Flora & Faunas Piglets

One of Flora's Piglets

Our two purebred Swallow Belly Mangalitsas had piglets.  Fauna on Dec23 and Flora on Christmas.  They are super cute, very healthy, both the piglets and mothers are doing great.

Some of Fauna's Pigs

Flora

Spring on Orcas Island

Cool but very sunny weather.  Not warm enough to eat outside, but soon it will be. 

Another tasty Mangalitsa product.  Brined and then hot smoked ham.  Really delicious, quite juicy with just enough smoke.  Tonight we will serve it with slow cooked local duck egg and asparagus cooked in some of the smoky fat.

Finally Spring

A nice calm sunny day at Ship Bay on Orcas Island.  Finally a day warm enough for bees to pollinate, the plums are in full bloom, so hopefully we will see more fruit this year.  The plums always seem to do ok with fruit production.

All the greens for the restaurant are now coming from the garden, radishes, turnips, Loma, Arugula, Pirat, Ruby Streaks Mustards, Frisee, Broccoli Rabe and Sugar Snap Tendrils.

The warm weather plant starts, tomatoes & Basil are looking very good as well, but still are on the warm bed.

Spring

Not to rave too much about any one topic, we just had to show everyone the incredible marbling of the Mangalitsa pork. This is a piece from the leg, which was brined and seared. Truely awesome.

We had the good fortune to be taught some basic grafting technique from a local expert orchardist named Ed, he grew up in Holland and was kind enough to come over and show us how to top work some old pear trees. The tree was vigorous, but the pears were not good at all. We grafted an old heirloom, asian type that we had here, and several old varieties of keeper pears that Ed had in his orchard, including one named after his father, Suij, from Holland. The tree looks kind of rough, but as the grafts take, we will continue to remove the old growth. We also grafted several plum varieties into our healthy Italian Prune Plum trees, of which we have plenty. We will look forward to reworking these trees and it will give us greater diversity and let us ripen over longer periods of time. Some of the cooking pears that Ed brought us were from last year, and are really good. As it is now, most of our pears ripen at the same time, during our busiest period, late August.

Here is a terrine being lined with some of the nice cured Mangalitsa Lardo. It is very clean and white, great for lining duck or chicken liver mousse.

The sun has been shining, lulling us into a false sense of security. We all know that many weeks of rain could be in store. But spring is unstoppable at this point, the tomatoes are started and the fruit trees are begging to bloom.