Farm Challenge - Day 7

The last day!

Saturday breakfast

Why cook when there are so many leftovers to choose from?  How about some quinoa salad and tilapia ceviche?  Mmm yes, that sounds good...

Saturday lunch


This lunch was notable for several reasons:

1. It was our final farm challenge meal!
2. Even though it was our last farm challenge meal, several new ingredients showed up: peanuts, sesame seeds, and chicken feet!

Chicken feet being readied for the fryer

Because it was a Saturday, many of us were around to help out with lunch.  Fried fish was on the menu, along with fried chicken feet, goat and tomato soup, and a salad.  LauraCatherine created a delicious sesame-lime-peanut sauce to go with the fish, and Andy whipped up some mashed sweet potatoes.  Another supreme meal, but it's no longer a surprise.

Jen and LauraCatherine shell peanuts harvested from the Monsoon garden

LauraCatherine ground the peanuts in a food processor along with half of a jalapeno pepper, some freshly threshed sesame seeds, a spoonful of oil and a healthy dose of lime juice.  This was a delightful creation that went well with both the fish and the mashed sweet potatoes.  I'd highly recommend it!

The mashed sweet potatoes were pretty good on their own, too!

The complete meal:

Papaya-grapefruit smoothie at the bottom, tomato-goat soup in the upper right.

When our 5:00 finish time arrived, it did so without the mad dash to the sugar shelf one might have expected.  While we did later enjoy a celebratory meal of wheat, dairy, bacon and chocolate, none of us were really starving for these ingredients.  Andrew popped an olive at 5:30, I nibbled at the cheese we were grating for the pizza dinner, and somewhere on a plane headed to Nicaragua, Kate enjoyed a piece of chocolate.  We're glad to have these ingredients back, but we're also less dependent on them than we once were, more comfortable cooking with the seasonal abundance around us.  It has truly been a blessed week, one which has taught us just how much abundance we really have, both in the volume and variety of food growing on our small farm, and in the creativity given to our fellow interns.  These are not things we created ourselves; much of the food was harvested from perennials planted and nurtured by faithful interns and staff in years past, growing in poor soil enriched by years of care.  We don't take these blessings lightly.  Many of us desire to work in communities whose land does not produce so abundantly, whose people are not as well fed as we have been.  It has been good for us to experience first-hand the bounty of a land that has been blessed through the faithful lives and work of its laborers.

Saturday dinner

Celebratory pizza & key lime pie

"Every good thing given and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shifting shadow" - James

Farm Challenge - Day 6

When this week started, many of us took a few days to get comfortable with what ingredients we had available and what to do with them.  As the week has progressed, meals have generally become more complex and flavorful.  We've discovered what herbs and fruit juices combine for the best salad sauces, and are becoming more fluent in the use turnips and daikon radishes.   What was a sense of guarded sufficiency on Sunday has turned into an unabashed feast of bounty.  Now on day 6, it is apparent that we are in no danger of using up our food supply, and it is showing in our meals.

Friday breakfast

The interns all eat breakfast together on Fridays.  We've been saving up our eggs for this breakfast for several days, so Andrew whisked up some a fluffy omelet.  More sweet potato hash browns were a given, and Andy cut up some grapefruit.  Kate suggested we fix banana pancakes, despite not having any flour, milk or baking powder.   This seemed like a great idea, so we stirred eggs, oil, water, cane molasses and mashed bananas into some corn flour.  This mixture didn't hold together well enough to make large pancakes, but we made lots of small ones and they actually turned out really great!  They were not only sweet and tasty, but had a remarkably pancake-like texture.  It was nice to eat something bread-like for a change!

Friday lunch

It's build your own salad day!  A large bowl of greens (New Red Fire and Ithaca lettuces, swiss chard, new zealand spinach, and katuk) was surrounded by bowls of salad builders, like shredded carrots, broccoli florets and cherry tomatoes.

Today's salad sauce was orange juice, olive oil, and blended strawberries with rosemary, tropical oregano, green onions, salt and garlic chives.  If a vegetables salad doesn't fit your bill, the fruit salad composed of pumelo (a giant citrus similar to, but sweeter than, a grapefruit), strawberries, and jujube might.

