Notes of a Wannabe Farmer

"In the early 1980's, my lived in a small gray house on what I now realize was a half-acre backyard homestead situated on a quiet, tree-lined street in Nampa, Idaho. I was just a small child then, but I still remember the vegetable garden my parents planted each year, tucked away in the far corner of our backyard." – Carleen Madigan, from The Backyard Homestead







There must be something very visceral about childhood memories that include the dark spaces and dank smells of grandparents' home. Up until the suburban housing revolution, it seems fairly safe to say that most of us probably have something like them anyway, maybe it was an attic, often times a porch, or some portion of an old garage where the smells of oil and dust commingled and turned to everlasting images. I remember well the farmhouse basement of my grandparents, with the creeky see though stairs, the chipped concrete of the foundation, a surprisingly unusual stand-up shower in the corner with nothing more than a circular curtain, and then, the masterpiece of all memory, the canning cellar. This one was quite small, full of cobwebs in every corner, and to the child's eye something that did not in any way seem like it would useable. It looked more like something that had been passed on from the previous generation; the pickles in their brine and tomatoes floating like suspended red orbs did not look like anything gotten at a grocery store. Yet there the pickles would appear come the magic dinner hour served alongside the soft farm bread and butter, the pot roast and potatoes, and had a kind of singular taste that tasted like the farm itself. These were the very same memories and images that combined with the hay loft up above the barn; the cow stalls, filled or not, the granary and the dairy production in its own building along the side. Canning equipment on its way via Amazon delivery, I feel its time to take an urban stab at canning and see if I can create my own dank cellar full of wispy cobwebs and anticipate the smells that rise at the first crack of the jar lid.

Notes of a Wannabe Farmer

"Up until two years ago, when Ammemarie started her home dairy, I had a completely nineteenth-century image of the process. In my mind's eye I saw a grandmotherly-looking woman seated at a kitchen table, turning a large wooden churn. And turning it, and turning it, and turning it. My mind even supplied two for three strips of flypaper hanging down over the table." – Neil Perrin, from First Person Rural, Essays of a Sometime Farmer







The city-dweller will also have to face the stark truth that as he or she would like nothing more than to look out their backyard porch at a well-conceived and self-sustaining homestead, including raised beds of veggies and herbs, a chicken coop out there in the deepest corner, some grains off to the side, and boxes of honey bees behaving themselves cornered up against the garage which is shared with the neighbor, there will be some issues of practicality and imagination that will have to be adjusted. One of the great motions of mind in modern times is the migration into the urban centers where the schools, the restaurants, the jobs are close by – biking becomes a valid option when compared to considering riding from the rural house fifteen miles in along a highway road shared with crop-cutters. Now once we establish ourselves in our tidy corner house on the cramped block – bless it, for it is beautiful and cozy – we now conceive of the backyard homestead, of course. 'If only,' becomes the key phrase inside the mind of the newly motivated urban farmer. 'If only we could have a few chickens in back,' or 'we need to compost everything for our...crops.' 'If only we had raised beds on the boulevards, corn and potatoes, that would be nice.'  In other words, the urban backyard homesteader is a good and proper dreamer. Landed with 40 acres to plant for real, this same dreamer might wonder what in the world to do with all this land, especially if we are merely feeding ourselves! Should we turn this rural plot into a going concern? Now, reduced to a backyard courtyard made of concrete tile, some planting beds about five by one feet extending at the top of the courtyard walls, and a patch of yard about two by twenty feet, we have to think in its opposite, as micro farmers, if you will. Usually at this point the good and proper urban micro farmer just wishes himself back about a hundred years ago when all these choices weren't around for him to pick from. My own father grew up on a family dairy, three other brothers, and the work was haying, cowing, fencing, manuring, or whatever new real crises arose. There wasn't a lot of thinking about microfilming in those moments. Much of the thinking, if I have gathered all of the information accurately, was something more like, 'let's get off this farm as quick as possible and into the cities and our desk jobs! for goodness sakes. Now we've had our generation or two of rest and its time to get our hands dirty again and we all know it. Notes of a wannabe farmer is a little tongue and cheek, yes, but it's also plenty accurate. The urban wannabe farmer is what it is: a looker back, a looker forward, and a looker of his plot as it is, and realizing that there are some small tasks that have to be planned and executed to make this little city block corner house a 'homestead,' and along the way it might be kind of fun...unlike real farming, which is, as I understand it, like, real, work.

