Morning Song Farm News

Some of you may recall that the family New Year's Resolution involved demonstrating once and for Who Is Really In Charge Here and definitively fence in (corral) Carl The Goat Terror and his cohorts where they belong, like the rest of the goats on the planet. This has been a long term endeavor, and not to be over reaching; we agreed that getting the task done SOMETIME in 2014 was a reasonable goal. Setting about the job without proper consultation would never do, as we mean business this time, Carl. So I called Premier Fencing's tech support line in the first week of January. They're the folks that handily instructed us how to create a llama corral that was never, ever questioned. Not by the resident coyotes, and not by our herd of three hundred pound llamas. The fence was never defied..a flagship of human will over a grazing animals instincts to eat the surrounding landscape into dust. Our otherwise untrainable dog was indeed trained in a single dog-meets-electrical-fence e...

Ingredients 3/4 pound of organic Nagami kumquats 2 cups water for boiling kumquats 2 cups water to make syrup 2 cups sugar ½ cup crystallized ginger 1 teaspoon ginger root, freshly grated Instructions Rinse the kumquats under running cold water. Cut each kumquat in half and flick out the seeds. Put the seeded fruit in a medium sized saucepan. Add two cups of water to cover the kumquats completely and bring to a boil on a medium flame. Once the water boils, keep an eye on the fruit and when it becomes translucent, you're done. Process the kumquats in Cuinsart to a smooth puree. Stirring, bring  2 cups of water 2 cups of  sugar and the ginger to a boil. Remove the syrup from the flame and pass the syrup through a sieve to collect the ginger bits. Keep the ginger aside. Put the syrup in a glass bow and chill in an ice water bath. Stir in the kumquat puree and allow to cool to room temperature. This will take about 30-40 minutes. Pass...

Large Share Garden n Grove box subscribers will find the ghostly parsnip in their boxes this week. So, no more difficult than mashed potatoes, and prepared essentially the same way. You just need to add less butter and salt to your end product because parsnips are more flavorful. Peel and cut your parsnips and boil, just as you would to make mashed potatoes. Be careful not to overcook into mush. Drain, and either use a mixer or a potato masher to puree into a mash. Add salt, pepper, and cilantro garnish. Serve warm.

Ok, I admit I've proclaimed this distinction before, but this time I REALLY mean it. Anyone who is a carrot cake aficionado needs to try this recipe just once. Considering there doesn't seem to be anything really that different about the recipe, I don't get it. Why is it so much better than I remember carrot cake being?  Anyway, Crew Member Shay, brings this in from time to time, and he's kindly offered the recipe to our CSA members today. I know some Large Share Garden N Grove subscribers have quite a few carrots to contend with lately. (I've been juicing mine.) But today... .cake. Cake 2 cups flour (white, unbleached, non GMO) 2 teaspoons baking powder --aluminum free 1 teaspoon fine sea salt 2 teaspoons cinnamon 2 cups sugar 1 cup canola oil 1/4 cup butter from hormone free cows 3 large, natural eggs 3 cups peeled, and grated carrots 2 tablespoons grated ginger 1 cup coarsely chopped walnuts (optional) 1 cup raisins (optional) Frosting 8 ounce...

Kind of a funky week, we have only a few Oroblanco Grapefruit ready to harvest, and the last of the baby carrots; so large shares got one or the other. Normally when we have only a little of something, it ends up in the Trade In boxes, but we had too much of both for that. So the harvest crew decided on that division. We're skipping a macadamia packaging week, but will have macs back in boxes next week. Gardens and Groves Large Box

..... ... .

Things have gotten back to a dull roar here on the farm after the Christmas holidays. Carl and his cohorts are finishing up this year's Christmas tree and wreath, so I wont have to drag it to the front of the property for the Chirstmas Tree Pick Up Crew, after all. The goats are treating the dried tree as if it's a foreign delicacy, with Carl lording over which family member gets the best munching position...after him that is. He abandoned his tasty tree guarding duty long enough to escape from the corral to eat all of the newspaper I had carefully taped to the side of the house as a drip guard for the long awaited painting of the farm house. Sometimes he lets us think that we've solved the Goat Escaping Issue, just long enough for us to high five each other, do the We Beat Carl Dance, and get complacent. He ate the blue tape, and all the newspaper that I'd spent hours getting just right. We continue to work on electrifying the corral, but have encountered technical iss...