How to S.L.O.W. roast a whole chicken with garlic (Farm to Table version)

Roasting Time: 90 minutes
Preparation Time: 12 months, plus 4 months and 2 days, 12 hours and 15 minutes
Ingredients:
1 free range mostly organic home raised chicken
20-40 gloves of home grown garlic
2 Tablespoons butter (sorry...we don't raise dairy cows or make our own butter) 
Salt, pepper and thyme sprigs (yes, we grow the thyme)
Total cost: More money, time, sweat and cursing than any meal should require = Priceless 

Preparation:
12 months...

Plant garlic cloves in early September. Mulch with compost soil, straw and cover with coffee sacks.
In early spring, remove the burlap coffee bags

Clip garlic scapes in July (as they begin to curl.)  = Side Track...dry in dehydrator for several hours, chop in food processor, mix with salt to make garlic scape salt!

Harvest garlic in early August (or when the leaves become brown). Hang out of sun light but in the breeze for 1 month. 

Clip and brush each head of garlic to remove dirt and roots. Store in house

4 months and 2 days

Order chics in early spring.
Pick up at the feed store (this year it was June)
Keep them under a heat lamp until their feathers emerge, about 6 weeks. We use a plastic swimming pool in the garage. 

Move them outside to the chicken tractor = Side Track...build a chicken tractor the summer or two before. Sara is good at it but it adds a few weeks to the preparation time of this dish!

Morning - let chickens out to free range. Move tractor to clean grass, replenish food, water and grit

Evening - move chickens into tractor and say a prayer that predators stay far away!

Repeat daily for 4 months - the last month, you may need to move the tractor to fresh grass twice per day.

After 4 months, load the chickens up in a truck or trailer and drive them for processing. 

Be sure to call early in the summer for an appointment. This year we needed to take them to Brainard, MN. This added two days of driving to the preparation time. 

Store the chicken in the freezer until you are ready to roast it (actually, it should thaw for a couple of days in the fridge...adding 2 MORE days to the preparation time!

12 hours 

7:30 a.m. (in the spring when the maple sap is running) - build a fire.
Feed the fire, using dry downed wood from the forrest, for approx. 12 hours.

= Side Track...Tapping trees, hauling and storing sap, primary boil (day 1-12 hours), secondary finishing boil (day 2-6ish hours and then can or bottle maple syrup! 

...and Paula says; "I sure hate to waste all of those coals!"

15 minutes

Make sure someone else is tending the fire and sap!

Peel 20-40 cloves of garlic and place in and around chicken
Rub 2 Tbls butter in and around chicken
Sprinkle with salt, pepper and thyme

*Borrow cool cast iron pot from your pal!

Using a l-o-n-g steal shovel, move coals aside to create a hole. Carefully set the caste iron pan into the red hot coals! Then carefully shovel the set aside coals on top of the pot.

Leave buried in the coals for 90 minutes

Carefully remove the coals from on top of the pan and dig out the pot. (I carried the hot pot into the house using the metal shovel! Headlamp required at this point in the process.) Be careful not to set the pot down on ANYTHING that could burn or melt!

Use a meat thermometer to make sure the chicken is done. 

ENJOY slowly and with immense gratitude and great intention!

Good Night Hannah Dog

 

Across the evening sky, all the birds are leaving

But how can they know it's time for them to go?

Before the winter fire, I will still be dreaming

I have no thought of time

For who knows where the time goes?

Who knows where the time goes?

song lyrics by Sandy Denny 

It was a slow gradual decline with a rapid plummet at the end. Our dear Hannah dog, curator of all things Nammah's Place, left us for the last time. It was time for her to go. March 15, 2021. 

What has become clear in the last few days of reflection and memory stroll, is how inextricably interconnected she is with this place. Nammah's Place WAS Hannah's Place! She arrived at 3 months and spent all of her (one month shy of) 14 years here. She owned this place and knew it. It was her free range dog paradise. 

I believe with every core of my being that Hannah was meant to live, and die, here at Nammah's Place. This dog who came to us with anxieties about being tied up, or fenced in, or left alone - found a place where she could run free (most of the time!)

I (Paula) have learned so much from this gentle soul: How to greet each day with a fresh enthusiasm. What unconditional love really looks like. And how to age with strength and grace. 

[maple syruping, March 13, 2021]

In her death I am finding new lessons about grief. There is something so complete about her life and death. She lived fully until the end and in the end was clearly used up. I could not ask for anything more. Not even another day! It would feel wrong and selfish. Grief with gratitude!