To make  sure our salad needs were met, Andrew also prepared a phenomenal ceviche out of tomatoes, cilantro, onions, jicama, cooked tilapia and citrus juice.   And just in case we were still craving fresh fruit, a papaya and grapefruit smoothie served as a drink and desert!

The cornbread on the lower left was made from leftover pancake batter

To balance out all of these raw vegetables, Andrew pulled out the deep fryer again and made his best sweet potato chips to date, with a side of guacamole!  Mmmmm.

Friday dinner


Yesterday, half an hour before dinner, 7 interns could be found huddled around a fencepost behind the shop, a dead rabbit hanging from it's back legs from a crossboard above a bucket.  Animal butcherings are usually learning and teaching experiences for us, a chance for us to pass practical skills on to each other[1] and review our anatomical knowledge.  "That's the gall bladder, right?"  Yup, that's the green one there.  Don't puncture it, it'll spoil the meat.

Yesterday's butchering lesson was today's dinner.  Matt took the brace of coneys home to his English wife, who rubbed them with herbs (pronounced with a hard "h") and roasted them up in classic European style with a side of broiled turnips and sweet potato.

Served with a green salad, some lemon kale and leftover fruit salad, this was a handsome meal.  It was nice to eat rabbit on its own, and to get a feel for how many people two rabbits can feed.[2]

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Reflections, day 6

This week has been so much richer experienced in community than it would have been alone.  One of the wonderful things about doing this challenge together is that we get to share in the motivation, planning, and execution of this pursuit.  This not only makes it easier to resist the draw of chocolate and cheese, but has the added benefit of allowing us to share the challenges and enjoyments of the work involved together.   Some meals can take up to 5 man-hours to prepare as we have to harvest each ingredient from the field.  However, by working together or taking turns, the workload is quite manageable.  And what's more, it gives us lots of excuses to depend on each other, to serve each other, to be community.  It's fun, rich, and unifying.

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[1] One thing I love about ECHO is that there are always people who know less than you about something, and others who know more.  This means that everyone in the community is at the same time a teacher and a learner.  Yesterday, I learned from Andrew how to kill a rabbit with a karate chop.  Quick, clean, and painless.
[2] Apparently, a family in the tropics can raise enough rabbits from one breeding buck and two does to have a steady supply of one rabbit per week.  This number is higher in temperate zones, where the colder temperature allow for a higher litter frequency.  These two rabbits fed us well, and we had over half a rabbit left over.

Farm Challenge - Day 5

Thursday breakfast

Another day, another breakfast of sweet potato hash browns.  Can't beat 'em.


Thursday lunch

I started fixing today's lunch yesterday.  Quinoa is a grain-like[1] seed crop related to amaranth and beets.  It is native to the Andes where the Incas called it the "mother of all grains."  Not only does it have a delicious, nutty flavor, but it features a balanced set of essential amino acids, making it a good source of a complete protein.  Brandon, the recent mountain intern, grew a demonstration size plot last year, which yielded about 6 quarts of seed heads.

Last night, I threshed these by rubbing them together between my hands to loose the seeds from the heads, and then dropping the mixture past a fan, which blew away the chaff, leaving the seeds behind.  It was a little tricky getting the wind speed and drop distance just right to accurately separate out the seeds.[2]

The end result was pretty satisfactory, though, even though the volume was diminished more than I'd expected - down to just one quart!

Luckily this was more than enough for the meal I had in mind: wait for it... quinoa wraps!  But I'm getting ahead of myself.

If you buy quinoa in the store, you can cook it more or less like rice, without further processing.  Most quinoa in the store, however, has already been soaked and rinsed before being re-dried.   The reason this needs to be done is because raw quinoa is coated with saponins, chemical compounds that foam like soap when washed in water:

I rinsed the quinoa, soaked it in water for several hours (removing the floaters), rinsed it again, and then put it in the fridge for cooking the next morning.  In the morning, I cooked it, and combined it with chopped cilantro, bunching onions, garlic chives, jalapeno pepper, lime juice, ground toasted pumpkin seeds, cherry tomatoes and fish beans (Tephrosia vogelli).  This mixture was served with broiled sweet potato sticks and blanched Wong Bok leaves (Brassica rapa var. pekinensis, related to Bok Choi) as a wrapper.

