Thanksgiving: In Review!

    Thanksgiving this year was a fun-packed weekend-long undertaking filled with incredible food, awesome friends and family, warm fires, and merriment. Whitt and Martha had the usual suspects up for Thanksgiving dinner aside from Grethcen and Austin. Unfortunately they were unable to make it up from Asheville, NC.
    The meal consisted of three (yes, three!) of our turkeys prepared in different ways. Two birds had been brined by Mia and Martha prior to cooking: one in a water and salt mixture, the other in a mixture of water, milk, salt, and various spices. The third was relatively untouched prior to cooking. The idea behind brining is that the salt and liquid mixture will coat the skin and form a protective coating that holds in the moisture of the bird while being cooked with minimum basting required. The two brined birds were grilled while the third was cooked as normal in the oven. Howard and Whitt spear-headed the grilling of the turkeys.

Howard sprinkling on some magic.

A couple swipes of goodness...

And viola!

Whitt and Howard talking about the boring view.

In goes the bird!

Annie doing one last nose check before the lid is closed to make sure it smells good.

     According to all present, every bird was unbelievable, but the grilled birds where exceptionally good. Of course the birds were merely the center piece to the meal. All of the sides and desserts were also, as normal, incredible.

Tomætoes, Tomátoes

    Martha has picked the last of the tomatoes before the gardens are switched to fall/winter mode. With the nights getting colder, and ultimately the day's temperatures catching up, that means it's time to break out the green house structures for the raised beds and move as much as we can into the affixed greenhouse off of the lower apartment. I've been working on tilling all of this years plants into the soil to decompose and nourish the ground. As a good way to end the time of year that the bulk of our veggie production slows down by sharing some pictures of the different tomato varieties we grew this year.

    Our tomatoes were good to us this year!

Sauerkraut Has Finished!

    Yesterday was an exciting day.  The sauerkraut we had started back in July has finally been jarred, and we were able to taste the incredible-ness that is fresh sauerkraut. 

    Now, to put my amazement into perspective, I thought sauerkraut from a can you buy at the store was incredible.  I would have to refrain from buying it because I'd end up putting it on everything -- i.e. hot dogs, bratwursts, sandwiches, corn flakes, et cetera.  However, now I don't think I'll ever want to buy canned sauerkraut from the store again.  It would only make me cry that it wasn't home-made with every bite.  I can't exactly put my finger on why the fresh kraut is so much better, it just is.

 The canning process.

 Mmmmmmmm...

Martha at work!

    For all you sauerkraut lovers out there, try and make it up for some reubens, or brats, or some corn flakes smothered in kraut with us!

Sauerkraut

We've made our own sauerkraut! Martha seasoned up a huge amount of cabbage with the appropriate ingredients used to make sauerkraut and I got the pleasure of mixing it all together in a large clay pot.







After the cabbage mixture has all been blended together, it goes into the basement to ferment and become incredible! We made this mixture back in July and it has been marinating ever since. We are getting ready to can the kraut very soon! Stay tuned for a post about the finished product!

Wonderful Time for Gardening

Summer is a great season for gardening. The plants are well underway, and many of them don't mature or blossom until mid to late summer. Here are some pictures below with descriptions by the garden planner herself, Martha.

This is the second year for the delphiniums.
The blossom spikes have reached at least six feet!

It is amazing how varied the colors and petals are-

Strawberry foxglove made an early show- I let it go to seed so I can
propagate more and fill in the borders of the Cottage Garden.

Many of the hollyhocks planted last year have deep purple- nearly black blossoms,
tho we do have some white and pin. Unfortunately with the wet spring they
have been stricken with hollyhock rust and have been cut back to nubbins. You can
see the rust forming on the leaves to the right. It looks like large scale. Looking in
Wymans I found out that this can be combated with laying down
ground cornmeal prior to emergence- otherwise it is best to destroy the plants.

We got four unique perennial onion sets from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange in
the fall. Unfortunately my labels disappeared during the winter!

The early lettuce has gone to seed. Not the most attractive but
the seed has to come from somewhere.

Hollyhocks prior to the rust explosion-

Bib and redleaf going to seed-

The Cottage Garden was created last spring (2010). The asparagus was
moved from the raised beds it occupied to the inner and outer aspects of
the garden border setting it back a yer. I expect that in the following years it
will be lush. I read in Field and Forest that I can put oyster mushroom
spawn under the asparagus in the straw mulch and plan to
try that next year...or maybe this fall.

This magnificent mass is an Autumn Joy Clematis combined with a Jackmanii.
It has totally covered the birdhouse we constructed during the snows of 2009-2010.
In the hidden garden of the foliage a hummingbird has nested. It is fun to see the
tiny bird zip in and out the huge jungle.

Bronze fennel obscures one of the bird baths in the raised beds
making a protected spot for some of the shy birds.

Red leaf lettuce- yumm salads

Salvia and lavender share the bed with climbing roses. The wet spring was
hard on the roses. Continual dampness allowed black spot to flourish-

We have had a bumper crop of cilantro-

Another view of the bronze fennel with baby's breath in the foreground.

You Have to Start Somewhere

Cair Paravel Enterprises is not a new idea, years ago (I'm sure I'll be told the exact date later) we operated selling chicken eggs...and other products? I honestly cannot remember, being the little tyke that I was, however I remember milking goats, shearing sheep, eating lamb and chicken from the farm, picking and canning, canning CANNING.

Here we are again.

Right now our production is limited to what we can spare, which is mostly eggs. The layers are contributing about 1.5 dozen a day, with a miscellany of yoke and shell issues. (Yesterday mom made pasta with a double-yolk egg and one of the hens laid a membrane-wrapped egg white. No shell. No yolk.) Eventually we hope to have fresh produce not only for ourselves* but for those interested in sustainable, organic (abet uncertified), oft-heirloom and above all DELICIOUS offerings-of-the-garden. I'm still trying to convince The Managers (ne Parents) to get milk goats or a heritage breed of cow for milk and meat. Dad (or Whitt, or Chef Ledford) will have some beautiful woodwork to offer after the summer work season, and hopefully will be able to offer some cooking classes in the near future. The sisters plan to eventually sell their products: artwork, clever crafts, and essential tools of life....


But for now, we're eggs and apartment rentals. For the record, the chickens incontrovertibly came first here.

- Lil

*78 quart jars of whole Romas have been canned
I forget how many jars of sauce, sauerkraut, dillybeans
endless bags of green beans are in the freezer, nestling with peaches
Heirloom tomatoes are being dried and frozen, apples too
We have enough pesto to float a pasta battleship.