Dark Duck Days of Winter Challenge

Despite my dearth of Dark Days local  food postings, we have indeed been feasting on primarily local foods this winter. The majority of our meals feature food grown on our farm, and since the New Year a surprising percentage of them have involved duck.  It is surprising to me, at least, because until now I had never eaten duck.

The ducks were also raised on our farm. Last summer when we picked up our turkey poults from the feed store, there was a kiddie-pool full of  ducklings that somebody had ordered but failed to collect, so they needed homes.  Ducklings are irresistibly cute, so on impulse I bought two. They were Pekin ducks, a meat breed, and they grew astoundingly fast.  After Christmas, when we harvested the surplus roosters,  Sara and Cadence persuaded me to also harvest the ducks.  It was the prime time if we were ever going to do it: according to our research, late fall to early winter is optimum because ducks have a lot of fat on their bodies then and after they are more than a year old they become tough.  It was not an easy decision, but we did it.

Sara loves duck meat, so she was put in charge of preparing our first duck.  We take our chickens to a great poultry processor and  feel it is definitely worth it to pay them to do it, but because ducks are much more labor-intensive to clean than chickens, it turns out they cost a lot more.  Instead of $3.50 per bird, processing the ducks cost $15 each, and there was still considerable work required by us to get out every feather. After completing the detail work, Sara rubbed the bird with olive oil so the herbs would stick, smothered it in rosemary and sprinkled salt and pepper inside and out. She roasted it at 450 F for a couple hours, turning it over after an hour. In the photo above it is still in the oven, not done yet, and you can see how much duck fat is already in the pan. Apparently duck fat is highly prized for cooking - I have some duck-fat cooking adventures ahead.

To accompany the duck Sara  made mashed potatoes (using our garden potatoes from the root cellar),

baked delicata squash (also from our garden)

and steamed brussels sprouts drizzled with the duck drippings.  (We don't know where the brussels sprouts were grown but we had them on hand and couldn't resist including them.)

The next night, Sara made a fantastic duck-vegetable saute over pasta with the leftovers and we made stock from the carcass. That was my first duck ever and it was incredibly delicious.

Duck #2
On Sunday, we invited our neighbors Betsy and Don for dinner in appreciation for all they do. I decided to try Sara's technique for preparing the second duck. I made it exactly the same way, except for squeezing the juice of an orange (not local) over the duck and placing the rinds inside the  cavity during roasting.

This duck was served with a colorful salad of fresh greens, carrots, radishes and pansies from the high tunnel (yes, it's still producing!!) served with honey-mustard dressing (made with our honey and scallions, organic mayo, mustard and balsamic vinegar), a loaf of Rog's freshly-baked sourdough bread, and a heart-shaped chocolate cheesecake garnished with fresh strawberries.  The eggs for the cheesecake were provided by our chickens, and the Organic Valley cream cheese was from regional dairy farmers but the chocolate and strawberries were very un-local. It was a tasty meal (if I do say so myself) with wonderful friends, and was made with plenty of heart and soul, if not 100% SOLE.

Colcannon Comfort

After indulging in fancy appetizers, rich desserts and other extravagant eating over the holidays, what we really craved on New Years Day was some simple comfort food.

So, after the chores I headed out to the high tunnel, bowl in hand, to harvest some greens. It is our first winter with the high tunnel and I had expected the growing to be done by the end of November, but with the unusually temperate weather this winter we are still blessed with lots of delicious greens.

The Tuscan kale is verdant under the protective row cover. I unclipped the clothespins from the metal hoop and folded back the row cover to pick the supper greens.

Had to set the bowl down in the snow to zip the high tunnel  shut. It is so miraculous to be harvesting from the garden in January!

Now, some garden potatoes from our "root cellar" - an unheated room in the corner of the basement where we store potatoes, squashes, pumpkins, garlic and onions.
Next, cue the  colcannon-making music:

Colcannon is a traditional Irish dish made with potatoes, greens (often cabbage, but I prefer deep green kale, chard or spinach) and scallions. We boil the potatoes, then add the  uncooked, chopped kale and scallions.  The hot potatoes wilt and lightly steam the greens.

