Do tomatoes have belly buttons? How about hearts?

My niece Caroline recently asked her mom if this was their house's belly button.

So I'm thinking that if a house can have a belly button, then certainly a tomato can too!

We attempted to grow several varieties of heirloom tomatoes this year.  The Cherokee purples are particularly delicious, but we didn't get very many ripe ones.  The orange one in the center is a Brandy Wine.  It is the only one that ripened at all, so we probably wont grow them again next year.  The Celebrity variety did the best and we had a daily supply of them once they started to ripen.  Next year we plan to start all the tomatoes inside around March so we have mature plants to put in the green house in the spring.

Celebrity, brandy wine, and Cherokee purple tomatoes from the Clarktic Circle Greenhouse.

Heart shaped Cherokee purple tomato.  

Although the weather has been quite nice for fall in the Clarktic Circle, it is dipping into the 30's every night and the green house is only getting into the 80s during the day.  So we harvested all of the basil today and made pesto and a maple basil vinaigrette.  We also pulled all of the cucumber plants and put them in the composter.    We left the tomato plants hoping to get a few more ripe ones before the snow flies.  The forecast is calling for snow on Friday.  I'm not ready for this yet....

Yes, that would be our truck buried under a ridiculous amount of snow last winter.

Garden of Eden?

I'm starting to think that maybe, just maybe we were made in the image of carrots.  But of course the opposite could also be true.  Carrots were made in the image of us.  Either way, we have now harvested carrots that have an uncanny likeness to both male and female lower halves.  I'm starting to think the Garden of Eden was actually in Clark Colorado!

Lady like carrot sits on top of last week's harvest of Napoli and Purple haze carrots as well as yellow beets.

Lady likeness?

A re-post of the male likeness carrots.

Fall Feasting

As the temperatures begin dipping here in the Clarktic Circle, we have ramped up our harvesting.

Cucumbers, yellow beets, fennel, tomatoes, carrots, scallions and garlic harvested last weekend.

The cold frames over our raised beds (seen in the photo below) have protected our crops from the frosts we have already had and extended our harvesting season by several weeks so far. 

Some of the last of the red tomatoes.  There are still loads of green tomatoes that we will need recipes for.  Share your recipes please!!!

This is the first head of romaine lettuce we harvested this year.  There are a few more smaller heads that I hope will mature if we leave the cold frames closed on the beds around the clock.

Romaine lettuce

 Naughty by nature

Homegrown carrots.  What happened here?

 Last week I posted some photos of the Chanterelle mushrooms we found while hiking in the Zirkel wilderness.  After several very long and busy 12 hours shifts catching babies, I called Tim and asked him to make a Pasta Carbonara with Sauteed Chanterelles for me for dinner on Sunday night.

Wild Chanterelle mushrooms sauteed in butter 

Carbonara sauce a' la' chef Tim Stone

Garden fresh oven roasted carrots and yellow beets 

Pasta Carbonara served with sauteed chanterelles and oven roasted root vegetables from the garden.

Goat Cheese Ice Cream

I've been on a bit of an ice cream making kick as of late.  About a month ago I was listening to The Splendid Table on NPR when Jeni Britton Bauer was on the show talking about her new book Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams at Home.


The unique recipes sounded absolutely wonderful to me, especially the goat cheese ice cream.  So I immediately requested that our library order a copy and I had it within a week.

I love goat cheese and was totally intrigued by the concept of goat cheese ice cream.   The first batch I made included a cognac fig swirl made from dried figs, honey, water and Cognac.  Delicious!

The second batch I paired with a homemade raspberry sauce.  Basically just a pint of fresh organic raspberries boiled with a half cup of sugar.  I think it was a little too sweet.

Tonight I made a goat cheese ice cream and served it with the fresh Whortleberries we gathered on our backpacking trip up to Mica Lake this past weekend.

It took three of us about an hour to collect just a cup of these tiny little berries that are packed with a wonderful sweet but slightly tart punch.


Making ice cream from scratch is really a lot more simple than I ever imagined.  All you need are some basic ingredients and an inexpensive electric ice cream maker like this one made by Cuisinart.

Pictured here are all the ingredients to make the goat cheese ice cream.

Whole milk (we used the raw milk we are getting from Moon Hill Dairy)
Heavy cream
Sea Salt
Sugar
Corn Starch
Cream cheese
Goat cheese

I replaced corn syrup called for in the recipe with sugar because I just have a problem with adding corn syrup to anything homemade when I try to avoid it at all costs in the foods I buy at the store.   I did use it the first time around and could not tell the difference when I used sugar in the second two batches.   I also did not have any heavy cream and substituted half and half in this batch.  I didn't seem to make a big difference when compared to the previous batches.

The finished product.  Goat Cheese Ice Cream served with fresh wild Whortleberries.

