Wendell Berry wisdom via the New York Times:
Then he takes me to the barn, where there are seven newborn lambs. And he says, “When you are new at sheep-raising and your ewe has a lamb, your impulse is to stay there and help it nurse and see to it and all. After a while you know that the best thing you can do is walk out of the barn.”
Thank you Mr. Berry for validating my intuition that sometimes the best way to help is to not help at all. I’m not the most skilled organism out there.
The good shepherd doesn’t lay down his life for his sheep. He slaughters them and eats them!
– George Johnston, as recollected by Cameron Afzal
I posted this photo of the meal Ross and I ate last night onto my Facebook page and the reception was so enthusiastic and the actual taste of the food so incredible and it had been so long since I posted a recipe on this blog and I thought it high time for an act of shameless self-promotion, I thought I’d go ahead and share:
Braised lamb shanks has about a zillion variations, but this was by far the best way I have ever had them. And there’s nothing to it. At. All. You’d think a food this good requires some kind of culinary finesse reserved for chefs at white tablecloth restaurants, and while the recipe itself comes from such a Chef (Frank Stitt), it is as wholesome, humble, and simple a dish as you can possible imagine. The keys are these:
1. Use really good lamb (try Many Fold Farm! I hear it’s great!) and to give it a good browning. I thought I had been doing a fine job browning meat for years until I realized I was only getting halfway there. Let me be clear: you want the meat not just to “brown,” but to caramelize. Use a good pan. Use a moderate temperature. Take your time.
2. Let the juices really reduce, like, to a syrup. I tend to get impatient with this part of braising. With a braise I feel like I’ve been waiting hours and hours as it is and the juices have all been reducing over that time anyway. Why can’t I just tip everything into a serving platter and be done with it, dammit?! Well, you can’t. Those flavors have not been reducing over all those hours so much as they have been extracting. The slow cook pulls water and flavors out of the meat. Lots and lots and lots of flavors in lots and lots of water. Do not let those yummy flavors remain watered down. Simmer that water out and you get to enjoy some highly intensified sugars and flavors. It is absolutely, unquestionably worth it.
Ingredients:
oil of your choice (olive oil, bacon grease, NOT vegetable oil)
3-5 lbs lamb shanks (or any other boney, sinewy, tough cut such as neck chops)
salt and fresh, ground pepper
1 onion, finely chopped
1 stalk celery, finely chopped
3 garlic cloves, crushed
1 cup white wine (I prefer something a little sweet more than dry)
1 bouquet garni (I use any combination of aromatic herbs I have around at the time: thyme sprigs, bay leaves, parsley, oregano or marjoram, celery leaves, leek tops)
3 cups chicken stock (c’mon people, let’s get serious and use home-made!)
2-4 sprigs parsley
2-4 sprigs thyme
2-4 sprigs marjoram
12 really good carrots, peeled and blanched
8 little potatoes (New, Fingerling, Rose, etc.), boiled in salted water
Method
Get your braise on! Season the meat with salt and pepper and then brown the meat on all sides in the fat/oil until caramelized (see note above). Then preheat your oven to 375ºF. Remove the meat from the pan and set it in one, snug layer in a good, heavy ceramic or cast-iron baking dish (you want something that is going to hold heat well). Then add your chopped veggies to the pan (this is where I cheat and toss the lot of them into a food processor). Let the veggies turn soft and add the cup of white wine to deglaze. Let that simmer for a moment and add your chicken stock and your bouquet garni. Let that come to a boil and then remove from heat and pour the liquid over the resting meat. Cover everything with a layer of parchment paper and either foil or a tight-fitting lid. Braise for about 20 minutes and decrease the temperature to 325ºF continue to braise for 1.5 hours or longer. You want the liquid to barely bubble while its cooking and you don’t want to take it out until the bones are brown and seeping their marrow and the meat is meltingly tender. Meltingly.
When the meat is meltingly tender, remove it from your backing dish and strain the veggie bits out of the liquid. Reserve the liquid and discard the veggie bits (compost, pet, baby food, adventurous muffins?). Put the liquid into a saucepan and reduce until it is almost, almost, almost like a runny syrup. Think maple, not honey (see note above). Adjust for salt and pour the reduced liquid back over the meat and add the peeled, blanched carrots and the boiled potatoes. Make sure everything is well-coated in the sauce and sprinkle everything with fresh parsley, marjoram, and thyme leaves.
