Last weekend in October

Egg update: We have had two brown and one blue egg for three days in a row! It seems likely that more than three chickens are laying. No Welsummer eggs yet.

It was a beautiful warm weekend. While it wasn’t the sort of weather to put you in the mood to get ready for winter, doing the ready-for-winter activities was a whole lot more pleasant. On Saturday, I dug the leeks and clipped most of the leaves off the kale. I left the small leaves at the top as an experiment. They are supposed to keep growing. We’ll see.



Leeks, left; kale, right

As I cleaned the leeks in preparation for braising them in chicken stock (which I made from one of the laying hens Friday night), I saw something I had never seen before—worms. What is the point of having all those oniony sulfur compounds if not to protect against herbivory? There weren’t a lot of them, and we are certainly not short of leeks. Still, I was amazed. It looked like some kind of insect larva. One worm seemed to eat quite a lot.

Worm on the right, damage from that one worm on the left. The little stinker eats a lot!

I also harvested one of the Kaitlin cabbages (Kaitlin is the variety name). It’s supposed to be a good keeper, which is certainly true. There’s not a one of them that has split. The downside is that they too continue to grow, and the one I harvested, with a  great deal of effort to cut through the massive stem, weighed NINE POUNDS. What am I going to do with a 9-pound cabbage? More to the point, what am I going to do with five of them? We’ve already got more than enough sauerkraut for the year.

This cabbage, about 8" in diameter, weighed 9 pounds

I made potage Parmetier (leek and potato soup) for supper. I took a picture of it, but it didn’t look like much. When I looked up the recipe in Mastering the Art of French Cooking, I saw that Julia had a recipe for cabbage soup. Maybe I’ll try it.

Hilda got started on the Brussels sprouts. We still have a whole row of them left. They can stay in the garden until Thanksgiving, although we’ll keep working on getting them blanched and in the freezer. Also, Brussels sprouts on the stem make great gifts.

Saturday afternoon, Terry and I planned to clean up around the chicken fence. After lunch, Terry said, “Wanna go scare some chickens?” I pulled the posts up while he wielded the weed-whacker. The chickens were conflicted. They were curious about the gaps that came and went under the fence, but the weed-whacker noise sent them scurrying to the furthest corner. It looked so nice when we were done, with the grass nice and short and the fence tight and straight. It won’t last.

The straight clean fence after weed whacking. The girls liked the grass clippings.

The chickens quickly settled down to a quiet afternoon after all the excitement.

Lounging in the shade on a lazy Saturday afternooon

Sunday, I decided to do something with all of those onions. I thinly sliced six of them and caramelized them half at a time. My goal was to make a lovely caramelized onion and blue cheese focaccia. I cooked the first half all the way down, making about a cup of caramelized onion from a couple of quarts of raw. It took over an hour.

Before

After

As I cooked the second batch, I got to fretting about having the onions burn as they baked on top of the focaccia dough. I didn’t cook them down quite as far. I made the dough while the onions cooked. After the dough had risen in the pan, I spread the onions on top and baked it for the first 30 minutes. I crumbled the blue cheese on top and baked it an additional 10 minutes. The onions did not burn. I probably could have caramelized them longer. Maybe next time. We have a lot of onions.

Caramelized onion and blue cheese focaccia