Holiday giving: Popover kit!

by June

Who doesn't love eggs fresh from the hens? And all the better if they come with warm holiday wishes and the makings for popovers.

One of our great pleasures is sharing food we love. For the holidays, we often try to pack up a mini-meal in a basket. Time is scant for everyone, and if we can give friends a tasty meal—and also help them shift a few minutes toward relaxing by the tree—well, that's two kinds of nourishment, isn't it?

Christmas breakfast is one of our most anticipated meals of the year. (We'll show you why tomorrow.) It delights us when we can contribute a little something to another family's holiday morning. Last year, when our hens were in the full vigor of laying (as they are not this year), we made popover kits.

We mixed a cup and a quarter of flour into a treat bag with a quarter-teaspoon of salt.

We nestled three eggs next to a sweet loaf of apricot-orange-cranberry bread (for nibbling while the popovers baked).

We added lemon curd (from Amy's yummy recipe) or our cherry-pie jam and tucked it all in a tin with instructions  (see below) for how to mix up the popovers and bake them.

Holiday-morning Popover Instructions

 In addition to the kit you will need…

1 ¼ cup milk

2 tablespoons unsalted butter, cut into dabs

a muffin tin

 Preheat oven to 400 degrees and set rack in the middle.

Butter or spray the muffin cups with oil.

Pour the dry mix into a blender. Add the three eggs and milk. Blend a minute or two – until the batter is bubbly and about the same consistency as heavy cream. (You can do this the night before, but let it come to room temperature before you use it.)

Stick the EMPTY muffin tin into the oven for two minutes. Then place a small dab in each muffin cup, return to oven until the butter melts and begins to bubble, about ONE MINUTE.

Fill each cup half full with the batter and bake 20 minutes, then reduce temperature to 300 degrees and continue baking 20 minutes. (Watch carefully toward the end.)

Makes 12 popovers. Serve with butter, jam, and spreads like lemon curd.

ENJOY…with love from all of us at Four Green Acres, including our flock of chickens.

How we peel a really, really fresh egg—if we get really lucky

By June

We are waiting for eggs. It's past time (by our eager calculations) for the first egg from our new little flock of Rhode Island Reds, and we can't even soothe ourselves with fresh goodies from the older hens; they are all molting.

First eggs are fun eggs. There's the thrill of discovering that first perfect offering, and then there's the thrill of cracking it open: Will it have a double yolk? And sometimes the first eggs are HUGE. See what happened last year...

But however large the eggs and no matter how many yolks are squeezed inside, the first eggs share something with all the eggs we get through the year: Fresh-from-the-hen eggs glow with rich orange and vibrate with taste...but they are hard to peel. Nay, they are impossible to peel. The white glues itself to the shell and comes off in great hunks.

So when we want to devil eggs, we either have to plan ahead (as old homesteaders did) and put aside some eggs to age. OR...what? Well, we set ourselves a mission to see if science had yielded any new tricks. We found this guy...



His technique, as you will see, involves boiling the eggs with baking soda, and then pinching a hole in each end and blowing the whole boiled egg out one end.

I am not going to show you pictures of us trying this technique; let's just say it wasn't the most dignified thing we ever did in the kitchen. We huffed, and we puffed, and we wheezed, and we coughed. Only Birch had the airpower to even dislodge an egg. We all stood around red in the face and fighting for breath, and we decide it was gross anyway. Who wanted to eat an egg that somebody had forced out of its shell with a lot of, er, spit?

But...we did find that the teaspoon of baking soda helped things along a bit. Even on a whim, the girls are now able to throw together a platter of deviled eggs. And, you know, a platter of deviled eggs create a party wherever they go.

I have to admit to a little motherly pride about their deviled eggs. You see, I grew up eating deviled eggs and watching my mother make them. But, years later, when I wanted to make them myself, I had to track down a recipe (this was before the Internet). So I felt a stirring of pride recently when I heard my daughters in the back seat discussing deviled egg recipes with a friend.

Blossom and Fern told what they did. Their friend discussed her recipe. That's self-sufficiency—knowing how to make something you love without being yoked to some writing on a piece of paper. Teach a child to devil an egg, she'll eat for a lifetime!

Here's Blossom's and Fern's recipe for Deviled Eggs from Really, Really, Really Fresh Eggs.

Put the eggs in a pot until the water is about an inch over their heads. Add a teaspoon of baking soda. Set the pot on the burner and fire it up high until it boils. Let it come to a really rolling boil, and then turn it off, put a lid on it, and let it sit for 12 or 13 minutes. (Lots of advice says 11 minutes, but we find that the yolk still has moist bits in it. We're trying to catch it at that perfect state between where it still has moist lumps and where the skin of the yolk turns that awful green. At our house, that's 12 minutes. Usually.)

Plunge the eggs into a bowl of ice and water. Shake it so the shells begin to crack. When the eggs are good and cold, peel away.

Slice the eggs in half the long way. Scoop out the yolk and whip it with a little mayo, a little Dijon mustard, and a little salt and pepper. According to Blossom and Fern, your fingers will know when it's the right consistency. Your taste buds will know when the seasoning is right.

Spoon it (or squirt it with a pastry bag) into the little bowls of the sliced eggs.

Sprinkle with paprika and fronds of dill. Try to get everyone to resist until dinner is served.

Now, ladies of the coop, please bring on those fresh, first eggs!