Prairie Views

january 5

Four in the afternoon. 10 degrees near sunset.

Where we park at Governor Nelson
only day old tire tracks circle
the thin stiff snow around the parking lot
but no other cars.
We open the doors and they crack
like old bones, stiff and heavy,
and complain at having to get out
in this cold snap one more time for God's sake.
The prairie across the road
for the moment still tall and golden under the last
long canvas of sunshine retreating
behind the flat cornfields fading west.
Big bluestem seems to lean our way in resignation.
Night has come again for its gold blades,
collars and sheaths like a thief
invited in by the gnarled black oaks.

Tagine of yam, shallots,
carrots and prunes

"The great secret of an authentic tagine is to simmer the ingredients over a low heat, so that everything remains deliciously moist and tender." – Ghillie Basan, from easy tagine












A stew worthy of poetry, as Ghillie Basan writes in her introduction to easy tagine, seems right on the mark for this new venture into cooking vegetable as tangines. I mentioned this in my first post for the Moroccan cooking method, that there's no reason to tuck away the slow cooker for good, or to shelve the new one-pot, but when these two appliances are considered up against the beauty, efficiency and flavor of the tagine, there is no real comparison. The tagine is an old and beautiful approach because it allows for, first of all, a surface hot enough to sautée your initial ingredients. In the yam, shallot and carrots recipe, the first ingredient down is diced ginger, which becomes quickly wonderfully aromatic, then cinnamon, which naturally enhances and sweetens this initial aroma. Whole shallots (I happen to cut mine into quarters) comes next until they are colored. This is the base of the stew as poetry. Because it is in tagine, it is very visible and accessible, just like cooking in a shallow dutch

style ceramic. No doubt it could continue to cook topless if chosen, especially to reduce. Add bite size jams, chopped (or whole) prunes, and strong drizzle of honey and then 1 1/4 cups of broth, season and stir, and this is, as you look at it, already a wonderful looking concoction. Yet it is the covering that makes all the difference. Unlike the one-pot, there is no sealing a cover; unlike the slow cooker, there is no anticipation for either a 5 or 8 hour wait; instead, this cover draws and recirculates the moisture of the broth and oils up an down the contours of the cover, and quickly. We imagine that this is the best method we might come up with for jams and carrots, both of which need not only the patience of a proper steaming method to soften. It just happens that the Moroccan tradition allows this to happen in a kind of syrupy and eventually caramelized liquid. With a few minutes left in the cooking time, lift the cover and set aside, allowing for whatever remaining liquid to thicken. Toss a pinch of shredded mint and cilantro over the top here, within the 25 minutes, is a kind of uniquely presentable vegetable stew that really can't fully be duplicated in pan or insta-pot. As the recipe suggests, serve with plain and buttery couscous and the meal is complete.

Chicken k'dra with turnips
and chickpeas

"It is Berbers we have to thank for tangines and couscous. A tagine is a glorified stew worthy of poetry – aromatic and syrupy, zesty and spicy, or sweet and fragrant are just some of the words that come to mind." – Ghillie Basan, from Easy Tagine












