The Quarter-Acre Farm Read online

  There is a passage in Leviticus that says when you reap your harvest, do not reap the corners of the field. While I’m more pagan than anything, I do like that sentiment. Leave some for others; do not be greedy. I wonder if there is a passage in there somewhere that says to thin the fruit of your trees as well.

  Recipe

  Candied Orange Peel Dipped in Chocolate

  When I was a kid, my Grandma Streeter always had orange sticks for us to eat at Christmastime. The three-inch-long sticks of orange jelly enrobed in chocolate were about the diameter of a pencil, all perfectly alike as a factory-extruded food is expected to be, and absolutely delicious. We kids would pretend they were cigarettes and, making a mess of our fingers, sashay around like characters out of old movies. Alternately, we would suck all the chocolate off the jelly base until we were left with a transparent orange column that we would mash against the roofs of our mouths with our tongues until it disintegrated.

  As an adult, however, I wasn’t so crazy about the orange sticks. I had mostly grown past the stage of playing with my food, and the candies seemed too sweet, too untextured. Was it the cheap brand I bought, or was it my adult palate that made the difference? In any case, orange sticks were relegated to a delight of memory.

  Then one Christmas a few years back, my neighbor brought over a holiday goody bag, and included alongside a number of cookies were some oddly shaped brown things. Frankly, they kind of looked like Christmas scat with a little orange tail sticking out. When I examined more closely, I discovered it was candied orange peel dipped in dark chocolate.

  With some trepidation, I bit into it. And to my delight, I experienced the wonderful taste I remembered from my childhood, but one evolved to appeal to my grown-up mouth. The orange peel was intense and chewy, the dark chocolate sweet and deep. Heaven. Now I make my own, and it is amazingly easy.

  I use the biggest navel oranges I can get off my tree. The rinds of Valencia oranges seem too thin, and I have even read recipes that instruct people to use a potato peeler to shave the orange peel from the oranges, but I think thick chewy rind makes the best candies. As for the pith, I’d like to say I remove it all before proceeding, but that would be grievously misrepresenting myself. I do scrape what seems like excess pith away for aesthetic reasons, but I pretty much allow a lot of pith to remain not only because I am lazy but also because the pith contains the highest amount of antioxidants. I like my candy to be healthy. It also seems to me that the bitterness in the pith is taken care of when I blanch the peels. However, if you are a perfectionist, scrape away.

  Ingredients: • 6 navel Oranges

  • 2 cups sugar

  • 8 ounces dark chocolate

  1. Using an orange scorer or paring knife, cut a cap at the top and bottom of each orange, leaving a girdle of rind around the middle of each orange.

  2. Pare the girdle carefully away from the orange in squarish pieces, trying to keep the peel intact.

  3. Use a spoon to scrape excess pith away, then place the squarish pieces of orange rind in a saucepan and cover with water.

  4. Bring the peels and water to a boil, then drain and repeat two more times.

  5. Cool the orange peels, then slice the squares into quarter-inch sticks.

  6. Meanwhile, bring four cups of water to a boil, pour in the sugar, and allow to dissolve.

  7. Place the orange sticks into the water and reduce heat to simmer lightly until the orange sticks are translucent. It will take anywhere from twenty minutes to more than an hour, depending on the peel. Don’t stir the things. Doing so encourages crystal formation, and then you might have crunchy parts on your orange rinds.

  8. When the orange sticks are translucent, use tongs to remove the sticks and place them on a sheet of parchment paper to dry. That can take hours or days, depending on humidity. If you want to speed things up, putting them in the dehydrator on low will do the trick.

  Once dry, the orange sticks can be eaten as is, or chopped and used in baking for fruitcakes or panetone. But they are best dipped in melted dark chocolate. I like to dip the candied orange piece halfway up its length. Half bright orange and half brown looks nice to me and provides a good handle for dipping. When the chocolate is set, bag them up to give to friends and to freeze. You don’t want easy access to them. They’re just too tempting.

  CHAPTER SIX

  CIRCUS HENS

  “I did not become a vegetarian for my health. I did it for the health of the chickens.”

