Home by sunset

Thinking outside the coop

by Johanna Silver, Sunset Test Garden Coordinator

With lettuce on the bolt and Honey's comb in need of a little TLC, I decided to build a portable coop so she could keep me company in the garden. This portable mini coop, also known as a chicken tractor, is a shining example of garden-animal integration.

Both birds and garden bed benefit. The gardener saves some back-bending and precious time because the birds do every action performed by a tractor — they till the soil with their feet (albeit in a very non-invasive way), drop fertilizer, and gladly clean up an old, bolting garden bed. The chickens get to nibble on fresh greens, weed seeds, bugs, and they get a chance to experience the great outdoors.

Our new tractor is about as simple as they come. I cut windows out of an old plastic bin, lined the inside with chicken wire, and fastened it all with nuts, bolts, and large washers. A door is secured with paper clips wrapped around bolts, and the whole thing is tethered to the ground with garden stakes. There is also a small dish of water near her at all times. This simple set-up works in our case — Honey goes home at the end of the day so I don't have to worry about predators digging under the coop.

Not everything went perfectly: It took some time to build the coop; Honey seemed a little spooked; and I will still have to fork the bed and pull up the rest of the old plants. So why bother? Mostly because it is an absolute blast to have a clucking chicken work next to me in the garden. I love the questions posed by people who pass by. And I'd like to think that there is a part of her small bird brain that is enjoying the new scenery and fresh chow.

Chicken tractors are used on both small and large scales and come in a plethora of creative designs. My favorite collection is here.

Vinegar the survivor

by Margo True, Sunset food editor

Recipe Editor Amy Machnak sips fresh homemade vinegar.

In our last post, we on Team Vinegar confessed to neglecting our project, to underfeeding the vinegar bacteria with fresh wine. We were pretty sure that two of our "mothers" had died from outright starvation.

Well, I'm happy to report that we tasted our vinegars a few days ago, and the jars with the seemingly expired mothers (the 1-gallon mason jars) actually yielded delicious vinegar. Very tart, strong, fruity, full of character. It was so much better than red-wine vinegar you buy at the store—just as our consultant, Paula Wolfert, had promised. And there actually were mothers in those jars—the barest shimmer on the surface.

Interestingly, the two wider (3-gallon) jars, which produced much thicker, visible mothers, made a vinegar that tasted good, but not as wildly fruity and tart as the Disappearing Mother jars. We pondered this, and realized that a) acetobacteria and their mothers (their cellulose "homes"), grow best with lots of oxygen, which of course the wider jar provides; and b) we should have fed the wider jars more often. The muted flavor is probably a result of overconsumption by bacteria.

We ended that day happy. Vinegar is one tough foodstuff, the rubber tree of the food world.

P.S.: We inadvertently broke one of the larger jars, so we threw out the contents, pouring them into a colander first to catch any chunks of glass from going down our garbage disposal. At the bottom of the jar were layers of spent mothers. They looked sort of like bologna. Or...well, you decide:

They're actually not bad to handle—just a little bit rubbery. Kind of like fruit rollups.

Squirting Chickens

By Margo True, Sunset Food Editor

Sunset imaging specialist Kimberley Burch, water pistol in hand, guards Honey (center, with tiny, pecked comb).

We last visited the sorority from hell (aka the Sunset henhouse) about 3 weeks ago. Honey was getting mercilessly pecked by at least a couple of the other chickens, to the extent that she'd taken near-permanent refuge in the nest box and had to be picked up by hand and deposited in the chicken yard to eat and drink. At the suggestion of a helpful former chicken-raiser, we've recently tried two new tactics: applying a paste of Dr Bronner's Baby Mild Liquid Soap to Honey's chewed-up comb (in the hopes that its nasty taste would act as a repellent) and squirting the attacking chickens with a water gun. It seemed to work. At least they squawked in surprise and retreated.

Alas, maintaining a round-the-clock squirt detail isn't possible. And Honey seems too terrorized to risk a foray to food and water on her own without a human protector. The pecking looks like it's continuing, even with the soap. Meanwhile, Honey gets lighter and lighter... we'll have to think of something else fast, before she just collapses into a heap of feathers. Readers, any and all suggestions welcome!

Racking our Syrah means sipping (and dripping) too, and it’s better than ‘not bad’!

By Erika Ehmsen, Sunset copy chief

There’s a certain amount of character that a wine can glean from resting on its lees, those exhausted (but undoubtedly happy) yeasty-beasties and other sediments that drop out of the wine as fermentation wraps up. But leave a wine on its lees too long, and those previously helpful yeast cells can turn on you, rotting and taking your wine with them.

If you’ve been keeping up with our One-Block Diet blog, you’ve likely heard the word “neglect” tossed around by other teams. To echo food editor Margo True’s recent Team Vinegar post, we have busy lives (and exciting spring and summer issues of Sunset to concoct—keep an eye on newsstands to see what we do in our desk jobs!).

