Lehman’s Country Life

Stinging Nettle

Spring finally has the sun splitting the sky here in Ireland. The winter aconite was very much later this year, as were the wild primroses and my planted daffodils. Just in time for St. Patrick’s Day the weather turned discernibly softer during the days, although the nights can still leave a ground frost.

What really alerted me to how late spring was this year was the non-appearance of the stinging nettles. The upside of stinging nettles is that they are a harbinger of good soil fertility. The downside is that they are rampant and will choke the life out of any vegetables you plant.
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The news is full of bad economic reports, more layoffs,and more budget cut backs. Many of us have to juggle more than a little to make ends meet.

One way to help your family economy is to plan for the future – and I am not talking about stocks and bonds. I am talking about planning a garden and starting to store up the canning supplies you will need to stretch your harvest.

Many times we can purchase packets of seeds we need for our gardens from family and friends or even the change we clean out of our purses or pockets. But canning supplies have gone up in price along with many of the other needs our families have.
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Year after year, surveys invariably discover that the Number One Favorite Veg of America’s backyard gardeners is the tomato, in any of its diverse forms – and often as not, in more than one of them. Why? It’s not just the pleasure (or even the economy) of being able to “do it yourself.” The reason is quality of flavor.

You don’t have to be an epicure to tell, in a single bite, the difference between a store-bought tom and a home-grown one. It’s hardly surprising why. Your typical commercial tomato begins life many hundreds of miles away from you –sometimes thousands of miles!— and has to endure picking, cleaning, grading, inspecting, packing, shipping, unpacking, and then being displayed…before it ever gets to your shopping cart, let alone your dinner table. The goal of the commercial tomato grower is to produce a fruit that looks good after the above ordeal, one that looks so good you’ll want to pay money for it. What it tastes like isn’t an issue, at the produce stand.

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Since my last post featured one of my dad’s signature recipes, I thought I would share one of my mom’s this time. There’s almost nothing that sticks with you better for breakfast than a bowl of  granola. This is an easy recipe and makes a crunchy, hearty, not-too-sweet breakfast treat. It’s delicious with milk or yogurt, by itself or with other cereal.  I like to sprinkle it liberally on my bowl of Cheerios. Try it – I bet you’ll love it!
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I spoke with a customer recently about her wood heating stove and how she used it to cook on during the most recent ice storm and power outage in Kentucky where she lives.  (Funny, I mentioned my Aunt lives in Morgantown KY, and she said she lives not far from there.)  She owns a Resolute Acclaim from Vermont Castings.  She said, “It worked great for making biscuits.  I purchased 2 stove top thermometers from Lehman’s and put one on the top of the stove and the other on the Dutch Oven I was using to cook with.”

Here are a few tips she’d like to pass along:

1. The wood that you’re burning needs to be fully seasoned, no wet or moisture-laden wood.
2. The temp of the stove needs to be 500-550 degrees for baking biscuits.
3. Use a stove pipe thermometer on the top of the stove as well as on the top of your Dutch oven to ensure the temp is kept even.
4. For baking time refer to your favorite recipe.
5. Absolutely NO PEEKING into the Dutch oven while the biscuits are baking.

Her daughter thought these were the best biscuits she’s ever made.

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It was a couple of years ago that Euell Gibbons got me all fired up about making my own maple syrup. It was late winter then and I was not prepared for my venture into syrup making at that point. But the following year I was ready. And I was fortunate enough to get me some of that sweet, golden nectar.

Yes indeed, there was some work involved, but the results far outweigh the effort. I was in it not to sell bottles of syrup, but to just make enough for my family and even a few friends to try.

With just a few maple trees (we will discuss species later), you too can have your own sugary sweetness. It doesn’t take a lot of fancy equipment; in fact, about the most expensive thing you will need is time.
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He used to make it only when the snow was flying, usually on his days off from his job as a registered nurse.

My sister Becca and I knew Dad had baked bread as soon as we hit the door, just off the schoolbus. Our little house would be filled with a welcoming, unmistakable aroma, and big, crusty loaves of his signature whole-wheat bread (”Daddy Bread” to us) would be cooling on dishtowels on the counter.  We’d eat some hot right then (if he’d let us), and multiple pieces of “Daddy toast” were often breakfast each morning before school. It was best with just a bit of butter – no jelly to overtake the nice, yeasty flavor.
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Cold winds are blowing, temperatures are freezing and below, snow is falling, and the ice on the steps refuses to melt. Sounds like the basics of weather this time of year. These conditions make it hard to be outdoors, but it’s a wonderful time for some rib-sticking comfort foods.

While researching this article I started by looking at what my family has been having on the supper menu the last couple of weeks. Although we are located in North Carolina, the temperatures here have been unusually cold, with nights in the single digits and days barely getting out of the teens. Our family meal choices have reflected the foods I grew up with in the Northeast.
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Quite often over the years people have asked me , “What do you eat? Or does it get boring eating from the garden all the time ?” So I thought I would share some of our favorite recipes with you from time to time. Let me say right here not everything we eat comes from the farm. About 90% of what we eat we produce. Some things I do buy at the grocery store but you don’t need a farm or garden to use these recipes as the ingredients are available at the grocery store.

Let me begin with breakfast because for us it is essential  to give us energy to begin the day’s work. Almost every day begins with oatmeal with other things added that are both nutritious and tasty. We do eat other things too sometimes.
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Did you know that pumpkins are really a fruit? They are members of the Cucurbitaceae Family (how’d you like that for a last name?), the same family to which cucumbers, gourds and melons belong. Indigenous pumpkins have probably been growing in the United States for at least 5,000 years. Not the same pumpkins of course. Unless you count the one grown by Dave Stelts of Leetonia, Ohio that weighed in at 1,140 pounds.

So, the question of the day is, if you were Mr. Stelts, and you had over 1,000 pounds of pumpkin sitting on your front porch, what in the world would you do with it? We asked our employees, friends and family here at Lehman’s for some of their best pumpkin stories. We will include some recipes, but we are talking unusual pumpkins stories.

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