Vigorously sprouting potatoes, a super-abundance of frozen green beans, combined with a busy schedule, a changing cast of visiting characters, and a certain level of personal laziness, drove menu choices this week at my house. There was a lot of potato salad around here and an every-other-day granola or eggs breakfast pattern. Then there were the hot dogs attributable entirely to summer vibes generated by warm weather plus a scary amount of rhubarb.
At the same time, I wrote future menus by what I planted this week in the garden and one of my chickens, overcome by broodiness, suggested the opportunity to reinvigorate my flock with new hens and provide a few chicken dinners made out of young rooster.
Sunday began with eggs for breakfast scrambled by my niece with freshly cut chives. I made rhubarb marmalade after breakfast. The rhubarb had stood overnight with sugar and I added shredded oranges and lemon, and also a can of well-drained crushed pineapple, cooked it up and produced seven half-pints. The pineapple juice came in handy for a liquid lunch in a yogurt smoothie I made with a little orange juice added to it, too. I gathered four eggs, and optimistically planted out paste tomatoes, eggplants and peppers in the unheated greenhouse from which I still harvest lettuce, chard and scallions. Leftover salad and some rice crackers made me a supper for one before going back outside to weed.
One and a half inches of applesauce remained in a quart-jar full put away last fall. Two spoonfuls with granola and yogurt was my Monday breakfast. For lunch, I warmed up brown rice with chopped parsley that wintered over and chopped scallions pulled out of the ground in the hoop house. Six hens laid five eggs—someone took the day off. I continued planting, lettuce and mesclun this time. For supper with a friend, I grilled a venison steak, and sliced it thinly and laid it on a bed of lettuce from the hoop house. The lettuce is desperately bolting in the warmth. There were buttercrunches, red romaines, a very fine curly-leafed loose-head lettuce. I taste a leaf from each one I harvest to make sure it has not become bitter. I am eating lettuce with every meal except breakfast. Maybe I’d better eat it at breakfast, too.
On Tuesday, after another granola breakfast and further inroad on the rapidly waning applesauce supply, I revisited the cellar and saw that a couple of spackle buckets full of carola potatoes showed pale sprouts pushing up the loose cardboard lids I put on top. I ought to dump them all out and snap off the sprouts; instead I merely grabbed several, peeled and boiled them. Cooked potatoes are useful to have on hand. Checking the newly planted lettuces shows that the cat, darn her furry self, dug up a couple rows of seedlings mistaking the lettuce bed for a catbox. A sprinkle of straw mulch over the top of the bed discourages that. I moved some volunteer lettuces scattered here and there into more salubrious circumstances among the broccolis where they will grow to edible just about the time that the brocs decide to spread their blue-green leaves to full-size.
Supper on Tuesday was chicken from away brought and cooked excellently by a friend, accompanied by the inevitable green salad, potato salad, and a favorite frozen green bean, Rattlesnake by name, a long green pole bean streaked with purple until I blanch them, which turns them all green. They freeze excellently and I warm them by sautéing a little homegrown red onion, one of 17 left hanging in the cellarway, in butter and olive oil until they are heated through and firmly tender. In fact, I had just planted more Rattlesnakes that afternoon after soaking the seed for a few hours.
Gustatorily, Wednesday breakfast was the highpoint of the day, consisting of sausage from home-grown porkers, homefries with red onion chopped into them, plus scrambled eggs. Eating an egg that has spent the previous night in a chicken is an experience that everyone ought to have at least once in their lifetime. Lunch was leftover pasta salad wolfed down before a dump run, and supper for me alone was leftover potato salad.
Wednesday’s heat and humidity turned on the gin and tonic light, and my niece, a couple of friends and I gathered late in the afternoon under a birch tree in the back yard for a cool drink with crackers and gorgonzola as the sun disappeared behind the trees across the road. Diesel dog patrolled hopefully for dropped crackers. Later, before dark, I planted leeks and even though in May I never dreamed that I’d ever wish for rain again, I actually found I’d welcome a bit of relief from all the watering my planting requires. Plus, I have big green strawberries fattening and they need rain, too.
By Thursday, there is no question that one of the chickens is broody. I had heard the chickens making odd sounds as they pecked around the yard and I speculate that they conversed and agreed to lay all their eggs in a highly favored nesting box whereupon the broody one would take up her duties. Today she ferociously pinches the back of my gloved hand when I reach under her to retrieve warm eggs. If a chicken can growl, she does, but she does not move. With six hens and two roosters, a combination of Buff Orpingtons and a variety of red called generically Dark Harbors from a flock that sprang up down-island, I can be pretty certain that the eggs are fertile. Well, I know they are because chickens are immodest at best, and besides, my neighbors across the street hatched out chicks from this lot when they had a pair of broody hens.
Lunch was rather grand. More darn lettuce, topped with tuna, dilly green beans, leftover rice noodles, some black olives in a weird variation on Salade Nicoise. Dressed with lemon flavored olive oil and and rice wine vinegar, it was beautiful, delicious and my two lunch guests made it disappear. At supper, four of us, three young ladies and myself, devoured grilled pork chops from the same pigs who provided Wednesday’s sausage plus a few hot dogs, a big pile of green beans prepared just as I did on Tuesday, and yet another potato salad.
My friend and I ate a companionable Friday breakfast of bacon and eggs accompanied by croissants donated by my friend and washed down by coffee and orange juice. We pretended for a couple of hours that we were actually ladies of leisure though we are not, and ate breakfast outdoors, soaking up sunshine before launching ourselves into the day. I planted the rest of my tomatoes, traded lettuce for a mango, and noticed it is time to make another batch of rhubarb chutney.
A pleasant surprise invitation to supper at another friend’s house treated me to a break from potato salad and green beans when she asked if I wanted to put together a black bean salad, which I did, with cucumbers, red peppers, onion, cumin and lots of cilantro. She cooked steak and asparagus, which I was glad to have because my new sixty-five-foot long asparagus bed is merely two years old and I have been exercising that terrible self-discipline required not to pick until year three.
Saturday begins with—you guessed it—granola. Lunch is hot dogs with my own homemade relish on them, and ketchup from the store. Supper is a cold vegetable pizza with a Thai flavored sauce topped with carrots from last summer’s growing and inevitably, lettuce and scallions.
Three heads of lettuce remain in the hoop house, new greens sprout well in the garden, and now it will be over-wintered chard that cries out for picking. I’ve decided to let the hen keep six eggs, and I think I’ll give potato salad a pass next week.
Sandy Oliver is a food historian and food writer who lives and grows food sustainably on Isleboro.