Max here... Here's a follow up to the post about our first olive harvest. 24 hours later, I was at the mill in Santa Ynez watching our olives get pressed. We started picking at 9:30 on Sunday, and at 9:30 the next morning the olives were milled. That means the longest ANY olive sat in that harvest bin was 24 hours, and most of them less! We've been learning that minimizing the time from harvest to mill is one of the most important factors in making a high quality oil. To quote one of our customers who tried the oil for the first time this morning: "WOW, your olive oil is amazing! I was in Italy a few weeks ago enjoying some delicious oils and yours is up there with the best. Really !" Below are some pictures and a short video from the mill. The process was fascinating start to finish. After being washed, the olives are ground into a paste and turned over and over in the "malaxer," for about 30-45 minutes. Malaxing the paste help separate the oil from the pulp. From there, the pulp is sent into centrifuge, and spun at a very high rate to separate the oil from the pulp. At the end of the chute, out comes freshly cold pressed extra virgin olive oil!
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Max here... I want to write about the dinner I cooked tonight. Not because it was some fabulous recipe. I want to mention it because it came from a mentality shift I am going through. We have been so busy lately between the Olive Harvest, and getting lots of new plants in the ground. Then, a few weeks ago, our two kids got sick, and the cold hung on for several days before clearing up. Eventually I got it too -- no fun, especially when there's so much to get done. I can't call in sick and just tell the plants and weeds to stop growing for a few days. My thought was "Why are we getting sick? Don't we lead a pretty healthy lifestyle and fresh diet?" Of course, I realize even the healthiest among us will get sick to some degree from time to time, but nonetheless it made me stop and rethink about what we've been eating lately. I didn't like what I saw. Can the farmer be too busy to eat his own food? Sounds silly. But I realized we were sliding down that slope. Amidst all the to-do, we found we were eating more and more "quick foods." Not your typical "quick food." But things like more sandwiches made with Ezechiel bread, and a lot of eggs, since they cook up quickly. I'm not saying that those are bad things to eat, but we weren't eating according to our dietary goals inspired by Weston A. Price, and the Sally Fallon's Nourishing Traditions. We have a freezer full of our very own chickens, but we weren't finding time to make stock and chicken. We do eat salads from our farm every day, but not as much kale, cilantro and parsley as we could be -- all green super foods that should be nourishing our bodies! So today, I pulled one of those chickens out, and some extra chicken feet we had, and put it in the stock pot to simmer. I walked the farm to see what I could pick fresh for tonight's dinner. I took home Romaine Lettuce, Kale, Green Onions, Ripe Tomatoes, Parsley, Cilantro. Tonight we enjoyed a large salad dressed with our own new olive oil (blog post on that coming soon!!). We had rice cooked in nourishing chicken stock, with kale, cilantro, parsley, garlic and green onion. We added the chicken to the rice, and at last we felt like we were once again eating a traditional, nourishing, delicious meal. And we knew the story behind where it all came from. And we're going to do it again tomorrow! Here's to picking up wherever you are, and doing one thing to put healthier, fresher food in our bodies, and connect with the story of that food and who grew it! For those of you that want the "recipe", here it is:
Rice Cooked in Chicken Stock 2 cups rice (we use organic long grain brown) 4 cups chicken stock Any amount of chicken meat (we use the meat from the carcass used to make stock) 2 Onions 4-6 cloves garlic A little Butter Several generous three-finger pinches of salt (we use Celtic Sea Salt.) Saute the onions in butter until cooked, and salt them well. Add the garlic and cook another couple minutes. Add the rice, stock, salt and chicken, and bring to a boil. Cover and simmer for 1-2 hours until the rice has soaked up all the stock. Once the rice is done, add freshly chopped green onion, cilantro and parsley and serve. Adding some lemon and butter or olive oil also helps. Add salt if needed. Max and Deirdre writing together here...
It's 8:45 pm, and we just wrapped up hosting a dinner at our house for a small group of friends who came out for our very first harvest in our 5-acre leased olive orchard! It was a great day, and a great learning experience for all involved -- including us. We set out to pick one ton, but ended up getting a half ton by the end of the day. We'll keep this post mostly photos, and few words for now, not only because it's late, and Max needs to be up tomorrow at 4:30 to drive the olives to the mill in Santa Ynez, but also because the photos speak for themselves! We'll be back soon with more details! Another great video that Diego Footer filmed a few weeks back when he came up to our farm for the day. This one is my favorite -- it shows in detail exactly how we pack the 100+ custom orders that come in through our webstore each week at Ojai Farmstand. It's a process that has been 4 years in the making, and is being improved all the time. We are making small tweaks now, instead of major adjustments, but those tweaks can make a huge difference. One brief example: until last week, we had to manually re-sort the boxes once they were packed, within a specific delivery route, to be able to order them such that the driver has them in the order they need to be delivered. This order is essential to efficient delivery. We now found a way to organize our labels report such that the labels are listed already in the correct order for the route. It was actually a suggestion of Diego when he was watching the whole process that got me thinking about a way to do this. It sounds simple, but we have to work within the parameters of the software we use for the store. We don't have the money or programming skills to design our own software tailored to our exact needs; we need to make do with programs that come close to what we want to do. Fortunately, after just a couple hours of trying different spreadsheets and reports, I found a way to order the labels in the right way. Thanks Diego! That leads me to say the best thing about this video for ME is now thousands of people are seeing the process, and commenting on it on youtube. Already in just 2 days, there have been several very helpful and interesting comments / suggestions from people on things we could do to improve. I LOVE that! Everybody has a unique angle from which they see something different, and somebody across the country watching the video once can suggest something I never thought of, even though I have seen the process every single week for 4 years! A fresh set of eyes is priceless. I am so grateful to all who commented on the video, and I will reply to those comments, and even make a post here with some of the best ones. Ben Hartman says in the Lean Farm that a good idea that goes unspoken is a form of waste. This is a very cool example of this, and Diego did us a great favor by opening up the process to all his viewers to see it and critique it. Keep it coming folks, and thanks for watching! Be sure to check out all the rest of Diego's amazing content both on youtube and his podcast. Hi there! Deirdre here...
