Henny Penny Farmette

It’s nearly Thanksgiving and our Henny Penny Farmette continues to bring forth delicious, organically grown edibles for our table for which we feel truly grateful.

We give thanks, too, for neighbors like Dan and Annie. This past Sunday, Annie carted to our house a box of persimmons and bags of apples and pomegranates. We harvested all our apples last month so her timing was great. While we have persimmons and pomegranates hanging on the trees in our small orchard, many are not yet ripe enough to pick.

Ripe pomegranate

Last month, I froze cubes of butternut squash in freezer bags and readied pumpkin flesh for pie. While picking a few ripe persimmons recently, I noticed that we’re sharing them with a visitor who seems to sneak in and munch during the night. I’m thinking the culprit could be a raccoon, opossum, skunk, squirrel, fox, or a gaggle of wild turkeys that seem to make an annual pilgrimage through our area.

The two main types of persimmons grown on our farmette are Fuyu and Hachiya. The Fuyu is rather squat-looking and Hachiya has an elongated shape. Both take on a bright orange color in the fall. When fully ripe, Fuyu is sweet and crunchy like an apple whereas the Hachiya is soft like jelly. Though commonly thought of as fruits, persimmon and pomegranate are technically berries.

Pomegranate and persimmon are plentiful this time of year

Fuyu persimmons can be peeled, sliced, and eaten fresh, roasted, or tossed into salads. They add a vibrant splash of orange to a winter salad that could include slices of citrus and pear tossed with greens,walnuts,  pomegranate seeds, and goat cheese.

Pomegranates are ripe when their leathery outer covering turns red and begins to crack. Inside each pomegranate is white tissue separating compartments of ruby-red seeds called arils.

Ripe pomegranates hang heavy on the trees this time of year

The seeds are high in antioxidants that reduce inflammation and free radical damage. Though they are messy to remove, the pomegranate seeds are healthy and nutritious additions to any diet.

To preserve pomegranate seeds, freeze them on a baking sheet. Once frozen, slip the seeds into freezer bags and return to the freezer. The seeds can be kept frozen for months.

Pumpkins come in a variety of sizes and types. Personally, I prefer the sugar pumpkins for recipes calling for pumpkin as an ingredient.

French sugar pumpkin are small but perfect for pies

This week as we prepare for the big feasting day of Thanksgiving, lots of cooks are already baking pumpkin pies.  Many will use canned pumpkin as a shortcut to their pie preparation but pumpkin filling made from scratch is especially delicious.

Our pumpkin pie features leaves of pie dough, brushed with egg, and sprinkled with sugar before baking

The old fashioned way to make pumpkin pie from scratch is to use fresh, organic pumpkin puree from the produce that you’ve grown in your garden. The process to make a pie takes longer because first the pumpkin must be peeled, seeded, and cut into manageable pieces and then cooked down. Then just follow your favorite pumpkin pie recipe.

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Taking care of yourself is one of the most important things you can do over your lifetime and it starts with healthy ingredients and fresh produce.

My newest self-help wellness book is  THE SELF-CARE PLANNER, A Weekly Guide to Prioritize You.

My books are available for purchase through online and traditional bookstores everywhere. Buy The Self-Care Planner and other titles offered by my publisher, Simon & Schuster online. Visit my author’s page at https://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Meera-Lester/2137649823

It’s never too late to get healthy and live a richer, fuller, and more meaningful life. Self care is not selfish but rather an act of love.

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Check out more recipes and tips for healthy country living in my Henny Penny Farmette series of cozy mysteries (Kensington Publishing, NY).

This three-book series of cozy mysteries features elements based on the real Henny Penny Farmette

What could be a healthier self-care act than eating an apple? On my way to do chores yesterday, I bumped against the Fuji apple tree, knocking off several. After finishing my chores, I picked up the apples and plucked a few more to take back to the kitchen. Fuji apples (like Cortland, Macintosh, and other firm varieties) are crisp and juicy and hold their shape during baking. Plus, they’re good for you.