I can't wait to try the Salted Caramel Ice Cream and the Beet Ice Cream with mascarpone, orange zest and poppy seeds. 

What is your favorite ice cream?

And then there were six...

We started out with 16 baby chicks that arrived by mail in May of this year.  We decided to give away 5 of them because we were concerned that our chicken coop would be too small for all of them once they were full grown.

Walter keeping watch over the ladies.

Sadly one chicken mysteriously disappeared a few weeks ago.  The other night we lost another four of our ladies.  We have been letting them out to free range in our yard and they have been venturing further and further from the house.  They always come home to roost right around dusk.  On the night that we lost them it was late before we remembered to shut the door to the coop.

The night before the ladies went missing I had seen a skunk scamper under the deck.  In fact we narrowly escaped an incident with Bella getting sprayed.  I think it must have been that skunk that got them.  I feel so badly that our carelessness caused our chickens to die.  We set an alarm in the house so that we don't forget to close the door for the ladies as soon as it gets dark.

Perfect High Altitude Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies

Baking at 8300ft has proven to be a challenge for me.  Inevitable I either add too much or too little flour when attempting to adjust a recipe for altitude.  I discovered this recipe for Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies and they turned out so perfectly (twice!) that I'll never try another recipe.

Perfect High Altitude Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies

1 cup butter, softened
3/4 cup sugar
3/4 cup light brown sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 eggs
2 cups + 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
2 cups old fashioned oat meal
2 cups chocolate chips


1/2 cup chopped walnuts (optional)


1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees and place butter on stove top to soften while oven heats up.

2. Mix together the softened butter and sugars. Add the vanilla and eggs mixing well on medium speed until fluffy, about 2 minutes.

3. Add the flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt and mix well. Add the oatmeal and mix well. 

4. Add the chocolate chips and mix gently on low until they are evenly incorporated into the dough. 

5. Place tablespoon size balls of dough on a cookie sheet.  

6. Bake cookies for 8-10 minutes, until the cookies are puffed and the edges no longer look shiny.  They will look very underbaked, but will be perfect after they settle and cool.  Allow cookies to rest on the cookie sheet for a couple of minutes before transferring to a cooling rack.

Since the point of this blog is supposed to be about growing our own food or at least buying locally grown food, I am including a photo of my cookies with the raw milk from Moon Hill Dairy.  Because raw milk is illegal to sell in Colorado, we have bought a share of a cow and pay a boarding fee to the diary.  They test the milk weekly to make sure it is safe to consume.  It is sooooo much more tasty than pasteurized homogenized milk.


The first batch of these cookies that I made disappeared quite quickly.  I guess there is a cookie monster that lives somewhere in the Clarktic Circle.  I made a second batch tonight so we could take some on our backpacking trip this weekend.  Tim isn't a fan of nuts in baked goods, so this time I made the first two sheets without nuts and the second two sheets with about half a cup of chopped walnuts.  Turns out he likes nuts just fine!  I might have figured out who the cookie monster is.

Coffee, Purple Haze Carrots, Sweet Peas and Raspberries for Breakfast

After brewing a strong cup of coffee this morning, I headed out to water the garden.  

While I was watering I found myself snacking on Purple Haze carrots fresh out of the ground 

sweet peas straight from the vine

 and fresh raspberries ripe from the bush.

So that is what I had for breakfast.  

Here is today's raspberry harvest.  Tim will be lucky if he gets any.  

I may just have raspberries for lunch too.

Walter is always close by when I'm out playing in the gardens.  

He thinks it is his job to protect me at all times.  I guess he's protecting me from the grasshoppers.  

The peas started growing up one of the cucumber plants and as I was searching for mature peas I found  this gigantic cucumber resting on the rim of the raised bed.  

It has either been successfully hiding from Tim, or he was purposefully seeing how big it will get if not harvested along with all the others he has harvested for pickle making.

The cucumber plants are producing at least 20 new cucumbers a week! Tim has been busy making at least one batch of pickles a week.  Here you can see all of his "putting up" efforts.  Jars of homemade tomato sauce, Palisade peaches, habanero spiced pickles, and homebrew adorn the shelf above the sink in the kitchen.

Golden Beets are my all time favorite vegetable.  Roasted with a little truffle oil and served with goat cheese and pine nuts, almonds or walnuts over a bed of fresh greens with a little sea salt.  Makes my mouth water just thinking about it.

For labor day weekend we headed down to Westcliff Colorado to hang out with some long time friends of Tim's.  We harvested some of our golden beets for the first time.  They were amazingly sweet!  We also harvested some cucumbers, tomatoes, carrots, endive, and spinach.   We had wonderful local meals all weekend long.  Some from our garden and some from the gardens of the Westcliff crew.