Recently I have become really excited about doing traditional crafts, particularly sewing, knitting, crocheting. I often find myself perusing the internet for photos and information on knitting, yarn sources, hand made clothing on etsy, super cute DIY home decor, etc. I started to feel frustrated that I was just dreaming of doing these and was never actually starting to just do them! (I could easily imagine myself still just looking at others' work in a year!!) So about a week ago I actually went to the arts and crafts store and bought yarn, knitting needles, very basic sewing stuff, and some twine and cute mini clothes pins for a craft project I'd been wanting to do for ages. It felt so good to begin turning my dreams into fruition. Instead of sitting on the couch with my phone in the evening looking at others' stuff, I am sitting on the couch beginning to crochet! I am committing to crocheting for at least a few minutes every day. My goal is to be able to knit and crochet hats, headwarmers, and Christmas stockings. (In my family growing up, my mom knit a stocking for each one of the kids and I always wanted to do the same thing.) As well as beginning to crochet, I also sewed felt hats for our flower fairy Halloween costumes and have been mending some clothes... very basic stuff but you have to start somewhere! My goal for sewing is to make basic baby clothes, headbands, and especially adorable baby bonnets (with Liberty of London calico). I hope one day to be able to raise sheep for wool, learn how to spin, and do the whole process from wool to clothes but for now it feels so good to be beginning to connect with generations of other women for whom these were every day important tasks! Max here... remember this post from back in March?
http://www.firststepsfarm.com/blog/olives-chickens-and-a-new-farming-adventure I don't think we've posted anything about the orchard since that original post, but we still have it, and have been working up there for the last 8 months. And now, we are exactly one week away from our first harvest!! We've been waiting for this moment for a long time! This is a very different kind of farming than what we are used to, and the next 1-2 months are going to be extremely busy harvesting, hauling, milling, bottling labeling, and then pruning the whole orchard shortly after that! I've never had to deal with more than a truckload of produce at once, now we are going to be hauling tons (literally!) of olives from the orchard to the mill. A combination of good luck and diligent care has won us a large crop this year, and almost all our 825 trees are loaded with olives. They are varying sizes, and a small number of trees are ripe now, with the majority ripening around Thanksgiving and early December. Our harvest next Sunday will harvest only the small portion that is ripe now, and we will be able to get a feel for the whole process, and press a small batch of oil before harvesting starts in earnest in about a month. Needless to say, the concept of having gallons and gallons of prime cold-pressed, local extra virgin olive oil is exhilarating! But I guess we shouldn't count our bottles before their pressed... stay tuned, the anticipation is building! Hi Folks, Max writing. As the weather finally begins to cool off here, our summer crops are winding down. Siobhan and Declan enjoyed picking some of the last tomatoes from the vines in front of our house, and we are saving the best ones to sell, and making tomato sauce out of the rest of them. We're also picking the last of our eggplant and basil, and it looks like the zucchini will hang on for a bit longer. We did a much later planting of zucchini -- it was a gamble, but it has stayed warm enough and it is paying off now!
One big change for us going into the fall is that for the first time, we are having a wholesale nursery 40 minutes down the road start our fall/winter crops for us. Up until now, we have grown all our own transplant starts ourselves, with varying levels of success. Even when all goes well, it is one more thing to do around the farm, and we are delighted to be paying the nursery $13 per flat of plants, and they show up to our farm in perfect condition. I no longer have to drive out to farm 2x per day including weekends (plants don't stop needing water on the weekend!) just to water the transplants. I simply supply the seeds to the nursery, and then leave them in the hands of professionals, who have the perfect greenhouse setup, and then I pick them up when they are ready. It's been a huge time saver for us, AND we now have increased yields because of high transplant quality. About a month ago, we transplanted out romaine lettuce, butter lettuce, salanova lettuce for salad mix, spinach, kale, and green onions. We are now harvesting large amounts of all those crops! We are so excited to have fresh greens again, other than arugula, which grows quite well through our hot 100+ degree summers. |
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