Farm Chef Blog

 

 

Jasper returns to Fairburn Farm, 5 years after he disappeared!

Tags: Farm Life by Mara
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Stinging Nettle Tarts photo S.Philip

 At this time of year I am usually finishing up the last of the winter vegetables and am ready for something fresh and green. One of the very first things to appear in the spring is stinging nettles. Nettles are a strong spring tonic, good for people, plants and animals.

The first time I really became aware of nettles was living on the farm in Austira. We had a big patch growing beside an old barn, where they are often found. At that point I wasn’t eating them and of course had an unforgettable experience learning about their sting by running into them. I think it may have been Giordano Venturi www.venturischulze.com who got me curious about trying them when we were their neighbours. Italians love wild greens of all kinds and picking them is an Easter ritual from north to south. I harvest and wash nettles using tongs and scissors but you can also wear gloves to avoid their persistent sting. Once nettles are cooked for 3 to 5 minutes they loose their sting, and can be used as a substitute for spinach in almost any recipe. I started by making nettle and potato soup, then quiches with both pureed and whole cooked nettles. When we moved to Fairburn Farm I had to get used to much later frosts and was not able to grow salad greens 11 months of the year as I had at Engeler Farm. So nettles became even more important as I was trying to cook for my guests, sometimes from sunny California, using only local products in March and April! Each year I try to think of something new to do with nettles. We make ravioli stuffed with nettles and ricotta, gnocchi, sauces for fish and timbales.

In 2006 I expanded my pre-occupation with nettles and held a Festival for the Stinging Nettle and Other Spontaneous Greens of Spring, a bi-annual tradition I will continue this weekend for my last year at Fairburn Farm. 

We’ll have a Stinging Nettle Cafe with tarts, soup, and pizza from our wood burning brick oven with a nettle pesto. Biodynamic farmers John and Katy Erlich of Alderlea Farm www.alderleafarm.com will give a talk on the benefits of nettle and their use in biodynamic farming, and I’ll be doing a cooking demo and giving away recipes for an easy to make nettle spanikopita. The festival is Sunday April 18th from 11 to 3 at Fairburn Farm. Admission is $5. for Slow Food members and $10. for non members.

Stinging Nettle Tart 

Here is a recipe for the nettle tarts pictures above. If you like you can puree the cooked nettles into the cream and egg mixture to make a custard that is brilliant green.

1 pie crust, blind baked

1 cup of cooked nettles

2 finely chopped shallots

2 Tbsp. of butter

1 cup of milk

1 cup of whipping cream

6 whole eggs

1 egg yolk

Salt and Pepper to taste

Add the pre cooked nettles and a pinch of salt and cook for another minute

In a bowl, whisk the eggs until well beaten and then add the cream and milk, season with a little salt and pepper

Remove the shallots and nettles from the heat, allow to cool for a few minutes.

Line the par baked tart molds with the nettle and shallot and fill with the custard mixture.

Bake approximately 35 minutes on the middle rack of the oven or until the tarts souffle and a knife inserted in the center comes out clean.

Tags: Farm Life, Ingredients 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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Navajo Churro lamb born Dec. 12, 08

December 12 was a full moon and the first really cold day we’ve had this year, and that was the day one of my Navajo Churro ewes decided to have her lamb. I admit, my farming style is somewhat hands off, which is exactly why I chose the Navajo Churro breed when I started raising a small flock of sheep 8 years ago.  A multi purpose rare breed, they can be raised for meat, milk or wool, but are not really champions in any category. Perhaps their greatest attribute is that they are low maintenance, seldom require veterinary care or help with birthing, and have good mothering skills. In fact, I often only notice a new lamb when I look out the window to see a small wobbly figure following it’s mother in our 2 acre orchard. Despite the fact that the sheep have a shelter with fresh straw to sleep on, they prefer to sleep under the stars, regardless of the weather. So this weekend, when the little black ram-lamb was born into cold wet conditions with a forecast for snow and sub zero temperatures, I agonized with the decision to intervene or not.

In the 12 years that I have spent on a farm, raising a few animals for meat has become  more and more difficult. New slaughter regulations and increasing centralization have meant  the disappearance of critical rural infrastructure, from finding someone to haul animals to the closure of many smaller abattoirs. Veterinarians can make more money giving dogs hip replacements in a big city then working in a rural area. A recent cover story in the Vancouver Sun stated that over 3 million farm animals die in Canada each year during transport to slaughter houses, a trip that can be up to 56 hours long without food or water. Calling up a food service supplier and ordering a box of industrially produced lamb racks from far away is just not an option for me. Local lamb, either from my flock or one of the few remaining local producers is a very special product and I need to use every piece of the animal.

All this ran through my head as the sun was setting and I could see the newborn lamb huddled with it’s mother in the freezing rain on the far end of the field. So my son and I caught the lamb and brought it under shelter to warm it up and dry it off but the mother, practically feral, refused to follow. In the end, we tried to bottle-feed the lamb some powdered sheep milk  and we placed it in a dog kennel in some straw. But seperating it from it’s mother just didn’t seem right and was giving stress to us all. So we left the door of the kennel open a little. The next morning, after a night of tossing and turning, I was relieved to find the lamb nursing from it’s mother at the end of the snowy field. I made them a big nest under a tree with some hay, and I am happy to report mother and baby are doing just fine.

Tags: Farm Life, Recipes by Mara
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