James Ranch, Durango CO

james ranch market durango

Last Friday we were driving from Durango to Silverton and Ouray (on an incredibly scenic road–if you are in the area, do it), and just north of Durango we saw a sign for James Ranch Market: Open Saturday. It being mid-April, farmers market-type places are in short supply, so we happily returned the next day to check out the James Ranch offerings. It’s a gorgeous property, with rolling green fields dotted with cows, a mobile chicken coop, picnic tables, and a little burger hut serving their own beef and cheese, in addition to the shop selling the farm’s products. We were disappointed that we’d already had breakfast so didn’t get to try a burger, but we did buy some ground beef, flank steak, and eggs, and strolled the grounds hoping to spot some baby animals.

james ranch food cart durango james ranch durango cheese james ranch durango meat cooler

James Ranch raises beef cows on a 100% grass diet with no chemicals or hormones. The beeves (a new word to me since spending time out West and I love it) spend their entire lives with the family herd in a stress-free atmosphere. The dairy cows and goats also live on grass, or rather leaves, bark, and shrubs for the goats. Pigs are new to the farm, living in herds on pasture, able to root and wallow like pigs do. Chickens are pastured too, happily eating fly larvae from cow pies to keep the fly population in check–and they have a guard donkey to protect them from predators!

james ranch durango picnic area james ranch durango pasturesjames ranch durango pastures james ranch durango

The James family practices sustainable agriculture in preserving soil and water quality, and believes in transparency in farming: they encourage consumers to visit the farm to see where the meat, eggs, and milk come from and how the animals are treated, and if you have questions about the animals or the meat, they are happy to answer them. It’s how a farm should be!

james ranch durango james ranch durango grass fed beef

Product review: The Eggstractor

Eggs are delicious and versatile protein powerhouses, and eggs from happy, pastured chickens should be a staple in every (non-allergic) person’s diet. I eat eggs scrambled with veggies for breakfast most days, but my favorite way to enjoy eggs is when they are deviled. Last time I attempted to make deviled eggs the shells did not want to go peacefully, and I have not laughed so hard in a decade as I did when assembling those pitiful, mangled eggs to take to a fancy luncheon. So sometimes not being able to prettily peel an egg may be a positive, but generally, when one peels an egg, one wants it to peel easily and come out with a smooth, intact surface.

Enter the Eggstractor. The Eggstractor “Peels Hard Boiled Eggs Instantly & Perfectly”! It’s fast and easy: just tap the egg to break the shell on one end, put it on the specially designed Eggstractor egg holder, and press on the billows to pop a perfectly peeled egg out of the bottom of the apparatus. Seems too good to be true, right

Fun and easy!

The A-Team and Haute Pasture teamed up to try out this magical tool. Carefully following the instructions, we made several attempts and ended up with a pile of crushed and/or exploded eggs, and much hilarity. We filmed our eggsperimentation for your education. Please watch this video before purchasing an Eggstractor.

Or if you’d prefer a photographic journey:

Many others have tried the Eggstractor with similar results, but there are some success stories in the comments of that article, claiming that you should only press down part of the way on the billows to avoid an eggsplosion. Maybe we’ll repeat our experiment in the future and employ some of these tips, but for now we can confidently say we do not recommend the Eggstractor, eggcept for a good laugh.

Thanks to the A-Team for their help with this eggsperiment!

Things I ate this weekend (spoiler alert: steak)

It’s boring to read about what other people ate. But since many of you aim to eat real food and avoid gut-irritants like I do, maybe this will be interesting despite being about what someone else ate. Also, steak!

So, without further ado, here are some things I ate this weekend.

Overnight no-cook refrigerator oatmeal. I love this easy breakfast and adjust it in the following ways:

  • I multiply the recipe x 1.5
  • I use half coconut milk and half water for the milk portion
  • I don’t add sweetener. It doesn’t need any!
  • I chop up whatever fruit I have and pack it in (or throw in frozen chunks), and add chopped walnuts or pecans

Yum.

Adult smoothie with frozen berries, coconut milk, and Malibu.

adult smoothie

Blend up a few cups of berries, a glug of coconut milk, and a few glugs of Malibu, and enjoy!

Avocado tuna salad. This is quick and easy and, like the oatmeal, you can toss in whatever you have on hand. I don’t bother with the fancy leave-some-avocado-in-the-shell part, but it would be impressive for company. I’ve added combinations of the following to great effect:

  • chopped onion
  • chopped celery
  • chopped hard-boiled egg
  • chopped tomato
  • chopped walnuts

Seared scallops over zoodles

zoodles

lemon pepper scallops

seared scallops with zoodles

This dish will be going into the HP household rotation. It seems sophisticated, but is easy to make with great flavors and textures. I don’t know that I had ever cooked scallops before; here’s a useful tip if you’re a scallop newbie too: put the scallops in the pan and don’t mess with them until it’s time to flip them. I’m a compulsive over-stirrer/poker and probably would not have gotten such a lovely sear if I hadn’t read that tip.