We confess: We’ve been bad wine parents. It had been a month since we last rolled our Chardonnay or checked up on our Syrah. We got around to rolling the Chard this week, and it was okay for that wine to sit and wait for us—last month, we shut down its malolactic fermentation by adding SO2 (in the form of powdered potassium metabisulfite; about 2 teaspoons per 5-gallon carboy), protecting the wine against oxidation and vengeful microbial spoilage. The rolling is just to add some character and round out any sharp flavors.

But on our Syrah, we were pushing the limit on the lees, risking all of our hard work. High time for the next step: “racking” (transferring) the wine into clean carboys and leaving all that fermentation muck behind. Time to call in our local expert: home winemaker extraordinaire Dan Brenzel, a retired chemist, Sunset garden editor Kathleen Brenzel’s doting husband and home chef, and incredible ribber of yours truly (“Watch, everybody! Erika’s gonna booger it up!”). He’s provided us with all of our equipment—from the hefty and spendy crusher-destemmer and bladder press to the glass carboy fermenters and the chemicals to sterilize them with—and countless chemistry lessons. Dan reminds me of my chemist grandfather, just a bit more sassy and clearly much less of a teetotaler.

Before we got started, Team Wine had another big decision to make: oak or no oak? Dan is a firm believer in oaking wine, oaking it some more, oh, and oaking it again. Wine editor and Team Wine leader Sara Schneider has been thinking that our big, juicy Syrah could use some oak to round it out, but she diplomatically put it to a vote. The measure passed, and we weighed out 26 grams of toasted oak chips for each 5-gallon carboy.

Besides the kitchen scale and sack of oak chips, our racking setup included: a card table to elevate our full carboys of Syrah, two 6-foot lengths of plastic tubing to transfer the wine (we kept one sterilized at all times), and a bunch of empty 5-gallon carboys on the ground. Plus lots and lots of potassium metabisulfite (SO2), to clean our equipment and to vaccinate the Syrah in its new carboys.

We also needed a garden hose with a jet sprayer, so we pulled everything out into a Sunset parking lot that gently slopes to a drain. (You may ask, “Is it safe to flush the SO2-tinged H20 down the drain?” Dan the chemist thought it was fine, and we’ll be drinking the tiny amount of sulfite in both of our wines.)

We didn’t use an auto siphon or racking-tube holders (check out this video to see them in action), but it looks like they would have made racking easier. Or maybe I just should have paid more attention to Dan’s instructions.

I was too excited to get started and didn’t see exactly how Dan got the siphon going. I understood the general concept, so I simply paced while waiting for my turn, completely missing that he’d slipped his finger over the bottom end of the tubing to control the flow and ease it into a fresh carboy.

Dan handed me some sterilized tubing and, before I could get my bearings, shone the spotlight on me with his aforementioned “Erika’s gonna booger it up” prediction. Lack of focus and total self-consciousness paralyzed me; I was doomed. Plus, before we’d started racking, I’d admonished everyone to be careful not to spill our wine, and suddenly I knew I’d be the first one in the splash zone.

So I rushed ahead, not pausing to think about the mechanics, sucking the air as you’re supposed to do to start a siphon, then nearly gulping down the Syrah as it came streaming toward me, much faster than I’d expected (people do this to steal gas? ugh!). I yanked the tubing out of my mouth and wildly tried to stuff it in a clean carboy, gravity-fed wine splattering it, the blacktop, and me.

Yes, I boogered it up.

And then Dan turned up the heat: hand-eye coordination. I had to watch the end of the tubing in the top carboy (to keep it from dipping into the mucky lees we were racking the wine away from), watch the rapidly filling fresh carboy that I was topping off, and keep my hands on both ends of the tubing to make sure that the top end didn’t dip too low and that neither end squirted up and out the top of its carboy.

Nervous, I messily stopped the siphon with two slippery fingertips (I should have used my thumb) and transferred it from the topped-off carboy to another empty one, of course dribbling more wine down the glass exterior. (Always thinking, Dan brought sponges, undoubtedly with this klutz in mind.) Still jittery, and with the wine level dropping ever closer to the muck, I jerked up the tubing a few seconds too early, wasting a couple sips of wine because I couldn’t restart the siphon with so little liquid left. More ribbing, of course.

Thankfully, Ben Marks, editor of Sunset’s California Wine Country, emerged from our Books division to check on us, cup in hand. He claimed this cup was just because he was drinking some water, not because he was looking for a handout, but we gave him a sip.

“Not bad, huh?” nudged wine captain Sara Schneider, fishing but always modest, and perpetually wary that our Syrah might have turned.

A big grin lit up Ben’s always-friendly face: “It’s better than ‘not bad.’ It’s lovely!”

Gleeful toasting all around, then quickly back to racking. Because as Dan soon proved when he was siphoning from a sky-high 12-gallon carboy into a ground-dwelling 5-gallon carboy with just 6 feet of tubing, it’s easy to lose focus when you’re chatting.

I didn’t tease him, just dove to reinsert the lower tube end, licking my wine-stained fingers because I really didn’t want to lose more Syrah!