Apples are a rich source of dietary fiber and are loaded with antioxidants. They are considered among the healthiest foods because apples decrease the risk for diabetes and thrombotic stroke as well as lower levels of LDL or bad cholesterol.

According to research done at Cornell University, eating an apple a day may help prevent breast cancer. Some compounds in apples are thought to aid in weight loss and lower blood pressure as well.

Inside the house, I ran through my apple recipes. Should I make pie, an apple crisp, crumble, kuchen bars, cake, or some other apple dessert? Pie seemed the simplest. Also, a pie only uses six or eight apples. I could keep the other apples as fresh snacks.

Instead of a regular pie crust, I made a pate brisee in my food processor and chilled the dough for a half-hour before rolling it out into the bottom crust. In lieu of a top layer of pie crust over the apples, I made a crumb topping using oatmeal and brown sugar with a little flour and butter.

The pie turned out delicious. The crumb topping added a little crunch to the softened apple filling and tender, flaky crust. I could have made it even crunchier with the addition of chopped walnuts or pecans.

APPLE PIE with CRUMB TOPPING RECIPE

Ingredients:

8 firm apples, peeled, cored, and thinly sliced

1/2 cup granulated sugar

1 teaspoon cinnamon

Pinch of ground mace

Pinch of freshly grated nutmeg

2 Tablespoons of cold, unsalted butter, cut into small pieces

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit

Position your pastry round over an 8-inch pie plate and press in place. Trim the pastry and crimp the edges.

Toss the apple slices with the spices and sugar and fill the crust. Dot with the butter. Cover the apples with the crumb topping and bake for 45 minutes (cover with aluminum foil during the last five or ten minutes to keep the topping from burning).  Remove from the oven and let cool before serving.

CRUMB TOPPING RECIPE

Ingredients:

1/2 cup (1 stick) cold, unsalted butter

3/4 cup dark brown sugar

1/2 cup all-purpose flour

1 cup rolled oats

Directions:

Place butter and flour in the bowl of a food processor and pulse until the mixture becomes like a coarse and crumbly. Add the oatmeal and brown sugar and pulse with the butter/flour mixture until combined. Cover pie with crumb topping.

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Eating apples is a healthy practice for self care. If you want to learn more about making self-care a priority, check out my latest offering available this fall in time for holiday gift-giving: THE SELF-CARE PLANNER, A  Weekly Guide to Prioritize You.

Learn how to schedule personal time to accomplish your dreams and goals for body, mind, and spirit. You’ll find prompts, reminders, and checklists to help you create and stick to your self-care routine. Put this book on your holiday list and find it online where books are sold and in traditional bookstores everywhere. This holiday season, remind yourself that self-care isn’t selfish. It’s an act of love.

Also, if you enjoy reading about country living, growing heirloom vegetables and fruits, and preparing delicious recipes, check out my cozy mystery series that is chocked full of craft ideas, foods, and wellness tips for humans and pets.

All novels are available online and in bookstores everywhere. They include A BEELINE TO MURDER, THE MURDER OF A QUEEN BEE, and A HIVE OF HOMICIDES (Kensington Publishing, NY).

My stalwart Scots-Irish grandmother was thrifty and talented when it came to food preparation. She made delicious pies from cherry, rhubarb, peaches, apples, pears, and sweet berries of every kind, including gooseberries. Her pies were my childhood delight when I lived with her and my grandfather on their Boone County, Missouri farm.

She made delicious meat pies from meats she’d preserved by canning. Missouri winters could be harsh. Those meat pies nourished me when the snow piled up outside the windows, and it was too cold to make a trek to the smoke house where her prized Boone County hams hung from hooks.

Flaky crust and tall meringue finish off this old-fashion vinegar pie.

