Farm Chef Blog

This summer, we had the biggest and best harvest of garlic I have ever had in over 10 years of growing garlic! After planting 2 boxes of seed garlic purchased for $200. , we now have around a thousand heads of beautiful, organic garlic. Like most chefs, I consider garlic a kitchen staple. But I hate to have to buy it. Nowadays, most restaurants use big plastic jars of pre-peeled, sulfited garlic, or worse yet, pureed garlic.  Like so many tasks in the restaurant industry, it is not worth the labour to pay someone to peel garlic. Even most of the garlic in the grocery store is imported from as far away as China and it is often chemically treated so that it will not sprout. So I try to grow enough garlic to last the whole year. Garlic is a wonderful crop to grow. Planted as the last task of the season, in mid October and mulched with straw to supress weeds, it lays dormant under a blanket of earth and snow until the soil warms up in spring. It will poke through the straw around March. In June it will sprout serpentine scapes,which should be cut off and then sauteed or pickled like beans. We cut back on watering by the beginning of July and let the garlic harden off, and from then on I check the size of the garlic by pulling out a plump head every couple of days. When the tops dry out and turn yellow and cloves have formed a skin the garlic is ready to harvest. This year the garlic harvest and subsequent cleaning, trimming and bundling took place over the course of one hot week in July and involved the help of WOOFERS (Willing Workers on Organic Farms), staff and even some of our guests! Our wonderful, creative gardener Valdilia figured out a way to weave them into decorative bunches. After about a month in a shady, drafty spot, we now have them dried and put away, enough for the whole year!

With so much beautiful garlic, I was inspired to make a  silky-smooth roasted garlic veloute. We served it to our guests several times this summer, with a zuchinni blossom stuffed with goat’s cheese and lemon thyme, a single, seared, Qualicum Bay scallop, some chopped arugula or a fresh salsa verde.

Tags: From the Garden, Recipes by Mara
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Last year, our Provincial government introduced a new carbon tax. Whether a carbon tax is an effective way to curb climate change is a discussion I will leave to the likes of climate change expert and my favorite critical thinker, British author George Monbiot www.monbiot.com . Instead, I want to focus on what I did with my $100. carbon tax credit cheque. Every man, woman and child in British Columbia was issued this cheque last summer with the encouragement to spend it on something with a positive environmental impact. No doubt a political jesture to quiet some of the negative press the tax had been receiving. Working at home and cooking from a garden takes a good chunk off of my bad carbon score for flying, but when my personal wine budget is tight I often turn to imports. So this was where I decided to try to make a difference. Here at Fairburn Farm we have about a dozen old fruit trees. They are very tall, crooked and well beyound pruning. Every year we loose at least one or two due to storms and the juvenille water buffalo that like to rub up against them. Yet they still produce enough fruit for 3 families, the sheep and chickens grazing in the orchard and the occassional bear or racoon that comes through in the fall. I never manage to pick as many as I would like and several varieties are not good keepers. So one warm day this fall my friend Valdilia and I headed out to the Orchard with a ladder and some plastic tubs. After about an hour of harvesting, we had around 200 pounds of heritage apples, including Gravensteins, Alexanders, Jonathans and Northern Spys, 2 kinds of pears and quince. We loaded them up in the car and drove them 5 minutes away to “Duncan McBarleys”, a local You-Brew facility. They washed and crushed the fruit and made a dry, hard cider according to my specifications, for a cost of $200. for 50 litres, including the cost of the bottles. A month later I showed up to bottle the cider, an easy task that took about an hour.The results were great! A dry, crisp cider which has developed more integrated fruit flavour in the last two months has been my local apperitiv through the winter months and has also been a great braising liquid for lamb, roast pork and sablefish. It’s just too bad it won’t last until summer!

Tags: Farm Life, From the Garden by Mara
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I love the story of the farm mouse and the city mouse. Anyone who lives on a farm knows the feeling of guilty neglect when you miss harvesting something at it’s prime, or suffer a setback because you have been off having fun or had your mind on other things. The flip side of that is the smug satisfaction you get when the cold weather comes and you know you have all kinds of treasures squirreled away, jars of preserves, a freezer full of meat and fruit, enough home grown garlic to last the year. This fall was particularily mild, and when I returned in mid November from my annual trip to Italy my garden was still green and lush. I am proud to say I have not yet bought any produce other than onions and celery this winter. All that changed this week with the onslaught of a foot of snow and temperatures cold enough to turn the cellulose structure of even my hardiest kale to mush. But three days beforehand, after listening to the weather forecast I headed out to the garden and filled two buspans with beautiful winter greens, escarole, radicchio, mustard greens and arugula. I picked the last tops of sprouting broccoli, harvested fresh chives and parsley and filled the produce drawers of my refrigerator with  green and purple cabbages.

Let it snow.

Tags: From the Garden by Mara
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