Furnace Hills Coffee Storefront and the Great Garlic Pull

That sounds like a great title for a tweener novel. Well, maybe swap out the word "storefront" for something more compelling. And I'd love for it to portend riveting character development and plot twists in what follows, punctuated with juvenile humor, but really, I just have multiple small things to write about and figured I'd slam them all together. But maybe my epic battle with the garlic will hold your attention.

Remember around Christmas time I wrote about two of my favorite local businesses for hot drinks - Sweet Simplici-tea for tea in Sykesville and Furnace Hills Coffee roasters in Westminster for, well, coffee. At the time, Dave Baldwin of Furnace Hills had acquired a storefront to roast and sell coffee from on Westminster's Main Street. For those familiar with the area, you can throw a rock from their place at 71 West Main Street and the Carroll Center for the Arts. It took a bit longer than they hoped, but they have opened for retail sale. Yesterday I had a chance to run by and pick up some freshly roasted Ethiopian Coffee. Dave was out, but I chatted a bit with Erin and took a few photos. The store hours are a bit irregular still, but you can always send them a note via Facebook. They also post there when the store is open later. As I understand, they are generally there on Monday and Wednesday 8-3:30, at a minimum, and they are still at the downtown Westminster Farmer's Market on Saturdays. Furnace Hills is still providing great locally roasted coffee, focused on providing a long-term income for Erin, who lives with Downs Syndrome, at very affordable prices. Here's a few pictures I snapped of the store.

Erin at the store

The new large roaster they have at the storefront

Furnace Hills Coffee at 71 West Main Street, Westminster, MD

After hemming and hawing a bit, or a lot, I finally pulled my garlic this past week. From everything I've read, which is not insignificant, deciding when to harvest garlic is quite an art. You are trying to balance leaving them in the ground to increase the size of the bulbs with pulling them before they've lost the protective outer coatings. There is lots of lore surrounding the perfect time to pull them, mostly having to do with how many leaves are brown, but in the end, nothing is really hard core science. If you yank them early, you get small cloves with too much outer coatings and it reduces the storage capacity of the bulb. If you yank to late, the coatings are gone, the cloves will start pulling away from the bulb, and, no surprise, it reduces the storage capacity of the bulb. So, what to do??! this is my first year with garlic, so what I did was read a lot. The Maryland Cooperative Extension says that most garlic in Maryland should be pulled around July 1st. Garlic is grown generally in more nothern climates, so as you read on the Internet, you'll see that most websites recommend pulling from early July through late August.  The key is the browning foliage.  Because I live in the woods, I'm usually about two weeks behind the neighborhood at the bottom of my hill. Of course, one might reasonably ask why you are growing garlic in the woods in the first place. Well, you certainly can't grow it if you don't try. So, I tried.

I made this!

I tried hardneck garlic, Red Chesnuk variety.  Hardneck garlic produces scapes that you can harvest and use in salads and stir frys while the garlic is maturing. But, it doesn't have anywhere near the storage life of the much smaller-cloved softneck varieties. In my case, the reason I tried this variety was because I ordered so late nothing else was available. Lesson learned. If you want to grow garlic, order early, like now. If you have sun and semi-decent soil, and you like garlic, I highly recommend it. It must have the largest payoff for effort reward of any annual I've grown, and it is quite cost effective.

Here's how it breaks down. A friend and I split a 1 lb order from Big John's Garden - an organic garlic and shallot farm - in Klamath Falls, Oregon. Why him? Well, I had just vacationed last year in that area and it's beautiful and he's organic. That's all. He's got a cool website, lots of variety (now, not in September), and was very responsive. He has these sampler packages, which naturally I missed out, ordering as late as I did. In any case, with shipping our 1 lb of Red Chesnuk was $27. I can't recall exactly if we split this evenly, but in any case, I ended up planting around 40 cloves myself. All you do is split the bulbs into individuals cloves, and put them in the ground a few inches under. Then mulch around them with straw or something. Garlic can not compete with other weeds, so if you don't want to be tied to weeding, you must mulch. One bale of straw will be plenty for Fall and then re-mulching in Spring. Then, no weeding. With the hardnecks, you remove the scapes as they come up in early June. Then you watch your foliage, and when it is 1/3 brown, or 1/2 brown, or when there are 5 brown left, or some other magical formula, you use a garden fork to go underneath the cloves and loosen them from their death grip on the earth. Having done that, you just pull gently, shake off the dirt, and let them dry in the house for about 3 weeks to cure the skins. If you try to pull them directly out of the ground, you'll be very sad. I am quite certain that my sneaky little garlic cloves tried to dig themselves in deeper during the winter... some of them were desperately difficult to get out of the ground.

Straight out of the ground - you can see the brown foliage

Ok, so I shelled out about $13-15.  If you buy organic garlic from the farmer's market, you are going to pay $1-3 per bulb based on size. based on the unrelenting reality that I have little sun exposure, most of my bulbs were pretty small. Still, when I added it up, I harvested about $50 worth of garlic this week. Not bad.  We also harvested my friend's garlic... the same original bulbs... but with a lot more sun...hers were big and plump... and I'd say easily $80-100 worth of garlic. Not bad at all. So, I already have plans to make a raised bed on the property where I have a bit more sun. This year, I want to try a softneck variety and we'll see what happens.