You’ll lick your plate. I promise.
I haven’t really slept in three days. That’s how I know lambing is now in full swing. Little creatures have been hitting the ground since New Years Day and slowly but surely ramping up to now. As Ross so aptly put it, it’s like popping popcorn: first there’s one or two, then a pause, then one or two, then a pause, then five or ten, then a pause, then more than you can count before it tapers off again. I’ve said it here before, but I’ll say it again, lambing is simultaneously really energizing and devastatingly draining. The oscillations between life and death can send us emotionally reeling. Worse still, our self-judgements of our relative success (when a lamb lives) or failure (when a lamb dies) are crazy-making. Ross and I are both guilty of ascribing judgements to the forces of nature playing out their grim realities, realities that are ultimately out of our control. It is hard to absolve onself of the overwhelming feeling of personal responsibility when a lamb dies, and when one lives, it’s as if nature has somehow has cut us a break. But this notion is, of course, absurd. This is nature at work, and while we shepherds play a role, its influence is minimal. In the sleep-deprived space of a few days of lambing, it’s very hard to keep such a level perspective and all our ambitions can evaporate into a feeling of pure futility. Here’s what I mean:
About a week ago, Ross went out around midnight to help a ewe in labor. It was our first set of triplets, ever. Triplets are not uncommon in sheep, and it is equally common for one or two of the three to not survive. In this case, the first baby died minutes after birth. The second came out fine, and the third had some respiratory problems; as if she aspirated on fluids a little bit on the way out. Ross put them in the claiming pen (a little pen on pasture that contains mama and babies to assist with bonding and to keep the babies from wandering off). One lambs was doing great, the other was clearly struggling. Then, in a horrifying stroke, the stronger of the two lambs turned up dead after having drowned in his mothers’ water bucket. We were momentarily devastated. It was an obvious mistake to leave the water bucket on the ground (who’d have thought the lamb could jump in there without also knocking the thing over?). Ross took it in pretty good stride, saying that for once it was clear what went wrong and what can be done to prevent it in the future. I really allowed myself to despair pretty intensely. The work we were doing felt totally pointless. Then, in that moment, I thought of my vegetable farming friends. I remember how Paige and Justin at Serenbe Farms talk about when entire crops die: weeks and weeks of growing and work and then suddenly comes some blight, some pest, or some unknown something and the whole thing goes up in smoke. I remembered William at W.A. Hennessy Farm down the road from us saying that something happens almost every day that makes you question the value of this whole enterprise of farming. And most of all, I remembered Joe and Judith of Love is Love, whose farm was completely destroyed in a flood nearly three years ago… and yet they still farm, they still grow, they still make it happen. Their perseverance especially acted as a salve for me in that rough moment. I remembered that I can do this.
Then, three nights ago I went out for the 11pm shift to check on the ewes. One huge ewe was clearly laboring and having difficulties. I called Ross out and together we got her two lambs out. The first one needed some help getting going. She wasn’t breathing right away and some quick pats and shakes had no effect. Ross preformed the “swing” technique wherein one literally swings the lamb by its hindquarters in a circle to help shake out mucous from the lungs and to give the lamb a little adrenaline boost. Amusingly, Ross preformed this task with a lubricated OB glove still on and so the lamb slipped and went a-flying like a gangly, multi-legged bowling ball. It was a brief moment of panic, but the lamb was no worse for the wear and was actually a good bit livelier for it! The second lamb followed shortly thereafter with minimal assistance. Mama and babies seemed to be bonding well (licking, nuzzling, making sweet little sheep cooing noises), and so we left. Ross went on to bed, but I went back out around 1:00 am to check on things. One of the babies was missing. I searched around by the light of my headlamp, trying to be as un-frantic as possible. Thankfully, the little guy turned up pretty quickly and I brought him to his mama and sister. After watching them together for a few minutes, I could see the new babies were having a lot of trouble nursing. The mama’s udders were still high (they usually drop low close to the time of birth because they start producing milk and so the lambs can access them easily) and the lambs were having a lot of difficulty finding the teat. In an effort to make sure these lambs would make it through the night, I ran back home to thaw some frozen sheep colostrum (that amazing first milk that jump-starts baby mammals and initiates the immune system) from a ewe whose lamb died last spring. I figured a little colostrum would get them through the night at least, then we could work out what to do in the morning. I braced myself for what could be a very, very long night if they did not take to the bottle or if the lambs had gotten lost again. When I returned to the farm, bottle-in-hand (around 2:30am) I was immensely relieved to find both babies merrily sucking away! The happiness, the gratitude I felt was just wonderful. Despite not having to be out bottle-feeding in the night, I was so wound up from the intensity, the oscillations between anxiety and relief, that it took me until about 5:00 am to fall asleep.
