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Ive been so busy this past week with Steves birthday that I havent had a chance to post but I have been taking pictures. Let me start by wishing my other half, Steve, a very Happy Birthday! I love you! XOXOXOX




Now about the food. While visiting with Steves parents this past weekend I noticed a cookbook on the bookshelf that I have never seen before. Its called "Eat Right, East Well - The Italian Way" by Edward Giobbi and Richard Wolff, M.D. There are a ton of wonderful recipes in this book and I look forward to trying more. I made very slight variations to the recipe because I wanted to use what I had on hand but nothing that really would compromise the end result. This recipe can be found on page 138-139 of the cookbook.

Pasta with Chicken Breasts

Serves 6-8

Ingredients:


1 whole chicken breast, cut into strips about 1/2 inches wide and 3 inches long
1 teaspoon minced garlic
1 tablespoon soy sauce
Freshly ground black pepper to taste
Juice of 1/2 lemon
3 tablespoons olive oil
Salt to taste
3 medium potatoes, peeled and cut into bite-sized pieces
1 pound tubular pasta, such as ziti, rigatoni, or penne
6 cups broccoli cut into bite sized pieces
3 tablespoons pesto (page 426)

Directions:

Marinate cut-up chicken breasts with garlic, soy sauce, pepper and lemon juice for several hours.

Heat the oil in a saucepan. Remove chicken from marinade and cook for several minutes over high heat. Add marinade and cook, tossing, for 10 seconds or more. turn off heat and set aside.

Bring a large pot of water to a rolling boil and add salt and potatoes. When water returns to a boil, add pasta. Stir, cook about 4 minutes, then add broccoli and cook until pasta is done al dente. Drain. Reserve some of the water - 1/2 to 3/4 cup - and mix with the pesto until it has a thin saucelike consistency. Add to pasta and vegetables in a large serving bowl. Add chicken and juices and toss.

Pesto - page 426

Ingredients:

5 tablespoons good olive oil
1 cup walnut meats
4 cups tightly packed fresh basil
3 tablespoons chopped Italian parsley
salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste

Directions:

Place all of the ingredients in a food processor and blend. Put in a jar, add 1/2 inch oil on top of pesto , and refrigerate. It will last all winter.


My changes were simple. I did NOT use this recipe for pesto. I included it here because it is a part of the recipe and I want you to have the option. I have my own recipe for Pesto but I didnt follow that either because I didnt have a lot of basil. So I basically just added the basil I did have (less than a cup), 1/4 cup parsley, 1 clove garlic, 1/4 cup pine nuts, 1/4 cup romano cheese, 1/2 tsp salt and extra virgin olive oil. I used my normal recipe as a guide and used less since I didnt have a lot of basil. It worked and it was delicious. So dont be afraid to make this if you dont have pesto or dont have all the ingredients for pesto.

When I cooked the broccoli it broke down a lot, almost to the consistency of the broccoli in a broccoli soup, so to me this was almost like a broccoli pesto. I loved that and I think thats the way its supposed to be but then again there was no picture so I dont know for sure. Either way, I liked this dish the way it came out and I would definitely make it again.

Geeta chithi in the front and Amma behind :)

This morning I got up early and drove out to WoolDrift Farm, home of Chris Buschbeck and Axel Meister. They raise East Friesian sheep for milk. I went early so I could see the sheep being milked.

Axel figures that they were the first in Ontario and maybe even in North America to commercially raise sheep for milk. That was a recently as 1994!

Mind you, in Europe where Axel got his training, sheep have been milked for centuries. In fact, worldwide, sheeps milk is far more common than cows milk - 1.2 billion sheep are kept for milk and "only" about 226 million cows.

Sheeps milk has twice as much calcium as cows milk, and is rich in zinc. Many people find it more digestible than cows milk. You can only buy WoolDrift Farms milk in the form of cheese or yogurt though because it is currently illegal under the Milk Act to sell fresh sheeps milk for human consumption. Axel is looking into the possibility of selling it frozen however, and he sells some milk for cosmetic purposes. It makes great soap.



The farm is a typical-looking one, with a big old barn. A few sheep and some horses were standing out in a fenced enclosure.