Team Wine members were all feeling pretty sensitive about our seemingly dwindling Syrah supply after food editor Margo True showed up to represent Team Vinegar, requesting 5 gallons of our labor of love to feed to her mother. (Have you seen these things? Very Little Shop of Horrors meets The Blob.)

We grudgingly set some wine aside for her. It’s going to make a lovely vinegar.

In search of honey, Team Bee buzzes forth

By Margaret Sloan, Sunset production coordinator

Ryan Casey, consultant for Team Bee, helps us set up the hives.

To sweeten our One-Block Diet with honey, we’re taking up beekeeping. Honeybees, or rather the mysterious disappearance of honeybees (often called Colony Collapse Disorder), have been in the news recently. Bees are under serious threat these days, so it is nice that we can (hopefully) help bees and also harvest the sweet golden goodness that these buzzy little insects make.

We just received all our beekeeping equipment. We now have things like smokers, brood boxes, supers, and queen excluders. I was a little daunted by the list of gear; it seemed so complicated. But once our consultant, Ryan Casey — our former test garden coordinator and an experienced beekeeper — explained everything, it seemed quite simple. Of course, this is all sans bees. We don’t have them yet. A beekeeper in Grass Valley is raising some for us and we’ll go collect them in May.

In the mean time, we’re all learning as much as we can about bees. We watched a terrific movie by Nova, called Tales from the Hive. The photography is stunning, and you’ll find you may think differently about bees after watching it. We found the DVD at a local library, but it’s available to buy on Amazon.

Team Leader, Kimberley Burch (the Queen Bee!) has been doing a lot of research and has been sending the rest of Team Bee websites to check out.

The following two sites are for local Bay Area Beekeepers organizations. They have lots of information and links to many great sites about bees. 

http://www.beeguild.org
http://www.sanmateobee.org (This is the site of the Beekeepers Guild of San Mateo County. These kind folks are advising us.)

I also read a q&a on the American Bee Journal website, and it made raising bees seemed daunting again. Seems like there are all kinds of critters — not just bears — who like bees: mites, moths, raccoons, even skunks!

Poor bees. They seem so fragile. No wonder they sting; it’s the only protection they’ve got.

From Team Vinegar: Mother, where art thou?

By Margo True, Sunset food editor

When Team Vinegar huffed its way to the Sonoma mountaintop home of renowned cookbook author Paula Wolfert in February and procured pieces of her precious, 40-year-old mother, we had every intention of being good caretakers of that weird but precious stuff. We meant to feed it with fresh red wine regularly, closely monitor the temperature, and sniff it now and then to make sure it wasn't starting to smell like furniture polish (the death knell, according to Paula).

Reader, we are guilty of neglect.

Hey, we have busy busy lives! Shoot, we've only fed it — by my haphazard records — four times since it came to live with us. Correction: Me. The jars sit in my office, in two cardboard boxes. I have to keep telling visitors that the strange smell isn't my feet, it's the vinegar.

Vinegar is supposed to be fed, according to Paula, every 1 1/2 weeks. Yikes. We last fed it on April 1. Here are some photos from that time.

Where are the mothers?

Now, if a developing vinegar is properly fed, the mother will appear on the surface as a thickish, solid layer. She is made up of pure cellulose and acetobacter — a nifty bacteria that converts alcohol into vinegar. By the way, the mother is completely harmless, if kind of slimy. When we're ready to use the vinegar, we'll just strain her out.

But I digress. As you can see from our 1-gallon mason jars above, no mother is to be seen. Failure! So many things could have killed this mother--too much wine poured in at one time (thereby "swamping" it), long periods of starvation, we just don't know.

Then we pulled out our other two jars. These are humongous 3-gallon things we found back in our dusty storeroom. They are very wide, and maybe that is why — as you can see below — the mother has formed a healthy pink presence:

A well-established mother.

At least two mothers have survived out of four, against the odds. But sometimes the dead spring back to life (at least when it comes to vinegar). We'll see...we'll be feeding them soon (the guilt is becoming too much to bear).

Salt: It's 11 miles away, but is it local?

Attention readers: If you’ve ever made salt, please let us know how you did it! Read on...

By Margo True, Sunset food editor

From the first moment of planning our one-block feast, we knew we had to have salt to season the food. Luckily, Sunset is about 11 miles from a network of giant salt-evaporation ponds owned by Cargill. So newly formed Team Salt set off one chilly morning to explore our local salt and then see about bringing some back for the feast.

What we saw—and walked over—looked like the surface of another planet: giant lakes of syrupy reddish brine and snowy fields of salt, cut by rivers of the same weird-looking brine. (Salt-loving algae in the brine create this color. At a less salty stage, the ponds are orangish from zillions of brine shrimp, which love that exact salinity. Brine shrimp are otherwise known as sea monkeys. Remember them? From when you were a kid?)

It takes five years for San Francisco Bay water, guided into the ponds, to crystallize into salt.

Team Salt, crunching across brand-new salt.