Everything seemed to be humming along smoothly until about 2:00 am the next night. Ross went out to check on things and returned with one dead lamb and one severely hypothermic. Apparently the mama ewe of these twins had abandoned them in the night. This happens sometimes. Bonding in mammals is a delicate hormonal balance and if for whatever reason those hormones are not triggered, they will not mother properly. Something was clearly wrong with this ewe. Her udders never properly dropped, and while it was clear that her babies did get some colostrum and had some initial success nursing, it seems mama’s milk never fully came in. We don’t know why and have rulled out the usual suspects (retained placenta, etc.). At any rate, Ross spent the better part of that night alternately dunking the hypothermic lamb in warm water and then blowing him with a hair dryer and rubbing him vigorously. Finally, Ross was able to get a few onces of milk replacer in him and the little guy has now made a full recovery (but will be a bottle baby, for sure).
With lambs now dropping daily and nightly, we are in full swing with the first round. Hopefully we will see a lull in the next two weeks to recover for a bit before our second group gets going. Through the sleepless haze, we are working to keep this perspective: we are not great actors in this drama. We are custodians. Our job is to provide a space for things to be when they work, and to minimize the damage and clean up the mess when they don’t. The degree of emotional detachment needed to do this is hard to learn. In farming there is much sentiment, but little room for sentimentality (apologies to Lady Edith and Julian Fellowes) and it is a very fine line between the two.
New Year’s Day greeted us with our first lamb of 2012! (let the sleep deprivation BEGIN!)
Check it out! After weeks and weeks and weeks and months and months and months of sisyphean effort, on Friday we got our foundation permit. We can move dirt, put in conduit and plumbing, and pour a pad. Next week (sometime) we should be fully permitted for the structure. I can hardly let myself believe it!
On this Thanksgiving, no one is saying “thank you” better than our friends at Hope Grows Farm. We are honored and grateful to count ourselves singers in “the gospel choir for the Southern Neo-Agrarian movement” alongside Arianne & Elliot and all the other amazing growers among us. Y’all give so much so many can be grateful for.
An End. A Beginning. A Thanksgiving Manifesto.
You’re reading this because somewhere along the way you became part of the story of Hope Grows. Maybe you helped us process chickens. Maybe you ate our bacon. Maybe you’re a farmer we called for advice. Maybe you wrote about us in the newspaper. Maybe you made a documentary about hot, young Georgia farmers. Maybe you came to one of our workshops or listened to one of our presentations. Maybe you’ve read the blog or are our Facebook friend or watched one of our zany videos. Maybe we ate dinner together. Maybe your children insist on our eggs… Read More…
Images:
Yesterday, we killed 210. 210 was an absurd sheep. He was handsome, had good growth, a thick, wooly coat, and a serious attitude problem. We might have kept him for breeding, handsome as he was, but for the attitude. This sheep had a ridiculous proclivity for escaping. Eight times out of ten he’d be outside the fence, munching away on the same damned grass as his fellow ram lambs, just on the outside of the fence. He’d look up, mouth full of cud as if to say: fences? parameters? boundaries? bah! I am a sheep of the old world, a sheep undomesticated and undomesticatable. Go ahead, rope me, toss me back in with the other sheep and their groupthink; it is only an opportunity to escape again, to show you humans that I am a self-governing, self-determining sheep, a lone sheep, a sheep to be free!
Truly, he was a rebel without a cause. And so, he was the first to go, for while a measure of such attitude is something humans admire in ourselves and each other, it’s about the last thing you want in your livestock.