Before I entered the milking area, Axel asked me to cover my shoes with these lovely blue booties. As with any dairy operation, sanitation is the number one concern. In this case, the aim is to keep diseases out of the flock.


Before the sheep are brought up, Axel fills the trough in the milking stalls with mixed grains. Axel is milking 42 sheep right now, although 55 is about average. Its still early in the lambing season, and quite a few are still pregnant or have only very recently given birth.


Most of the sheep were hanging around inside the barn. These are mostly nursing ewes and their lambs, with a few ewes still pregnant. When a ewe shows signs of giving birth, she is given her own pen. Once the mother and babies (twins are common, and triplets are not rare) are well bonded, they get moved to a larger pen with other recent mothers and babies. Once that group is interacting well, they all go back to the hurly-burly of the herd.

His flock of 80 sheep produces 110 to 120 lambs per year. Some of these are sold as breeding stock, and some go for meat. I didnt ask, but I assume a couple are kept to replenish the herd. There was one old ewe who could hardly stand up, she had such terrible arthritis. She is 13 years old, which is pretty darned old in the sheep world. Dont think Ive ever seen such an old sheep before!


Once Axel opened the gate to the milking parlour, the sheep stampeded their way into a holding pen, from which they went into the milking stalls in batches of 12. An adult ewe weighs 140 to 180 pounds, and they shove like crazy. Axel has - and uses - a shepherds crook; very useful for snagging stragglers and re-directing traffic.


Their enthusiasm for the process was clearly mainly driven by their desire to get at the grain, although all but a few were highly tolerant of the milking process. Its a somewhat noisy process. Axel plays the radio ("Its what theyre used to.") and the equipment itself runs with a constant clickity-clack.

Before the milking equipment is attached, Axel squirts out a few teaspoons of milk from each udder to test for quality. His two dogs (a miniature daschund and a great Dane/Australian shepherd cross) were happy to hang around and clean up the evidence.



The udders are wiped with alcohol-based wipes to clean them, then the milking machine is attached. Axel set up every second ewe, and by the time he got to the end of the line, it was just about time to go back and switch to the remaining ewes.

In general, the ewes produce 2 litres of milk a day, for about 200 days. Right now, not all the lactating ewes are being milked, and a lower overall quantity of milk is being taken, as many of them are still nursing their lambs. Hes only getting about about 1/3 of the expected amount at the moment.

Most commercial milking operations remove the lambs at birth and raise them on formula. At WoolDrift, they are left to nurse naturally for 30 days or so. Axel figures that while he gets less milk this way, the lambs are healthier and hes not out as much as you might think, due to the cost of the formula. Theres also the labour involved in making sure that all those lambs get fed properly. This way, he just has to keep an eye out for problems - there is always a ewe or two who rejects her lambs - and those few lambs can be hand fed.



This one isnt being milked! Axel got most of the lambs separated out from the ewes coming in to be milked, but this one was determined to stay with Mama and snuck through. At that point it was easiest to let it wait out the process, since it was in the last batch of ewes and the milking stalls werent all needed.


This is the view from the other side of the milking stalls.


Once the milking is done, the fence is raised and they thunder off back into the barn, and make room for the next set of ewes waiting in the holding pen.


Once all the milking was done, Axel washed up and set the milking equipment up to be washed. It looks like its just hanging there, but its basically run through a "dishwasher". First its flushed with water, then soap, then an acid solution, then finally, just before being used again, a mild bleach solution.


The milk is taken from the holding tank, put into plastic pails and weighed, and stored in the 10 x 20 freezer. Sheeps milk will store, frozen, for a year or more, but it must be kept very cold: -22°C. If a batch of cheese is to be made, Axel will take the milk directly to the cheese maker, but otherwise it is frozen until wanted.


And this is the freezer, full of pails of milk.


Thats the manure pile back behind the fence - regular readers of this blog will know I take a keen interest in manure. It sits there for a year or so, then is taken and spread on the pastures.

Once the ewes are milked, Axel walks round the barn and feeds a ration of grain to the other animals, and there are lots of them! In addition to the sheep, there is an emu, a llama, 3 horses, 2 dogs, assorted cats and 20 rams.


