That’s right friends, this month marks three years on Main St in Amherst!  We have the most amazing customers, and we’re so proud to be part of this thriving, beautiful community.  To celebrate, we’ve had free birthday cake in past years, but this time we’re doing something even better (in our humble opinion)!  To celebrate our birthday and harvest time, for this Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, all of our breads will be the regular price and flavors, but they’ll be made with 100 % locally grown grains!  Ben’s become quite the milling master, and we’re both excited to share this incredibly delicious, nourishing, alive grain with you!

Seriously now, it’s crazy good.  I’m just telling you because I love you, and I don’t want you to miss it.

At home, we’re trying to soak up the abundance and not go crazy trying to capture it all.  Here we are in our Three Sisters Field – last year the crows ate our corn planting twice, but this year, it’s thriving.  The Bloody Butcher corn is now a foot taller than me, and the squash is like a jungle!  (Three Sisters are a traditional Native American planting of beans, squash, and corn.  The beans fix nitrogen into the soil for the corn, which is a heavy feeder, and the squash makes a great ground cover, keeping down the weeds.  Apparently the raccoons don’t like to walk on the prickly squash leaves, either, protecting your harvest!  Pretty incredible.)  Our other garden is, um, weedier than I’d like to admit, but this field is heaven.

Oh, and while you’re at it, hop over and read Broadturn Farm’s post “Put Your Big Girl Panties On, Get Out There and Farm.” Amen.

And then they, with our amazing friend and farming partner Seth, proceeded to rock the field, weeding and hilling the beans all at once!

I’ve watched our sunroom and house fill with sheaves like these: wheat, oats, garlic

I started my preserving, and filled our oven with these,  making Round the Clock Tomatoes (from Paul Bertolli’s Cooking by Hand), to take us into winter.  (Mostly, our locavore strategy is: Eat yourself silly while it’s in season, and then wait ’til next year.  I am putting up some tomatoes, and freezing some berries, but we’ve found that after a few years of eating seasonally and locally, we actually don’t even desire to eat the items that are out of season.)

Starting preparing for Lamas – the Harvest Festival on August 1st.  Get ready to see some loaves at Wheatberry that look a bit like this, and taste like the best terroir this side of the Nile

Hope you’ve had some weeks filled with all the glorious tastes of summer, friends!

With a broken camera (oh that fateful final “click!”), family visiting, and no internet at home, the time is ripe for a blog summer break!  Only for a week or so, and then we’ll be back.  In the meantime, pop over to www.localgrain.org to see a video of Ben and Seth cultivating the bean field with our horse Cole.  Also, sign-ups for the 2010 Pioneer Valley Heritage Grain CSA are now open, and you can print out the form!

We had a fabulous Field Day with Alan and got to see the spelt field just days before it will be harvested.  We’ll have photos and video up very soon from that Field Day.  Have I mentioned that we got a wonderful Sustainable Community Grant from New England Sustainable Agriculture Research & Education (NESARE)?  That’s part of what is making this whole year possible, especially this space here and our Field Days.   So thank you NESARE!

This week, Ella and I will be continuing a pilgrimage through Julia Child’s Art of French Cooking, a wonderfully spattered copy handed down from Ben’s mom.  I’m reading (and loving) Julia’s memoir My Life in France, so it’s only natural that I would cook from her.  Did you know she couldn’t cook a lick until she was in her thirties?

Why haven’t I used her recipes more before?  A mystery.  Last Sunday, with cherries from our Kitchen Garden CSA share, we made Cherry Clafoutis.  I’ve always wanted to like clafoutis, but it’s always seemed soggy and weird.  Not so when you make it at home!

Super easy – Clafoutis is basically a pancake batter without leavening, spread half in your buttered hot pan, dump on fruit (any fruit, not just cherries!), then top with remaining batter.  Put in oven.  Devour.

So until next week, folks.  We’ll be out in the fields, in the kitchen, in the lake, and knitting away as furiously as a squirrel gathering nuts.  (Seriously, I’ve got this shawl, this fall hat, this sweater, and more on the needles!  Apparently June tells my brain: prepare for the winter!)  Have a great week everyone!

Meet Gertrude and Elisabeth.

In other news, we’ve got beet ginger kvass in the fridge (recipe here , but I used homemade yogurt as my “starter”), wheatberry salad on the dinner table,

and beautiful (but very thirsty) plants in the garden.

(garden photos by Ben Lester)

Have a great weekend everyone!  We’ve turned off our internet at home, so if I’m not at the bakery, I won’t be here, either.  For Gratitude Friday, well, I think you can guess some of what I’m grateful for this week.  And you?

her fleece was white as snow (lanolin-covered snow, that is). Meet Clover, our sweet little ewe lamb, born Wednesday.  My dad was in the backyard putting up fence, walked over the hill for less than 10 minutes, and came back to see a little white lump on the ground – Clover!  Curly surprised us all by having her lamb before the enormous Molly, and is doing a great job as a Mama.

Clover is already up and walking around with the rest of the “herd,” and very tolerant of our love.  We’re trying not to hover too much, but it’s hard with this much cuteness!  Ella, remembering the towel in my lambing basket, grabbed a cloth napkin and proceeded to “dry off” day-old Clover, while Curly watched carefully.

