This month, I’ve chosen Chili for the pork recipe.  Reason?  I was inspired by the beans!  I’ve been shelling dry beans for next year’s seed and fresh beans for eating this week and wanted to share some of my beany-ness with you.

This is more of a concept than an actually recipe.  For those of you who have a favourite Chili recipe already, you could simply experiment with some of the following ideas:

Add Pork

• Cut your favourite (or least favourite, as it will take on the chili flavour) cut of pork into one inch cubes.
• Season with salt and pepper before browning in hot oil in small batches.  Add to chili before simmering.
• Also, cook bacon till crisp and crumble into chili.  How much bacon, you ask?  It’s up to you.  How much do you like bacon?
• Use the left over  oil to saute your onions, peppers, garlic or other veggie additions.

  

Make Kickin’ Chili

The next suggestion sounded a little odd to me the first time I read it, but then I remembered experimenting with dark chocolate in my chili once upon a time.  Suddenly, coffee doesn’t sound so strange.

• If you’re using your own chili recipe, simply replace some of the liquid with good quality coffee.  Substitute about 1/8 cup of coffee per serving of chili.
• If you like the sound of caffeine in your food , but don’t have a favourite chili recipe click on the picture above for a somewhat complex version from Epicurious.com.

Beef and Broccoli Stir Fry

This is one of my favourite, easy stir fry recipes.  With luck, there will still be some local broccoli around to use in it!

Ingredients:

• 1/4 cup soy sauce
• 1/4 cup dry Sherry
• 1 tablespoon honey
• 1 tablespoon (packed) chopped garlic
• 2 teaspoons grated orange peel
• 1 pound flank steak, cut diagonally across grain into thin strips
• 1 large head broccoli, cut into florets
• 2 tablespoons vegetable oil
• 1 tablespoon cornstarch
• Cooked rice of your choice

Preparation:

Whisk first 5 ingredients in large bowl. Add meat; toss to coat. Cover and refrigerate at least 1 hour and up to 4 hours.

Blanch broccoli in large pot of boiling salted water 2 minutes. Drain. Rinse under cold water; drain well.

Heat oil in heavy large wok or skillet over high heat. Drain meat well, reserving marinade. Add cornstarch to reserved marinade and mix until smooth; set aside. Add meat to wok and stir-fry until almost cooked through, about 2 minutes. Add broccoli and stir-fry until crisp-tender, about 2 minutes. Add reserved marinade mixture and boil until sauce thickens and coats meat and broccoli, stirring constantly, about 2 minutes. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Serve over rice.

Serves 4.

I say this is a basic recipe because it doesn’t contain any strange ingredients.  However, I’m interested in hearing from anyone who has a similar recipe that can be done without the 1 to 4 hour wait on the beef.

As usual, I love to hear about your kitchen adventures whether you’re using these recipe ideas or not!

For some comedic relief to start and to show that I don’t only read about farms, check out this great daily comic.  Today’s strip is about ear wax.  How does that entice ya? 

Here’s meat – or rather the veggies – of my reading, though.  And oh!  The inspiration to be had in the gardening department!

Click here for Winter Planting Plans on the Observer Organic Allotment Blog

• Check out the beautiful produce pictures at one of my favourite blogs, Throwback at Trapper Creek.
• If you’re interested in extended season gardening specifically, click on the winter garden plan picture to read about this piece of useful art.

• For those of you who get a little overwhelmed with the task of gardening to sustain a family,  (we’re just starting to attempt to grow enough to avoid the grocery store), I found this great resource.  It’s a gardening calendar specifically for hardiness zone 5b but I’ve got to think there are more helpful bloggers out there in other zones.  (Potential future post: compilation of gardening calendars?)

On the livestock front, I had the pleasure of reading about a shockingly smooth pig loading session at Tylerfarm Homestead’s blog.  Yes, it is that time of year.  The cold weather meat producing animals have reached full size.  The freezer will be full soon.

Our pigs are not yet ready for the freezer as they are on the slow, mainly grass-fed plan. Here John is enticing them back to the barn after a successful attempt to escape. Our three year old sounded the alarm while I was cooking lunch: "Mom! The pigs are on the road!"

My pig loading experience stems from long ago and was not that smooth.  When my sister and I were small, our family lived on a small farm near on Blue Mountain.  My mother has been known to tell the story of one loading day when a somewhat coarse talking neighbour came over to help out.  I would have been 3 or 4 years old with my sister a couple of years older.

I guess my sister, Gena, and I sat on the edge of the log enclosure the pigs lived in and observed the proceedings.  Later in the day, the weather had turned and we went in to play in our living room while mom worked down the hall in the kitchen.

As she tells it, her ‘mom-sense’ went off and she started listening more closely to us playing.  Finally, certain that she was hearing our attempts at some of the worst language you can think of, she came in to ask us what we were doing.  My sister, always bold and sure of her right to do as she pleased piped up:

“We’re playing ‘load the pigs’, Mom!”

Neighbours.  You take the good with the bad.

On the topic of pigs, click on this lovely Large Black to visit the site of a great little farm that I have recently

Click on the photo to check out Upper Canada Heritage Meat.

discovered not too far from us.  I have yet to approach them about it but I’m dreaming of some of these beauties for our farm next year.

For anyone yearning to hold onto summer just a bit longer, here is the one and only flower on our new hydrangea bush from this year.  It took all summer to brew.

I took this picture two days ago and it is still sitting there, though slightly less fresh.

On a final note of what has been, for me, a leisurely, random post, our co-op student, Kenley, was here on Saturday for what was her last full day.  We did some puttering around in the garden, shelling dry beans, taking down the pea trellis, bundling the last of the herbs for drying and generally enjoying the beautiful day. 

We have enjoyed having her here and are thrilled that our local highschool has seen fit to run an agricultural co-op program that actually give the students the chance to learn from experience.  What a novel concept!

Kenley’s last few hours will be spent next Saturday, preparing our meat CSA packages for delivery.  After that, we’ll be back on our own and richer for having had her with us.

Now, I can cross ‘Sanity saving’ off my to-do list and move on to the marketing. Happily, that is a task that I enjoy, not only because I know that a small farm like ours would never fly if someone didn’t SELL IT!