To one side rose a mountain of salt with a tiny-looking funnel on top, pouring on fresh salt. That end still had a tinge of pink. The other end, having dried for months, was pure white. (Rain sheets off the crust that forms on the outside.)

In the main building, we listened to Cargill’s PR person, Pat Ludis, as she described some of the 14,000 uses for salt—yes, that’s 3 zeros behind the 14! Apart from all its food uses, salt pulls dye into clothing, cures leather, de-ices roads, removes wine stains, is a coolant in nuclear power plants, and goes into the manufacture of brass, glass, chlorine, and paper. It helped mummify bodies in ancient Egypt and was salary for soldiers in ancient Rome. (The Romans called it “salarium,” or “salt allowance.”)

Then we got to poke through various forms of Cargill salt—everything from a powder as fine as talcum (for cheesemaking) to tablets portioned out for canning (soup, vegetables, chili, etc.) to 50-pound licks for livestock.

At Cargill, a table full of salts.

My favorite display: a model of a kosher salt crystal (below right), a hollow pyramid with ridges. An ordinary table salt crystal (below left) is cube-shaped.

Kosher salt's shape makes it very good at sticking to and pulling moisture out of foods. It’s called “kosher” salt because religious Jews have long used it to kosher (draw blood out of) meat.

We each left Cargill with a pretty pink lump of crystallized salt and a box of Diamond Crystal, the fluffiest, crunchiest kosher salt around.

Our search not over

However, we realized we had to keep searching for local salt. The tour was fascinating and the people couldn’t have been nicer or more articulate. But Cargill isn’t a local salt supplier, for us or anyone else. As one of the largest commodity food suppliers in the world, with 80 different companies under its umbrella, its orientation is anything but local.

So we’re still seeking local salt. We’re thinking we might try making it ourselves…but we sure don’t have five years to spare.

Got any tips? We'd love to hear them.

Poor Honey!

Overheard about the coop: "That place is worse than junior high!"

News of our henpecked hen has been spreading through the office, and everyone is distressed about our coop dynamic.

Here are ways we're planning to make things better:
- Give Honey a place to hide
- Pick her up and pet her a lot. (Admittedly, this last suggestion is from a colleague who watches a lot of The Dog Whisperer, who reasons that small dogs are such terrors because they're always being held up higher; thus the higher we keep ol' Honey the higher the other chickens will hold her in esteem.)
- ??? (Readers? Help?!)

On the other hand, this seems to be about the mildest case of pecking order horrors. I've read multiple stories of chicks introduced to adult flocks; it never ends well. One hen will peck the chick's head till she bleeds; then all hell breaks loose. Once chickens have drawn blood, their evil reptilian side comes out and they almost always peck the chick to death. The shocking part: This happens even if the hen who laid the chick is a member of the flock!

Nature is red in tooth and claw, indeed. Be glad your mama wasn't a chicken.

Crisis in the coop!

by Elizabeth Jardina, Sunset researcher

Our girl Honey is spending a lot of time in the nesting box.

It was getting to the point where every time you opened it up, she'd be in there, fluffing her feathers and acting a little pouty. We chalked this up to broodiness, the state when hens get it into their heads that they want to sit on and hatch a clutch of eggs.

And we all thought it was adorable. Our little Honey! She was the last to lay, but here she is, getting motherly. So jolly and cute.

On Saturday, I got annoyed with Honey's "broodiness" and pulled her out of the box and put her back in the regular coop. (You're supposed to discourage broodiness in pullets and any other chicken who's not going to eventually raise chicks.)

Instantly, it became clear to me why she's spending all her time in the nesting box. Carmelita is terrorizing her. Within seconds of my plopping her down in the coop, Carmelita was pecking Honey's comb till it bled.

I felt so bad about all this that I spent the next 30 minutes running interference so Honey could get something to eat and drink. (She seemed hungry and thirsty.)

So the question is: What to do? I've read about putting hiding places into the coop — a panel of screen door is often recommended. That way, Honey could see what was going on in the coop, but wouldn't be vulnerable to attack. Of course, I imagine if you live on a farm, you might have part of a screen door lying around. Us? Not so much.

I feel terrible. This has been going on for weeks, and we thought she was just hanging out in the nesting box for fun. But now I feel like she's a prisoner in her own coop. Honey's a really sweet chicken; unlike her more cranky sisters, she never bites, and doesn't mind being held. How could I have been oblivious to her peril?

In other news, I bought some black oil sunflower seeds yesterday. Hopefully adding a handful of these to the girls' feed every day will keep them from doing so much feather-plucking. (Apparently the sunflower seeds provide an amino acid that you can also get from ... feathers.)

Is it a hunk of quartz? A meteorite? No, it's....

SALT.

Who knew that salt could be so impressive?

That's just the start of it. More soon on the first expedition of Team Salt—the key to seasoning our One-Block Feast. — Margo True, Sunset Food Editor

Our chickens are made of meat

by Elizabeth Jardina, Sunset researcher

When it comes down to it, our chickens are made of meat.

