vegan zucchini lasagna

it's been a month or more since we've had rain, but the way the zucchinis have been giving, you wouldn't know it. we've been harvesting them for almost two weeks now, running through the rows daily to ensure we get them while they're small and sweet, not big and watery.

zukes for our CSA members

the other day I found a whopper hiding under some leaves, way too big for our members but good enough for us and especially useful for grilling. that same day, my mom emailed me this recipe. it would have been a perfect use of the rejected zucchini, but I'm short three very key ingredients: tomatoes, large quantities of basil, and a food processor. well, whatever. we went to Todd's, the shitty Hastings grocery store, to get the last block of tofu in the county, a couple of tomatoes, and an eggplant, then spent the evening making lunch while we waited for Brophy to arrive from Burlington.

I subbed the pesto for a tomato sauce I made using canned diced tomatoes and our own herbs, garlic, and onions, but followed everything else pretty exactly. if I were to make it again, I'd use more tofu than the recipe wants; there was barely enough for one layer. also I'd grill the vegetables and tofu using the lemon zest marinade; using plain oil to grill, and then the oil and lemon marinade to drizzle on top of that, makes for an extremely oily dish, even when you consider it's supposed to be served chilled, like a salad.

personally, I do not eat of the wheat, but I know others like a more substantial lunch after six hours of weeding, so I toasted up some garlic bread to have with the lasagna, which I finished off with a liberal sprinkling of nice salty nutritional yeast "parmesan". it seemed to go over pretty well, although it turns out our guest of honor has a citrus allergy. well damn. since he absconded with Chris to Algonquin for the weekend, I guess I'll just have to eat the leftovers myself.

avec du pain, and some of our broccoli seconds steamed with olive oil and fresh pepper

beets: they're what's for lunch

today and tomorrow the Chickabiddy crew - including farm mistress Sherry and her adorable handywoman Gisele - is building two new greenhouses from the ground up. in other news, beets are in season. and what else to feed all those hot and hungry workers? beets are hearty, versatile, and beautiful. last night, I headed out to the garden to see what I could find.

golden beets

I didn't have to change a thing about Isa Chandra's Chilled Golden Beet and Ginger Soup recipe for it to be simple, delicious, and vegan.

what a lot of people don't know about beets is that their greens are some of the nicest out there. I vastly prefer them to chard; they have an earthiness to them that's not found in other leafy greens.

while the beets were roasting, I steamed their greens in a bit of soy sauce, whipped up a quick peanut sauce, and juliened some of our own zucchini, scallions, and the last of the snow peas, then stuck it all in the fridge to chill overnight.

this morning before we got to our construction project, we spent a little while in the garden picking the very first tender, sweet green beans of the season.

haricots verts

way too beautiful to spoil with cooking, right? onto the veggie pile they went. next I scrambled a couple of farm eggs, then rolled it all up to make a perfect side for the chilled soup.

my cold rolls didn't look that pretty but they tasted great

lunchtime!

for dessert, more beets! very un-vegan Red Velvet cupcakes with cream cheese icing. I used this recipe but cut the sugar quantities in half, and no one seemed to mind.

eat me

tomorrow we're building all day after harvest in the morning. hello, eight o'clock bedtime! good night.

on CSA, local food, and Margaret Wente's dumbassery

my dear friend Adeleine posted a Globe & Mail opinion article to my Facebook this weekend which lambastes the local food movement as "the most wasteful, inefficient way to feed the human race you can possibly imagine" adding that it's also bad for the environment and a rip-off, all in the most condescending manner possible. she asked for my thoughts, and what else are blogs for?

I've noticed this growing trend towards petty controversy-creation in Canadian media - Jian Gomeshi, I'm looking at you - but it's still surprising to me that the once-mighty Globe would publish a piece so utterly unfounded, dishonest, and downright slanderous towards the new farmers' movement. to my pleasant surprise, the comments on the article were largely on the side of Good, but that didn't keep me from composing a few choice words for Ms Wente while I harvested beet greens this morning.

bitch, please. you think cheap food is really cheap? you come by your Californian tomatoes and Mexican avocados and out of season Chinese such and such by way of slave labor, catastrophic environmental degradation, and the condemnation of millions of local people to starvation in the name of cash-crop production for foreign consumption. consider yourself lucky to be choosing local food, Wente, because with people like you and your ridiculous global food system, it's not going to be a choice for much longer.

you know what? food should be expensive. it should be so fucking expensive that people don't waste it, don't buy it and let it rot in their fridge, don't leave half of it on their plates and then demurely decline a doggy bag. all-you-can-eat endless salad and breadsticks? extra value meals, ninety-nine cent hamburgers? fucking Tim Hortons anything? screw you and the privileged white aging Boomer horse you rode in on.

I do not consider myself an "eager young idealist" but we all damn well "work like dogs" to produce nutritious food for people in our community. we charge a fair price for our produce at our local market, and we sell out every week, and I highly doubt that the people we're feeding are buying and eating to humor us.

what Wente seems to be missing about her quaint experience at the local market, looking down her nose at people like us as she buys carrots for a dollar a piece, is that it's not the local food movement ripping her off, it's herself and her painfully narrow view of what local food means. sure it's nice to shop at a market: you can tour around, compare prices, see all the pretty displays, feel good about yourself. but the truth is, markets make tons of money for farmers because people expect to pay more there; and people pay more at markets because they're buying an experience and an image. it's win-win, but it's not the whole picture.

basically, it all boils down to three little letters: CSA. depending on who you ask, they can stand for "community shared agriculture" or "community supported agriculture" but either way they tidily sum up everything I've just said and totally waste Wente and her bullshit.

