The Last Haul!

Winter comes early in the Clarktic Circle!  On Thursday night October 6th we got our first snow of the season.

So tonight, we were forced to harvest the remaining veggies.  Here is the haul in it's entirety.  

In the green bucket is the remaining produce from the green house.  Tomatoes, green peppers, jalapenos, and sage.  

The blue bucket in the sink is full of scallions, fennel and carrots. Next on the counter are the remaining yellow beets.  We actually planted these half way through the summer when we realized how well the yellow beets were growing.  They are pretty small, but a great yield for how late we planted them from seed.

  Finally a pile of red and yellow onions (and some green peppers and jalapenos from the green house).  The onions are also small, but a better yield than we expected.

Now, what to do with all of it??????

To start with, I'm roasting some of the fennel to make a Roasted Fennel Soup.  But this is what is left over after roasting.  

Do you have any awesome fennel recipes you can share with me?

Golden Beet Ice Cream: Inspired by Jeni's Splendid Ice Cream

Last night I made another batch of ice cream inspired by my new favorite "cookbook" Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams at Home.





If you are a Steamboat resident, Bud Werner Memorial Library has a copy of this book, but be forewarned, you will regret ever checking it out if you are trying to watch your waistline!

My favorite new cookbook, Jeni has a recipe for red beet ice cream.  Since we are growing golden beets, and in an effort to keep my cooking projects local, I decided to try the recipe substituting golden beets and see how it turns out.  I also used raw whole milk from Moon Hill Dairy again.

This is the photo in the cookbook and on her website of the red beet ice cream.


Looks yummy, huh!

The basic ingredients are the same as the last recipe I posted about Jen's goat cheese ice cream with mascarpone instead of cream cheese.  However, I couldn't find any mascarpone in Steamboat (not to mention at the Clark Store!) so I substituted her usual ingredient of cream cheese and added a little extra heavy cream.

To process the medium sized beets, I roasted them in a dutch oven at 450degrees for one hour.  The skins peeled right off of the hot beets.

The next step with the beets is to put them in a blender to puree them and the press the puree through a sieve to remove some of the cellulose.  I'm guessing you could probably skip this step, but you might end up with less creamy ice cream.  I didn't take any pictures of this process.

After boiling the milk, cream, sugar, zest of one orange and cornstarch for 5 minutes, I combined the beet puree with the cream cheese/heavy cream mixture and then put the whole recipe back through the sieve.  Turns out the orange zest was supposed to be in large strips obtained with a vegetable peeler, but I used a micro plane and had to get the little bits out again.

Jeni's technique is to place the prepared mixture into a plastic bag and then cool it in an ice water bath for 30 min.  While this method is very convenient, I'm not so keen on placing a hot liquid that I will later be consuming into a plastic bag where it might be leaching chemicals into my food.  So I placed the liquid into a stainless steel bowl with a tight fitting lid and chilled it overnight.

This morning I poured the cool mixture into the electric ice cream maker.

After about 30 minutes of spinning in the ice cream maker we had a soft texture ice cream.  The jury is still out on this flavor.  It is certainly earthy.  I'm taking some to a dinner party tonight and we will see what everyone else thinks.

I packed the ice cream into pint containers to freeze them into a harder consistency.

I want Tim to design some labels for my ice creams.  I was thinking about calling it A. Stone Cold Creamy Creation.  Do you have any creative ideas for naming my homemade brand of ice creams?

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.