The talented young gun of Atlanta’s Miller Union, Justin Burdett, a disciple of all things farm-to-table and nose-to-tail, wanted a complete kill-to-table experience. He was of the mind that if he’s going to eat it, he needed to experience the whole process of harvesting an animal. And so, Justin and a few of his friends came to the farm in the cool morning where 210 met his demise in the form of two .22 bullets. It was Ross’ first time slaughtering an animal bigger than a turkey, and he got through it admirably (especially for having shot for the first time with live ammunition only the day before). He approached the task with a kind of resolute stoicism, as if he always knew one day he would have to do this, and that day just happened to be today. Nick, our farmhand extraordinaire (and the person who had spent the most time wrangling 210) held the ram still and steady, amusingly imploring Ross ” just don’t hit my hand!”
After that, we hung 210 on the gambrel and let Justin take over, going slowly and steadily with his sharp, sharp knives. The rest is best summed up in the pictures (which are graphic, so consider yourselves warned). It was clean, it was fast, and it was a really a lot of fun. We were honored that Justin gave us the opportunity and really the excuse to finally do something we have always wanted: to see an animal through from birth to death, right here on our own farm.
Ross and I just had a conversation while looking at our books that I thought I’d share:
Rebecca: I see why people open franchises.
Ross: Or just don’t go into business for themselves.
Rebecca: Being an entrepreneur is hard.
Ross: It is the hardest way.
Rebecca: Why are we such over-achievers?
Ross: Because we wouldn’t be happy any other way. We are pushing the world forward one grey hair at a time.
This week, there has been a lot of talk about the USDA’s nutrition guidelines. The great pyramid of my childhood has been revised. I mean, let’s be honest, this was crazy:
I remember looking at this kind of pyramid as a kid in my public school cafeteria and would feel a pang of anxiety. My good-girl, type-A over-achieving, follow the rules and guidelines self would heap pasta onto her plate in a spasm of fear about how I would eat the recommended 11 servings of graina along with everything else I had to eat to be “healthy.” Fortunately, the carb overload would calm me down just enough to nearly fall asleep in my afternoon classes. Sometimes I wonder how my kid self would have responded to this, revised pyramid:
Huh? Wait, that’s just a big pile of food. A big pile of food and some colors that appear to be beaming down from the heavens. Why are some of the items illustrated and others photographs? Were there only clip-art carrots but not apples? Did they just do a Google image search for “bread” and stick in the first result? And excuse me, but what are those little blobs emanating from the purple beam and why are they also floating around the green beam? And why is there a photograph of canola oil in the milk section? Or is it in the fruit section? And what’s with the stick figure? Are we supposed to climb something? Perhaps he’s going up to the heavens to ask the gods for some key to understanding the great mystery of how this was ever considered an “improvement” or how anyone ever conceived that such a chart would be at all helpful. Or maybe this new pyramid tells us what we all needed to know: THROW ALL YOUR FOOD ON THE FLOOR AND GO CLIMB SOME STAIRS, YOU FATTIES! (thanks Fitbomb).
Somebody apparently, was also confused, and so the USDA released its new, revised nutrition guideline visualization. Behold:
Welcome to the “My Plate” revolution, the new panacea of nutrition information. So clean, so simple, so not a pyramid! “What’s easier to understand than a plate?” our First Lady asks when this was unveiled this week. This is what our plate should look like, we are told. This is the way to good health; half a plate of vegetables and fruit, half a plate of grains and protein, and a little dairy on the side. Simple, right? Easy to follow. We’ve hit graphic design gold! But wait, I’m confused again. Doesn’t dairy have protein in it? Don’t grains? Don’t some veggies, too? Are beans a veggie or a protein? Also, where are the fats? Is butter “dairy” and margarine, since it’s made from soy “protein”? Let me put it in terms of something familair to school children, the standardized test:
Which of these items does not fit in the series?
Fruits, Vegetables, Grains, Protein, Dairy
a) Dairy
b) Grains
c) Protein
d) None of the above
Yeah, that’s right, protein. Why? Because fruits, veggies, grains, and dairy are foods; protein isn’t a food, it’s a nutrient. It’s in foods. In point of fact, there is protein in foods from each of the food categories on the chart. Now, I do think that protein here is probably being used as a euphemism for meat, but meat is not comprehensive enough. What about fish or eggs? And what about vegetarians? And can’t dairy count as a protein? See the quandary? What I’m getting at here is that food is more complex than this graphic can reasonably handle. The simplicity of this graphic leaves room fr the kinds of absurdity Bill Cosby points out in his famous routine where, instead of cooking breakfast for his children, Bill gives them chocolate cake and grapefruit juice. By the standards of MyPlate, his wife would have no cause to admonish him: cake has a bit of protein from eggs, has a hearty serving of grains, and a serving of dairy. With the addition of the grapefruit juice, the only thing missing is the vegetable! Perhaps this could be corrected by giving the children carrot cake!