  —ISSAC BASHEVIS SINGER

  According to the people who study this sort of thing, the first domesticated animals appeared in the Euphrates River Valley about ten thousand years ago. I imagine a Neolithic woman eyeing a goat (Capra aegargus), thinking, I could catch that goat, easy. Too bad I’ve already eaten. Then a new synapse fires and it occurs to her that she could catch the goat and save it for later. Maybe if she had a few of the creatures, they’d multiply and she wouldn’t have to chase goats all over the Middle East every time she was feeling peckish. Hence, Neolithic farmers began keeping small herds of animals.

  About eight thousand years ago, red junglefowl (Gallus gallus)—the flamboyantly feathered cousins of the pheasant—were domesticated as well, I’m guessing in much the same way. These fowl eventually evolved into the farmyard chickens of today (Gallus domesticus). Our earliest relationship with these animals was pretty straightforward. They were meat and we ate them. Then another bright guy figured out that animals could be used in other ways—for their milk, their wool, their blood, their eggs—and he called his brainstorm the Secondary Products Revolution.

  Jump ahead eight thousand years to a municipal park in Spearfish, South Dakota, one summer afternoon when I saw a girl, maybe twelve or thirteen years old, walk my way towing a wheeled cooler behind her. She had a large Wyandotte Gallus domesticus tucked under her arm. When she reached an open grassy area in the park, she put the chicken on the ground, sat on the cooler, and waited.

  In short order, children spied the chicken calmly pecking at the grass. They were entranced at the basketball-sized animal who minded not at all a growing mob of shrieking children surrounding it, petting it, and making their own version of chicken noises. The girl desultorily answered questions. Yes it was a chicken. No, it didn’t have a name. It did belong to her. Then, when the crowd’s interest had dimmed a bit, she flung open the cooler, displaying an interior brimming with popsicles, and instructed the mob, “Ask your Mom for a quarter.” She made a killing. Secondary Products Revolution indeed.

  The chicken certainly seemed revolutionary to me. Other chickens I’d known had, perhaps, a bit too much Gallus gallus and not enough Gallus domesticus in them. They were ill-tempered, pecking each other bloody. They would never stand to be petted, though my brother learned to hypnotize a squawking chicken into flaccid idiocy by stroking its head at the base of the beak until it went cross-eyed and could be placed on its back, legs to the sky. Sometimes he could get half a dozen hens staged in ridiculous poses before they’d come back to their small chicken senses, roll over, and stagger back to business.

  Back then I preferred ducks (not domesticated until 2500 BC), their rubber bills set in perpetual smile. Unfortunately so did raccoons. They would do anything for a taste: tunnel under the duck house or jimmy open a raccoon-proof latch. Once a raccoon pulled a duck through the wire grid of its pen, piece by piece. It was horrible. That was the last time I tried to raise ducks in Wyoming.

  When I moved to California, I once again got ducks, certain they would be safer in town than at the ranch. Unfortunately, I found that urban California raccoons appreciated duck entrees as much as rural Wyoming ones did.

  So we got the gander (domesticated 1500 BC) to protect the ducks, and with his mighty serrated beak and mightier honk, Goosteau has likely kept many a fowl murder from occurring. Additionally, he once alerted us to the presence of a drunken frat boy (not domesticated at all) who had scaled our fence at two in the morning on a mission to steal a farm animal for
the glory of Alpha Omega.

  We got our goose, Jeannette, to keep Goosteau company. As a perk she provides about thirty eggs a year, which, when colored, make awe-inspiring Easter gifts. Regardless of these merits, I would not recommend geese to anyone not living on a piece of land the size of Disneyworld. They are not just horrifically noisy, but noisy for a long, long time. The oldest known goose, “George” from the United Kingdom, lived forty-nine years, though the New York Times in 1907 reported a gander that lived to be seventy-one. I imagine George might have lived longer, but someone likely throttled him so they could sleep in on a Sunday morning.

  Further complicating matters was finding that ducks only lived about six years, so the pairing of duck and goose was a poorly proportioned relationship, kind of like pouring a gallon of milk on a cup of fruit loops.