Since I had to sacrifice a pumpkin to access its seeds, I cut up the pumpkin and broiled it in a grapefruit and cane molasses glaze with crushed Brazilian red pepper seeds and dried chili peppers.  For a drink, we mixed up some strawberry lemonade, sweetened with more cane molasses.


Thursday dinner

If you haven't noticed already, we have a lot of citrus available to us - not only in variety, but in quantity.  Last night, we started marinating the goat meat for tonight's dinner.  But firsts, the girls decided to juice some citrus.  And by some, I mean a lot:

By the time we got around to marinating the goat, it was getting late, so we threw some goat ribs and stew meat into ziplock bags, poured some of our bounty of orange, lime, and grapefruit juice into the bags, and added some herbs:  mint to the orange juice ribs, habanero peppers and tropical oregano to the lime juice ribs, and bunching onions and garlic chives into each bag.  We also added a few slices of green papaya to each bag, as the enzyme papain, found in green papayas, has been utilized as a meat tenderizer for thousand of years. Into the fridge, and off to bed!

12 hours later, we rubbed the ribs with salt, transfered them to aluminum pans, and poured in a sauce made of goat broth, orange juice, cane molasses and hot peppers.  After covering the pans, we baked them at 250 F all afternoon while we worked on the farm.  By 4:30, the meat was falling off of the ribs.  Ruth uncovered them, turning them once more at 5:30 so that they were nice and caramelized by the time the rest of dinner was ready at 6:30.  These were truly among the best, most tender ribs I've ever had;  those in the orange-mint marinade were especially sweet and scrumptious.

Meanwhile, the stew meat and soup bones were cooking all afternoon in broth along with bunching onions, garlic chives, turnips, sweet potato, daikon radishes, tropical oregano, Indian firecracker peppers, and other herbs.

At dinner time, we dipped into Andrew's sauerkraut that has been fermenting in the fridge.  It's still pretty young (less than two weeks old), but already pleasantly sour.

The girls made a large lettuce, tomato and strawberry salad with a citrus-cilantro dressing:

And if that wasn't enough, Katie pulled out some fruit leather she had made by blending and drying papaya, bananas, citrus and prickly pear leaves:

With so much good food, we had to invite friends to share it with.  Six volunteers, staff members and visiting missionaries joined us around the table for what was truly a feast.  Given such a bounty, the term "farm challenge" seems inappropriate.  Perhaps we should call this "farm feast week."

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Reflections, day 5

Andrew noted that he's been dreaming a lot more at night this week.  He attributes this to the fact that he's been eating fewer snacks after dinner, so all the blood usually bound up in the digestive process is now running to his head and giving him dreams.  It's a theory.

Citrus and papaya marinated goat ribs are a win.  I'm sure this week's diet wouldn't be quite as rich if we weren't eating our animals at such an unsustainable rate, but I think we could still eat off of the farm for much longer than a week without starving, become malnourished, or growing bored with our food.  Though I'd probably miss cheese, bacon and bread after a while, I haven't started craving them yet... not while I'm getting a fresh glass of citrus juice with every meal!

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[1] True grains, such as rice, wheat, corn and sorghum, come from grasses.
[2] I reckon the learning curve could have been shorter if this practice was part of our cultural knowledge, something people around me could have passed on.

Farm Challenge - Day 4

Wednesday breakfast


Yesterday's breakfast was tasty and easy, so we cooked it up again this morning after our morning run.  The sweet potato is a lighter color because we used a different, white fleshed variety.

The citrus slices come from an ugli fruit, a Jamaican wild cross, thought to be between a grapefruit and an orange.  The fruit is large and ugly, sweeter than a grapefruit (but not as sweet as a good orange), and easy to peel.

Wednesday lunch


LauraCatherine and Ruth cooked lunch today.  Since we had a lot of leftovers from previous meals, these made reappearances; chicken soup, saag, and Kate's jujube-sweet potato bake were back.  Rookies players in this meal included broiled bananas and an orange chicken papaya dish.

