I love doing morning chores this time of year. You get the peace of pre-dawn, plus a chance to see the world wake up at sunrise. This week provided a couple of stunning sunrises with crescent moons. I wish I could carry my good camera during chores, but the cell phone shot will have to do.

It’s been downright difficult getting back into the flow of menu planning this fall!  As a result, I’ve been eating too many dining hall meals, and my immune system hasn’t been appreciative.

However, this week represents a transition.  Term 1, which included teaching a new “solid” class, with new curriculum, has come to an end.  Term 2 will begin this Wednesday, with different challenges.  My class schedule is a little lighter, and the farmers’ market season has come to a close.  However, it’s time for the rifle team to get cranking, which means coaching every night.  And, for a couple of weeks, overlapping Lancer Band preparations for Veterans’ Day.  While winter sports seasons do tend to go on forever, I’m excited for this year’s rifle team.  We have a couple of very strong leaders returning, and a push towards national rankings for Junior Olympics from a couple of students (plus the success of our first Junior Olympian to compete at nationals last season for motivation).

All of this highlights both the difficulty and importance of getting back on the ball with menu planning.  So, let’s get this week’s menu going!

New from the farm: The garden is finishing a bit early this year, as we work on infrastructure things.  Brussels sprouts are coming in, and should appreciate cold weather late this week (we haven’t had a frost yet!).  Baby turnips, radishes, a few tomatoes and pepper are hanging in, and we’ll need to pull the basil before late week coldness kills it anyway.

Groceries: Kroger –  $67.27 (I stocked up on some things that were on great sales)

Just a small portion of our trench, showing a new hydrant install, as well as the partially-repaired electric that was cut by the backhoe, and phone line still waiting for repair

So, my weekly gratitude photo is a bit different this week.  This time, I’ve never been so grateful that I decided NOT to do a project myself.

We’re having some serious infrastructure work done on the farm.  We’re running electrical to the barn (no more extension cord from the house to the air compressor or block heater on the tractor!  Lights in the winter!), the summer kitchen to be, and the greenhouse/X’s shop.  We’re also putting in a two inch irrigation mainline from the well out about 480 feet, which should allow much lower maintenance and higher efficiency irrigation of the veggie field.

I was a bit worried about all of the underground obstacles to work around, so we hired a local electrician friend.  Such a good call!  Besides the fact that they have a lot more equipment and experience, he brought a 5 person crew out to work, expecting it to take a day and a half.  Well, until they cut the pipe from the well with the backhoe.  Then the electrical with the backhoe.  Then couldn’t find the phone/internet (it wasn’t where the location service flagged it), until they decided to dig the electrical a bit deeper to make it easier to repair.  Oops, the phone was in the same trench, just a bit deeper than the electric.    Then they ran the trencher through the drain line from the geothermal system.  Then two drain lines from the septic…

This all makes them sound incompetent, but that’s really not the case.  Things at our place were just not done in a normal manner.  I almost certainly would have run into each and every one of the same problems they did.  But wouldn’t have insurance to cover it, nor the experience fixing it all, nor the time to deal with the setbacks.  Suffice it to say, we still have no internet, the well is only producing a fraction of the flow rate it should, the lane is all torn up, and they’re probably only about half way done.  Hiring it out, even though somewhat more expensive than what I expected it would cost to have done it myself, may just be the most cost effective of choices we could have made!

Meanwhile, we did an OK, job following the menu last week.  The Tromboncini Fajitas turned out to be an amazing inspiration – really, the best fajitas I’ve had.  So, we’re going to repeat significant chunks of the same menu this week.  It’s seasonal, an yummy, and, well, there’s a lot of stuff and only a little inspiration.

New from the farm: The current produce list is over 25 items long!

Groceries: Park N. Shop – $2.82

Onions on our farmers’ market display

The weekly menu returns after its summer vacation this week!

We’re back to school with a partial week of classes under our belt, so it’s time to get back in the routine of planning meals.  Spending most of my time off-farm means we won’t be snacking on veggies while working in the field, and cooking around the schedule needs forethought.

Meanwhile, things are really hopping at the farm!  We have a huge volume of produce coming in. We’ve hauled over a ton of produce to market each of the last four weeks, with more to come.  The late summer/early fall crops have done well.  Of particular note, and a great personal existential victory, is onions.  It’s embarrassing as someone people think of as a gardening guru, but I’ve never been successful growing bulbing onions.  I’ve tried multiple methods, in gardens with widely varying conditions over 15 years, with no success.  Until this year!

This year’s onion crop produced a great harvest of salad onions in the late spring and early summer, and now we’re harvesting good-sized bulbs, with great flavor.  It’s also a variety known to be a good long-storing variety, so we should be set for the winter (though they sold like crazy at market this weekend, which surprised me a bit).

New from the farm: The current produce list is over 25 items long!

Groceries: No grocery shopping this week!

Getting ready to set up at the farmers’ market – over 1800 lbs of produce!

So I’ve received a few comments about missing menus.  Why haven’t I posted any?  Am I giving up my all-organic, all-unprocessed diet ambitions?  Or did all of the health stuff I talk about on the why page suddenly reverse itself?

Alas, I’m still fighting the autoimmune problem (though it has improved a great deal).  It’s more like the weekly menu has taken a summer vacation.

The end of the school year is crazy busy for most teachers.  For band directors at private boarding schools with many complex ceremonial needs, it’s insane.  Add to that running an organic farm, and, well, planned eating is a bit challenging.  Eating is a bit challenging…  Thus, I intentionally didn’t plan the last couple weeks of classes and all-day faculty meetings.

Immediately following that, I was way behind on the farm, due to health problems in the winter and the school schedule, but our annual Hole in the Woodstock event was just a couple of weeks away.  So, crazy days there.

From there on out, the garden has been dominating life.  Two days a week of farmers’ markets (a market may only appear to be a few hours from the outside, but it’s way more than a full days’ work!), a full day of harvesting for both…  Those are times it’s difficult to do a meal.

Ironically, they’re also times full of great food!  Every morning begins with a walk down each garden bed checking on the progress of our 2 1/2 acres of veggies.  There’s a lot of sampling that goes on during those walks!  And, of course, I spent a fair bit of time developing recipes for the onslaught of zucchini!

So, all told, I don’t really need to plan menus in the summer.  Much of my eating isn’t even in meals anyway.  However, school’s starting to come back to life.  We’ve had a few meetings and workshops already, and the band is back this weekend.  Then we jump in, with the matriculation ceremony during the eclipse!

So, I’ll be posting menus again shortly.  The next couple of weeks are going to be weird transition stuff, so I may not do so until classes get going.  But stay tuned, and we’ll be back at it soon!