  Worst of all, however, is the fact that the geese are ornery. When he was eight, Sam insinuated himself into Goosteau’s good graces by standing in the house and feeding the gander one peanut after another through the window. Louis, however, did not get along with Goosteau at all. Maybe it was Louis’s beard that put Goosteau off, or maybe it was Goosteau’s nature to make a lot of loud noise and refuse to back down—it certainly was Louis’s. Any time Louis went into the backyard, Goosteau’s head would drop and he would attack. I sometimes found my husband holding Goosteau’s beak shut in self-defense while the gander squonked and flapped in fury, both of them unwilling to give.

  I loved Goosteau. Louis didn’t.

  Such complex interactions between man and animal have played out over and over since that day in the Euphrates River Valley. In fact, in the early nineteenth century there were more divorces among the Pawnee over horses than any other reason. Pawnee men loved horses. Ownership of them was a mark of prestige as well as an advantage to crossing more ground in a hurry. Pawnee women, however, hated them because horses ate their gardens.

  Louis and I managed to navigate the problem of Goosteau just as I imagine the Pawnees did the problem of horses—through containment. We gave the geese their part of the yard and the humans took the other.

  When I decided to rely on the Quarter-Acre Farm to eat, yet another problem made itself apparent. Both the remaining duck and the goose were relatively poor egg layers; geese are bred to be meat animals. People apparently prefer eggs in single-serving sizes, not the economy size that geese produce. Besides, Jeannette only laid her monumental eggs one to two months of the year and our remaining duck, Sunny, was in her declining years. Living off the Quarter-Acre Farm necessitated that I have eggs to eat year round. Eggs, along with legumes, would be one of my prime sources of protein. Eggs also provide a myriad of other nutrients including folate, iron, zinc, and choline.

  Odd that I didn’t remember ever hearing of choline before, but apparently eggs are second only to beef liver in providing it. Research shows that only one out of ten Americans gets enough choline, which aids not only in the transport of nutrients through the body but also in brain and memory development. Ah.

  Eggs were obviously important. To that end, friends who had a ranchette on which they raised pigs, wine grapes, horses, and chickens, offered to give me two of their laying hens. Their chickens had a wonderful setup, with a cozy henhouse and the run of several acres. Those chickens did not know how good they had it.

  Once upon a time, people raised chickens in small flocks. Up until World War II, most eggs came from flocks of fewer than four hundred hens. Today, flocks of one hundred thousand are more typical, with flocks of more than a million hardly unusual. Incubation farms hatch chicks, which are then sent on to egg farms and meat farms where hens face crowded conditions and are often debeaked to prevent cannibalism. In California, a groundbreaking law passed requiring that chickens be housed with enough room to turn around. A sad victory.

  Our friends’ hens had a few acres to turn around in and therefore were rather difficult to catch. In the end, we managed to snare a barred Plymouth Rock hen (who had an unnervingly bare posterior, which eventually sprouted a profusion of downy feathers) and a Rhode Island Red. Our friends promptly upended both chickens and dusted them with delousing powder. We popped the hens into a laundry basket, bungeed another basket on top, stuck the whole shebang in the back seat, and drove back to town.

  Sam shared the back seat with the chickens. We reminded him how lucky he was. While one of his best friends flew to Nicaragua that summer, another to New York City to watch a play on Broadway, Sam got to visit North Dakota and drive across rural California with lousedusted, red-butted poultry beside him.

  Back at the Quarter-Acre Farm, we introduced the chickens to the wheeled chicken house Sam and I had built out of plywood and an old garden cart. The house had two rooms (one for nesting, one for perching) two sections of roof that opened, and a front wall that lifted entirely for cleaning. Sam primed the chicken house and applied a coat of brilliant blue. The door of the house served as a ramp and opened into the chicken tunnel, which was a long propylene net stretched over three copper pipe supports. We could roll the chicken house to different locations around the garden as needed, stretch the chicken tunnel in front of it, and let the chickens out. The chickens would scratch to their heart’s content while tilling and fertilizing the plot at the same time.