the concept is as follows: at the beginning of the year, or in a couple of installments, you buy all your veggies for the whole season directly from the farmer of your choice. then, from June til October, you get a weekly haul of whatever's in season. at most places, it works out to be about twenty bucks a week for more veggies than most people know what to do with. some CSA programs include more than veggies, and a lot of CSA farms offer locally-sourced extras like eggs or meat or flour as add-ons. you eat what's in season, and if you really have to you can go to the market or the grocery store to round things out.

our members have been getting their shares for  exactly a month now. over the past four weeks, we've fed seventy something households and two Toronto restaurants: mixed salad greens; several varieties of head lettuce including Romaine, iceberg, and buttercrunch; snow peas, snap peas, and shelling peas; two kinds of radish; three colors of beets and their delicious greens; rainbow chard and black, red, and green curly kale; arugula; beautiful buttery potatoes; five kinds of cabbage; scallions, leeks, fresh garlic, and garlic scapes to cook with; broccoli; a full range of herbs for cooking and drying, from dill and cilantro and parsley to thyme, sage, oregano, sweet marjoram and Russian tarragon; early spring perennials like asparagus and rhubarb; and starting this week, the sweetest zucchini you'll ever taste. over the next week or two we'll start seeing green, yellow, and purple stringbeans, cucumbers, onions - and it's only the first week of July. by the end of the month we'll be into tomatoes, early squash varieties, more potatoes, carrots... and by the final delivery, just after Thanksgiving, our members will need a second person to haul home their bags full of hearty fall vegetables.

it's time to stop looking at food as items on a restaurant menu, ingredients in a recipe. there is a time and season for everything. learn to cook it all, treasure it while it's here, and look forward to it when it's gone. treat yourself to an imported whatever if you want; lord knows I keep myself in tomatoes all year round. but, Wente, do not write down to me from a national newspaper about this shit because when it comes to making food, you and your little back yard of tomatoes know jack shit.

movie night

almost immediately we three interns came to the realization that our wide and varied media tastes align pretty fucking nicely. since our second week here we've been having regular movie nights, where we set up a laptop on the kitchen table, snuggle into the futon with some air-popped popcorn and a pipe of Old Toby's finest leaf, and let Hollywood hit us in the face again and again.

Tara picked first: a comedy by the Napoleon Dynamite people called Gentlemen Broncos (2009), a gem which should be seen by anyone who has ever written or been a fan of sci-fi and genre fiction. we followed that up with Predator (1987) featuring commentary by Christopher Lawson. by film three it was easy to see where this all was going: Aliens (1986), Starship Troopers (1997), a fieldtrip to the Peterborough Cineplex to suffer through Prometheus (2012), and last week a look back at when Ridley Scott knew how to make movies with Legend (1985).

tonight, obviously, it's Independence Day (1996).

midsummer

according to the Farmer's Almanac, it's Midsummer's Day: a rainy evening here in the Trent Hills, perfect for posting to blogs.

not that a bit of rain normally stops us working. lately we've been at it from six to six, through soupy low 40s temperatures and raging thunderstorms that blow up out of nowhere and soak down the afternoon's haze. Josh, meanwhile, never seems to sleep or rest at all. it's June, the craziest time of year for a farmer. this is the push: the cold frames are overflowing with things that need planting, but things also need to come out of the field and get distributed to CSA members, but harvest also needs to be taken to market, but the weeds are coming in cohorts thickened by every drop of rain, but pests are springing up left and right, but beds need to be made for all the seedlings outgrowing their pots, and etc.

even after sixty hours a week of it, I still love gardening. the greenhouse is my haven even on the hottest days, and planting is truly a joy. but it's become clearer and clearer over the past six weeks that farming on this scale, in this style, isn't the life I want, or at least not for a long while. the animals drive me nuts with their neediness and noise and stink. the sheep, with their constant bleating for more food even as they waste and spill and shit in what they're given; the pigs and their frantic squealing, a sound out of nightmare that fills me with a very primal urge to flee them; and oh god, just... the chickens. (more on chickens later, much more.)

Lucy the worried old goose and her three duck flock continue to charm me. they're quiet, polite, neat and pretty. they lay their eggs in carefully woven nests and eat from a wide dish of scratch like perfect ladies. and I cherish what wildlife I've been able to glimpse around the farm and during my morning runs: a fisher, lots of deer, chipmunks, red squirrels, raptors and songbirds of all sorts, snapping turtles, and once, a coyote looming over the chicken coop at dawn.

really, farming is like any other job in that by the end of the work week you're pretty much over it. and by quitting time yesterday afternoon, Christopher and I sorely needed a break from the farm. so he met me in Peterborough after market and we splurged on lunch at the Planet Bakery and drinks at the Only Cafe on its incredible riverside patio, then took in the sights and sounds of the Ode'min Giizis Festival. somewhere between wandering the aboriginal arts street fair, laughing at a typically shitty theatre production, and dancing our dead-tired tails off to A Tribe Called Red well into the wee hours of Midsummer's Eve, we managed to get our heads out of the field.

bring it on, Monday.

Job Description

Farming is sort of like this: You're a traffic cop at a 3-way intersection. From one road, a violent parade of unknowable and radically different creatures are barreling towards you. The other roads are clear. One leads to Death, and the other to Prosperity. Your job is to force each creature down one road or another, but if you send the wrong ones down the wrong road, you don't get paid. Also, your choice concerning any single creature may cause other creatures to try and press their way down one road or another. Sometimes you want this to happen. Other times not. 

dawn in the poppy brake