Sometimes, my grandmother combined fruits or berries in a rustic pie (today, we call it a galette) and on other occasions, she made a raisin, pecan, pumpkin, coconut, or a custard pie. And meringue, if used, was high and sweet and just the right shade of golden brown. But it was the pie crust that I loved.

For the top of a peach pie, she’d cut in a large curve shaped like a branch. Then two or three other lines would curve from it. Lastly, she cut teardrop shapes along the arch lines so the top crust art would suggest a peach tree branch. When she worked crisscross strips atop a cherry pie, it was both beautiful and delicious.

Storing or rolling the crust between sheets of plastic wraps is a good way to avoid handling the crust with your hands.

The secret to her buttery, flaky crust was not to handle it too much. Today, I make the same recipe but in my food processor. Like her, I use chilled or ice water, adding only drops at at time as the food processor is pulsing the dough–only enough to get the dough clinging together. The point is to move the dough from dry and crumbly to clumping into a ball.

This fluted crust is ready for almost any kind of filling. I will prick the bottom and sides with a fork before filling and baking.

After the dough is made, I dump it from the food processor bowl onto aluminum foil or plastic wrap and work it into a ball (without touching it). The dough goes into the fridge for a chill over an hour and up to 24 hours. The recipe makes enough for a pie top and bottom or a couple of pies requiring only the bottom crust.

 Ingredients:

2 1/2 cups flour

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon granulated sugar

1 cup chilled unsalted butter, cut into pieces

1/4 (plus a few tablespoons more if necessary) cold or ice water

Directions:

Add the dry ingredients (flour, salt, and sugar) in the food processor bowl.

Cut the butter into small chunks and drop the pieces in. Pulse into a crumbly, dry meal.
Add ice water to the mixture in the bowl by dropping spoonfuls through the feeding tube and pulsing after each addition.
Remove the dough when it clings together–neither too wet nor too dry–by dumping it out on a large sheet of aluminum foil or plastic wrap.
Mold the dough into a ball and flatten  into a thick disk to make it easier to roll out.
Chill for an hour or up to 24 hours.

Makes two buttery, flaky crusts.

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If you enjoy reading about farmette topics (including gardening, beekeeping, and delicious recipes), check out my cozy mysteries A BEELINE TO MURDER and also THE MURDER OF A QUEEN BEE in the Henny Penny Farmette series (from Kensington Publishing).

These novels are available through online retailers such as Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo Books, and Walmart as well as from traditional bookstores everywhere.

See, http://tinyurl.com/hxy3s8q

Now available in mass market paperback, this debut novel launched the Henny Penny Farmette series of mysteries and sold out its first press run.

See, http://tinyurl.com/h4kou4g

The second cozy mystery in the Henny Penny Farmette series, available Sept. 27, 2016, is now available on Net Galley (netgalley.com) for professionals and readers who write reviews.

Potpourri mixtures are easy to create and their long-lasting fragrance can add an attractive visual appeal and fresh scent to any room. You can find many items in nature. Use a festive basket or crystal bowl for displaying your potpourri.

 

 

 

 

A five-pointed, dry and leathery pomegranate peel takes center stage in this potpourri

 

 

 

 

Go on a nature walk to hunt for materials (see the List of Potpourri Items below).

 

Visit a shop for spices–whole nutmeg, cinnamon sticks, cloves, and allspice.

 

Cut or purchase herbs (preferably dried)–lavender, rosemary, and mint.

 

Combine nature’s materials with spices, dried herbs, and dried citrus slices and peels.

 

Add rose petals, lavender buds, and/or pinecones and red cedar bark.

 

Arrange pretty seashells or small pieces of driftwood.

 

Include fresh leaves and berries from eucalyptus trees  and also he fuzzy seed pods of wisteria.

 

Put the potpourri in a pretty basket or cut crystal bowl; add a drop or two of essential oil if desired.

 

 

 

LIST OF POTPOURRI ITEMS

Combine using any of the following to create interesting mixes, textures, and colors.

