would also serve as a pectin.  The strawberries slowly turned to mush and did not boil over into a foamy mess.
Then it was time to add the sugar.

  I try to limit my sugar intake, so even though both recipes recommended about twice as much sugar, I opted to use about half, or 7 full cups of sugar to the 16 cups of now boiled down strawberries.  I also added the apple mixture to the pot. In essence, I combined the recipe from Preserved with the recipe that I found on MothersKitchen. I boiled this new mixture for about 30 minutes, stirring constantly and slowly coaxing the mixture to rise up to 220 degrees, the magic number for the sugar to reach a setting point.  After testing my jam to see if it was ready by dropping a dollop onto a saucer, chilling it to see if I could coax a wrinkle, I was ready to jar up my jam.
Okay, I'm not an expert cook- but I managed to make some incredible jam.  Into the sterilized Ball jars they went. And my leftover pounds of berries will be gracing the insides of PB&J sandwiches and the tops of crusty pieces of toast for at least another year.

Bo Yummee!
                                                                                 

Which came first? the chicken or the CHICKEN FARMER!!!

Oh my gosh.  What fun!!  Raising chickens in the back yard.  So, what came first… the chicken farmer or the chicken??

most likely the backyard came first!!

:-)

Meet the Casey family, urban chicken farmers (along with other various callings!) from the inner city of Traverse City, Michigan.  They aren't your typical chicken farmers, since this is somewhat of an experiment for the young family who has taken to loving and naming the chickens such affectionate names as "Butter", "Sweetheart" and "Owlie".  But their flock (i mean progeny) is delightfully diverse, a very progressive notion for the contemporary urban farmer.  And don't be mistaken, these chickens are loved.  They have the best coop, the best compost and more freedom than "ButterBall" from Pilgrims Pride could ever imagine!  I don't think that these gals will ever end up on somebody's plate. I hope not.  They are individuals... with their own personalities... i mean chickenalities...

What's going on??? What does this all mean?

Welcome to 2010 and the new Michigan economy!  

Where else could you live on an urban farm inside the city limit???  

(answer; Detroit)

Maybe the Casey family is setting a new trend or maybe Traverse City is just a small step behind Detroit.  In any event, urban farms are springing up all over Michigan and the country. The notion to return to our roots and to live more sustainably entices us.  We're tempted to grow our own herbs, gather our own eggs and even if it is on a 50x100 foot city plot, we're reconnecting. Nature beckons us. She is our faithful friend.  

It is the way forward.

To love the chickens...