One Brown Egg

Finally, one day before the chickens turn 26 weeks old, we have our first egg.

It's probably not the first that they have laid, but it is the first we have.  I locked them in the chicken run yesterday, instead of letting them run about the yard.  In one corner, I placed a recycle bin filled with wood shavings and a white supermarket egg to give them a hint of what I wanted them to do (with no risk of mixing up which egg is fresh since all the girls are brown egg laying breeds).  One of them obliged, but I have no idea which one.  They are locked in again today.   Leftover rice really helped encourage them.  While I stepped outside to photograph the egg, they all lined up and stared at me from inside the run, seemingly indignant that I would lock them in for a second day.  Sorry girls, it will probably be a week or so.  They need to get used to laying their eggs in the recycle bin instead of some hidden spot in the yard, leaving the eggs to feed the big possum.

I've spent some time reading Sandor Katz's Art of Fermentation.  It makes me wish it was the beginning of the growing season instead of heading into the winter.  I've been wanting to try some vegetable ferments beyond the kimchi experiments, but couldn't figure out exactly where I would do put some of this stuff.  Our not quite 1300 square foot home is not equipped with what my grandparents referred to as "cold cupboards", closets on the north side of the house that were unheated and used to store food.  We do not have a basement, but as the weekend projects have reminded me, we do have a crawl space.  We have been removing insulation that was installed with the paper outward-trapping moisture-and either flipping it or replacing it, depending on its condition--a horrible, nasty job requiring tyvek suits, goggles, face masks, gloves,lots and lots of crawling on the ground and lots and lots of time.  The area of the crawl space nearest the hatch opening is high enough to sit up in (for me, but not my husband) and could be a reasonable storage spot for some kimchi, sauerkraut, kosher dills or who knows!  I could always dig a bit of a pit to help insulate against temperature changes--but first the fiberglass insulation under the floor boards.

I have to be more careful with the bread ferments, the sour dough bread, pancakes, appams, etc., because of the 1500 calorie issue.  The breads (sigh) add up quickly.  I did try sour dough pancakes this weekend, they weren't sour tasting because I added baking soda shortly before cooking them.  I fancied them up with apples and cinnamon inside, and a bit of my apple butter on top.  They came out pretty well, but I'm going to tweak the recipe a little.

Fermenting Ideas

It's that quiet time between soccer and basketball seasons, a time when dinners do not need to be rushed, homework can be put off a little later and the weekend schedules are what we make of them.  I'm sure I'll figure out something to do in all the extra time.  I have eleven books out of the library that have food themes, mostly recipe books.  I'm on a 1540 calorie diet.  I may be setting myself up...

I finished Michael Pollan's Cooked a couple of weeks ago and now the books that intrigued me from his bibliography are arriving through inter-library loan.  The section of Cooked that grabbed me was one that I had played with off and on, but had forgotten about between moving, gardening, parenting, job hunting and the bugs (which I will come back to).  Pollan refers to the section as Earth, he uses the ancient elements to structure his book, so for him "earth" is the process of fermentation. 

A few years back in the deep-dark-mid-life-grad-school days, I filled some of my time growing Chinese cabbages and daikon radishes in Florida (among many other things).  They grew wonderfully in the mild fall and winters, so well that I had to figure out what to do with them, which wasn't hard, because at that point in life I was battling a kimchi addiction.  At five bucks a quart, the kimchi habit bit into the teensy grocery budget.  Soon I was searching on-line for a reasonable recipe that someone who was not Korean could consume without reaching their capacin limits within the first mouthful.  A helpful clerk in the Asian grocery made sure I had all the right ingredients, while trying to get his mind around an American making kimchi.  A few minutes later the cashier looked into my basket and said, "You're making kimchi???" I replied, "Of course!"  The Korean people who I have spoken to about kimchi give it the status of both a mark of pride for the Koreans and as a cure-all of sorts, a means to maintain health. A proud look appeared in her eyes, but then she looked at me and I saw uncertainty.  After a few moment of chatting, she made sure that next time I planted radishes I would plant the Korean "mu" with its green shoulders, not the pure white Chinese daikon.

I hauled my ingredients home and proceeded to rub salt into the cabbage and daikon, and within a mere five days I had a plastic tub of kimchi stowed in a cooler in bottom the small, dark coat closet.  It was wonderful.  A few weeks later when the next growth of cabbage was ready I made another batch.  That evening my husband walked two steps into the house, pulled himself up short and said, "You made kimchi again, didn't you?" It was a little fragrant, maybe a bit pungent and somewhat stinky.  Perfect.

After fermenting several vats of kimchi, my addiction was cured. I haven't made it since (going on about six years now), then I read Michael Pollan, I might have to do it again.  I had been toying with the idea this past spring, but the bugs, slugs  and caterpillars conspired against my kimchi dreams.  The cabbage was unusable.  It looked like someone had fired a shotgun loaded with bird shot at it.  Next year, I will do the floating row covers that my husband had recommended (and I  blew off his suggestion, oops).  I did see some bai tsai (Chinese white cabbage) in the grocery store last week though, hmmmm...

The other thing that reading Pollan's book set me back onto was sourdough bread.  I had a starter a two years ago, and was having pretty good success with it.  Things got crazy when we bought the house and moved in six weeks flat and the starter went somewhere in the process, probably into the compost.  I began a new starter, but this time I was trying to do wild yeasts and whole grain and it has been less successful.  It smells right, but I have created two very different "lead" breads from it. I now have plenty of bread crumbs in the freezer, on 1500 calories a day there is no room for food that is sort of okay. 

The rising just isn't happening in the whole grain doughs.  A few tweaks and we'll see what happens.  In the meantime, I'll be reading Sandor Katz's The Art of Fermentation, quickly, because it has no renewals!  Who knows where this will take me!