Part of the problem with the previous iterations of these food charts is the complexity of eating. Older graphics have been criticized as “vague.” There is a lot of food out there and, as omnivores, we can eat pretty much all of it. I think the first government food chart was probably the best, as it wisely counsels us to “Eat some food from each group every day… [and] eat any other foods you want.” It may indeed be a vague suggestion, but tell me what is so specific about “grains, dairy, fruit, protein, and vegetables”?
These inconsistencies aside, what may be most informative about this graphic is how it reflects the way we are collectivly thinking about food. MyPlate, graphically, suggests neat categories where foods can be defined and clearly understood, but in a world where folks aren’t sure about whether a tomato is a fruit or a vegetable, I wonder hour realistic this is, or how meaningful. Additionally, MyPlate assumes that its categories and ratios are ideal for most people. But what are most people in the “melting pot” of America? MyPlate presents itself as a kind of proscription for eating, but this isn’t Scandinavia or Japan where people are genetically similar and thrive on similar, traditional diets. In a country with tremendous diversity, isn’t MyPlate bound to be less than ideal for some groups? And so here’s what disturbs me most about MyPlate: with its categorizing and simplifying, with its lack of deference to the inherent diversity of foods (and by extension, people), it shows that we are thinking about how we eat food the same way we think about how we grow food: as a monoculture.
I saw another chart today, twos diagrams of the White House Kitchen Garden:
The first diagram is full of the diverse bounty of late spring: an assortment of leafy green veggies, root veggies, varied salad greens, peas, and blueberries that, come summer, will shift into tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, and beans. These kinds of foods are passively supported through things like, well, the White House Garden. It’s bounty and diversity are subsumed by a quaintness, an utter lack of seriousness. In the second diagram, we see serious agriculture. It’s serious for a number of reasons, not least of which is the fact that it is actively supported through government subsidies and is so cheap and so plentiful that it finds its way into our diet from all angles: a monoculture of starch in the form of corn, rice, wheat, and soybeans. The idea of MyPlate is to make sure people eat a veriety of the right foods, it hopes that its vageries will be interpreted to reflect the White House Garden. How quaint. The reality is this:
Yummy. Dry, brown, corn syrup-laced slurry bread is the “grain”; corn syrup-soaked mandarin oranges are the “fruit”; sad, canned, overcooked green beans represents the vegetable; and protein looks, well, like protein, you know, that stuff they’re growing in labs these days. Oh, and don’t forget the delicious corn-fed, denatured (pasteurized, homogenized, and defatted) 2% milk. THIS ISN’T A MEAL, PEOPLE! THIS IS CATEGORIES. Neat, tidy, bland-ass, fat-free categories. Call it food segregation. Everything is orderly, everything is in its place. On a standardized test, this meal would get an A. This type of eating, through MyPlate, is what we are culturally subsidizing. When we teach our children how to eat, this is what we want them to have. Trouble is, they don’t want to eat it anyway. I mean, who would? What in the world is appetizing about MyPlate? This interpretation (and it is the dominent one in school cafeterias) supports a false dichotomy: good food tastes bad, bad food tastes good. They are rarely given the option of good food that also tastes good. Children will eat what tastes good. What tastes good and is also good for you? A meal. Foods that go together, that harmoniously blend and meld through the medium of fat, that are fresh and in-season, that are whole, that satisfy our appetite by giving us both the calories AND nutrients as well as the combinations that help us metabolize those nutrients that we need to make it though the day with energy and alertness. But we don’t do this, and so, our children will keep eating their onion rings.
Bill Cosby is right. We have hemmed and hawed about what we eat and what we should eat, we have consulted experts, read the science, considered the needs of our agricultural economy, hired a graphic designer, written speeches, and pass out pamphlets. Indeed, it takes a lot of thinking and work to keep from working.