More familiar to me is grief with regret. Want for more time. Regrets about what was or wasn't. With Hannah, there is none of that. I have no regrets and there was no more to want for!

In fact the opposite is true...prior to my retirement from UMD I heard myself say: "I just want a full year at home with my dog." No rushing off to work or being distracted by a busy schedule. When I start to twist elements of regret into my grief, I think about how I was given exactly what I asked for (plus 13 bonus days!) It makes me smile. COVID19 allowed the gift of a daily 24/7 for a full year! I find it hard to imagine it being any more complete.

And still we grieve. A full and complete life is still a fatal and final end at death. Because Hannah WAS Nammah's Place, she is everywhere here. At each location I find myself on our property, I know exactly where Hannah would be perched while joining us there. Her preferred perches were clear and not to be dissuaded! Her preference for the side of the gravel road (between the house and garden) when we were in the garden - was particularly unnerving. It was as if she wanted a front row seat to the infrequent passer by. As they slowed to avoid her, she was sure they were stopping to chat (or pet.) 

Hannah was a garden dog.

A woods woman!

Spirit Field appreciator

A lover of little visitors (and older ones too)

She loved the front porch
And her favorite position was repose!

Good night Hannah. I don't know where the time goes, but I am forever grateful for your time with us.

"What makes you think I was out digging?"

What happened to 2020!?

 I was prepared (and even inspired) to write a post with the lyrics to Sara's "Song Like a Seed" about the garden tucking in tight for winter when I logged on and...(screeching halt) that is exactly what I posted the last time I was on here, one year ago! SO...where did Nammah 2020 go? Well children, hold onto your hats!! Once upon a time...

...there was a year called 2020. SO many difficult things happened that there were jokes and memes about "when will it end?!" It also happened to be the year that Paula retired from her 30 year career at the University of Minnesota-Duluth! Coincidence? Nah.

2020 was the year of a virus called COVID-19 (and no, it wasn't the 19th virus, it started in 2019). 

This virus caused a world "shelter in place" just a week or so after the most amazing retirement party - 

followed by the best (and last) spring break trip to Red River Gorge in Kentucky! 

A cancelled flight and a COVID quarantine road trip home via rental car, and that was that! 

Almost 9 months later - we are still in the same place. With COVID19 and the timing of this blog post!

There is a garden that grows at night

Then in the winter it tucks in tight

Drifts off in dreams about birds in flight

Who carry the seeds of this garden’s life

~Sara Thomsen, from Song Like a Seed

  

SO...instead of planting songs like a seed (as Sara would do). Paula planted seeds like a song! A Sarah Greer style songtaneous improv jazz song!! 

Thanks to Paula's retired pandemic existence (and overall way of being), more than birds carried the seeds for Nammah's 2020 life! Neither Seed Savers nor Johnney's had seeds to sell (unless you were a commercial grower) so EVERY tomato seed in our saved seed stash was germination tested and planted. The result was over 120 tomato plants (though many more that did NOT grow.) Over half of these went out to friends and neighbors. Some seeds were exchanged. It was a great year to make do what what we had and collaborate!

The end result was a greenhouse filled with 48 tomato plants and 14 hot pepper plants with basil in between. The greenhouse was packed! 

And dear Sara spent days tying up determinates! SHE was the determined one. 

Still, it was more than we could keep up with so the air flow wasn't very good and the middle section of blossoms did not get pollinated (we did get some early lower vine tomatoes for eating.) I was feeling like a failure when late season, we hacked the tops and run away suckers, put a fan in for a couple of days and a late season boom turning into a banner tomato crop. 

Salsas, spaghetti sauce, chutneys, relish, sauce, paste, ketchup, BBQ sauce, everything tomato! Sara claims that it's a good think we lost the middle crop or she might have needed to build an entire new room instead of just the extra shelves she made for the pantry! 

The hot peppers had a good year too resulting in pickled jalapenos and habanero hot sauce.

More lessons were learned as we (hind sight) neglected the soil in our outside garden. We did spent an inordinate amount of time on the greenhouse. 

New raised beds, compost soil, replacing hole-y plastic...all to say that some of the raised beds outside didn't fare as well. I am guessing it was the soil and am determined to do better next year! Though baby beets are cute, they are not what I was going for!

SO despite the difficulties that 2020 brought, and continue to bring to the world, Nammah continued to sustain, and humble, us. More is not necessarily more! IF I can remember that lesson, I vow to plant fewer seeds/plants, and give them more space and nutrition. I'll let you know (a year from now) if less is, in deed, more! 

And still...the pantry is full!