They cluck, they peck, they're covered in feathers, but underneath it all, they are bones and fat and skin and muscle — dark and light meat. Suitable for soaking in buttermilk, breading, then frying.

It's an inescapable fact of chicken-raising. We have these chickens with names, chickens who are pets and who we raised from tiny babies, but all of us who care for these chicken are meat-eaters. Chicken-eaters, even.

I've been thinking about this lately, especially because of this comment we got on the blog a few weeks ago. (Reader Emily, I haven't been ignoring you.) Here's what she said:

My understanding is that you are not planning to harvest the chickens for meat, only their eggs. I can understand why, but I ask that you reconsider. If we are going to include meat in our diets, there is no better source that I know of for personal, animal and ecological health than happy chickens raised in our backyards. I think it would be a great gift to your readers if you share with us how to handle the difficult business of bringing home raised chickens to the dinner table.

When we got our chickens, we knew that we were not going to kill and eat them. This is primarily because we're urbanized, soft-hearted, lily-livered wimps. I, for one, had never even touched a chicken before we visited Jody Main's chickens last summer.

Our favorite chicken reference book (The Chicken Book by Page Smith and Charles Daniel) is even sterner on the subject:

Never make chickens into pets. ... Chickens are not pets; they are chickens; they are producers; they exist to lay eggs and be eaten. Never name a chicken. To do so is merely cute  — and silly — and an abuse of names. That does not mean that you must not enjoy, admire, and love chickens individually and collectively; it just means that you must not sentimentalize and falsify your relationship to chickens. This, for the most part, is why I feel keeping chickens should involve killing chickens as well. Somebody or some machine has to kill chickens, so why shouldn't you, especially if you are going to eat them?

I'm not volunteering to swing the hatchet or anything, but I do understand the hypocrisy of our position. I was a vegetarian for a decade. And not the fish-eating, occasional-poultry kind. I didn't eat anything with nerves or eyes. So what changed my mind? Partly, this Michael Pollan article in the New York Times magazine from 2002.

Partly the fact that I got a dog. I'm annoyingly crazy about her, but despite my devotion, she is absolutely not a person. Not a person at all. When she dies, it won't be like a person dying. (Although, trust me, I'm going to have to take a few days off from work, dear bosses.)

It occurred to me that I didn't know anything about cows, pigs, chickens, or fish. Nothing. I wasn't going to eat them, but I didn't know anything about them. And people who did know them — farmers and ranchers and such — didn't have any qualms about it. They raised them to be eaten. And I was some urban kid from Dallas who was taking the moral high ground by not.

Thus began my non-vegetarian transformation. (I also got my ears pierced. My brother joked that I should be on The Swan.)

So now — here we are, with these chickens. Their fate is not in question, but I do think about it. Could I kill one? I read the Backyard Chickens forum "Meat Birds ETC" board with some regularity. It leads me to links like this one. (Warning: If you click around, it will teach how to pull the heads off your chickens to kill them. Not for the squeamish.)

Right now, um, no, I'm not going to kill our girls. For one thing, it's so unnecessary. There's lots of food available on the San Francisco Peninsula at any of our dozens of nearby grocery stores. There's no need, no tension, no reason.

When the revolution comes, and we actually have to subsist on what we can grow? Chickens, you're on notice.

High tech, low tech

By Sara Schneider, Sunset wine editor

The numbers are in. Our immensely helpful consultant, Michael Martella, took our wine samples up to Thomas Fogarty Winery to analyze for pH (which is in indirect proportion to acidity) and TA (total acidity). Here’s what he reported.

Our Syrah
    pH: 3.8 (a little high; Martella thinks it will still come down)
    TA: .64
Our Chardonnay
    pH: 3.2 (low, which means our acidity is high, which is an excellent thing)
    TA: .68 (great)

His evaluation: “I think you’re still on track. It’s going to be very good wine.” Phew!

And advice: Let the Syrah go another couple of weeks, then send him more samples. But the Chardonnay is “done,” meaning that both fermentations are complete. Douse it with meta bisulfite (in, as he does, a ratio of 1 pound per 1,000 gallons of wine! For us, that translates to about 2 teaspoons per carboy and would give us about 60 parts per million in the end—a good goal for sulfites). And start stirring the lees, to soften up the wine and add some complexity. We have two choices: Buy a ridiculously expensive machine that stirs the lees magnetically from the outside, or turn the carboys on their sides and roll them once a week or so.

The choice might have been a no-brainer, but nothing’s as easy as it sounds. We couldn’t roll the carboys with the ferm locks still in place; we had to put in some solid corks and secure them with duct tape, to avoid spilling wine all over Sunset’s courtyard. The rolling itself went without incident, even if the layers of lees were so compact that we had to manhandle the carboys vigorously. But untaping the corks was a little bit of an adventure—Erika Ehmsen (copy chief) almost lost an eye when one came shooting out. We learned to finesse it, though, and now have a weekly regimen.

Your barley is showing

By Rick LaFrentz, Beerless leader

Photos by Kimberley Burch

“John Barleycorn must die.”