The veggies are mashed with a generous bit of butter and cream.  We served it with a couple slices of sharp cheddar cheese, lots of ground pepper...

and a slice of Rog's  crusty, multi-grain sourdough bread.  It may be considered peasant food, but colcannon is a very pleasant aspect of peasantry.

Solstmas Feast

We celebrated Winter Solstice and Christmas by feasting with  a dear friends, a bunch of folks we have celebrated many holidays with over the years, no, decades.  In keeping with the goals of the Dark Days of Winter Eating Local Foods challenge,  this was a SOLE meal: made from sustainable, organic, local and ethical ingredients.

The star ingredient of the meal might have been the greens, harvested from our high tunnel just moments before this photo was taken.  When we built and planted the unheated high tunnel last September, I was hoping we might still have greens for Thanksgiving.  But, because of the crazy warm weather, we are still harvesting chard, kale, spinach, carrots, pansies, beet greens, scallions, parsley and radishes in late December! I did not realize how incredibly sweet and delicious these veggies would be; the cold-weather growing spurs them to produce sugars which serve as antifreeze in the leaves and help them grow even tastier in the cold!

We planned a simple feast, featuring lasagna,  both vegetarian and carnivorous made with ground beef from our own steers and  a bit of local hot Italian sausage from  Misty Meadows Farm. We intended to make the mozzarella from milk from our cow LaFonda, but time ran out, simplicity won out, and we used organic mozzarella, cottage cheese and parmesan from the co-op, made from dairies in SE Minnesota and Western Wisconsin. Some of the greens were layered in the lasagnas.

The sauce was made from roasted tomatoes we had frozen from our garden last summer, as well as garden onions and garlic. We also grew some of the herbs.

Our daughter Sara is home and probably could have been persuaded to make the pasta--she and her friend are pasta entrepreneurs in Chapel Hill, NC (their operation is called Porcino) but since she is on a well-deserved vacation, I tried no-boil lasagna noodles from Trader Joe's (which were remarkably good!)

The finished meat lasagna, ready to serve.  Both lasagnas included mushrooms grown by Forest Mushrooms in St. Joseph, MN. The veggie lasagna also had organic garbanzo beans sprinkled  among the layers.

Accompanying the lasagna (but not photographed, alas!) were six loaves of whole wheat sourdough bread, made from our own 4-year-old sourdough starter and locally milled flour from Great River Organic Milling (leftover loaves went home with guests as Solstmas gifts),  a humongous salad made from our greens (and non-local organic pomegranate seeds, clementine sections, and toasted pumpkin seeds), a fabulous squash casserole contributed by Vera  and Earl (from a River Falls Farmers Market squash), and a few bottles of Jon's incredible homemade wine, made substantially from raspberries, elderberries, and currants his family had picked on their land.

You can't get much better than feasting on SOLE food with  the family and friends who feed your soul!
From the left: Our sweet friend Barb, wonderful Vera and Earl from River Falls,  Anne and Jon (best buddies from Dakota, where we raised our  children and celebrated many a Christmas together), my awesome husband/partner-in-farming Rog, Ian (Anne and Jon's eldest), our intrepid summer interns Brendan and Bethany, Camille (Anne and Jon's  youngest), Cadence (our younger daughter) and  our older daughter Sara - darn, I only caught the edge of Sara's lovely face in this photo.

Here is Sara.

The dinner was followed by decadent vanilla ice cream made by Sara from organic cream, raw sugar and vanilla, (in her other entrepreneurial venture, Sara makes gourmet ice cream sandwiches, delivered by bicycle: Bikescream.)  The ice cream was served with homemade hot fudge sauce --with exotic chocolate, pistachios and pomegranate seeds.  Bethany and Brendan brought homemade holiday cookies and Barb treated us to her famous Christmas cordial -- a top secret recipe, but I am pretty sure it must contains creme de cacao and  Benedictine.

