We ate the last of the barley for breakfast this morning. My dad had his with chopped peach, my mom had hers with maple syrup, and I had mine, as always, plain.
Right before lunchtime, my mom went to get feed at J & L in Corfu while I worked on bread. The bread was a new recipe for me, Scottish Sponge Bread from The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book. (Note: The recipe is too long to share below. If you haven't already, just go out and by your copy of this bread cookbook. You won't regret it. It truly is indispensable.) I decided to try this recipe I've been so busy earlier in the day that I forget to start bread lately until evening, when there's not enough time for it to rise and bake before I go to bed. Because of this, bread hasn't been getting made recently. This recipe calls for the sponge to rise overnight, which allows me to start bread in the evening.
Anyways, I had to work on my bread dough right before lunchtime. It ended up taking a while, because I had to add the rest of the ingredients to the sponge part of the dough, mix it all together, get a large stew pot washed so I had a container big enough to knead my humungous amount of dough in, and finally knead it all for twenty minutes.
My mom had arrived home while I was still working on the bread. I was shocked that the bill for a mere two bags of organic feed was $75. Just a few years ago, a bag of organic turkey feed wasn't much more than twenty dollars. We just needed a little more feed to hold my birds over until our order from Lakeview Organic Grain, a NOFA-NY Certified Organic grower and grinder of animal feed in the Finger Lakes region. We've tried out Lakeview a bit before and I've been wanting to make the switch to Lakeview for years. It finally looks like we've got our act together with a couple of friends so it will be happening for good. After seeing the feed bill today, I'm even my happy about the switch. The feed for my poultry from Lakeview will be $20 to $22 dollars, depending on the specific amounts of protein mixed in it.
It was well past lunchtime when I finally finished kneading and let the dough rise again. This presented a problem, as my mom and I were both hungry and grumpy by this point. I was getting sick of the same old dishes we've been making again and again this month, but neither of us had any good ideas. After fruitlessly looking at cookbooks for recipes using the vegetables we have handy, I remembered that I'd had an idea a few days ago that broccoli with a lemon sauce would probably be good. I googled it, and right away found this recipe at Cooks.com for Broccoli With Lemon Herb Sauce.
My mom and I agreed to have this dish (farmstand broccoli, friend's goats milk, egg from my hens, Wild Card Item lemon, Thorpes soft white whole wheat flour, Marco Polo Item dill), along with our old fall-back of boiled potatoes from the garden. I put the potatoes on, my mom cooked the broccoli, and I made the sauce. Being me, I had to modify the recipe. In this case, I didn't think it was lemony enough, so I added the juice of half a lemon. We both loved the way the broccoli tasted with the lemon sauce. My mom said it was almost like candy, but I wouldn't go that far. Still, it's now my second-favorite way to eat broccoli. My very favorite, Stir-Fried Broccoli With Ginger, doesn't fall within the Locavore Challenge parameters.
Right before my dad came home from work, I took the four (four!) loaves of Scottish Sponge Bread out of the oven. We all sat down to try the hot fresh bread and all liked it. I think I'll make the recipe frequently in the future, because it's a relatively easy way to make what's about a week's worth of bread for my family at once. I can leave two of the four loaves in the cupboard and freeze two loaves, which can be taken out later in the week.
While I worked on dinner, my dad put an electrified wire around the chicken coop with the young chickens in it. He'd just gotten it back from our friend with the goats and chickens. Once the little chickens perching on a board down the middle of the chicken coop at night they should be safe, but they're young enough that they're sleeping in a pile in the corner of the coop. This is how a predator was able to kill the chick yesterday. We're hoping that the electric wire will offer some painful discouragement. In past years, we've had the electric wire up as soon as the chicks went out and had no trouble. Last year, we never got the wire up and we got lucky. We pushed our luck too far this year, and just don't want to take any more risks after what happened yesterday morning.
For dinner, I made ratatouille (farm stand garlic, farm stand onion, Wild Card Item olive oil, garden eggplant, garden tomatoes, garden zucchini), which was served with some of the best corn on the cob I've had all summer and some of the fresh Scottish Sponge bread. We finished off almost a whole loaf of it tonight!
Speaking of corn on the cob, I received the fall issue of the NOFA newsletter, The Natural Farmer, today. My favorite part of the publication is the section that contains summaries of all sorts of agriculture-related news stories recently published. I was extremely upset to learn from reading this section of the newsletter today that Monsanto is planning on starting to sell transgenetic (a.k.a. genetically engineered or genetically modified) sweet corn seeds this fall.
The list of complaints against transgenetic crops is longing, and includes the emergence of superweeds, health concerns, and lawsuits filed against seed-saving farmers whose crops crossed with GMO's through pollen drift from neighboring farmers' fields. According to a poll conducted by MSNBC that I read about it The Natural Farmer, ninety-six percent of Americans support the labeling of trasngenetic crops. The government won't even consider it, though. Meanwhile, such crops are banned in Europe.
Until now, there were no commercially available seeds for transgenetic produce. My family been buying organic grain for years, so we've not worried too much about our consumption of transgentic crops. My dad isn't too fond of Thorpes sweet corn, so I've picked my battles and let him by it from local conventional farmers. With Monsanto's release of trasgenetic sweet corn, we're either going to have to grow our own or buy organic now.
That's not the end of the world, obviously, but I do hate to see the tentacles of transgentic crops (and thus companies like Monsanto) spread. If their transgenetic sweet corn is anywhere near as successful as their trangenetic feed corn and soy, it will easily come to dominate the market. Today, about 90% of most commodity crops grown in the United States are transgenetic.
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