Local ribeye steak from The Organic Butcher, with Mustard-Garlic Brussels Sprouts

steak and brussels

I wasn’t crazy about this steak, but Mr HP, who knows better, was. It was too chewy and fatty for my redeveloping meat tastes, but the flavor was good. Mr HP salted the steaks and threw them in the freezer for a bit before grilling on high heat to crisp up the outside while not overcooking the inside. The Brussels sprouts were phenomenal. They were both savory and a bit sweet (due to roasting), healthy, and incredibly simple to make. YOU NEED TO MAKE THIS RECIPE.

A Paleo Frittata

paleo frittata

This recipe is designed for leftovers. I planned on using leftover steak, but we ate it all for dinner, so I used onions, avocado, tomato, and spinach. It was a fun change from scrambled eggs, but it did involve me spending a considerable amount of time staring at the frittata in the oven to see when it was cooked enough but not too much. Presumably I will have to watch it less as I get more frittata experience.

Please share your favorite healthy, easy, tasty recipes with me!

HP visits Australia: Sydney

Favorite things about Sydney:

New Years Eve Sydney

Sydney Opera House

The Opera House. I cannot get enough of the Opera House. Well, I guess I’m not enamored enough to do a tour or go to a performance there, but I’ve taken 10000 pictures of it and I do plan to hit the Opera Bar.

Surry Hills. We’ve been escaping the tourists, camping out at cafes, drinking in hipster bars, and eating at nice restaurants without reservations. (The restaurants in the CBD we’ve tried have been overpriced with long waits, terrible service and average food.)

Baxter Inn

Baxter Inn. It’s a dark bar in a basement with more types of whisky than you’ve ever seen. And really good non-whisky drinks. Sit at the bar and watch the bartenders work.

Sydney Harbour

Sydney Harbour Bridge

Sydney Opera House from the Harbour Bridge

Running through the Botanical Gardens and over the Sydney Harbour Bridge. See “The Opera House” above.

Rainford Street Social

Rainford Street Social, our office away from home. The breakfasts are hearty and delicious, the coffee is fabulous (coffee here is not like coffee at home), they have decent, reliable wifi (good wifi is hard to find around here), and don’t seem to mind that we stay for hours upon hours. We do make an effort to keep ordering more coffees and fresh juices while we work so we’re not total deadbeats.

Free range eggs in Sydney

More relevant to this blog’s theme is the prevalence of free range eggs at cafes and groceries in Sydney. Stopping at a grocery, all the eggs we could find were labelled free range, and they are what was offered at the cafes we’ve breakfasted at–an improvement over what we typically see at home in the States. Are the pro-chicken laws stricter in Australia? Is societal pressure for happier hens greater here?

Now might be a good time to remind us all that “free range” just means the hens must have access to the outdoors; they can still be kept at high density in a barn, and the label doesn’t have anything to do with what they’re fed.

Currently in the state of Queensland, Australia, for a farm to use the free range eggs label, the maximum number of hens per hectare (1 hectare is approximately 2.5 acres) is 10,000, with a density of 12 hens per square meter within a barn [cite]. Contrast that with the EU, where free range hen density is 2500 birds per hectare, with each hen getting at least four square meters of space in a barn [cite]. As bad as the Queensland limits seem, they’re better than the other Australian states, which have no legal definition at all for free range [cite]. Slightly better than the majority of Australia is the US: the USDA definition of free range is that the hens have access to the outdoors. There are no maximum density regulations [cite].

So, it seems Australia and the US are way behind the EU in terms of the legal requirements of the free range label. Fortunately, consumers in all three places are exerting increasing pressure on producers and legislators to improve the quality of life of laying hens. Kudos to the cafes in Surry Hills like Rainford Street Social that use only free range eggs! And, as always, it’s important to keep pushing for change using your dollars. According to Compassion in World Farming, the leading farm animal welfare charity:

The simplest thing you can do to help the hens that lay your eggs is to buy free-range.

We’re off to Perth tomorrow to inspect the egg situation there!

Lucky egg

Now that Spring has sprung, I’m back to buying eggs from the vendors at the Charlottesville City Market rather than from the good folks at Market Street Market.

Liberty Farm eggs, Bentonville, VA

Saturday’s purchase was from Liberty Farm and included an unusually large egg. Sure enough, when I cracked it open–

double-yolk egg

two yolks! It was (they were?) delicious. But why do double-yolk eggs occur? They’re usually produced by young hens with immature reproductive systems that release two yolks at once. Less often, stress could make an older hen could pop out a double-yolker. Double-yolking can be hereditary.

For a household of only two humans, we go through A LOT of eggs, but this was my first double-yolk experience. In fact, double-yolk eggs are quite rare: apparently, the probability of getting a two-yolk egg is 1/1000, but I couldn’t find an explanation of that number and what it takes into account. One would think the relative probability of finding a double-yolker in a carton of local, small-farm eggs would be much higher than finding one in a carton of graded commercial eggs, because the USDA grading and sorting process typically excludes these abnormal eggs.

I read that finding a double-yolk egg is good luck. Seems it’s also good luck for the chicken, as the layer of your lucky egg is more likely to be a local, small-farm hen, and good luck for the farmer who sold you the lucky egg and pockets your cash. Everybody wins when you buy local eggs!

