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| Arrowhead ranch barn |
Yesterday Steve and Joella got married at Arrowhead Ranch. Audrey read the hillarious Book of Love poem by Stephin Merritt. And Rose read the serious Pablo Neruda love Sonnett #17. Great herds of clouds lumbered over the mountains and across the prairie, churning up drenching bouts of rain and dripping trees. And in between the towering white shouldered beasts with their dark flanks, blue autumn filled the sky as still and patient as paint on canvas. And I thought, well Steve and Joella got the rain, but they got the clouds too.
For the wedding supper, I braised a dutch oven of beef cheeks. It's a special dish we usually only have at harvest time. The bittersweet harvest of our beautiful steers. I'm thankful for the skill and compassion of the mobile harvest service. I'm thankful for the healthy animals we raise that feed so many families. And I try to show respect by using as much as we can, like the beef cheeks. Which I had never cooked until a few years ago.
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| Dales Mobile Harvest |
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| One of my heroes |
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| Trimmed beef cheeks browning |
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| Ready for veggie roux and wine braise |
First I trim the cheeks, brown them and then braise them in wine, with roux of cooked down veggies. Hours of slow, patient cooking rewards us with a rich and tender dish fit for a celebration. A long marriage is kind of like a braising cut of meat, that complicated web of muscle, tendon and fat that takes patience and time to meld into something worth savoring.
The vegetables at the wedding were no less delicious. I tasted Mary's first slaw of the summer from her own beautiful and perfect cabbage (grown under netting), with her first green pepper so fresh it seemed to burst when she sliced it. And tiny yellow tomatoes that you could eat by the handful, and fat red tomato slices lolling in fresh basil leaves.
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| Morning harvest |
This morning I waded into the garden, searching under the sprawling squash plants to find the cucumbers. I was rewarded with enough for another batch of honey curry pickles.
I first learned to make these with Linda Donnelly, from the Old Fashioned Recipe books our husbands gave us for Mother's Day. The husbands had gone to town for supplies. When one of them saw the books on sale at the merc, they had the brilliant idea of purchasing us each one. It was my first Mother's Day gift.
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| Honey curry pickles |
These pickles are zippy, crunchy and perfect on sandwiches. I hope to make enough this year to give some away, maybe for a wedding gift.
From Sara at Magpie Ranch, home of Bunchgrass Beef
