Getting Granola

I confess, one of my favorite breakfasts is homemade granola with just enough plain yogurt to make it wet. This is a great light breakfast in summer. In winter granola can be sprinkled over apples and baked for a hot breakfasts. Just thinking about it I feel like taking a break for some homemade granola.

To really enjoy that wonderful gut scrubbing, wholesome feeling of eating granola, one must actually make one's own. (It takes much less time than one would think.) Perhaps "must" is a strong word, but real granola purists will tell you that homemade is truly the most satisfying nutritionally and spiritually.

Don't roll your eyes at me being philosophical over the merits of fresh-from-the-oven granola over store bought. The other nice thing about making one's own granola is that one can pick one's own ratio of nuts, oats, fruit, and other ingredients, so that it suits one's own tastes. Since I've been making granola recently, I'm giving you my recipe, but you should know I don't like mine very sweet, while grocery store brands are very sugary in my opinion. In order to help you make adjustments, I've included notes at the bottom about how one might adjust the recipe for preferences.  

Dude Looks Like a Lady

Sexing chicks is not simple. Entire discussion boards are filled with chicken enthusiasts desperately seeking the answer to one question, "Is it a cockerel or a pullet?" One is supposed to be able to tell by its growth rate, its comb, its saddle feathers, its color, and its attitude. The expert's method is to check the chick's butt for male sex organs in development. I admit that I squinted at the photos of little pink chicken anuses on the internet --  chicken porn -- for a long time. All these months later I still have no idea what I was supposed to be perceiving as sex organs. They just looked like butts to me.

A normal person would wonder why this is important. A person learned in chicken culture, i.e. not a normal person, would know that having the correct ratio of males to females is critical to keeping a stable and healthy flock of layers, i.e. hens laying eggs. In other words, too many macho cocks harrassing the hens and antagonizing each other produces nothing but trouble for all the food they gobble. Even a normal person could imagine how cock fighting in the coop would be undesirable.

Naturally, when I got my chicks I wanted to know what they were. Genetically speaking, odds are in favor of at least one of my four original chicks being a cockerel, so I compared their other sexing traits to one another and there were subtle differences. Three of them were larger, pushier, and growing their combs more rapidly. Within a few weeks I was certain I had three males.

Nothing sets a notion in concrete like making an investment in it, so my reputation as a chicken sexer was on the line as soon as I bought four pullets to adjust the ratio more favorably. Still, no matter how hard I tried to convince myself in the subsequent weeks that "the boys" didn't look like other boys their age because I wasn't pumping them up with steroids and antibiotics, the harsh reality is that they are girls. They are on the cusp of maturity at nineteen weeks and there isn't a single cock among them. "Lola, la-la-la-la, Lola!"

Not to be too hard on myself for being delusional, some part of me doubted enough to name one of them the sexually ambiguous Bossy Pants, and the other three after literary characters whose names were misattributed in some way: Norbert (Hagrid ' s female dragon in the Harry Potter series), Jayne (the brutish, but loveable thug of the television series Firefly), and Smeagel (Gollum's real name in the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings trilogy).

So, I'm accepting my folly. Enter Javier, 100% male of yet another breed: Silver Laced Wyandotte. Don't let the "lacey" name fool you, he's all man, macho, testosterone laden, strutting on his perch ready to take on hens and predators alike. He is one big boy; and I haven't even looked at his butt. There's no chance of him taking a walk on the wild side. "Doo, do-doo, doo-do-doo-doo..."

We obtained Javier from a Craigslist ad posted by a couple who had found him abandoned after the county fair. Javier inspired them to begin raising hens, but they decided they didn't want chicks. When we first met him he was in the coop protecting his brood. He would hussle the girls behind him as we moved around, which is precisely what a good rooster does in the presence of dangerous predators like me. The next test was to pick him up, which he resisted but not nearly as hard as my girls do. Javier was clearly handled a great deal as a young cockerel. 

So Javier came home with us and went into quarantine for a few days. He and the girls could see and hear one another in the seperate quarters, but the girls didn't pay much attention to him until he crowed.

Most chicken enthusiasts like the sound of crowing, never mind the hour. No one really knows what it's all about, though the common joke is that a cock crowing is greeting the day with the song of his people. If one allows for a moment of anthropomorphism one can imagine them crying out, "I am here! I am here!" in a spirit reminiscent of Walt Whitman.

Indeed, on his first morning Javier belted out his ear splitting song. It might have been an existentialist anthem but it was definitely not "Sweet Transvestite." In the hen house the crooning inspired a reaction similar to what would happen if Justin Bieber had materialized in a middle school girls' slumber party. The girls rushed to the window and craned their necks for a better look at their new heart throb. Javier strutted and sang. The girls swooned over his dreaminess. At last a real man.