  It worked like a charm. Sam named the hens Klio and Kalliopi after the muses of history and music. Just as one hopes muses will be, they were productive, each laying about five eggs a week. That meant the chickens were working at the top of their game since it takes about thirty-four hours for a hen to produce an egg.

  The best eggs have a thick albumen (egg white)—the source of egg riboflavin and protein—that stands high and is differentiated from the thin albumen located nearer the shell that spreads around the thick white. In grade AA eggs, the “chalazae,” which are the cord-like strands of egg white that anchor the yolk in the center of the egg, are prominent (the more prominent the chalazae, the fresher the eggs). The yolk is firm, round, and high. This described our eggs perfectly, and further, our yolks were so orange they tinted the dinner rolls we made a pale yellow. Of course, the reason the eggs that came out of our hens were so good was because of what went into the hens.

  Chickens will eat practically anything, including leftover oatmeal, greens, meat scraps, polenta, pizza—the combination of which provides them a pretty decent diet. Further, it allows them to fit perfectly into our recycling program. What we didn’t eat went to the hens, and what the hens didn’t eat went on to the compost; the compost went into the garden, and what the garden grew went into the frittata, and what we didn’t eat of the frittata went back into the hens.

  Along with scraps, we also fed our chickens a daily treat of birdseed, which they threw all over the pen in their haste to get the one particular kind of seed that was their favorite. They then spent the rest of the day plucking the second-rate seeds strewn on the ground. Cracked corn supplemented the grass, worms, and weeds they scratched up from where their house was parked that week.

  Even though it seemed our chickens were egg-laying machines, I knew that hens went into a slump for a time in the winter. I decided to bank my eggs against just that possibility. (Properly refrigerated, eggs last a long time. Some say up to five months. If you wonder about the age of the egg, put it in a glass of water. Newer eggs sink and older ones float. There is an air cell in the large end of each egg that’s caused by the contraction of the egg’s contents as it cools after the hen lays it. It continues to increase with the egg’s age. Thus, more air means more floating means older egg.)

  Just to be safe, I also froze some eggs. I cracked open the shells then stirred the white and yolk together and put them into ice cube trays to freeze. If you want to separate the white and yolk, the white will freeze fine on its own. The yolk, however, will become lumpy with freezing. To counteract that, stir either salt or sugar in with the yolks (making sure to mark them for either sweet or savory dishes) before sticking them in the freezer. They should last up to a year.


  With all these eggs, I felt free to make omelets, eggs in a nest, fritters, frittatas, and pancakes. I also hard-boiled them, scrambled them, put them in baked goods, and best of all, made my famous (or it should be famous) French toast. Even if my hens suddenly stopped laying, I would be able to continue doing so for a couple of weeks.

  I was pleased with my preparations, and with the eggs themselves, but what really pleased me were the chickens. As I said, I had never really liked chickens, but now I was smitten. Why? Maybe it was because they were feeding me; I could love a black widow spider if it skittered over with breakfast on its carapace. Yet I think it more likely that I had never really gotten to know the chickens from my childhood.

  Louis, Sam, and I spend a lot of time in the garden, and therefore a lot of time with the hens, watching them, talking to them, feeding them bits of food. Hens have about thirty different utterances including separate calls for danger approaching from over land, water, and air. Listening carefully, we sussed out the “something good to eat” cluck, the “back off” cluck, the contented cluck, the “watch the cat” cluck, the “Hey, I’ve laid an egg!” cluck, and my favorite, the pleased greeting trill.

  A large vocabulary wasn’t our chickens’ only attraction, it turned out.

  We referred to Klio and Kalliopi as the circus hens because they would leap a foot off the ground to grab a grape from your fingers. I took everyone who came to the house into the back for a demonstration, as proud of the chickens had they written their names in the dust with their yellow beaks. Even the cats were intrigued. The old cat, Pippin—who, to keep her from killing birds, had been weighted with so many bells during her prime that she looked like a bit player from Spartacus—gazed at the hens as if they were cat TV.