finished bench!!!

sorry about the bad lighting in the photos, but the bench is finished! The finishing took longer than building the bench, but I'm happy with it. I ended up using a slate blue finishing paint, which is water based and looks more like a stain, as it soaks in to the wood and shows the grain. I finished it with Linseed oil, as I write this I realize I just put water based paint under oil, but we'll see how that goes... uh oh.
breakfast and lunch shift tomorrow then down to Northampton, MA for some fun! yea for fun!!!

a day full of cooking

hola! today was full of cooking, as I was on the lunch and dinner shifts. We only have 3 students right now, so it's cooking for a small group too. Today was rough but started looking up towards evening time. on the menu:
brown rice risotto, vegan and gluten free with short grain brown rice.
all kinds of toppings to go on: ham, roasted beets, feta, sharp cheddar, green onions, sauteed kale
roasted Brussels sprouts
and dessert- i made my new favorite easy dessert:
flourless chocolate tart from Colleen Patrick-Goudreau's book the Vegan Table
happily off work and in a sugar coma I will now sand my bench and add the third coat of stain, and work on my resume which I have been putting off...


flourless chocolate tart

1 cup raw pecans (or cashews)
1 cup raw walnuts
3/4 cup sugar
4 T earth balance, melted (or coconut oil)
16 ounces semisweet chocolate chips or dark chocolate bar
2 cups nondairy milk (I use rice or soy from vermont soy company)
2 tablespoons cornstarch
1/4 cup water
cinnamon, cayenne pepper to taste

preheat oven to 375 degrees. pulverize the nuts, and sugar in a food processor. Add butter/oil and process until a thick batter forms. Press in to a 9 or 10 inch tart pan. (I use a spring form pan and it works too.) Bake the crust for 10 min. till golden brown.
meanwhile melt chocolate in a double boiler or microwave. In a saucepan heat milk over med. heat till scalding hot but not boiling. Add melted chocolate to the milk- whisk in corn starch and stir well. Lower heat and simmer for 10 min, stirring occasionally.
the chocolate mixture will slowly thicken. Pour mixture into the baked tart shell and chill for at least 2 hours or overnight.
It's also fun to cut a stencil out of wax paper and sprinkle powder sugar over the tart.
serves 6 to 8 people and is so tasty.

a very long day

It is beautiful here! sunny and in the high 40's. Not quite the 73 it is over in St. Louis today- but I'm happy with it. My good morning muffins were beautiful this morning! Last night while I was prepping them I also got on my game and made rice and soaked beans for today's lunch. This morning I cooked off the beans, made the enchilada sauce, and was on my way when around 9:30 two guys came from the gas company and shut off my gas (so, no stove or oven) for 2 hours (they swore it would be an hour) so I couldn't cook anything else till 11:30. Other people in the school knew but failed to pass on the information/ don't remember to think much about the kitchen until they are hungry. It was simply a classic case of yester*miss communication, but I was livid I'm a little tired pants now, to be sure, but I managed to pull off the following:

Black bean, sweet potato, kale, and turkey Enchiladas with chipotle cheddar cheese and homemade roasted banana pepper enchilada sauce

cilantro, lime brown rice

Juan Louise's black beans. sauteed with onions and peppers and simmered in red wine for hours- delicious!

guacamole, salsa, sour cream, chips, beautiful green salad, chipotle croutons.

It all turned out to be delicious and people really enjoyed it/ appreciated it, so it was worth it.

photos to enjoy, sorry about the low quality- taken with the computer.

hearts.

faith in baking

I wouldn't really consider myself a baker. I like baking, mostly muffins and cakes, but when I think about cooking and how I put things together, I don't following recipes and eyeball most of my measurements.
I feel with baking you have to be so much more precise. I was on breakfast this morning and something possessed me to make popovers of all things. I feel like popovers are one of those baked goods that just don't make sense and take total faith that when you open the oven you will see beautiful, fluffy popovers. It just seems so strange to fill tins with this slightly heavy custardy soup then open to fluffy air.
Today's popovers were made in muffin tins, in an oven that we don't have a thermometer for so we don't know the actual temp, so they were a bit heavy- but tasty.

For lunch I mad lentil soup and people loved it. I used some leftover red lentil Dal, added more red lentils and french lentils, and a ton of onions, carrots, paprika, turmeric, cumin, coriander, hint of soy sauce, more garlic, and some garam massala spice blend.

the few inches of sleet have finally melted and I can see the greensin the garden again. Friday it's suspose to be sunny and 50 out- like spring!!!

winter

It came as a shock to me today, but it is officially winter here in Vermont. Today was one of those days where you just want to stay inside drinking hot cocoa and reading a good book. I had the day off so I kind of did that/ slept a lot, it was fantastic. Outside is a 'wintry mix' of sleet and snowish like stuff.
My little lettuce, spinach, and kale were under a good 1/2 inch of frozen sleet this morning, poor little things. I still hacked off some kale and made breakfast with it though. Breakfast these days has been a recent favorite of mine, introduced to me by Karie, former kitchen staff who is now frolicking off in warmer weather. It usually goes like this: rice, sauteed with some coconut oil and a tad of soy sauce. Sauteed onions to the point of caramelized, garlic, kale from the garden, portabella mushrooms, a bit more soy sauce. I layer them in a bowl, then toast a slice of bread and fry two eggs from our chickens, when they are perfect I lay them on top of the greens and it is the best breakfast ever.