"Isnt that a lot of rams?" I asked. Most places just seem to have a couple or so. However, Axel sells breeding stock, and he also keeps his flock genetically diverse. Rams start at about $1,ooo and go up to about $15,000 or more, at least in Europe where sheep dairies are well established.


They do like that grain!

The sheep get sheared twice a year, but as Ive noted before, thats a money-losing proposition, with wool currently bringing in about .30 cents a pound, which doesnt even cover the cost of the shearing.


This picture gives no idea of how enormous this horse really was. Its a Clydesdale, and that apparently little sheep sharing the manger with him is actually a good-sized ram. I was amused to discover that the rams have a much deeper and hoarser "baaaa" than the ewes do.


The llama was back in the barn with the ewes. Llamas are often kept by shepherds, as they are very protective of the flock.

I asked Axel about coyotes, and he had a very interesting response. Apparently, there are quite a few coyotes around - the farm backs onto 500 acres of wild land - but he has had no problems with the coyotes thus far. He figures the local coyotes dont know that sheep are tasty, and since they are very territorial animals, they are keeping out other packs of coyotes which might know that sheep are tasty. He never disposes of dead sheep by leaving them out in the woods; that would risk the local coyotes discovering that sheep are tasty...



And finally, of course no barn is complete without a few cats!

I did not meet Chris; although the farm does make a profit, it isnt enough to support a family so she was at her off-farm work. Axels dream of a 100-sheep farm being enough to live on may not be here, but the dairy sheep picture has surely changed a lot since he first started out with about 50 frozen embryos brought over from Europe. The Ontario dairy sheep industry is now producing about 1 1/2 million litres of milk every year. From zero to 1 1/2 million is a big change in less than 20 years! And theres no reason to think that there isnt a lot more room for the sheep dairy industry to grow.

Chapter 4 -Food Bloggers learn about good writing

I felt like I was back at school when John Cooke, food writer and marketer took us through the basics of writing about food for our blogs.

John started by reading two pieces with very different styles: AA Gills Table Talk and Claudia Rodens Arabesque.  The point of this was to help us understand that good writing is good writing whatever the style and that good writing tries to tell you something you dont know. Which is exactly what he then proceeded to do:

• Think about  why you are writing and who you are writing for, off line or online?
• Write as if you are writing to one person
• Where will it be read?  PC? Tablet? mobile phone?  Size matters!
• Do your research - find out something your audience doesnt know
• Avoid cliches: Drizzle not, No to Nom Nom
• Edit and write again in half the space (be your own editor)
• Do the overnight test - DONT PRESS THE BUTTON
• Read it aloud to yourself, read it to someone else if you can
• Being funny isnt easy, leave it to the comedians
• Think about colour in your writing, use similes
• The start is very important, make sure the first sentence grabs your audience
•  End by referring back to where you stared

 Back to the classroom, it was our turn to write. Working in pairs, our topic was "the best meal you have ever eaten" and we had to write no more than 180 words.

 I was fortunate to be paired with Kellie Anderson of Food to Glow.  At first we struggled to find a topic, but then I remembered a meal eaten in Penang, Malaysia and we were off!

"The best meal I ever had was not about fine dining, there was no Michelin star chef, nor a sommelier.  In fact I wore flip flops and we drank local beer. I dont remember the name, but it was ice cold and hit the spot.  I cant remember what we ate, but we rode in a cable car to the top of a mountain and stepped into a different world.  The menu was unintelligible but the views over Penang were unforgettable. We could have had a cheese sandwhich and it still would have been a memorable experience.  I may not recall the menu but I can almost see, smell, taste and hear it some 30 years later."

Although the memory was mine, Kellie was a superb co-writer and editor and I doubt the piece would have had the same impact without her input. I am trying to avoid cliches, but in this case, two heads are definitely better than one.

I thought you might like to see the photograph, of my husband, which was in my minds eye when I recalled this most memorable of meals.  When I looked at the photograph I was surprised to see that the food was visible because all I could remember was that glass of beer!

Many thanks to John for his workshop, it was good to be reminded that, just like cooking and baking, writing is a craft which requires practice and constructive criticism to improve.