Oh, yum! What a great way to celebrate the shortest day of the year and the  return of sunnier days.

Dark Days Challenge: Week 1 - A Whole Darn Local Foods Day

This is the first week of the Dark Days Local Food Challenge, in which we are supposed to prepare, eat and blog about one local foods meal a week throughout the short days of winter.  I signed on to this challenge thinking it would be easy since we grow most of our own food, but it will definitely be a bit more challenging during the Minnesota winter when, deprived of fresh garden produce, we often succumb to exotic produce temptations like avocados, oranges and mangos.

We launched the Dark Days challenge with a local foods breakfast. Our dear friend Vera joined us for breakfast and the menu was multigrain pancakes, scrambled eggs with cheese and scallions, and bacon.  The eggs came fresh from our own sweet chickens (0 miles).  Ordinarily I make pancalkes from scratch, but I wanted to try the pancake mix from the Whole Grain Milling Co in Welcome, MN (135 miles) because it has received rave reviews.   The bacon was from the Good Food Store co-op - labeled "local" despite being from LeMars, Iowa (264 miles). Normally we purchase bacon at the Farmers Market from a nearby farmer but we missed the previous market day because our cow hoof trimmer was here:

(Our milk cow LaFonda getting her hooves trimmed last weekend- see last year's Hoof Trimming post for complete details.)

It was a classic farm breakfast--not very original, but very delicious! We scrambled the eggs with cheddar cheese curds from Kaplan Farm in Chatfield, MN (30 miles),  scallions from our high tunnel greenhouse and dried tomatoes from our garden last summer (0 miles).   The butter  for the pancakes was from Organic Valley (SE MN farms) and the honey and  maple syrup (0 miles) were from our own farm. It was my first crop of honey form my own bees this fall.  The maple syrup is from the silver maple trees in our yard collected last March --it takes 60 gallons of silver maple sap to make 1 gallon of syrup!

Although Rog and I drank  non-local coffee (not grown locally, but sold by City Kid Java, which benefits urban kids in Minneapolis, MN  - 85 miles) and Vera drank tea made from dried mint and wild nettles gathered on our farm.  Stinging nettles are not a very fun plant to weed out of the gardenbut they are delicious and nutritious to consume, both as cooked greens and dried for tea.

When you combine  breakfast and lunch into brunch, you only need two meals a day! Our evening meal was mostly comprised of farm ingredients: 
 A green salad made from fresh chard (biondi di lyon and rainbow) and beauty heart radishes from our high tunnel greenhouse (0 miles), tossed in a salad with roasted pepitas (? miles), crimini mushrooms grown by Forest Mushrooms in St Joseph, MN (156 miles)  and homemade honey-mustard dressing (honey from our bees - 0 miles).

We roasted beets from our garden (0 miles) and tossed them with  ground pepper and a bit of  balsamic vinegar (Italy--many miles).

The T-bone steak came from one of our own grass-fed steers harvested last summer (0 miles).  I slathered it with spicy ground mustard and broiled it.   Even though it is incredibly delicious beef, I have to admit I wept as I ate the first few meals from this beast we had raised from infancy.

The steak was served with the roasted beets and roasted baby onions grown in our garden, baked acorn squash drizzled with melted butter and farm honey, and accompanied by a delectable bottle of GoGo Red wine from Cannon River Winery  (45 miles).

A simple, local feast fit for kings -- or farmers!

Dare You to Eat Local One Day a Week!

When I came across the Dark Days of Winter Eat Local blog challenge, I couldn't resist joining in.  After all, we eat mostly local already, the fruits of our farm labor. This challenge will be a little incentive to be more creative, try some innovative cooking (we are usually pretty content to just roast a chicken or some potatoes  and squash... toss together a salad and voile' - we have a satisfying meal) and document some of our fabulous farm feasts.

If you are passionate about eating local, it's not to late to join in.   It would be great fun to have a large cadre of participants from Southeast Minnesota!  Who says you can't eat local in Minnesota in the winter, at least one meal per week?