Missing Willow Farm

In the past 24 hours, we drove to a U-Pick sour cherry farm about an hour from here and I have processed every single one we brought home.  I made Luxardo cocktail cherries, brandied cherries, syrup, chutney and a pie.  I also put some in the freezer.  I don’t need to see my pitter again for a good long while….

When we put our asparagus patch in almost ten years ago, we also planted a few horseradish roots.  We had never attempted to harvest any of it until Brian accidentally dug one up with our tractor when plowing our little potato bed.  Since it was harvested, I had to do something with it…

Here’s what the plant looks like in the garden.

The root is gnarly! Fortunately, it’s easy enough to peel. These are the pieces of a single root.

I chopped the peeled root into about 1 inch chunks.

That got whirred in the food processor with white vinegar and a little salt.

The result is amazing! We’ve so far had it mixed with mustard on roast beef and boursin sandwiches, in shrimp cocktail sauce and in a beef stew. It’s fabulous.

These photos were taken in our pastures within the past few weeks.  Nobody is creating trouble so all are welcome.

Our garden is 100% planted.  We’re trying some new things this year; daikon radish, chinese long beans and thai basil to name a few.  We even ripped out the honeysuckle down by the little house and put two fig trees in.

We have two kinds of peas coming in. Giant garden shelling peas and sugar snaps.

Baby purple kohlrabi.

Shallots and a few of our carrots.

Our potatoes are in the greenhouse this year.

So are our jalapenos and cilantro. I’ve been experimenting with thai cooking and use cilantro on almost a daily basis lately.

We planted six sunchoke roots in this bed last year. This year we have what appears to be a few hundred plants. They grow to be about 20 feet tall. We obviously have to get control of this situation!

When we visited Tahiti last year, I bought the fattest most plump-yet-still-expensive-considering-where-we-were vanilla beans.  I have a few projects in mind using them, first on the list is homemade vanilla.

I started by slitting a bunch of them in half while leaving their ends attached.

Using a sharp knife, I scraped out the seed ‘caviar’ from inside the beans.

The pods and seeds went into both vodka (on the left) and bourbon (on the right) then were stored in a dark cabinet. The jars were shaken daily.

Here is the clear vodka version after just one week.

Just two months later we have bourbon vanilla cupcakes with a bourbon vanilla buttercream frosting. 100% made by my husband Brian.  Who’s lucky?  This gal! 

Here are some artist trading card sized summer cocktail recipe cards to celebrate the day. You can find the how-to at http://gslcuts.blogspot.co.uk/2018/05/summer-cocktail-recipe-cards.html

We’ve seen coyote, deer, beavers, otters, raccoons, possums, a bear and all other manner of wildlife on our property over the years.  This is a first.  Four cows strolled into our back yard last weekend.  Our gate was open at the time so it’s possible they walked the half mile up our driveway.  When they noticed us staring at them, they nonchalantly walked into the woods behind our house and disappeared.  Brian took a ride to see if any of our neighbors had a fence down or was out frantically looking for livestock but couldn’t find anything.