This latter feature was created by reducing (boiling down) several gallons of orange juice to a fraction of their initial volume, adding salt and habanero pepper sauce, and using that as a sauce on blanched green papayas and shredded chicken.  As you can imagine, this was amazingly sweet and flavorful.

Wednesday dinner


Wraps are quickly becoming an intern favorite.  You can use all sorts of fillings, and we have lots of leafy greens to use as wrappers.  Today the filling was a tilapia, rice, and swiss chard mix, and the wrapper cabbage leaves.

Some of the rice-based leftovers made an appearance.  You can't complain about leftovers, though, when Katie serves them up like this:

A mixed farm salad with an intense salad sauce by Kate (tomato sauce, olive oil, Indian firecracker peppers, garlic chives, and other goodness) rounded out the meal.

Dessert? How about a starfruit-strawberry-banana-papaya-prickly pear leaf smoothie?

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Reflections, day 4

Well, there's obviously plenty of food, and of abundant variety.   What a blessing to live on such a well planned farm, bursting with diversity and well stocked with perennial fruits and vegetables!

One thing we've noticed this week is that we are producing far more kitchen waste than usual, and far less trash.  Since we have oversight over the entire field to table process, we also retain the privilege of deciding how the processing wastes are used.  It is nice to know that everything taken out of the ground for our dinner ends up either in our stomachs or, via the compost pile or worm beds, back to where it came from.  It makes me wonder where all those scraps normally end up, when I eat semi or fully processed food.

Farm Challenge - Day 3

Day 3 - Tuesday breakfast

Andrew cooked breakfast at the guys' house again:  Shredded sweet potatoes, fried with green onions, garlic chives, tomatoes, and salt.  I'm really falling in love with sweet potatoes.

I cheat - accidentally


This morning made me realize how little I think about what I stick in my mouth.  While chatting with one of the staff members in the office, I spied, took, unwrapped, and consumed a chocolate sitting in a container on her desk.  The moment I had swallowed it, I realized my grave error, but by then it was too late! There was nothing I could do.  Oh the misery... never has the aftertaste of chocolate been so unpleasant to my mouth!

The apparent lack of an active filter between my eyes and mouth was an interesting realization.  I'm still not sure how I feel about it.   On the one hand, it means that I live in food freedom, not having to worry about what I eat, since my desires generally haven't (yet) outpaced the needs of my body.  On the other hand, it worries me a little that a daily gift as central to my life as food receives so little conscious consideration.  I guess habit supersedes deliberation.

In the late morning, I perused a web link Matt sent me, a collection of information about sweet potatoes compiled by the late and great George Washington Carver.  His list of ways to prepare sweet potatoes had my stomach growling in no time, so I was excited to find the delicious lunch that LauraCatherine had cooked up.

Tuesday lunch


Chicken soup!  This chicken soup was just about as flavorful and comforting as any I've ever tasted.  The fresh chickens were simmered together with turnips, daikon radishes, sweet potatoes, rice, cilantro, spotted beebalm (Monarda punctata), rosemary, and other herbs.   Hearty and delicious.  Here's a photo:

The soup was accompanied by mustard greens and kale, cooked and mixed with a citrus juice dressing.  All this was served with a light orange and calamondin (a small, tart, flood tolerant citrus) juice.

Tuesday dinner


Kate let out all the stops tonight and served up 7 different food items!

This tomato-chicken soup was bursting with flavor:

I don't know exactly what was in it, but the chicken was running around a few days ago, and the tomatoes were processed from the several gallons of cherry tomatoes we picked from Andrew's rainforest tomato patch.  These were some of the only tomatoes that survived and bore fruit after the recent freezes.  This meal involved more picking, sorting, and cooking than using cans of diced tomatoes would have, but I think that the greater investment payed off well in the sweeter, richer taste of the end product.

Vying with this soup for the spotlight was an apple-pumpkin bake, except that sweet potatoes, jujube,  sorghum, and sugar cane molasses were substituted for the pumpkin, apples, and nuts and sugar (respectively) usually used in this dish.

These delights were accompanied by guacamole and a smörgåsbord of tortilla chip substitutes, including jicama slices, bok choi petioles, sweet potato chips and jujube sticks.