These are lyrics from a song I would listen to in my wayward youth. It was about a group of men who set out to disrupt the planting of the evil barley seed.

Barley is such a vital commodity in our everyday life and an absolute necessity in the process of brewing, why would one want to prohibit its planting?

The barley that we planted several months ago for our homemade beer is, at last, setting seed. Break out the cigars.

We chose a fairly new variety of barley called Lacey that has 6 rows of seeds growing on the seed head. Barley either grows in 2 or 6 rows. From my research on the subject, the 2 row seed heads are the most preferred by the brewing industry because they contain less protein, which will cloud the appearance of beer, but Lacey was developed for its plight in the brewing process.

We also had planted white wheat (shown left). I had planted the seeds rather thick not knowing what the germination rate would be and to our delight almost all of the seeds had germinated. We thinned a few rows at a time to avoid over crowding and allow for less competition but to our surprise the rows that had not been thinned actually grew taller and had deeper lush green colored foliage.

It’s an enigma.

This is the time of year when hop rhizomes arrive at your local brewing outlet. Hops are another vital ingredient in the brewing process.

We chose 3 different varieties, out of dozens, that we feel would grow without difficulty in our climate. Cascade, which is a very popular variety with the micro brewing community, gives a citrus-floral character. Another hop we chose is Centennial, which is very similar to cascade, but is more intense and will add bitterness to the beer. The third variety is Nugget, which again will add bitterness, but has an herbal spicy note. (Finding yourself captivated by hops varieties? Wikipedia has a nice roundup.)

During the growing season, hops have a tendency to attract spider mites and mildew so I guess we can count on these exquisite little inconveniences to add complexity to the final product.

Which hops and to what extent they will be used in our brew will be decided by committee.

Our next step in the home brewing process will be to wait until the barley seeds have dried and then try to malt the seeds to produce a product that we will be able to ferment. Wish us luck.

Et tu, Carmelita?

by Elizabeth Jardina, Sunset researcher

Nobody loves our chickens as much as our Jim McCann. Sunset art director, leader of Team Chicken, he is probably the person who spends the most time in the coop. He brings them an afternoon apple every day, he holds them and pets them, and he is the most vigilant of us about keeping them fed and watered.

And what does Carmelita do in return? Bites him.

Hard. Drew blood.

Do these chickens have no sense of decency? Jim is so tender-hearted that he issued a proclamation that we shouldn't lift our chickens up and take their eggs while they're still in the nesting box, because he's afraid it will upset them. (Secretly: I'm still taking their eggs from under them; I think that's a time-honored part of chicken-human interaction.) But still ...! He's the one who was most distressed when we were worried that Carmelita was a rooster. (Which would have likely meant the stew pot.)

Nothing like a little blood-sport to change a man's opinion. After she gave him a chomp, even Jim was considering Carmelita coq au vin.

We don't have any photo or video documentation of the event, sadly, but I think it probably went a little like this. (It's a video.) And despite the potential danger in a chicken bite, Jim seems thus far undiseased. Only his heart is broken.

And it's not just biting humans. Carmelita seems to be our group's little Robespierre, leading her own reign of terror. (I know, Julius Caesar to the French Revolution — I'm mixing historical metaphors.) But she's managed to peck out nearly all of the sideburn and muff feathers on Ophelia and Alana, and she pecks poor Honey so much that her comb is starting to look stunted.

Although we've had much wringing of hands about this, it all seems well within the bounds of normal chicken behavior. The pecking order is brutal, man.

We're trying to calm her behavior using a combination of techniques:

• Bold and fearless movements  — we're not going to cower, even if she does try to peck us
• Saying "No" firmly (apparently birds are auditory creatures?)
• Responding to aggression with firm and gentle ruffling of feathers.

We'll let you know how it goes.

***
In better chicken news, I have the perfect way to use a half-dozen fresh chicken eggs: a souffle. I'd never made one till this weekend, and let me tell you, it was superb. Easy! Delicious! As satisfying a cooking experience as I've ever had. I made this Classic Cheese Souffle using sharp provolone, and I added a crushed clove of garlic and a tablespoon of chopped rosemary to the bechamel.

I didn't even have a proper souffle pan (I just used a 1.75 oven-safe glass casserole) and made a foil collar to prevent overflow. Worked like a charm.

Serve it with bread, a salad, and a glass of Riesling, and you've whipped up the perfect Saturday night dinner.

Fill'er up

By Amy Machnak, Sunset food writer

Finally our olive oil is ready to be bottled after sitting in darkness to let the sediment settle.

It took us a while to get started, but once we did we had quite the assembly line. Team Olive set up a spot behind the offices to transfer our olive oil from 20-gallon plastic jugs to individual 250-ml bottles. As we were getting started, we kept having to run into the kitchen to get another tool (we hadn’t quite thought things through). After we finally got all the required supplies and our line working smoothly, almost 2 hours had passed and we were barely 1 jug done with 3 more to go. We hadn’t really expected it to take us so long to pour from one container to the other, but it did. We eventually had to call it quits as the sun went down.

