Guest Chef and Dog's Plot

Although Dog's Plot Restaurant is self-serving and not open the the
public, we sometimes invite a guest chef to give us a lesson: here the
very young chef Silas Clay, working with foraged ingredients in our
elaborate summer kitchen.

Guest Chef and Dog's Plot

Although Dog's Plot Restaurant is self-serving and not open to the public, we sometimes invite a guest chef: this one being a very young survivalist who gave a cooking demonstration in our summer kitchen, using foraged materials.

VineLand

The early European arrivals called this continent  "Vineland", because of the  grape vines that grew wild  over  just about everything and still do. The big old corn crib next door had its poles climbed right up onto theroof and had spread over the whole roof.  It was full of bats and swallows until the neighbor who had hoped to improve the barn sometime, cut the vines and they haven't remounted, but the grape vnes rule around here,.  They are all over the pop up Rose of Sharon trees that came here with me, and go up my Pear trees like they meant to eat the pears.  They would eat the whole tree, if I didn't cut them back...and then they creep along and under the ground. I have made jelly from the wild grapes but they are mostly seed and low on sugar.

So, of course, I decided early on that i had to plant grape vines, so I did: several vines, of several types, in several scattered locations, including beside the chicken house, hoping it would go right up, cover the roof, and mount the cupola. 

Which it did, but every season when we have had grapes ripening there and in the other places I had planted them, the birds coons and possums ate them before the fruit was ripe. I think the critters like them better than the wild ones.  I know that the remedy is fences , severe pruning, and nets over the developing fruit, along with a speaker system broadcasting the loud distress calls of the bird species currently feasting.

But I would rather have ... A WORM FARM! 

Anyway Dog's Plot is and will stay a low volume homestead.

A normal egg, an extra large elongated egg, and a tiny, wild-bird egg I found i the grass  ten months ago an have kept safe since.  I do not plan to look inside that one ...tough maybe we could "candle " it with a strong back-light, as they do to determine sex or fertility.  Which reminds me of old Aunt Sammy, who told my semi-adopted brother William that she was his real mother, having (she claimed) been pregnant for twenty or thirty year with the offspring of an Oswegtchie River guide ... whose name I can't at the moment remember. 

Dog's Plot Restaurant

 DOGS PLOT RESTAURANT

 

Here at our tiny Dog’s Plot Mom and Pop Up Restaurant (once the cats have been fed) our staff of two spends  most of the morning conferring over coffee -  first about the coffee, then about the day's menu -  after which  we move on to other food related subjects,  like today, for instance:
    Learning that  a camel hump is not actually a sort of water bag, but that it is mostly FAT; what good is a bag of camel fat when you are crossing the desert? 
    Which brings us to a lot of other questions we can't answer.
    By the time the questioning petered out this morning,  we had just about finished the coffee, so Georgia started to put together some of her famous banana-oatmeal- raisin-date-nut breakfast cookies and then chopped up the resulting  banana skins for me to take down to the chicken house with some spilled dry cat food from the kitchen floor for the chickens to breakfast on..
    Now that the hens have started noticing that the days are getting longer so that they have started laying again, one of the hens was on the nest yet, and missing out on the scratch, and, after  I put some layer ration in all the regular containers, I lingered to pile little on the rim of her nest box so she would miss out on the eats.
     I had left the orchard ladder standing down there under a pear tree I had not finished pruning yesterday, so I took care of some of it with the clippers I carry on my belt, then went back to get the pole handled pruner for some I couldn't reach with the ladder, then I had to check to see if the chickens had water, and by  the time I got back it well past most peoples lunch time, and I hadn't had what most would call a breakfast even:  only my usual oatmeal cookie, which is plenty the first thing in the day for me, and so good and healthy that I always carry them as s travel food. We could sell those cookies, they are so practical, and good but we don’t. 
    But of course it is not practical or even possible for us to serve breakfast or lunch to others here.
         And supper or dinner or whatever you call  the one meal one has if one is having only one, is a big deal for us: an intimate family function, not a commercial operation,.  In short, we are NOT your orfdanary sort of restaurant that serves the public. Dog's Plot Restaurant is  mostly a conceptual thing; you know. As a matter of fact, we don't even know what we are going to have now

When I returned from pruning in the orchard this afternoon, Georgia wanted to know what adventures I had out there, but all is chilled and still, and anyway, when I walk, or work, or just stand among the trees I have planted and the wild seedlings I have grafted on to out back here - some of them big as a house now - instead of just feeling kind of proud, I feel like my own grandfather, or my own grandson, or an ancestral ghost, or all at once, and nobody in particular at all. It is cold up on the orchard ladder and I came in early, to avoid turning into a tree, though it was very close. That would be quite an adventure and a tale I could never be able to tell, but it would be a good way to go.

Chickens in Snow Mode

The snow fell in rafts of flakes, and Gerald Rooster saw no reason to
stay out in it, but the hens persisted and sweetly accepted their snow
coats.