Laramie Locavore

Chokecherry Jam

“Chokecherries so furre the mouthe that the tongue will cleave to the roofe, and the throate wax hoarse!” Early settler, 1634

When I bought my house on the West Side, the young woman who sold us the place got teary when she told me that she remembered her grandmother making chokecherry jam from the tree in the yard. I assured her I would carry on the tradition. But it’s taken me six years to get around to making jam from the black orbs that hang in clusters in the late summer, attracting birds and squirrels to gorge upon them. But finally I decided my children were old enough to tackled jam production and this year we did some research and tried it.

Chokecherry bushes grow all over town and are a common riparian-loving bush in our mountains, growing fragrant, drooping racemes of flowers not unlike lilacs. The flavor of the berry explains their name, it’s tart acidic juice puckering the mouth instantly. Native tribes ground the berries and pits together and ate them in dried patties. Pioneers invented chokecherry jam and it’s one of the great pleasures of mountain life and an easy fruit for high elevation gardening.

It took my children and I all morning to pick the cherries. We climbed a ladder high into the inner world of the tree and picked every one we could reach, collecting about a half gallon from our 10-foot tall tree. Then we spent most of the afternoon de-stemming. Yes, making chokecherry jam was time consuming but not so terribly unlike climbing Medicine Bow Peak, except there was toast and jam at the top instead of a view.

I used my handy Rocky Mountain Wild Foods Cookbook by Darcy Williamson for the recipe. To make the jam, I had to fine tune the cookbook’s recipe to fit my half gallon of berries. I also used the recipe on the back of my freezer jam fruit pectin for measurements. First, I washed the berries and cooked them in three cups water for fifteen minutes. While they cooked, I mashed them thoroughly with a potato masher. Meanwhile, I mixed together three cups of sugar and the pectin. I started with two cups of sugar but when I tasted the jam later, I knew an extra dose of sweet would balance the tart and added a half a cup of sugar at a time until I had the right balance. The wild food cookbook emphasized the need to ring every drop of pulp from the mash and suggested pouring the whole vat into an old pillow case and twisting the juice out. I put the berries and juice through a wire sieve and used the back of a slotted spoon, but wasn’t satisfied. I ended up picking up handfuls of berries and pits and squeezing the liquid out like a sponge in my bare hands. This worked marvelously without sacrificing my linens.

My half gallon of berries made exactly the four cups of liquid required for the pectin recipe. I mixed the pulp together with the sugar and pectin and poured it into clean jars and plastic containers. It made enough jam to give away as gifts and to eat the whole winter through. Afterward, the kitchen looked a little like we’d been inflicting murder and mayhem, smears of blood red on floors and cabinets, but that only made me think how many antioxidants we must get from the jam. I’ve already been thinking of Thanksgiving recipes to use it with. Chokecherry jam over baked pumkin? Bring on autumn.

Laramie Locavore

Sharing the Bounty

Rhonwyn with radishes in front of greenhouse

The radishes in my garden are bulging red under their prickly leaves and I know it’s time for them to be served in a salad with the last of my green leaf lettuce before it goes to seed. But my family aren’t the avid radishes lovers I am. They haven’t learned the pleasure of sneaking out to the garden with a bowl of salt, washing a red orb under the hose and eating them wet and spicy straight from the earth, the way I did as a girl growing up in Walden. Nowadays, I mostly plant radishes to deter the earwigs and other pests who don’t care for the spicy flavor they bring to the rest of the bed. Needless to say, I now have a few too many radishes.

So for last Friday’s farmer’s market, I harvested several bunches and delivered them to the Sharing the Bounty table down in front of Grand Newsstand. Along with Anddee Gilliam, Gayle Woodsum and Laramie Local Food Group, I’ve been helping to organize a table to accept excess bounty, like my radishes, to be donated to Soup Kitchen, Interfaith Good-Samaritan and, later in the fall, to Headstart.

This last Friday’s donations were bountiful indeed. Our baskets burgeoned with fruits and vegetables people had harvested from their own gardens, or bought at the farmer’s market especially to donate to our cause. We had bags of potatoes, a jar of Wyoming honey, a mighty harvest of homegrown tarragon, one lovely peach, carrots, onions, cabbage and more. We also received a very generous cash donation to help us offset the cost of the canopy and other supplies we’ll need.

The donation table is part of a growing interest in all things foody, whether its the quality of meals served in nursing homes and schools, the importance of reducing the amount of fossil fuels it takes to deliver our foods to our tables, or educating the public about how to prepare fresh fruits and vegetables at home. Gayle calls this new trend a movement toward “food equality” in which it is considered a human right to have access to good food. You’ve probably seen the TV chefs visiting the most unhealthy sectors of our country and teaching children how to garden and cook. When it makes it to reality TV shows, you know you’ve got a full blown trend on your hands.

We’ll be accepting donations at the Sharing the Bounty table every week through the farmer’s market season. Stop by and share your gardening stories and recipes.

