There was so much to love about dinner tonight; free-range grilled chicken with rosemary and slices of lemon, Purple potatoes, baby fennel, colorful carrots, even baby artichokes simmered in vegetable broth, then grilled to perfection. But who gets all the attention? That's right, the pesto. There were even artichokes in the pesto, but like the unpopular friend who latches on to the cool kid in school, it was barely noticed. Mara confessed after dessert and the end of our movie, that she was upset. Upset with pesto. "Pesto has an unfair advantage", she said, "it's got it all". The perfect combination of tantilizing tastes, basil (the king of herbs), garlic, lemon, olive oil, expensive pine nuts, and parmesano-reggiano (the king of cheese), this kid has got it all. The other food in the dish hardly held a candle to the sauce in the corner of the plate. I had to admit it was a little unfair. I mean here we had made a special trip to get all the special baby vegetables from the farm cooler (forgot to bring it home after market), the chicken was quite expensive, yet the pesto, made a few weeks ago, late at night as an afterthought to use up some extra wilting basil, needed only to be pulled from the freezer, lumped into a bowl and allowed to melt. Talk about being born with a silver spoon. This trustfunder never had to work a day in its life. The basil plants from which it came have loafed through the season falling prey to any member of the wrong crowd who breezed by, from beetles to grassy weeds. And yet, it shines.
There was always that cool kid in class that got all the attention, never did a damn thing, but got all the grades, girls (or boys) and teacher accolades. Pesto is that valedictorian, and my poor little baby vegetables, the quiet workers who never got noticed. Even as I ate dinner, I thought, "I could use a little more pesto." This is a call to action. We all know the score. Pesto has sat on top for centuries. Mara has vowed to dethrone the king. Can the humble mojo, a Spanish knock-off made with blended toasted almonds, roasted red peppers, olive oil, garlic and salt, take down the verdant star? Can a Vietnamese ginger-lemongrass-cilantro-chile paste gain attention in the shadow of the de facto paragon of flavor? Perhaps an olive tapanade can claw its way from the back of the class to gain recognition for its hard work all these years? So many more sauces should have the attention that this simple green mash receives. I could hear the cries of the fennel, the wails of the carrots. They had grown so long in the ground (75 days!), and yet were second string in the presence of this popular simple sauce made with easy-to-grow basil (55 days!). Mara and I know the sting of being the quiet ones in class, of being overlooked, helping the valedictorians with their physics homework, only to be left sitting in the back clapping with stupid grins on our faces during the graduation speech. Well, no more! The time has come to overturn the slacker kings. We will henceforth be seaching for that diamond in the rough, the replacement for the king of sauces.
And, we will also be making a lot of pesto to freeze for the winter. Huzzah!
Well, the weather has definitely shifted and those 60 degree days we had in October are gone for this year, I think. However, today was a very nice high 30s that already feels warmish to me (hard to imagine!) after some pretty chilly days. In honor of the nice, dry morning with promise of afternoon rain/sleet, the dogs and I decided to finish one last remaining farm task - mulching the garlic! This is normally a not so nice job, as the straw usually has gotten wet by now and we have heavy, moldy, slippery nasty straw to deal with. Not this year! We invested in an extra-large tarp to cover it with last year, and it is up on a hay rick near our swale field, so it's off the ground, which allows it to drain if it does get wet. 
I was pleasantly surprised to find only a couple of damp bales, and mostly dry intact ones. I loaded them into our garden cart, and made 4 trips to the beds with the garlic, where it was relatively easy to break up the bales, and heap it up onto the beds. I also discovered, or actually, Mr. Smeems discovered, a nice warm cat nest in the heap of straw under the tarp. There were 6 kittens that look about 5 weeks old. I think 
Mr. S thought it was the best day of his life to have made such a find, but I made sure that he didn't terrorize them too much, and made them a safe nest out of harm's way. We had been hoping that someone had inhabited the straw bales because it did look cozy, warm and dry in there! Charley, Spencer's dad helped us to plant our garlic on November 2nd, which we really appreciated. He was a great hole maker as Spence and I scooted along and filled in the holes with the garlic cloves. 
We had promised ourselves and the garlic that we'd make it back out to the field before too long to do the final step - mulching with 6 inches of straw to ensure early season warming and encourage those bulbs to throw out green shoots when the time is right. Also, it helps to keep down the weeds in those early weeks of the season. Alas, it took us nearly 4 weeks as we got over colds, and dealt with other tasks before I made it out there to finish the job. We won't be pulling the garlic until around July 15th, so it needs a happy, healthy spot to rest for the 8 months. We have found that it really likes going into the place where our potatoes were. The garlic we grow is very similar to a German Extra Hardy Hardneck variety. We actually don't know what it is exactly - we obtained the original seed garlic from a farmer named Ann-Elise Johnson when she was leaving the Intervale 4 
years ago, and she got it from someone else who got it from someone else who got it from....so we call it Ann-Elise. We've continued to select for the largest cloves to plant, and were finally able to sell some of it this year for the first time - we have grown our original stock of around 150 cloves (1 clove = 1 bulb of 5 or so cloves when mature) to 2000! Of this, we will sell 1000 bulbs green in July, 500 dry through the fall, and we'll plant the remaining 500 bulbs into our fields next November. We hope to keep building our planting stock up, which means we'll be able to sell more and more each year. This is some amazing garlic! 
People get very pushy about the garlic when it makes it to our farmstand in July (most of it goes to chefs, I must admit, who put in their orders in January for hundreds of bulbs of green garlic!), because they don't want to miss out. We've even had to withhold it from people we previously said we'd sell it to just to make sure that we can have enough to plant next year. Sorry if you happen to be one such person - we simply want to keep the crop growing so that we can sell it to you next year! The green garlic I mentioned earlier is so special because it is not as pungent as cured, or dry garlic, and it is soooooooo much easier to peel since you don't have to deal with all those papery skins. Our garlic is particularly nice 
because the cloves are so huge, you don't need to peel as many to get the requisite amount for a recipe. We are constantly amazed by how big these cloves are and estimate one clove to be on average the size of 3 normal sized cloves. Yum! We had our friend Gregory Poulin paint a couple of renditions of garlic for us, and the ones you see here on the blog are both his. His interpretaions of our scapes is a particular favorite. Sleep well, garlic - I'm already thinking about my favorite summer garlic recipes!
Turkey goes into the tumbler, which acts like tons o' fingers and plucks most feathers off.
Turkey gets hung upside down, and de-necked, de-intestined, de-cropped, de-gizzarded, de-livered, de-hearted, de-lunged and de-footed here. The livers, gizzards, hearts and necks go into a bag to accompany the turkeys. We also pick off remaining feathers.
Trying my hand at eviscerating...
Success!
Spencer was great at getting the lungs out all in one piece! 
He's done it again! After this, they get iced, and then off to final inspection.
Dawn's dad was in charge of final inspection.
And voila! Time from lopping to bag for each turkey is about 10-15 minutes; it was a very smooth process that we actually really enjoyed. See you on Thanksgiving, Mr. Turkey!
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WHAT?!