The slow cooker has always had its place in the kitchen. The insta-pot, a fairly new popular phenomenon, turns out a nice meal in a relative flash. But what happens if we take away the technology and get similar results from a ceramic that has a thousand year tradition behind it? The tagine concept has been interesting to me for a long time. 'One-pots,' as the cooking language goes, have really come to exemplify for me the best of weeknight family cooking because it solves so many of the problems of the six o'clock rush – you get proteins, you get vegetables, you get it tender and it you get it as comfort food, usually fairly quickly, even if done in nothing more than a cast-iron either stop top or in-oven.  The wonderful cookbook Olives, Lemons and Za'tar, by Rawia Bashara inspired me to re-think the process of the one-pot by celebrating her own version of the chicken tagine, which I tried as a pan one-pot.  Although wonderful, there was something still quite tantalizing about the clay pot with domed hood and cylindrical handle that may or may not have a hole cut into it for steam release. I could imagine days at the desert bizarre accumulating turmeric, turnips and smen (a made butter that cookbooks say takes some getting used to), tossing them into the bottom of this authentically decorated pot and letting it steam its way to magic. Because of that circulation (similar, let's be honest, to the insta-pot), the tagine approach forces us to simplify once its on the stove. No need to stir and fuss, just let the lower seep to the upper and back down again, carrying along its way that bed of spices and vegetable aromatics along with it.

So I bought my near 3 qt. tagine and tried a chicken k'dra with turnips and chickpeas, a dish that is traditionally cooked in a large copper pot and packed with plenty of vegetables.  The recipe covered all the essentials, of chicken, onion, turnips, and chickpeas, seasoned by turmeric, garlic, coriander, and finally topped by parsley. Even though this was my first true tagine experience, I decided anyway to make a couple of additions that I thought might round out the texture and the salt – I added some pitted greek olives, both green and purple, and also added cubed eggplant over the top, where I new the soft texture could both hold its shape but also absorb the recirculating flavors.  Our gas fired stove top is potent and it took no more than 35 minutes for the k'dra to finish. As I lifted the hood a steam cloud rose up. Underneath was, to my excitement, a near replica of the picture of the same dish shown by Ghillie Basan in her easy tagine cookbook.  Take the tagine over to the counter, set the hood at an angle over the bottom bowl, and not only do you have a non-sticking one-pot, but one that is visually enticing. Spoon the thighs and essential stew over or near couscous and this might very well be as close to Moroccan one-pot cooking as the home cook can get. It got me to thinking that it would be very easy to consider using the tagine for virtually any meat, veggie and bean combination that suits your taste. A favorite beef stew set into the tagine comes to mind; meatballs; two large turkey legs and new potatoes? Insta-pots are fast, but I'm not sure they are as easy or interesting as the tagine.

Songs for Cold Mountain

"...crowded ridges breath in snow
sunless forests breath out mist..."  – Han Shan, 6











Cold snap has hardened Lake Monona
to nothing but a sky's mirror
under the Yahara bridges
the ducks waddle over cracked ice
where the water opens they leap in
and tip their tails to the distant sun
then plunge like hot arrows
to the bottom with eyes
like moons at midnight

Songs for Cold Mountain

"Towering cliffs were the home I chose
bird trails beyond human tracks
what does my yard contain
white clouds clinging to dark rocks
every year I've lived here
I've seen the seasons change
all you owners of tripods and bells
what good are empty names." – Han Shan, 1






Punta Cana

1

Back home the world is below zero
the sky is likely clear but untouchable
here on the white sands of Punta Cana
we are winter flowers our feet are seeds
it does not take that much to bloom
behind the long leaf of the palm tree
above our small hut the sun is close
enough to seek us for rescue

2

The cobblestone our walkways
here the Dominican workers move
back and forth from tricycles with baskets
filled with small shovels and hard rakes
to manicure the encroaching jungle
small kittens dart under the mangroves
the mice and small creatures hide
in wet tunnels under the teak bridge

3

Mind must be something like weather
morning it rains and droplets cover the windows
clouds linger and brief hope is dashed
blue is the color of new dreams
yellow above is mother spoiling us
when dawn strikes we walk the beach
and lights from the resorts skim the tips
of waves like lightening strikes