The end of farm design was really fantastic. We visited a few more farms, and each presented our design projects to the class, some staff, and a few guests. overall I was really pleased with how my design/ design process turned out.

This weekend I took my first real building class here. Kind of odd to be at a design/build school and not know how to really build things for the first 10 months, but some times that's just the way the cookie crumbles. The class was power tools for women, and in two days we each made a really awesome little shaker style bench, with the seat of the bench opening to a little storage space. Here are some photos of it unfinished- I'm planning on finishing it with slate blue paint stain sort of product. It's colored like paint, but soaks in to the wood like a stain.

oh! on the photo of me with the bench, check out the heart rain boots I have on- I've been looking for the perfect pair of rain boots for over a year and found these at the local farm supply store. I love them!

enjoy the photos & stay warm, friends!

more photos!

photos: Lee, Jenny and I harvesting. A September Kale harvest, September veggie bounty and two photos from Canadian Thanksgiving!

Last week we celebrated Canadian thanksgiving. Just to make sure we Americanized it enough, we celebrated on a Thursday and had copious amounts of turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, apple pie, squash and gravy. We had a slim crew at the school, so we transformed the kitchen in to a pine bough covered paradise with a huge square table and 16 people cooking and sharing a meal- it was beautiful. Pictures taken by the lovely Julie who ,Sadly for us, has left the valley for the green pastures of the west coast. I miss her lots and lots, but now have a good excuse (along with another former intern, Mary Kate, being out west) to go visit!

harvest

I know, I know you must be thinking "three posts in one day, I hardly know what to do with myself." I Thought i'd do a quick update of the yester garden while I was going all blog crazy. These photos were taken today and are the spinach and lettuce mix- spinach should be ready soon, the lettuce still has a while to go. The

swiss chard is still looking beautiful! and now has 2 rows of garlic planted down the center. The long shot in the center with the garden cart in the corner is the planting I did of winter oats! They will die off in the winter and are just a cover crop to keep the weeds off till frost. In the background are the 2 huge beds of garlic I planted. hooray!

Butterworks farm

photos: long shots of the buildings, haylage (think fermented hay-like sauekraut for animals. It is bailed while still damp, so it makes it a lot easier for farmers in this weather to bail hay. ) Windmill, Jack in front of his buckwheat field, the solar barn a hoop house filled with hay that the cows live in during the winter- this way they are out of the elements but get full sunshine- the door to the milk storage room, and stairs up to the yogurt processing room)

Yesterday we found our way up north and east to Butterworks Farm. If you aren't familiar with it, Butterworks has been making tasty yogurt Since 1979- they started with just a few cows and sold their yogurt in glass mason jars to their neighbors. I highly recommend checking out their website (well deigned, super interactive) and getting yourself to the market as soon as you can to pick up a quart of their maple yogurt- you won't regret it. After visiting the farm, I have so much respect for the work they do, and the whole operation- though they make tons of yogurt, grains, and flours It still feels like a family, homestead farm, and it is still family run. They have the most beautiful Jersey cows, a windmill, new barns and grain elevators, and really exciting grain crops. Jack grows buckwheat, wheat milled into flour, cornmeal, flax for flax oil and sunflowers that they make in to sunflower oil. If you ever have the chance to visit, or go their to pick up your yogurt, or to hear Jack speak- do it. on to the photos! enjoy!

Farm Design- green mountain girls

photos: turkey friends and pig friend at GMG

Living Machine (filters all of the water used in the greenhouse through plants eg. uses plants rather than chemicals to treat water) and view of the GMG farm, with the new hoop house all the way on the right)

hola! Lylee in class here- I'm in a farm design class right now, which is pretty much just what it sounds like. We are visiting farms around Vermont, and spending the rest of the time in the studio working on our own farm design projects. So far we have been to a whole bunch of amazing farms. Monday we visited Green Mountain Girls' farm in central Vermont. http://vermontfarm.blogspot.com/ They are wonderful folk and offer a year round CSA share complete with meat, goat milk, veggies and canned goods. We spent a few hours visiting all the animals and even got to help raise a green house. They had toiled for about 300 hours getting a second hoop house planned and built, and we got to help with the final, heroic feat of shimmying the plastic up on to the hoop house.

so awesome!

winding down

ello'
IT's a rainy day here in Vermont so I have been catching up on all of the documents and information I am leaving for the people that come after me. While crunching the numbers I figured out that the garden produced/ we harvested 587 pounds of veggies!!
I'm really happy with that number.
winding down for winter. I have some spinach, beet greens, and lettuce mix going as well as kale and chard and herbs and lettuce in the cold frames. It'll be exciting to still have some greens throught he winter.
more soon
Lylee