From farm to table for Thanksgiving

Long Pie Pumpkin for Pie

Turkey from Copicut Farms

and lots of other yummy dishes, some grown by others

Grace's amazing Butternut Sage Galette was a hit! The sage and butternut were ours.

And how is the honey wine coming along?

Ready to Oak.

Now I have some aging in a bottle and some in oak for comparison.

What else is fermenting?

Another bushel of pears!

From Buckle Farm solely to ferment. Instead of using the press today,

we are cutting and layering them with other ingredients,

including honey,

in a 5 lb fermenting crock.

Thanks to our friends, this job is Done!

Whats fermenting?

Concord Grape projects:

Honey wine from the second concord grape wine batch bubbling again with the honey.

To be aged in Oak.

The barrel must be swelled by filling with water for a few days, like a boat, so it can hold liquid instead of float on it.

Daily Harvest from the kitchen garden(and the freezer and root cellar)

For venison stew with shitaki mushrooms root veggies and chives.

I also use these scraps from the week of cooking for a flavor packet.

and slow cook it all day for a nourishing meal after hard work. I dont publish my recipes because they are made up each time by what is available. I encourage to eat seasonally, shop at farmers markets, grow a kitchen garden and create through inspiration. For this meal I used venison hunted by my brother, macomber turnips from our fields, onions from our root cellar, dried shitaki mushrooms carrots and celery root from my farmers market, and herbs from my own kitchen garden.

Another walk in the fall

Reflecting as the trees let go,

leaves fluttering down..

showing us the way,

to say good bye with grace

to last years old junk.

Nostalgia; we reminisce, rummage, feel remorse, repress,

bemoan, burrow, brood over

the beautiful past as it dies before our eyes...

while the trees bare themselves gently, letting go as the color fades, and then sleep until they start to create new life.

In the fields late in the season

Turnips greens and other roots

and beautiful dried objects with potential for new life

Even if these still green fields bear little more.

All Hallows' Eve

Remember this?

We had to Pick it up with this.

To bring it to the city to awe the children and their parents who were Trick or Treating.

Bill grew two very large pumpkins just in compost. No artificial fertilizer was used. This one made it all the way to Cambridge where children stopped to see it everyday for a week leading up to Halloween.

Samhain(pronounced sah-win) means Summers End, was celebrated in Celtic countries the eve of October 31st to the eve of November 1st, marked the end of the Harvest season and the beginning of Winter or the "dark half of the year." 

And it is getting very dark this weekend at least in the evening.

Checking in with bees

 There are a few flowers left in the fall for bees to forage. This was earlier in October.

But they are beginning to cluster especially on the colder days.

When I took the first picture 3 bees came out of the cluster to see what was happening at their entrance.

On the same day, October 24th, the flowers seemed to have already been pollinated. But a few days later the farmer responsible for cover crops was on his tractor in a field and saw so many foraging bees that he stopped cutting to give them a chance to gather more. We are worried for their well being this winter.

Yesterday they got their new late fall entrance, but today the weather was nice and they were hanging out on the front stoop and checking it out.

Whats fermenting ? Pear juice!

Several varieties of pears were crushed and presses and kept separate to ferment. These are from this weekend and our pressing on 10/13/14.

These are from the pears from The Buckle Farm in Maine. Today we crushed and pressed more pears from here on Ivory Silo Farm-two varieties, and the sweet pears from Simon's tree.

These pears from the tree right next to the silo are so astringent we really couldn't eat them. As you can see they are round like apples and have an asian pear skin.

It is most likely our last pressing this year. Now we wait.

Pizza!

Appetizer pizza: Beets, fava beans, olives, olive oil, goat cheese...

Main course: olives, olive oil, lion's mane mushrooms, mustard greens, onions, parmesan romano mozzarella cheese...

and fresh herbs: sage, thyme, oregano, basil.

And for dessert: Pizza! With raisons, coconut oil, chocolate almonds, pear sliced thin, brie cheese and just drizzled with maple syrup.

So good topped with raspberry sorbet. Decadent!

Daily Harvest

Concord Grape Wine or Pyment?

I strained the concord grape wine,

but I didnt want to waste the juice in what was left over, so I tried to figure out how to press it at home.

I wrapped it in cheesecloth

and pressed it with a bowl.

I definitely got more wine but the result was still wet. So I started to do it in smaller batches by hand.

I only recommend this method with less than 5 gallons of fermenting wine and friends. But it worked and I got about 1 1/4 gallons of wine.

I added a few lbs of honey to that yesterday and its already bubbling again.

No sulfites, no yeast, no nutrient, nothing. So from what I read, to make a pyment you use grapes and honey and make a wine mead combo, but you start the ferment with both ingredients at the same time. I am not sure I can technically call this a pyment if I added the honey and started a second fermentation after the wine had fermented. Its not a sweetened wine though because the sugar will be eaten by the yeast bacteria. I plan to add oak cubes since I dont have an oak barrel to age this in, and some spices-cloves etc. depending on how it tastes in a week or so when it stops bubbling and running over.
11/9/14 note: This tastes delicious. I think I might spice some of it, and age it, then bottle it. Its sparkling now, so I may bottle some to preserve the fresh taste and sparkling qualities. But to answer the"pyment" question this site says its technically a Concord Grape Melomel and that Pyment in the historical sense was a wine with honey added at drinking time to sweeten it. However, on wikipedial under Mead it says that a Melomel is made with berries and a Mead that is fermented with grape juice is called a Pyment. The recipe on the link  above boils the honey with water before adding grape juice and then uses yeast and nutrient, which I didnt use. My project explores the ways before those innovations and adds honey after the grapes have finished their initial ferment-not exactly fermented with juice but wine, so I still dont quite know what to call it, except homemade Concord Grape Honey (help you through the winter) beverage with a nice kick, or just "honey-wine" for short.