Melodie Edwards is a local writer and a member of Laramie Local Foods, an organization dedicated to growing, harvesting and eating locally grown foods. She can be reached at laramie.locavore@gmail.com.

Laramie Locavore: Patty’s Poultry

Laramie Locavore

Patty’s Poultry

The Chicken Coop

I’ve made a bit of a project of taking my children to visit the places where their food comes from. I took them out to the shady spot under the cottonwoods to meet the Morning Fresh cows in Laporte and took a hayride to see the Grant Family Farm many vegetables grow. So when I went to visit Marla Petersen, manager at Big Hollow Food Co-op, my first question was, “How do I get in touch with Patty?” The co-op has several local egg producers but because of her dependability and price, and maybe because I know her by name, I always reach for Patty’s eggs.

Laramie is unusually blessed with egg producers, thanks to the co-op. Marla says they haven’t sold commercial eggs in over a year. “Once you’ve tried [local eggs] you can’t go back,” Marla said. She’s right, and it’s not just the flavor that makes them better, but they’re more nutritious, too, with a third less cholesterol, twice the omega-3 fatty acids, more vitamins A and E and seven times the beta carotene, which gives them their lovely orange-y yolks.

All Patty Eats are Eggs!

All of this good news was no new news to Patty Ranz, the 23-year-old chicken, duck and rabbit farmer living on her great aunt’s ranch near Harmony. “I hardly ever get sick,” Patty says. “Thanks to my eggs, some fish oil and good sleep.” When you look in her fridge, it does appear that eggs are all she eats, nothing much else in there but cartons of the morning’s egg collection. “I just wash them here at my kitchen sink. I don’t use egg soap because I don’t trust the warning on the label,” she says. She washes each one by hand with a little Dawn, the same tough but gentle stuff they’re using to clean brown pelicans in the Gulf.

When I asked how she got into chicken farming, she says growing up in Laramie her backyard was a zoo, “but my parents let me follow what I loved…[Raising animals] is a source of joy for me.” She was a shy kid but participating in 4-H showing rabbits gave her confidence. However, she didn’t learn to raise chickens in 4-H. That, she says, is in her blood, all the way back to her homesteading grandfather who gave up practicing law to move to Rawlins and raise chickens. She has taught herself everything by trial and error, with the help of a few good books. (One of her bibles is Incubating: A Guide to Better Hatching by Janet Stromberg.) This summer she’ll be building onto her pens to enlarge her flock as well to build an egg mobile, a cart with nests inside that will allow Patty to tour her older layers around the ranch to help her mow down weeds and bugs. With the egg mobile, the older hens will continue to provide a service even when they are laying fewer eggs. Before winter, she also needs to get a wood stove in the chicken coop. “Winters are hard,” she says. “The power went out last year when we had those 45 below temperatures and I lost all my rabbit litters. I’m too dependent on electricity. It’d be sad to lose everything just because I’m not prepared.”

“Who’ll help you build all this stuff?” I ask.

Patty shrugs, a slight young woman with waist length brown hair and a quiet smile. “I’ll build it myself. My dad taught me carpentry as a kid.”

The Duck Puddle

She shows my two girls and me into the chicken pens past the ducks sitting around their puddle. “Duck eggs take a while to cook,” Patty tells us. “But they’re great for baking. They make everything really poofy.”

Inside the chicken house, the roosters and hens are singing at the top of their lungs, perched everywhere on the highest points in the coop. “Someone laid an egg,” Patty yells over the racket. “They’re all very proud about it.”

After the din dies down, she tells us she has about 80 chickens currently but is incubating another 20 or so and intends to keep growing her business. None of her chickens have clipped wings or beaks and when one stubborn hen insists on roosting up in the rafters, Patty provides her a box up there. “The recession came along right when I graduated from LCCC and I was out of work. But Marla said something that got me thinking. She said, well, you’ve always got your eggs to fall back on. And it’s become a passion. It’s my goal to utilize every part of the animal.” She even wants to figure out how to compost the bird poo to sell.

After leaving the chickens, we head back out into the mosquitoes (the chickens keep their pen free of them) and meet Patty’s guard dogs, a friendly collie and a rescued malamut/shepard who ran away from everyone else but who chooses to stay on with Patty, chain-free.

Other than the animals, Patty’s only company is her 88-year-old great aunt. “She gets around the house alright,” Patty says. “But I help her get to bed and eat right. She’d eat ice cream for supper if she could.”

Patty Ranz in Front of Her Aunt's House

Patty walks us to our car and we say goodbye. My girls and I know that every time we drive past Patty’s place, we’ll wave at the chickens that give us eggs and think of Patty out there, putting in her wood stove, the raucous songs of proud chickens all around her.

To arrange your own visit to see Patty’s chickens, make an appointment at 307.761.0804.

Melodie Edwards is a local writer and a member of Laramie Local Foods, an organization dedicated to growing, harvesting and eating locally grown foods. She can be reached at laramie.locavore@gmail.com