What to do on a gray soggy day in Tahoe

   Finally the sun decided to hide itself, after two weeks of glorious weather progressing from freezing daytime temps to full-on spring.  The snow has turned to mush all over the mountains, leaving me to putter around the house and do some much-needed chores--cleaning up after the chickens mostly.  We kept all 6 of the hens from my summer job after originally planning on giving 2 away to another home, and all are happily eating organic feed and compost, each laying one egg per day.  The results of this are twofold: a dozen eggs every 2 days are far too many for Kit and I to eat ourselves, and the mess piles up before you know it if not tended to about twice a week.  Eggs aren't too hard to get rid of around here; we found a friend who wants to split feed costs and hopefully some chicken care labor in exchange for half of our eggs.  Perfect!  They are such tasty eggs too, with a steady supply of vegetable scraps and maybe some bugs, though not that many in winter.  We're hoping to have a small garden this summer to at least use some of that good chicken-created fertilizer, but are looking for some other folks who would like to share this never ending gift since the compost pile has begun outgrowing its container.

   I haven't mentioned cooking very much in this blog, but I have to confess: I LOVE food! Not just any food, the kind you find on the shelves of your average grocery store but pasture raised beef and chicken, wild boar, and vibrant rainbows of organic produce such as that found in our weekly CSA box from Mountain Bounty Farm.  Yep, I'm one of them hippies.  The discovery of the CSA delivery was one of the biggest highlights of fall in 2011, after lamenting the end of summer farmer's markets and falling into despair over the local Safeway's typical produce offerings.  My cooking repertoire and palate expanded immensely after having to find creative ways to dispense with turnips, rutabagas, kale,  fennel, and other oddball veggies that I didn't grow up eating.  The boxes also contain more standard offerings of broccoli, cabbage, carrots, cauliflower, and potatoes, allowing the cook to mix and match for a more colorful and interesting dish.  It has inspired many substitutions and improvised recipes, and happily I discovered that a stew, soup, or stir fry (the easiest to modify) could contain any number of non-standard vegetables and turn out just fine!

   The variety and quality of the vegetables we receive every week has made pickup day a high point in my week, looking forward to finding new recipes for some things and re-inventing old recipes to improve from the last time.  Almost like Christmas!  After splitting a box with another couple for the past year, this winter season Kit and I decided to try a whole box and the fruit share as well.  The self-imposed challenge for this winter is to use everything in the box without exception, and to not buy any fruit or vegetables from the store at all.  If any strange root escapes being eaten and starts to rot the chickens will take care of it, but I'm going to try not to let anything sit in the fridge ignored.  I think it will be an interesting game to try and cook with everything we are given, including these Russian heirloom black radishes from 2 weeks ago...those are going to turn into roasted root vegetable chips tonight.

   Helpfully, the boxes come with a newsletter each week either tucked inside or on their blog, usually with recipes for some of the weirder things found in the box, and I now have a large collection of these from last season.  The internet is such a great resource for recipes as well, along with my growing collection of cookbooks, mostly vegetarian for some reason.  I guess they tend to have more recipes for oddball veggies than your standard recipe collection, and we eat such a minimal amount of meat that I have it all figured out when I do make a meat dish.  That's usually a whole chicken, roasted in a cast iron with vegetables or grilled with a beer can up its butt, which turns into soup or enchiladas as leftovers.  Homemade bison burgers are another good one, and every once in a while we'll have some sausages made by the local butcher shop in Incline Village.  Luckily for me, too, Kit is an adventurous eater and though he may complain good-naturedly that we're not eating pizza or hot dogs for dinner, he actually has cleaned his plate every night in recent memory and not complained once about having too many vegetables.

   Yum!!  I'm getting hungry thinking about all this good food and I still have to finish some loaves of homemade bread and put them in the oven before I start on dinner.