When we reconvened to finish our task, we made sure we had our equipment. Since having the right gear makes the process much faster, we have compiled a quick list for you before you start bottling yourself.

Supplies:
aprons, one per person
power drill fitted with a small bit (for making a ventilation hole in plastic jugs)
olive bottles and corks
funnel
towels or rags
mallet or small hammer
tarps to spread under area or over valuables
large drip pans (turkey roasting pan will do)
permanent marker for labeling
bucket of hot soapy water

Here’s how we did it:
We found it easier for one person to fill the bottles at each spigot (we had 2 going simultaneously) and for a third person to push/hammer in the corks. A fourth person wiped off the oil that inevitably dripped down the bottles’ sides with warm water and a rag, then put them into the boxes that the bottles came in.

Our labeled boxes of bottled oil are currently sitting in organized rows in our temperature controlled work shed. Before the weather warms, we’ll move them to the wine cellar to keep them cool and dark (heat and light are two enemies of oil). At some point, we’ll need to devise the best way to adhere (aka melt) the gold plastic seals over the top of each bottle.

Does anyone have a quality hair dryer we could borrow?

Easter, sunshine (and disastrous DIY dyes)

by Elizabeth Jardina, Sunset researcher

Obvious-yet-profound revelation of the day: The connection between eggs and Easter is not a coincidence.

I feel like a fool even admitting this, but until I had a real relationship with real, live chickens, I didn't really consider that they might have a laying season. But — duh — of course they do! Chickens lay sporadically when it's cold and dark and wintery. Then as the lightness of spring comes their laying cranks up. We're getting six eggs nearly every day, and the weather is as springy and spectacular as I've ever seen it. These things are related.

And of course a basketful of eggs is a longtime Easter tradition. I thought about that this afternoon as I took my basket to pick up our blue, green, pale brown, and rich ecru eggs.

I wanted to do something special with our bounty of colorful (and delicious) eggs for the holiday.

My inspiration? The ever-fabulous Pam Zsori, whose housemartin blog is a favorite around here, and whose spring design tips are in our April issue of Sunset. (Now on newsstands, people.)

I was browsing her blog when I came across this idea — pure genius:

Rather than the sacchrine palette Easter-egg dye usually imparts, these eggs were sophisticated, gorgeous, surprising. She dyed brown eggs. Look at how marvelous they are!

Energized by this stroke of brilliance, I decided that I too would dye our colorful eggs to achieve new colorful heights. And rather than use those old-standard dye pellets, I decided that I would go with all-natural dyes. (Ha, ha. This seemed like a good idea at the time.)

I did some research, consulting the natural dye instructions at Plantea.com. Since they recommend hot dye methods over cold ones, I decided that's what I'd use. But I thought 30 minutes was too long to boil eggs — I wanted then hard-cooked, not over-boiled. Since I'd recently read instructions for making perfect hard-cooked eggs every time, I tried to incorporate that timing into making the eggs. Also, at this point, the prospect of using our precious eggs from our own chickens for this weird experiment started to seem like a bad idea, so I bought brown eggs from Trader Joe's (along with white eggs, which would act as a control group).

As for my natural dyes, I went with things I had on hand or could buy at TJ's. (It was a Tuesday night. Time was tight.)

Although experienced natural-dyers go with onion skins and other such ingredients, I went with the three most-staining things I could come up with: blueberry juice, beets, and mustard. (Natural dyeing techniques favor the lazy refrigerator-cleaner. I swear, I opened that blueberry juice in December, so I didn't feel bad about using it to dye my eggs. Also, I had no fewer than three open bottles of mustard; who knows when I opened those.)

The beets I pureed, then added water, and the mustard I thinned with water. I added white vinegar to each batch, because that's supposed to help the dye stick.

Then I put my eggs on the stove, brought them to a boil in the (very vivid) dye/juice/weird runny mustard, then let them sit, covered for 14 minutes, as our instructions specified for tasty hard-cooked eggs. Then, they went into the fridge to cold-soak overnight.

Let's just call this a failed experiment and get it over with:

The pretty blue, green, and brown eggs you see here are eggs as they came straight from the chicken. The creepy black ones were dyed with blueberry (color that, by the way, unattractively flakes off when you touch them) and the mustard-dyed ones were crazy-blotchy. You don't even see the beets, because rather than the violet I was hoping for, they turned out uneven beige.

The good news is that they're cooked perfectly. Now I just have to figure out how to use up 14 hard-cooked eggs.

All Yolked Up

by MacKenze Geidt, Sunset Assistant Travel Editor

Meet Jumbo: (and Jumbo's little brother egg on the right, providing size perspective in this case)

Jumbo weighs a whopping 72 grams.  Now that may not sound like a lot, but consider this: I checked with the USDA to find out average egg size delineation and here's what I found:

Large = minimum 45 grams; Extra Large = minimum 50.5 grams; Jumbo = minimum 56 grams

That makes our Jumbo egg 16 grams larger than a regulation Jumbo egg! (it was so big that the lid of a Trader Joe's Jumbo egg carton wouldn't close over it!)