It’s incredible how baby animals are born and then . . . walking and skipping along!  Now, with one eye on the full moon, we’re just waiting for Molly’s lamb(s) to arrive.  Blessings on your weekend, everyone!

(photos by Ben Lester)

And have I mentioned that our two ewes are hugely pregnant?  Oh yes, there is that . . .

For now, we’re feeding our girls kale and red raspberry leaves fresh from the garden, and keeping a close eye. I’ve got my Herbal Handbook for Farm & Stable close by, plus Practical Sheep Dairying and Living With Sheep.  (They all have different advice, of course!)  East Friesans are known to twin, triplet, or even quadruplet (usually not their first time!), so we might have a whole lot of sheep really soon.

We’ve got our lambing basket ready, and I’m ordering a cheese press right now – getting ready for all that milk!

This week, we’ve closed down Wheatberry, to train some awesome new staff, and to prep and plant beans for the CSA.  In case you were worried we were sitting around, here’s our morning in photos:

Meet Kara – new Wheatberry staff, and PVHG intern extraordinaire.  She can now add “rock picker” and “wheat trial manager” to her resume!

Have a great week, friends.

First – my favorite moment this week, for which I am so grateful, amidst turmoil and our whole family being really sick:

Standing in the twilight drizzle, feeding the chickens with Ella, watching her gather weeds for them, and “read” them a story about bunnies.

I hope you’ll forgive me for mish-mashing a bunch of things together here – we’ve been very busy training new staff, planting, and then we all got really sick!  So, these would have been several posts, but I’m just going to put them all together here.

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Grain Cleaning 101:

For those of you who got grain shares with us in 2009, or anyone who grows their own grain, or gets it from a local farm, you have probably encountered some grains that still have hulls, and some weed seeds.  We had particular trouble getting our oats clean last year, despite a lot of effort (remember Ben cleaning on Christmas Day?).  We tried to explain to everyone how to use water to clean off the hulls and weed seeds, but in case we didn’t get you, here we go!

You can do a small or large batch of grains at a time – at home, I usually clean about 1/2 cup of oats at a time, to cook for breakfast, but at the bakery Ben has cleaned several quarts at a time.  Just make sure you size your containers appropriately.  In the photo, you see about 2 cups of oats in a quart mason jar, filled most of the way with water.  Pour in your grain first, then fill with water.  Right away you will see hulled grains and weed seeds floating at the top – pour them off, or skim them with a spoon or ladle.  Then take a spoon (or your hand, if you’re working with larger quantities in a big bucket), and stir up the grains and water.  Let them settle, and you’ll have more hulled grain and weed seeds on top.  Pour or skim them off, and repeat at least three or four times, until there’s nothing more floating to the top when you stir.  Voila – clean grain!  If you’re going to cook it whole, go right ahead.  If you’re going to mill it, or aren’t going to cook it right away, spread it out on a cookie sheet to dry (this takes 6-12 hours).  Enjoy.

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And now, something I’m really excited about – Nixtamal.  Nixtamalization is the process of adding lime (alkaline, not the citrus fruit) to dent corn, to soften the skin and make it more digestible.  Nixtamalization turns dent corn into hominy (also known as posole).  I’ve been meaning to try and find a recipe for this, and then a CSA member mentioned that he had been making it from Wild Fermentation, which I had on my bookshelf at home!  Sandor Ellis Katz  rocks, as always.  (Katz notes that whole nixtamalization is not a fermentation process, he includes it in his book because it’s a necessary first step in order to make a traditional fermented corn drink.)  So, below is his recipe, straight from Wild Fermentation:

Homemade Posole:

(to make about 4 cups of posole)

2 cups dent corn (whole, dried corn – not popcorn or sweet corn)

water

1/2 cup wood ash OR 2 tablespoons hydrated lime (also called calcium hydroxide – you can get it from pickling/canning suppliers or agricultural suppliers, just be sure it’s food grade!  I used wood ashes from our woodstove – be sure if you use ashes that they aren’t from pressure-treated wood or plywood, and sift them first to remove large chunks.)

Soak the corn in double its volume of water for 12-24 hours.

Strain off the water, and transfer the soaked corn to a pressure cooker or other large cooking pot (Katz doesn’t mention Crock-Pots, but I think they would work well).

Add 8 cups of water to the pot, add lime or sifted wood ash.  Bring to a boil, and pressure cook for 1 hour or boil for about 3 hours, stirring periodically.  (Note to our CSA members: I found that our corn cooked in about 2 hours instead of 3.)

To test for doneness, rub a kernel of corn between your fingers to see if the skin is loose.  If so, remove from heat; if not, continue cooking.

Rinse the corn, kneading and rubbing it to loosen and remove the skins.  Rinse until the water is clear. You’ve made posole!

Now, you can cook with the posole, adding it to soups, stews, or chili, grind it into a dough for tortillas and tamales, or make some fun fermented things, like Katz does.  We ate ours on the side with black beans and it was super delicious!

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Ok, I’m off to bed for some rest and recovery – wishing you all blessings on your weekend, and a day of rest.