Spring is fickle here in the Pacific Northwest. We get lured out of our cozy caves in late February with balmy, sunny days. We put seeds in the ground knowing that they will get knocked down by a cold snap that is just around the corner. We cross our fingers and hope for the best when the wild spring winds blow through the orchard and it is too cold for the bees to pollinate the crops. But some things are sure signs of spring, harbingers that the days are really growing longer, that things are turning from brown to green, and that we all renew.

One of my favorite TRUE signs of spring are nettles. They creep up when we are not looking, and then WHAM, there are so many that you have to bushwhack to walk the path back to your neighbors. They scare me a little, because a sting from them will stay with me for days (I am a wimp), and as my friend Bella put it "I always feel a little witchy" when picking and eating them. I have consumed them in many different ways: tea, pasta, lasagna, basically any recipe that calls for spinach. But to use nettles you have to go through a lot of work, unless you are my little buddy Orion who just eats them raw. I most like to make a soup out of nettles, because the prep work of washing, blanching, shocking and chopping dovetail nicely into hovering over a soup pot. I also love that after foraging you can sit down to a wonderful bowl of spring "tonic" in about an hour. So, if you have wondered if it is really spring yet, if you need a sure sign of things to come, please enjoy this:

Nettle Soup
(Adapted from Deborah Madison, goddess of all things veg)
10 to 12 ounces of nettle leaves (I usually gather about a pound or so of nettles and then use all the good leaves I can snip off)
3 Tbsp butter (if you happen to have some compound herb butter kicking around now is a good time to use it)
1/2 onion sliced or the equivalent amount of overwintered scallions/leeks/onions out of the garden
Couple Tbsp of chives or some of the green tops from those over wintered onions
One fist sized potato
3 cups sliced chard or spinach leaves (I use one bunch of chard from the produce department or forage the last greens from my winter garden)
6 cups stock (and here give yourself a break if all you only have cubes, it's okay, use it and maybe save some of the blanching water from the nettles for added veg flavor)
2 handfuls of rice (any white rice will do, but do not use brown)
1/2 cup of cream
Salt and pepper to taste

Bring a few quarts of water to a boil while you defrock your nettles from their stems. (I use kitchen scissors and full yellow dish gloves while doing this) Wash the resulting leaves first like you would lettuce, and then instead of spinning them dry just scoop them out and plunge them into the boiling water for two minutes. Drain the nettles (saving a bit of the water for the soup if you like) and rinse the nettles in cold water to stop them cooking. Roughly chop the leaves and set aside. Melt the butter in a wide soup pot and add the onions and chives or onion tops if you have them. Slice the potato and add it to the onion and saute them together until the onion is soft and the potatoes are beginning to soften. Add the chard or spinach leaves, give them a couple good stirs to wilt them and then add the stock and the handfuls of rice. Bring everything to a boil then reduce it to a simmer with the lid off for 10 minutes then add the nettles and cook for another 10 minutes or until the potatoes and rice are totally soft. Puree the soup either with a hand blender on the stove (my fave) or in batches in a blender with the usual precautions. Add the cream to the soup and taste for seasoning, try to not let the soup boil at this point because it is just so hard on the cream.

Now there, that wasn't hard was it? And now you have a fabulous bowl of spring green in front of you with plenty left over for tomorrow and or the freezer. Pat yourself on the back and go out tomorrow and pick more nettles.

Got any other ideas? Share them!

Ringing in the new year...Anyone Home?

What?! It is January, and it is almost over? Oops, sorry!

Where have we been you ask? (Because I know you worry about us sometimes, which is good)

We are busy! Now go away!

Okay, here is a a snippet...

We now have sheep. Yep, that's right Mom, we have sheep so we can eat them. They also happen to be as distracting and entertaining as Facebook on a good day. So far there are three of them: Gravenstein, Buckley Giant, and Blenheim Orange, and there are rumored to be more on the way. We hope they are pregnant, that was the main premise behind buying sheep before winter set in and not in the spring like most sane farmers. They truly are magical, and quiet, and sneaky, and they smell like a comfy old sweater. We found many weak points in our fences, are becoming regulars at the local hotspots for livestock advice, and never get tired of how soft their muzzles are when they are eating grain out of our hands.

We also are spraying, scratching, planning, seeding and pruning the Terra. The chickens are restless, not all of them made it through the winter, sometimes it seems like not all of us will make it through either! And we found out that our dear Freja is allergic to not only wheat, which is becoming more and more common, but also to eggs. Yes, I typed correctly, we live on a farm with lots of chickens and she cannot eat eggs. So we pouted for a few weeks, and then reinvented ourselves in the kitchen and are now quite the masters of some amazing wheat-free, egg-free bread that we do not just keep to ourselves, but also sell to our friends around town.

All in all, life is good, the sun continues to rise, and as Gus said the other day, "It is amazing that there is enough air for us all". Yep, pretty amazing.

Thanks.

Bleeding Berries

They are here; a corporeal translation of sunshine. They drink it up and grow dark and fat to the point where they burst open and bleed their insides down the vines. I try to save them all, but then it is me who starts to bleed. Like blood brothers we stand in this thorny clubhouse sharing our secrets and then eating them up. I crush and mash and juice and jam these jewels in the scorching heat of summer, hoping that when I taste them again in the cold winter mornings I will feel this heat and the sun making me sweat.
The logans are the first to come ripe. They are big, matte, burgundy berries that carry a luxurious reputation around here. People clamor to buy up our supply, and I get excited about the new positive cash flow. Next come our ever bearing raspberries that we just let Gus and Freja have at and fill their bellies whenever they are in the garden, call it keeping the natives happy. Next come the Cascadeberries, my favorite tasting berry, but also my toughest berry to pick and sell. Each berry is like a jewel, black, shiny, multifaceted, and thorny as hell. They have this tiny window of ripeness, pick them too soon and they are tart tart tart, as a friend said: "only a true berry lover would dare eat these", pick them too late and they melt in your hand Macbeth style. These berries do not look as glamorous as the logans or as familiar as the raspberries, and maybe part of why I like them so much is their underdog status. I love the look on peoples' faces once they have tasted a perfectly ripe berry, preferably still warm from the sun. They marvel at the complexity of the taste, the way the memory of the berry lingers well after it is gone. I get terribly defensive when people turn down buying the cascades and opt instead for the familiar, the predictable. But when I do find someone willing to step up and taste, buy, and come back for more cascades I find they are the kind of people I love to be around.
We seek out reflections of ourselves in friendship. It is easy to find the sweetness, conviviality, and classic good traits in a friend. But you know that someone really loves you when they risk the thorns and embrace you completely. I love what we are growing and making here on our little farm. I love our friends old and new. And I love berries.