Look how big Jumbo is compared to a storebought egg (Jumbo on the left, sterile-looking storebought egg in the center, and Little Brother on the right).   Around the office, Jumbo was initially referred to as "The Dinosaur Egg," and everyone was eager to see the contents (I personally was secretly hoping the contents would be somehow mutant...)

I finally worked up the nerve to crack Jumbo and got an inadvertent lesson in egg-cracking from Sunset Food Writer, Amy Machnak.  Amy taught me that you should never crack an egg on the surface of the bowl you're using to collect the contents.  Crack the egg on a separate surface.  Why?   Bacteria collects on the outside of an egg shell (think Salmonella), so the shell shouldn't make contact with the egg white and yolk.  Good tip!  The U.S. Department of Agriculture agreed:

http://www.fsis.usda.gov/Fact_Sheets/Focus_On_Shell_Eggs/index.asp

Check out Jumbo's contents: Jumbo had twins!                                                                                        

A double yolk!  My secret wish for mutant contents was fulfilled!   Although maybe it's not that uncommon after all... According to PoultryHelp.com, "double Yolkers appear when ovulation occurs too rapidly, or when one yolk somehow gets "lost" and is joined by the next yolk."

http://www.poultryhelp.com/oddeggs.html

Compare our beautiful double yolk with the storebought option:

Margo True, Sunset Food Editor explained that the runnier the yolk is, the older it is.  Conversely, the tighter the egg white, the fresher it is. 

Top image = storebought

Bottom = Sunset home-grown double-yolk egg

Which one would you rather eat??

Sunset Syrah for all

By Sara Schneider, Sunset wine editor

Well, here’s a bizarre twist in our year of wine at Sunset—a cautionary tale for anyone planning to do this at home!

We’ve had our stash of glass carboys filled with Chardonnay and Syrah lined up in a breezeway behind one of the buildings on our campus here in Menlo Park, with some smaller containers of the same wines alongside—intended for topping-off the bigger vessels as we pull wine out for tasting and analyzing. But when staffers in that building came in to work the other day, they found a stranger—from all appearances homeless—passed out beside the lot. He’d drunk an entire magnum of our Syrah. Generous evidence of the fact was smudged all over his face. Conflicted on all fronts, we called in the police. Their parting message to our plant manager, as they escorted the man to their car, was, “Tell whoever made that wine that it must be good, because this is one happy man!” A chuckle and a painful head shake all in one. Needless to say, we’ve moved the rest of the wine to an inside courtyard, where it’s thriving. Next up: a chemical analysis—pH, TA (total acidity), all the really exciting details.

Aphids: scourge of the spring garden

By Lauren Bonar Swezey, Sunset special projects editor

Believe it or not, it's true. Everything is NOT hunky dory in the test garden these days. We've had our first attack of those cursed tiny (1/16 inch long) gray aphids. They've hit our cauliflower!

Aphids in general aren't that bad, especially when they hang out on the tips of new growth (such as the green ones you might find on your roses). It's easy to blast them off with a strong spray of water. But get those clinging, soft-bodied insects inside cauliflower curds and the wily creatures are nearly impossible to extract. So what's a gardener to do?

I asked Ryan, our test garden coordinator and expert CSA farmer who grows lots of veggies at Blue House Farm in Pescadero, how he controls aphids. Here are his tips:

• Prevention is the best medicine. Aphids attack stressed plants. Make sure your plants are getting the best care possible—adequate sun, water, and air circulation.

• Don't over fertilize. Too much nitrogen produces lush growth - a magnet for aphids. Most cool-season veggies grow perfectly well with just compost mixed into the soil before planting. If your soil is particularly poor or sandy, you can also mix in an organic fertilizer (follow package directions).

• Plant vigorous varieties. According to Ryan, some heirloom varieties aren't as vigorous as modern hybrids. If you prefer certain heirlooms because of their romantic past, just make sure you give them perfect garden conditions.

• Monitor the crops. At the first sign of an infestation, blast the pests off with water or spray with an organic insecticide, such as insecticidal soap.

Once the pests have infested your broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower, and other cool-season crops, here's how to get rid of them (well, MOST of them):

• Soak in a tub of water. Right after harvest, drop the whole head in a tub of water for 20 minutes or so. Swish it around to release the insects.

• Blast with water. While holding the heads in your hand, blast them with a strong stream of water. Beware! You'll get wet.

Of course, you could also just not worry about the aphids and savor the added protein. Bon appetit!

More about safer pest controls

Making vinegar: Our first feeding

Our homemade vinegar is brewing. Soon after returning with our "mothers," we moved them to bigger jars to start the feeding process.

We put each one in a mix of water and wine, then topped the jars with cheesecloth secured with rubber bands to keep out vinegar flies.

Note: If doing this at home, you might want to move the mother with a ladle, or wear gloves.

I used my bare hands and—even after scouring them with coffee, baking soda, and other supposed odor neutralizers—they smelled of vinegar for two days....