Spring Cleaning, Kale Pesto & Hey, It's Garden Time Again.

Hey y'all it's spring! Hence the lapse in posting. A new garden to till, seeds to plant, & since we actually have a yard here raking & clearing of flower beds & all that fun stuff. Including grilling outside!
Hells yeah to having a huge yard in a gorgeous place.
Watching chickens frolic while grilling meat is where it's at.
It's been busy busy times around here. I've been putting in many hours at the day job (numbers numbers numbers) & we have land to clear, since our cottage came with ample abandoned garden space. We were going to rent a rototiller but since for the past two weeks I've only had Sundays off, it just didn't work out & we couldn't resist starting to dig.
Then the awesome sense of accomplishment that comes with doing shit by hand got to us & we'll probably just finish it that way. We invested in a nice shiny new pitchfork. I'm totally loving it.
On top of all that, I agreed to make a painting at my boss' request as a present for my co-worker's son's first birthday, & that is guaranteed to make me a nervous wreak on all counts. I am always apologetic when people buy my paintings, I'm terrible at creating work on request, & I don't know anything about babies. Plus I love this co-worker, so even though I was being paid it really mattered to me that she like the finished product.
Here's what I came up with:

March 2012: Teenaged Chickens Love Kale. 

There you are. I CAN work on commission! Call me for all your chicken painting needs. Really, do that.
I need an agent. Or the right sort of self-esteem. 
I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out. Those are two of our now eight week old chickens. They do adore kale. 
So I've been doing that, working, gardening.
I have this week gone on a spring cleaning spree. The house has gotten rather of out of hand with everything else going on so my goal this week has been to take on at least one major cleaning task every night, since I no longer have a painting deadline & I have a real weekend off this week so the garden can happen then.
I am quite fond of Easter. As holidays go, it pleases me. As does Passover. I do have a Catholic & Jewish soul I guess. I want the house in a good place by then. My plan is since we have spent every holiday since we got married last September running around between in-laws this one we are staying home & I am cooking a leg of lamb & we will eat chopped liver & matzo crackers first & we will spend the day living fabulously & decadently & enjoying each other. Hell, we have chickens now-we can dye eggs laid in our yard!
Oh yeah, Kale Pesto. Yes this is a food blog! Kale Pesto.
I'm obsessed with it. I feel like finding a cheap way to make decent pesto in the winter is achieving a major life goal for me.
I buy a lot of kale in winter because it's cheap & I'm poor & I like eating green foods.  I get bored with it though.
Secret fact: I'm a very food adventurous & love vegetables but until Owen had his vegan restaurant cooking job & learned a certain kale & cumin seed trick, I hated eating kale.
 What can I say? I grew up in New Bedford, Massachusetts & we had Kale Soup in the elementary school cafeteria quite frequently. It isn't easy to get over early food trauma like that.
 KALE PESTO has really blown my mind. Although I greatly anticipated garden food season, we are not there yet, not at all. Still a few weeks away from asparagus & fiddleheads & ramps, even.
A bunch of kale is a couple of dollars & making a quick pesto out of it is a cheering way to eat summerish food right now in early April when you want it but it is not here yet.
Recently I have made a kale pesto & chicken apple sausage lasagna. I made a nice pasta thing with kale pesto, anchovies, & cannelloni beans. Kale pesto makes a delicious sandwich condiment, & is fantastic mixed in scrambled eggs. Good over grilled applewood smoked chicken (we have a huge downed apple tree here). 
Recipe, Sort Of: Kale + Olive Oil + Cheese + Garlic + Salt & Pepper + Chili Pepper Flakes &/or Splash of Sriracha (Optional, I like it hot), into the food processor. Quantities to taste. Any cheese works fine.  
There you have it. There are always new things to learn about food. Thank Christ. I'd be so bored otherwise.
Kale Pesto! Fantastic!

An Overdose of Cute? Nah, Just The Perfect Amount.

Obviously, I am talking about the day 27 of the cutest puffballs you ever saw arrived at the Greenfield, Massachusetts post office in a box & we took them home.

February 2012: The Arrival Of The Puffballs.

These little guys are just absurdly cute. For the first couple of days, it was really hard to keep from just sitting & staring at them & pointing out incessantly how cute they were. Well, more than a week in, & we still kind of do that. 
How did we end up living in Cute City? Well, it all began one early January Saturday morning sitting around drinking coffee & reading the Murray McMurray Hatchery online catalog. Or did it begin with my picking up the excellent book Farm City by Novella Carpenter & falling in love with the idea of a box of baby poultry arriving via the U.S. Mail? Or did it simply begin last December when I emailed about a seemingly perfect craigslist rental that came complete with a chicken coop?
No, it all truly began much much earlier in time, when I met, started dating, & then married a guy as into or even possibly more so, crazy garden & farm plans as I am.
From the day we met we wanted to do this, & so what, if on that fateful January morning it seemed totally insane? So what if we already had four chickens, & the money we spent on the chicks could have been better employed elsewhere.
Spring is the season for chicks. We, by some very lucky twist of fate, ended by living somewhere we could have baby chicks just in time to place our order. How could we not? If you asked us in early December, we would have said sadly that we were at least a year, if not years, away from this project.
Look at us now. Lucy, Amanda Jo, Miranda, & Lulu outside in the chicken run, & an assortment of Barred Rocks, Araucanas, Golden Campines, Black Australorps, Partridge Rocks, & Sliver Laced Wyandottes currently chirping away in a brooder in our second bedroom.
We started with 27, but we lost one on the second day. Very sad especially considering it was a trying day during which I mostly focused on coming home to baby chicks, so finding that sad little body was quite a blow, but a week later the other 26 are still going strong.
It is really amazing to watch them grow. In just a week & a day, they have gone from little balls of fluff to much more bird like creatures, with wings & the tiniest most adorable tail feathers you ever saw. Their tail feathers kill me. Seriously.
If this post has a point beyond the obvious fact that omg, baby chicks are cute, it is that sometimes you have to just take a risk & go for the things that you know you want in your life. You can't just wait around to make enough money to afford your dream life later, sometimes you just have to go for it, & buy those baby chicks even though we knew we'd need that money down the road.
I don't regret it. Just now I took a break from writing this post to go outside & shut up the outdoor chickens in their coop for the night, & I can't properly express how happy the chicken tasks make.
In the last couple of weeks I have been reading the books & blog of Jenna Woginrich & I hate to use the word inspiring, but they really have been.
Big shout out to the farm & garden & food sections of the Forbes Library of Northampton for making us not even miss tv or netflix online or hulu during the almost two months we have lived here.
Turns out, I love having farm chores. My days are more fulfilling with chickens. I am happier here than I have maybe ever been, scary finances or not. We are on the right track.