in my kitchen, around the farm
in my kitchen, around the farm
fermented drinks/healthy cows/plant medicines
‘Tis the season for natural sodas, vinegar, shrubs, and preserving the early blooms of spring. It’s also time to collect nettle. I still have a little jar that I rescued from my Slovak Bapka’s kitchen when she died. It’s a little jar of dried nettles and on it, in her Slovak/English she had written for “arthorities” (arthritis). I could never use it, but it sits proudly on a kitchen shelf, reminding me of the connection these tasty, healing foods of nature foster in our hearts.
I do all sorts of things with nettles, but my favourite is the first nettle soup of spring. I use an Irish nettle soup type of recipe to make it. It’s simply steaming a couple of cubed potatoes with some chopped onion in a few tablespoons of butter. To do this you melt the butter until it’s getting frothy and then put in the veg and cover it with a lid. When it’s shy of tender, pour in some good bone broth (I like chicken/turkey/rabbit/goose/duck over a heavier broth like beef or lamb). Then you simmer away until it’s near ready (takes maybe five to ten minutes) then plunge in mountains of freshly chopped nettle. Don’t worry, the sting cooks out. This only needs to cook for a couple of minutes before you pour in a cup or two of raw milk or cream and season well with salt and pepper. It’s so simple. The trick is to not overcook the nettles. Just a couple of minutes is all that’s needed. It’s easy to overcook nettles and then you lose their incredible flavour. What I like most about this recipe is that if you read between the lines, you can find its authenticity in there. The only ingredients are what would have been available to the peasants at that time of year: nettles, potatoes and onions in the root cellar, bone broth, and some fresh cream or milk from a cow that just had herself a fine, young calf.
It looks like our cow, Leah, is about to have her fine, young calf any day now. She’s only ever had bull calves and she’s getting up there in age so we’re keeping our fingers crossed for a little heifer. As we start to shift around our animals to be more in line with how we eat and what we need to raise and grow over a year, we’ve decided to cull most of the Red Poll breed out of our lines. We’ve been experimenting, as we seem to continuously do, with other breeds and cross breeding and we are a lot happier with the animals we have through cross breeding than the purebred animals. There really is something to be said for “hybrid vigour”. I’m a hands-off type of farmer. I want my animals to live robust lives with as little interference from me as possible. To that end, we need animals that are good mothers, virile, have strong immune systems, and still have some semblance of survival skills. We need cows that thrive on grasses alone. Fowl that are thrifty and hatch out their own young. That sort of thing.
A big contributor to our animal’s health is the fact that we don’t vaccinate them. Never. Not for anything. It’s usual practice in commercial herds for them to be vaccinated for all manner of “disease”. They also commonly get hormonal implants and anti-parasitical and de-worming treatments. I think each of these interventions begets the next. It’s just like us, getting sucked up into the “health care system”. You get a test for one thing and they find X and then they want to do procedure X or give you pharma X, which comes with a host of side effects but it’s “strongly