Boiled beets rounded out the meal, which was served with hot cinnamon tea.

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Reflections, day 3

Several meals today were extremely flavorful, demonstrating excellent utilization of the available herbs and spices.  Far from having to scavenge or go hungry from the restrictions set on our diet, we're eating healthier, tastier food than we normally do.  I'm not yet sure how much of this is a product of the increased time and creativity we put into cooking for each other rather than cooking for ourselves, and how much has to do with the freshness and selection of the ingredients themselves.

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The farm goat herd was reduced by one member today.  Look for goat on Thursday's menu!

Katie showing us how it's done

Farm Challenge - Day 2

Day 2 - Monday breakfast
My house mates Andy and Andrew and I usually go running on Monday mornings, and after several very solid farm challenge meals so far, we felt we had adequate energy reserves to do our regular run.  Upon returning, Andrew fried up some sweet potato hash browns and served them up with 2 of our precious eggs[1] and some Duncan grapefruit.

Monday lunch


Lunch, cooked by Jen, consisted of leftover rabbit wraps (this time using blanched kale as the wrappers), accompanied by a green papaya salad.  You've probably never had that before, so let me assure you that it is delicious.  Green papaya is not very flavorful, so it makes a great base to other flavors.  Here, the papaya was grated, blanched, and then tossed with lemon-lime juice, jicama, bunching onions, hot 'Indian firecracker' peppers, cherry tomatoes, salt, and olive oil.

Monday dinner


I wanted to use some of my urban garden mustard greens in cooking dinner, so I made food inspired by an Indian blended greens dish called Sarsoon ka saag (or just saag for short).   This dish is traditionally accompanied by corn pancakes called Makki di roti.  I didn't have all the right spices to make this dish authentically, but got as close as I could[2].  Here's how you do it:

1. Start with a big pile of greens:

New Zealand spinach (Tetragonia tetragonioides) in the front, mustard greens in the back.

2. Fry up your spices, onions, and garlic:

Cinnamon leaves, curry leaf, bunching onions, garlic chives,  and jalapeño peppers.
Turmeric to follow.

3. Cook/steam the greens in an inch or two of water.  I don't have a pictures, but it took two enormous pots to fit all the greens.  Don't overcook the greens or they'll lose their color.  An Indian chef on youtube told me to leave the lid off as well, as it allows some of the less tasty phenolics to boil off.  When the greens are limp, put them through a blender or food processor, along with the spices from step 2 and some salt.

4. The corn pancake are a mix of corn flour, chopped cilantro, salt, and hot water.  Make patties and fry them in a pan.  Making the patties is difficult unless you are Punjabi, in which case you can make it look really easy.  Mine ended up a lot smaller and fatter.

We served these together with a papaya-grapefruit-mint juice, prepared by Andrew:

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Reflections, day 2:  Another good day of satisfying meals, featuring substitutions (sweet potato -> potato) as well as completely unfamiliar dishes.

We're definitely noticing that food is commanding greater proportion of our time and thoughts than it normally does.  When all your ingredients start out in the garden, planning, harvesting, preparing and cooking meals can easily take several hours.  In our case, this is not time we always have available during our lunch break or late afternoons.  Thankfully we worked ahead last week; the corn was already ground and the papayas grated, blanched and frozen.  It's evident, though, how much the industrialization of our food supply has reduced how invested we are in our daily meals.  And not only in terms of money.

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[1] Eggs, another alternate protein source, are in short supply this year.  Andrews ducks and my chickens aren't laying, and LauraCatherine's are only popping out 3 or so a day.
[2] Almost every published recipe I could find online was followed by dozens of angry comments berating the chef for "not being a real Punjabi."  I'm still not sure how Saag is "supposed" to be cooked, but apparently neither does anyone else on the internet.  If anyone knows, let me know!

Farm Challenge - Day 1

Farm Challenge Week is here!!

This week, life on the farm continues as it usually does... but with one small exception:

None of us 9 interns are allowed to eat anything that we didn't harvest from the farm.

This may sound easy, but you'd be surprised how many different ingredients are in your average daily food intake, and how much of that food would disappear if you removed all the wheat, sugar and dairy. Added to that, it is now the middle of the winter, and several early freezes destroyed most of our fall vegetable crops.