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Despite having an audience, Javier has been bored, homesick and frustrated with isolation. Today his quarantine was lifted. Enjoy the videos of their first meeting and the first minutes together...

 

If video does not load, go to http://youtu.be/lXTkK7HRGPo . 

#farmdiva

Under the Italian Influence

At our house, September means it’s time to start planning for the holidays. (Those of you who are crafty know what I mean.) My particular holiday craft is making limoncello, an Italian, lemon-flavored liquor that takes weeks to prepare. Sadly, I don’t live in a lemon grove in California nor do I live in a state that allows heritage licenses for producing my own grain alcohol. Nonetheless, I have a great recipe thanks to my days organizing an Italian cultural organization and one of the Italian-American friends I made there.  (Grazie mille, Michele!)

Italians and non-Italians  alike love to debate the authenticity of Italian cultural memes; and Italian cuisine is ripe for such discussions. Italian recipes are notoriously difficult to translate, due to ambiguities in measurements and differences between what is recorded in the recipe and what is actually done in the kitchen. Not surprisingly, those of us who make limoncello love to compare notes on our different methodologies and flatter one another by stealing ideas. Though we may not agree on what is authentic, everyone pays proper respect to the fact it is homemade. There are a lot of authenticity points awarded for “fatto a mano” – i.e. made by hand.

I hope you are able to try making your own limoncello with the recipe here.  Even if you don’t have the Italian air and water to make your limoncello sweeter, I’ve included some notes to help you can make it authentically and uniquely your own.

Chicken Run and Play

The girls overseeing construction.

This past weekend, Salt and I completed the chicken run, so I thought I would share some photos from our construction project. After months of thinking about the perfect plan for a chicken run, we finally decided we didn’t have time this year to construct one of our own design, so we ordered a kit. It turned out to be simple enough that I could construct it while Salt worked out the more difficult problem of how to make a secure entry from the chicken coop. We started on Sunday morning and five hours later the chickens had their new outdoor play yard. The grand opening of the chicken yard was a big success as they all came out to explore, eat grass and ultimately flop onto the ground to sun themselves. 

Getting Back to the Garden Revisited

I'm following up on the post "Getting Back to the Garden" in which I describe the outcome of this year's crop.  There is now more news to report: the sweet potatoes have been harvested.

Some of the sweet potato leaves slipped out from under their plastic cover during the freeze this week and turned an unattractive shade of black.  That wasn't a big loss since it was harvest time.  I think we might have done better had I not been set back a month by a bad batch of slips, but I think the results were good enough that we should try again next year.  There were a lot of fingerling sweet potatoes, so I foresee some roasted sweet potatoes in my future.

I also thought I would share the interesting way in which we ended up protecting the tomatoes from our early freeze.  

Getting Back to the Garden

Remember that garden I was going to plant last spring.  I did plant it, but every time I start to write about it I stop myself because it's a work in progress.  At last a landmark has arrived in the form of September's fickle weather and the garden is on the cusp of a change.  So I must assess its success or failure now or never. The short version of this assesment is that there were mixed results.

Death on Deer Hill

I rarely hear of events that can compete in the complexity or hilarity of James Thurber’s short story, “The Night the Bed Fell,” an account of how a series of misunderstandings feeds deep seated fears to create a carnival of consequences. Occasionally, something does happen that sets my wildest fears and imagination to the task of creating a great drama in which I might play a part. On the day of the tragicomedy of "Death on Deer Hill," I criss-crossed my property in rubber boots and a dressing gown with the grim duty of burying the victims only to find that the one thing keeping me from being the neighbor lady who has fits of insanity was that I had not accessorized with a handbag full of cat food.

I should start at the beginning...

Just Hitched

 

The big news here has been that Salt and I eloped. Having worked in the meetings and events industry for so long, I could have put together a fairly good sized wedding in a week, but we were more inclined to keep it low key. So we went to a favorite overlook, sat under a tree and exchanged vows we wrote. It was a very touching ceremony with tears (me), romance (Salt) and laughter (I started it).

Chicken Thoughts and Other Mysteries of the Universe

Bossy Pants ca. Nine Weeks Old

The rooster next door is crowing, which tells me it's around 3:30 a.m. The sun is not up yet, but the sky will begin to lighten in another hour or so. I imagine there is a wave of call and response crowing moving from East to West across the country at the speed of the sun rise. A distant cock crows and then a closer one responds, until the sound circles the globe and starts over again.