Find other ideas for farm crafts and delicious recipes in A BEELINE TO MURDER.

Click here: http://tinyurl.com/nhdae39

The author and her debut cozy mystery, A BEELINE TO MURDER

The heirloom blue tomato vines have to be staked, especially since we grow them in raised beds

I couldn’t breathe in yesterday’s heat. But with so much work to be done around the farmette, I soldiered on, staking heirloom blue tomatoes. I hadn’t finished canning my organic apricots and now the plums and peaches were ready. I felt overwhelmed and longing for cool spot to sip tea, rest, and read.

We had already removed the apricots from our “torture tree” since we’ve been unable to surmount its many problems after planting it five years ago. Carlos wasted little time chain-sawing it down. I deadheaded the roses, while he dug out the stump.

The bees have to work really hard on hot days to keep the queen and brood cool

Then with a clear view to our hives, we quickly realized that the we needed to suit up and install extenders or the bees would swarm. Even as we felt the urgency, we realized there were also dozens of other chores screaming for our attention.

I told myself that breezes would soon blow inland from the Carquinez Strait, a channel of the San Francisco Bay where the San Joaquin and the Sacramento Rivers flow to the ocean, but by mid-afternoon, nary a leaf moved on the apricot, plum, and pomegranate trees. By four o’clock when the wind finally did kick in–the air wasn’t cool as it usually was. The winds blew strong and stifling hot and threatened to suffocate anyone still working outside.

Freshly picked Elberta peaches are easily turned into a scrumptious pie or cobbler

Abandoning the outside chores, I retreated indoors and turned on the air conditioner. Seeing the lug of apricots and crock of peaches resting on the kitchen counter, I groaned. The jam had to be made, but I couldn’t face stirring boiling fruit on a hot stove.

Deciding to use up some of the fruit for a simple after-dinner dessert, I flipped through the pages of a few cookbooks. Maybe a cobbler would do or a peach pie. I really didn’t need a recipe for those, but in  Country Cooking by Dori Sanders, I found an intriguing raisin-cinnamon crust that sounded tasty. I bet it would go with peaches but I  probably could have baked it on the patio floor.

With a glass of sweet tea and an armload of paperbacks and hardcovers, I curled up on the couch and finished reading Murder is Binding, Lorna Barrett’s debut book in her cozy Booktown Mystery series. I love this author and her writing, but soon figured out who done it. Still, I read to the end; you never know when a clever twist might show up.

Next, I read the last few pages of  A Tuscan Childhood by Kinta Beevor. At bedtime, I’d been savoring the chapters of that book like pieces of rich, dark chocolate. Beevor’s evocative descriptions of her bohemian childhood in Tuscany captured my imagination, drawing me in so completely I could almost smell the wild thyme, pine needles, and rocky Tuscan terrain in the searing, summer heat. Like Frances Mayes (Under the Tuscan Sun), who wrote a quote for the cover, I felt sad when Beevor’s lovely memoir ended.

Returning to the stack, I selected another memoir, The Orchard, by Theresa Weir. I’d bought the book on impulse during a trip to the farmers’ market at Todos Santos Plaza, our downtown green space surrounded by bars and banks and, of course, a second-hand bookstore. Drastically marked down, the book had been summarily deposited on a set of moveable shelves, and rolled outside the storefront for a quick sale.

The artist and writer in me understood immediately why I had picked it up and purchased it: the cover art pictured a young couple in a loving embrace, standing in lush green grass surrounded by apple trees. But there was something in that image that evoked sadness, like a bittersweet dream of a time past, viewed through a long lens.

As the descendant of five generations of farmers, I suspected Weir’s book would resonate with my own experiences of farm life in America’s heartland with bone-chilling winters of snow and ice and sweltering summers when you prayed for rain. What I didn’t expect was exquisite writing and the juxtaposition of love against the deadly realities of widespread pesticide use on the farms that ushered me into her story and swept me along. I finished that book in one sitting and will long be haunted by it.