If you’re interested in other wacky eggs, check out http://www.poultryhelp.com/oddeggs.html.

Resources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_yolk#Double-yolk_eggs
http://www.wilcoxfarms.com/news/how-common-are-eggs-with-double-yolks/
http://www.betterhensandgardens.com/2011/04/13/what-causes-double-yolks/
http://www.eggsafety.org/consumers/consumer-faqs
http://keep-hens-raise-chickens.com/eggs/double-egg-yolks
http://curbstonevalley.com/blog/?p=3612

Devil deviled eggs

Last Saturday I took deviled eggs to a party. I love deviled eggs, but don’t make them often, or ever, actually. I wanted them to be beautiful and delicious for this special occasion. On Friday, I bought 3 dozen local, pasture raised eggs, boiled them, and threw them in the refrigerator overnight. I found a recipe in an America’s Test Kitchen book and borrowed a piping kit from Cheenius, cake decorator extraordinaire. Saturday morning I got the eggs out of the fridge and peeled all 36. Zero came out unblemished. Ninety-five percent of them were horribly disfigured, with lumps and gashes and flaps.

ugly eggs after peeling

Only after surveying the messy results did I remember hearing that older eggs are easier to peel. As eggs age, air passes through the shell, increasing the air pocket between the egg white and the thin membrane between the white and the shell. When an egg is fresh, the shell, membrane, and white cling to each other, leading to chunks of white being pulled off with the shell.

I thought I could disguise my ugly egg whites with lovely piped and sprinkled fillings, but way overestimated my skills with a piping bag and paprika shaker.

ugly deviled eggs

So they were hideous, but tasty. Just about all 72 were eaten, and I hoped that people would know how fresh the eggs were, based on their mangled whites.

Vacation egg fail

Last week Haute Pasture was on vacation in the Caribbean. We cooked half our meals, and had two grocery stores to choose from when doing our provisioning for the week. Neither store seemed to be on the local/organic/sustainable bandwagon. Despite the fact that chickens could be found wandering the streets in many places, our grocery store egg option was this:

Factory farmed eggs that travelled from far away. I visited the Hillandale Farms website hoping to at least read some marketing lip service regarding caring about the well-being of the chickens, but alas, there’s nothing.

So yes, I willingly ate factory farmed eggs that were shipped a long distance. What made it worse was I had just gotten to the chapter on the treatment of chickens and other poultry in Temple Grandin‘s book Animals Make Us Human.

The chickens chapter details the horrors she found when she first started working to improve the living conditions of factory farmed poultry. I recommend reading it, but not while you’re eating factory farmed eggs.

It’s a good read if you’re interested in animal behavior, including dogs, cats, and horses, as well as livestock. I’ll write a more formal review when I finish. And yes, the eggs I just made for breakfast are local and from pasture raised hens.

“It’s their misfortune that they lack big eyes.”

Is an Egg for Breakfast Worth This? by Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times tells the horrifying story of Kreider Farms, which was recently exposed by a Humane Society undercover investigation. The article describes the dirty, crowded, rodent and fly infested barns where hens are raised and argues that even chickens, who don’t display much personality, should be exempt from cruelty.

I argue that chickens have plenty of personality. I submit the following as evidence:

Guest chickens quickly sized up the threat level presented by Dog, and acted sassy toward him to the point of stealing treats from under his nose.

Guest chickens learned that the humans came through this door and rushed it whenever it opened. They would have come into the house if allowed.

Chickens are hilarious. I’m not sure how anyone who has spent time watching chickens putter around a yard could think they don’t have personalities, or could eat a factory farmed egg or chicken meat product.

Random happy-farming news

I have a zillion articles waiting to be read! Here are a few blurbs I’ve enjoyed as I work through my pile of mail:

urban farming trend

From Heifer International‘s WorldArk magazine: Urban farming, in the form of windowbox gardens and backyard chickens, is on the rise in the US.

Also in WorldArk, scientists are experimenting with growing meat from stem cells, hoping for a cleaner process for mass-producing meat.

Gotham Greens

From the JW Townsend, a landscape contractor in Charlottesville, VA, newsletter, a blurb about Gotham Greens. Gotham Greens grows produce in rooftop greenhouses in Brooklyn, and supplies NYC markets and restaurants with local, sustainable food.

Switch to grass-fed beef

From Reader’s Digest, Feb 2012: an article called “The 20 Tips Health Pros Beg You Not to Skip.” Number 19, from a psychiatrist, is “switch to grass-fed beef,” for the health benefits.

Hyatt commits to cage-free eggs

From Mary Jane’s Farm, Aug-Sept 2011 issue, good news that Hyatt Hotels & Resorts is switching to cage-free eggs. That’s 2.4 million eggs fewer per year coming from battery cages.

Facebook CEO's Food Challenge

And finally, from the same Mary Janes Farm issue (yes, a bit outdated, but still an interesting read), a paragraph about Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg’s personal mission to learn more about sustainable farming and meat animals. The only meat he ate last year was from animals he killed himself.

That was the easy stuff. I have a stack of Foreign Affairs magazines staring me down. I’m halfway through The Globalization of Animal Welfare; comments to come soon!