Why dont you tell me about your most memorable meal?

On Sunday we took a tour of local farms put on by Savour Stratford Perth County Culinary Week. Our first stop was Augusts Harvest, where we were greeted by owner Warren Ham. He explained that they grow about 10 acres of garlic, about 10 acres of shallots. Hes been growing garlic for 21 years, and this year is his first with a general vegetable CSA, for which he grows 60 varieties of vegetables.


We started out in his barn/shed where much of the action is taking place at this time of year. The machinery above is used to remove the outer layer of dirty skin from the garlic heads, leaving them smooth and clean. Cases of packed garlic surround the cleaner.



Warren showed us his garlic curing device; garlic is put in chipboard box, and as the moist warm air rises from it, it is pulled out by the fan on top.

Warren explained that the garlic they grow is allium longicuspis, a very ancient form. It has fewer cloves than more modern varieties of garlic, having only 4 to 6 cloves. It is, in fact, our old friend "Music". Did you know that fresh garlic has a higher sugar content than grapes?! I didnt.


Next to the curer sacks of garlic cloves await planting. Cases of processed garlic products line the shelves behind them. The garlic heads, by the way, are all cracked (broken apart) by hand. Machinery exists to do this, but a lot of it gets bruised and damaged. Its planted by hand too, for the same reason. However, it can be harvested by being undercut and lifted mechanically. It then is left to cure in the field for 10 days before coming in to be cleaned, finished in the box curer, sized and crated. Much of it is sold to the local Korean market.



Ive spoken a bit about garlic bulbils on the blog before. Garlic is interesting in that it does not flower or produce seeds. Garlic is normally propagated by breaking the heads into cloves and planting the cloves in the fall. Like daffodils, they will form roots in the cool late fall and early winter weather, then go dormant until the spring. In the early summer, as they grow, the clove of garlic will expand and split into more cloves of garlic, ultimately forming a new head.

However, this vegetative reproduction (cloning, basically) means that any viruses or stubborn fungi or bacteria the cloves pick up over time tend to get reproduced as well, and over a few years the garlic can really deteriorate. You can solve this problem by sending sound garlic to a laboratory to be reproduced through tissue culture. However, there is an easier and cheaper way to revitalize your garlic.

While they dont produce flowers, garlics do produce a long, looping flower stalk, generally known as a scape. Usually these are removed. This achieves two things; the plants energy is redirected to produce a larger head of garlic in the ground, and the scape can be sold as the tasty delicacy that it is. However, if the scape is allowed to develop, in the fall the garlic will be topped by a head of little bulbils - tiny garlic cloves, identical to the cloves growing underground except in size. Because they are above ground and not in contact with the soil, they do not accumulate the problems that the underground cloves and heads may suffer from.

So, every few years some of the garlic is allowed to form bulbils. The bulbils are planted, and the first year they form a single round clove of garlic. Thats what is in the bushel basket in the photo above. These will be planted again, and next summer they will form heads of garlic. After 4 years of planting, the garlic will be fully mature and can be treated as usual.



Once we had been shown the process that the harvested garlic goes through, we went out and looked at the garden. Augusts Harvest also runs a CSA, and rows of peppers, tomatoes, Jerusalem artichokes and other vegetables were still there, although the brassicas had been harvested.


Warren Ham was a prairie boy originally, and he still grows a favourite fruit of his childhood - Saskatoon berries. The shrubs have been moved recently, so are still quite small.


Theres all those squash we saw at the Garlic Festival the day before. Beyond them, the garlic fields are full of mustard. The mustard is grown until the seed pods begin to ripen, then it is plowed into the ground. The strong mustard kills some of the pests of garlic, in particular nematodes and, I would think, acts as a green manure as well. I was chatting about this with Warrens lead hand at the garlic festival, and Im going to try the simplified version he was recommending; mixing powdered hot mustard seed with water and watering it into the soil. Im going to try this around my turnips and rutabagas, which are somewhat prone to getting worm damage. It might work and even if it doesnt, I will have only lost a few pennies worth of mustard and a little time, and no harm will be done to the soil.



However, its an action-packed day so its time to get back on the bus and head on to the next farm...