I felt guilty for having only paid pennies for Weir’s book. A pittance for a tale that evolved out of all she had lived through. Less than the price of bus fare to journey with her as she pieced together scenes from her life in the Heartland. In every page, I was with her as she struggled, never abandoning her dreams. She learned as I had how to tuck them away while you dealt with the realities of a hard life with heart-breaking lows and highs that reached euphoria. But there were scenes she left out, only hinting at experiences she said she would “never talk about.” The truth is, I wept after putting down her book.

When a reader identifies so closely with a character in a story (and this was Weir’s personal narrative of her life), he or she rides the emotional ups and downs with that character. Good writers understand how to tug at their readers’ emotions and milk the drama. Theresa Weir had skillfully threaded a leitmotif of darkness and light, joy and sorrow, pain and healing through her story, but never once did I feel manipulated. Every sentence of The Orchard rang true.

I couldn’t read anymore after putting that book down. As I made dinner, I thought of how many scenes in her life resonated with mine. Even the widespread pesticide use on farms and the stubbornness of farmers to change.

I thought about Rachel Carson’s famous book, Silent Spring, that sounded the wake-up call to farmers everywhere about the dangers of chemicals in fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides.  So many small farms have been overtaken by agribusinesses these days and still the chemicals are used. I decided to forgo making the peach pie.

With the heat of the day gone, I opened the windows and stretched out between freshly washed sheets. I listened to the rustle of oak and eucalyptus leaves. To crickets and the unseen critters that make noises in the night. I listened to the soft voices of my Lebanese neighbors chatting in their orchard with relatives.

As dreams beckoned, I could almost smell the fresh lilacs that Theresa Weir had written about in her memoir. Their cloying scent had filled her grandmother’s kitchen just as they had filled my grandmother’s, my mother’s, and mine. I wondered if the lilacs would ever disappear or if the world would one day wake up to find the honeybees gone, the fruit trees without fruit, and the berries and other sweet produce in our gardens and orchards reduced to a memory.

Edible flowers make ordinary butter beautiful

Picture a red nasturtium or peppery-tasting marigold displayed around a mound of lemony-yellow butter. Or, imagine the beauty of a handful of sugared purple violets or red rose petals, sans the sour petal base, crowning an iced picnic cake.

During bygone eras when the Romans ruled the world or Queen Victoria reigned during the age named for her, flowers weren’t just for bouquets on the table, they formed an integral part of the food that was consumed.

Many flowers and seeds are poisonous, so it is imperative that you correctly identify any flower or plant you plan to eat or use on food. Also, make sure you are not allergic to the plant before integrating its blooms into your diet.

What flowers are growing in your garden that you could use in your culinary endeavors?

Several edible florals include the blossoms of herbs such as lavender, dill, garlic chive, coriander, basil, bee balm, marjoram, oregano, anise hyssop, winter savory, summer savory, sage, and mint. Also edible are the flowers of certain varieties of pumpkins, squash, cauliflower, scarlet runner bean, radish, sweet garden pea, and fennel.

Consider also the delicate blooms of society garlic, dianthus, pansy, signet marigold, red clover, African marigold, plum, scented geranium (rose, lemon). You can candy the blossoms of apple and crabapple, but the seeds are poisonous.

Lemon and orange tree blossoms are fragrant, lovely, and tasty

Some blooms, such as hibiscus (China rose), mint, rose, and chamomile are used to flavor teas. Lemon blossoms will have a slightly bitter taste whereas orange blossoms are sweet but both are lovely floating in crystal bowls of punch.

Research your chosen plant and correctly identify it before using it in any food preparation. See, http://www.extension.iastate.edu/publications/rg302.pdf

Also see, http://www.ext.colostate.edu/pubs/garden/07237.html