Now it may sound impossible, but fortunately for us, we live on one of the most diversely vegetated patches of Florida, with several hundred varieties of edible food plants growing on 10 acres.[1]

This week I'll be posting daily updates chronicling our attempt to get a better feeling for what it's like to truly live off of the land, to be dependent on the food that we grow for survival.  If we succeed in utilizing the produce on our farm, we'll have expanded our culinary horizons and gained new appreciation for underutilized vegetables.  If we fail, we'll probably lose a few pounds and be thankful we aren't actually depending on what we grow for our survival, like so many people in the world do.

Day 0 - Saturday Night


We decided to start our week on Saturday at 5:00 PM, so that if we were hungry in a week we could celebrate with a feast of bread and ice cream.

 4:55 found Ruth (the incoming rainforest intern) and I chowing down chips, dips and chicken bits in front of the Steelers game (Ruth and half of the ECHO staff are big fans), our last fix of flavor enhanced snacks before the starting bell.   Ruth had reason to wish for more of these stress-relieving munchies by the end of the first half.

Andrew (the outgoing rainforest intern) had volunteered to cook dinner for us all, and decided to start the week off with some pumpkin and duck soup, rice, and white yam (Dioscorea rotundata) fries.

Pumpkin soup on rice

I should mention that there are two exceptions to our no-food-not-from-the-farm rule: oil and salt.[2]  Andrew took advantage of these exceptions and pulled out the deep fat fryer.  Probably cheating, but oh so delicious!

Having over 65 different varieties of citrus on campus means our supply of fresh orange juice is limited only by our willingness to squeeze enough for everyone to have a glass.  Luckily Ruth had some steam to burn off during the Steelers' half time.

Day 1 - Sunday lunch

I didn't eat breakfast today.[3]  I then got to go out to lunch with a new friend after church, so by the time I had finished watching him eat his southern fried chicken and corn fritters, I was more than ready to get home and see what Matt (the mountain intern) had cooked up!  He didn't disappoint!

Rabbit raps: Rice, a rabbit, mustard greens and katuk, cooked with celery, bunching onions and herbs and wrapped in blanched pok choi leaves, along with some jicama sticks.  Served with a starfruit, strawberry and grapefruit salad.  Delicious!

Dinner:

There were plans for fresh fish for dinner, but apparently, farming skills don't translate well to fishing.

Instead, Jen (the semi-arid intern) cooked up a scrumptious mixture of broccoli, chicken[4], kale, and other leafy greens, served with rice and mixed baked sweet potatoes[5].

Another meal made complete with orange juice.

Andrew is picking out the rice grains that didn't get de-hulled completely.
It makes eating the rest of his meal more efficient.

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Reflections, day 1:  Generally high spirits, everyone seems well fed and satisfied.  We are, however, depending pretty heavily on our limited supply of rice.  Will it last all week?

Some of us are experiencing old flavors in a new way as they are isolated from the menagerie of spices that usually accompanies them.  This is especially apparent in the meats, which are, of course, also more flavorful than their store-bought counterparts.

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[1] ECHO's campus contains 55 acres.  Of this, most of the food we grow comes from a 5 acres intensively managed "global farm."  I'm including another 5 acres or so of fruit trees from around the campus.
[2] We don't really grow many oil crops on campus (at least not in processable quantity), and salt... well, nobody grows their own salt.  (Actually, technically some people still might.  Several species of plants, including salt grass, exude enough salt from their leaves to make it worth collecting as a source of salt.  This has been done by some cultures in the past.  But I digress.)
[3] Partly out of respect for ancient church tradition as I was attending an orthodox liturgy, and partly because I got up to late to get creative anyway.
[4] You may notice a relatively high occurrence of meat in this weeks menus.   This is partly because we have a fresh supply of tasty rabbits, ducks, chickens and goats, and partly because we don't have many alternate high-quality protein sources;  few of our demonstration-size plots of beans are large enough to yield a single meal.
[5] We grow 6 varieties on the farm.  After harvest, these were sorted into three size classes:  a) To be sold as food, b) to be fed to the interns, and c) to be fed to the rabbits.  We're not complaining.