Gardening – Page 9 – Southern Fusion Cooking

An Old Farm Boy Discusses Hoya about Chickens on the Interwebs

Gott in Himmel! A Chicken on a Red Wheelbarrow, Surrounded by Grass Clippings, and Next to a Compost Bin made of Chicken Wire

As an old farm boy, I am endlessly amused by the farming experts on the interwebs, especially those who have no idea what they are talking about. That would be most of them. To paraphrase Nate Silver, the average expert, on their best day, is as accurate as a coin toss. I think that’s being a little generous.

The great Congressman Mo Udall once famously said, “I have learned the difference between a cactus and a caucus. On a cactus, the pricks are on the outside.” Considered to be too funny to become president, he told the all time greatest story about Hoya.

He claimed to have given a speech to a group of Native Americans, and every time he made a promise the whole crowd would yell, “Hoya! Hoya! Hoya!” He thought his speech had been a killer, when he was invited to have a look at their ponies afterwards. As he was walking into the horse pen, the chief told him, “Be careful not to step in the Hoya.” There’s a lot of Hoya out there.

Here are my two favorite Hoya’s about chickens, having grown up on a farm where we had 10,000 chickens a year.

Hoya 1: Grass clippings will kill chickens.

Hoya! The only things chickens like better than grass clippings are food, and chicken sex. Kind of like people, except for the chicken sex part. BTW, my clippings are produced by an electric mower, which is recharged with a solar generator.

Hoya 2: Chicken wire isn’t strong enough to keep chickens from escaping.

Hoya! Our 10K chickens never once broke through chicken wire, and we raised hatching eggs, which meant we had roosters that were almost ten pounds. They were mean buggers, and would slam each other into the wire. Maybe I slammed a few into the wire as well, after they attacked me. I disremember.

So use experience as a guide. Chickens survived millennia of evolution because they aren’t stupid. I refuse to comment on the same topic concerning humans. See: Deniers of Anthropomorphic Climate Disturbance, aka Global Warming.

Veg and Fruit

“I have lived temperately, eating little animal food, & that, not as an aliment so much as a condiment for the vegetables, which constitute my principal diet.”–Thomas Jefferson

Edible Plants

“Homegrown is the Way it Should Be.”–Neil Young

Speckled Lima Beans

Lima Beans, known as butterbeans in the South, are one of our most prized fresh summertime vegetables, partly because they are less common than other goodies, like really fresh ripe tomatoes. They are less productive and more labor intensive than many other legumes, even though it is yet another crop native to the Americas.

Imagine our surprise, then, when we were roaming the Festhalle Farmer’s Market yesterday morning, to see market baskets full of butterbeans being sold by one of our favorite farmers. Note: a standard farmer’s market basket is four quarts, or roughly 1/10 of a peck. We swooped in like a chicken on a June bug, only to be told these were a special speckled variety of butterbean. Naturally, that made them more expensive. Nevertheless, we paid up, and bought a basket.

They turned out to not only be a wild range of different psychedelic speckled colors, but also included some funky solid colored beans. They are butterbeans tripping on LSD, and almost too pretty to eat, but eat them we will. Here’s the recipe:

Ingredients

2 cups fresh Butterbeans–any variety. (Frozen will do if fresh are not available)

Water

Seasoning Meat (in order of preference–Tasso, Smoked Ham Hock, Smoked Bacon, Country Ham)

Salt and Pepper

Tasso, in the South, is a Cajun/Creole invention made of heavily spiced strips of pork shoulder, which are then hot smoked, which means smoked and cooked at the same time. It’s easy enough to make yourself. Tasso adds more flavor than other kinds of smoked pork.

The cooking process is simple enough: simmer the beans until they are tender. Removing the seasoning meat when serving is optional. I like my butterbeans to fly solo. These will work great that way, especially considering that they are already on a trip.

Salad Dressing Maison

“Here We are in Our Summer Years, Living on Ice Cream and Chocolate Kisses”– Billy Bragg

I’m always amazed that people actually buy salad dressing, as it takes less than a minute to make a really good one. Here’s my latest creation. By the way, all that title means is “House Salad Dressing.” Once again, everything sounds better in French.

Ingredients

1 tablespoon Dijon Mustard (Most of the mustard seed actually comes from Canada)

2 tablespoons Catsup

2 tablespoons Mayonnaise

1 tablespoon Sweet Pickle Relish

Salt

Honey to taste

Chipotle Hot Sauce to taste.

The last two are the kickers. This stuff is delicious. Some Romaine lettuce, Cucumbers, and Tomatoes are going to disappear tonight.

More Taters, Precious

I now have a couple of months worth of new potatoes, because I grew these myself. Those in the picture are Yukon Gold and Russet potatoes. It’s next to impossible to buy potatoes of this quality. You have to grow them yourself.