Beautiful spring at last: All in one salad

by June

The days are longer. The light pours down from the sky (when rain doesn't). And the grass is coming up green. So it's time for us to push past the dark season and into the sunshine ourselves.

To those of you who missed us, we thank you for your kind patience. We missed you. We'll be skipping right over to visit your way too.

Winter and its darkness we consign now to winter. Be done. We are grateful this moment for spring of the year and its seed packets arriving by mail. We are grateful for birdsong when we wake each morning and also for falling asleep at night to the sound of rain tapping against the window glass. We are grateful that the hens are laying bountiful eggs, and that Fern and Blossom's egg-money savings has now mounted up to $171.35 cents, which is maybe half-way to their dream of welcoming home a goat (or, dare I say it, twin goats). We are grateful that it is the season of matzah ball soup and bright eggs hidden on the garden gate (and soon enough in nests along the honeysuckle hedge).

To celebrate this season, we're sharing a couple of recipes that make the most of early spring's delights. Here is Lidia Bastianich's Scallion and Asparagus Salad, paired with some Pennsylvania Pickled Beets. (Please note that my eggs were only dipped in the marinade for an hour or so because I wanted a pink color rather than a red.) Garnished with fragrant dill, this dual-salad makes any table feel as though family and friends are gathered.

Enjoy! And please do tell us what you love most about this spring. We're so happy to be back in our nest here, catching up with you. So what's new?

'Tis the season for snowy-day noodle-making

by June

We're home most days (at least half the day). But snow days are still snow days, which is to say special. They are not to be squandered but savored.

Today was our first big snowstorm of the season. It snowed and snowed and snowed. It was the perfect kind of day for two things...playing outside and playing with noodle dough.

When the hens are being generous -- and hallelujah, the Littles are now laying -- we like to stock up on fresh noodles.

We use a cup of flour for every two eggs. The traditional way to mix the dough is by making a "bowl" of the flour and breaking the egg into the center and then drawing in flour with a fork until the dough has the perfect doughiness. (In our kitchen, we judge doughy perfection by whether it's as pinchable as one of the girl's cheeks.) Often, though, we toss both ingredients into the food processor and make a series of batches.

Then it's just a little kneading...

A little "chunking" down to size...

A little rolling through the machine...

A little cutting into noodles (after letting the sheets become dry to the touch but still pliable)...

We dry them on the same racks we use to dry our mittens and scarves after a good day on the snowshoes. On a day like today, all the racks get to work.

Now we have noodles to add to soup or to toss with sauce for a quick dinner in the midst of all the work that's going on here for our homemade Christmas. Sometimes the noodles even become one of the homemade gifts: Dried into little nests, we tuck the noodles into a basket with a jar of sauce (Italian tomato or Chinese Tangy Orchid), clementines, and some cookies. It's a quick meal for friends as busy merrymaking as we are.

What do you love to do on a snow day?

Lonely Little Petunia sandwiches

by June

It's a lonely-little-petunia day around here. The sun is peeking through the clouds, but Birch is away. To cheer ourselves, we made our favorite summer-day lunch: Deborah Madison's Fried Eggs with Sizzling Vinegar (from a gardener's and market-goer's must-have cookbook, Local Flavors). We always make the fried egg into a sandwich and somehow got started calling it the Lonely Little Petunia.

Here's how we do it (and you can too):

We fry an egg in butter, then shuffle it to a slice of Birch's country Italian loaf.

Next, we add two teaspoons of butter to the frying pan. When it bubbles, we toss in minced shallots. (Today we used baby leeks, yummmm.)

Next comes a quick swirl of red-wine vinegar or homemade tarragon vinegar, about a tablespoon.

This sizzling sauce gets poured right onto the egg.

To serve ourselves, we piled on pea shoots and Tom Thumb lettuce. Fern looked at it in satisfaction, and proclaimed, "It's all our own!" And so it was, with many thanks to Birch for baking and the hens for laying and the greens for loving the rain.

Dipping-sauce Egg-drop Soup

by June

Chinese dumplings, oh how we love them. For quick meals and impromptu celebrations with friends, we keep the freezer stocked with homemade dumplings, as well as our favorite packaged brand from Boston’s Chinatown (Chinese Spaghetti Factory). When we need something easy but crave deep satisfaction as well, we reach for the dumplings, steam jasmine rice and flash-fry some greens. It’s a meal we can't get enough of.

But afterward there is always a smidge (and sometimes more) of left-over dipping sauce. To be at its piquant best with dumplings, the dipping sauce has to be freshly made. I use two parts soy sauce to one part rice vinegar with a healthy lashing of sesame oil, a double pinch of sugar, a pinch of kosher salt, and a sprinkling of scallion rings and minced garlic. It’s simple stuff, sloshed together as the dumplings hit the platter and head for the table.

The fragrant little-bit of leftover sauce means yet another fast meal is on hand: Egg-drop soup.

Whether the chicken broth is homemade (from the freezer) or poured out of a handy box, it is quickly transformed into our most comforting fast soup.

To the broth, I add a quarter-cup of Shao Shing cooking wine, some chopped scallion, and a couple of coins of ginger lightly smashed. When the broth reaches a nice simmer, I throw in whatever scraps of dried pasta we have hanging around. Then in goes the dipping sauce. A tablespoon of cornstarch dissolved in a quarter-cup of cold water brings out a sumptuous silkiness when it is added to the simmering brew. When the heat goes off, I stir the beaten eggs in ever so slowly; the streams of egg bloom into yellow ribbons.

And so the slurping and sighing begins.