With that said, hereby hangs a tale, as Shakespeare might have written. I come from a line of many generations of potato farmers, and my grandfather Earnie claimed to have started the sweet potato industry in Alabama. Here’s the story.

During the 1920’s, farmers from the South would travel to Northern industrial cities to work during the winter. Folks from Cullman would go to Cincinnati to be among their fellow German descended folks. Factory work paid better than sitting on your butt all winter.

Factory owners caught on to this migration, and instituted a rule that no one who quit to work at a higher paying factory could be re-hired by another one. Before the days of Social Security numbers and other ID, my grandfather just used a different name, every time he moved from factory to factory.

He would also look for markets for anything he grew. One day he ran across a grocery wholesaler who was really interested. Here’s how he would describe the conversation:

Wholesaler: “So what do you grow down there in Alabama?”

Earnie: “Our main crop is strawberries.”

Wholesaler: “Too perishable. They’d be rotten by the time they got up here.”

Earnie: “We also grow lots of sweet potatoes.”

Wholesaler: “Sweet potatoes! Oy vey! I can never get enough sweet potatoes. I’ll take three carloads.”

Earnie: “I’ll get three guys to bring up three carloads.”

Wholesaler: “No, I want three train carloads. That will just be the start.”

And thusly every sweet potato in the county was sold, and an industry born. The first time I walked into our first Whole Foods store, I saw a big sign that said “Local Sweet Potatoes,” next to the picture of a farmer I went to high school with. Taters run deep.

Tuscan Style Grill

A Work in Progress, but another Rustico Design

This is an idea that came about from my sudden interest in Tuscan outdoor cooking, where a fire is built on a hard surface, and then a grill is placed above. I thought, why not make it as flexible as possible? Also, I had a number of leftover bricks to do something with. So Rustico decided to make a multi level open hearth grill.

The foundation may not look like much, but that is one hundred pounds of concrete. The grill is behind my wood burning oven, and next to my rustic cabinet. No worries, there will be a brick wall between the fire and the cabinet.

Eventually the inside will be lined with slate, as soon as I find an adhesive that can take the heat. I’ll probably go with thinset mortar mixed with fireclay, and buy a couple of grates to go along with my Lodge ones. Then it’s off to a dream project–Stew Stoves like the ones in the kitchen at Monticello. Old school is the best school.

Barred Rock Chickens

Barred Rocks in the Chicken Fortress, with Oak Leaf Hydrangea and their Red Wheelbarrow

We chose Barred Rock chickens for our flock, as they are an heritage breed with a sterling reputation. All six have made it through their chicken childhood, and are now chicken teenagers. I will detail my crack brooder design in a later post.

Here’s a chick at about five or six weeks (They don’t come with a birth certificate). I put them out early as the weather was so nice.

They grow fast, and Barred Rocks are well behaved for chickens, becoming almost like pets. One chicken, that we call Big Tail, falls asleep when you rub her back.

Raising chickens from tiny peeper chicks is a definite change from when I was a teenager, and our ten thousand fully grown chickens arrived on the back of flat bed trailers. These birds will destroy anything green that they can reach, and they love to eat Virginia Creeper. And before someone tells me that Hydrangea is poison to chickens, they won’t eat it, but they will pull the leaves off that they can reach. The one thing they won’t touch at all is Yaupon Holly, which was the source of the vomit inducing “black drink” concocted by native Americans. You’ll have to find your own recipe for that.

Wild Blueberries

The first wild blueberries are ripe here, which is the cause for some serious noshing (see the next post). These tiny buckshot sized berries have a mind blowing sharpness of taste.

Every other year I will spend an hour or so picking enough of these little devils to make one of my favorite sauces. Here it is: Wild Blueberry Sauce. Serve it on crepes or any pastry.

Ingredients

1 tablespoon Butter

1 cup of Wild Blueberries

2 tablespoons of Honey

Juice of 1 Key Lime

2 drinks of Brandy (One for the dish, one for the cook)

Cook the blueberries in the butter, and then add the other ingredients. More or less honey may be needed depending on the tartness of the berries. Lemon juice can be substituted for the limes, but I always use what I have (my wife grows Key Limes and Meyer Lemons). A crepe is really just a thin pancake, but once again, everything sounds better in French. You could use cognac instead of brandy, but they’re just different priced versions of the same thing.

The Red Wheelbarrow

Inspired by one of my all time favorite television shows, Shaun the Sheep, I put my very own mini-junkyard in my new chicken fortress (the sheep flock in the show spend hours jimmying with the discards in their junkyard) . It’s only an old wheelbarrow, but the chicks can run for cover under it whenever they get buzzed by a hawk. Just today, the entire flock was snoozing under it.

The old fellow lost its wheel while getting dragged up there to the fortress. I hand mixed tons of concrete in this thing, and the dents prove it. No worries, however–I have a new red wheelbarrow.

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