Mine are curing in the basement on paper

This post is part of Real Food Wednesday at Kelly the Kitchen Kop.

Change of Seasons

Ed Bruske teaches at Go Local Fair

In the last few years, the seasons have almost blurred into two: when there is fresh local produce and when there is not. We are just coming out of one season and into another, and the last few weeks have held any number of markers for this change. This week, I baked our last apple pie until they return in the Fall. I'll say for myself that it was awesome. Given my well-publicized fight against pie pastry, I think this was my biggest success yet. Before someone asks, no, I didn't use the lard. I'm going to make a quiche soon and try again with lard. But, the two of us are steadily making our way through a fabulous apple pie. It was also time to reconcile our food stores.

I talked last Summer and Fall about our storage of peaches, some 60 lbs of them, cherries and blueberries, 40 lbs of each, and 70 lbs of apples. From the start, I was concerned about two things: first, being caught in the squirrel mentality - store, store, store and if you eat it, you don't have it -- and second, whether we'd be able to finish that ridiculous amount of fruit along with a more manageable amount of veggies we'd frozen. We weren't really dessert people, so we did have to change up our normal eating routines. My nine-year-old son was quite okay with that. I made a lot of pies and crisps, basically aiming for once a week. We had made a ton of preserves with the cherries and blueberries, and we used them almost daily for our plain (homemade) yogurt. Drum roll, please.... we're almost done. The pie was the last of the apples, the peaches are gone, the preserves, except one jar, are gone. We have a few large bags of cherries and blueberries, but we are quickly turning them into smoothies using the whey from our cheese. (adding that protein removes them from the dessert pile into the oh-so-good-for-you-pile, eat them when you want pile). and we have one pint of apple sauce left. So, wow, now I know how much fruit we can consume. Strawberries are already starting to come around.

The peach freeze

The Go Local Fair put on by Sustainable Living Maryland yesterday in Westminster was another turning point. We got to see all the farming faces that we missed over the Winter months and catch up on their plans. Ed Bruske, the Slow Cook, from Washington, D.C., did a cooking with kids talk, which was fabulous. He did a small version of what he teaches in an aftercare program in D.C., and the kids made zucchini carppaccio, asparagus salad with a mustard vinaigrette, and strawberry crepes. In this courses, he teaches the kids about international foods, sustainability, and how to really cook. His daughter accompanied him and was a great help to the class; at ten years old, you can see how confident she is in the kitchen. He also teaches the kids about consuming all parts of the animal and discussed recently bringing in chicken livers for them to cook. It was a small audience, but hopefully others enjoyed it as we did. I highly recommend his blog as an insight into the things he does with the kids and with school food reform.

Truffula Produce's Lettuce Dryer

We got to see a bunch of producer friends too. Next week, the downtown Westminster Farmer's market opens Saturday, 8-12. Truffula Seed Produce will be there again. Shawn and Josie have rented another acre of land and the two of them are, still alone, busily trying to work all that property organically and sustainably, with traditional methods. They'll be serving up 20 CSA shares this year, their first time in that business, and hopefully it will go well.  Like most of the farmers there yesterday, they had lettuce for sale. Lots and lots of lettuce, which all gets dried in their modified washer!

I also ran into Dave Baldwin of Furnace Hills Coffee. The brick-n-mortar business is coming! He expects it to open this week or next. Once I get a chance to go visit it on Main Street, Westminster, I'll post some photos and details. His coffee is so reasonably priced and so developed with a heart, I highly recommend it.

Scott from Sattva Place Farm was there too. He will be processing 100 chickens soon, and his plan is to have fresh chicken available at the Westminster Market every weekend this season. Scott is certified organic and a one man farm. Our buying group has been nothing but happy.

Akeys CSA pick up last year

I talked briefly with Micheal Akeys of Green Akeys Farm, too. His CSA has expanded from 14 to 18 shares, which I know will be huge shares based on past experience. He also picked up a milking cow this week. I think he moves intrepidly into everything.  I don't think Micheal is doing any markets, but I might be wrong. To buy meat from him, you can call him and go to the farm. Micheal is getting some help this Summer, though, which seems wise given the breadth of farming going on!

I took a quick peek into De La Tierra's tent and didn't get time to chat with owner, Jackie, but I know she will be selling cut flowers at the market and she is selling her beautiful plants this Spring for the garden, both flowers and produce. I also ran into Greg Thorne, of Thorne Family farms, and he said that because of the constant rain we've had over many weeks now, their planting is way behind. He left the fair early to take advantage of the good weather and get some work done on the land.

This past Winter, we were able to make it through using our winter CSA from Everblossom Farm and our food storage, with almost zero produce bought at the grocery store. I never would have thought we could do that, and eat a ton of veggies. We did. What a great local challenge for ourselves. Now, we are looking forward to the season of plentiful.

This post is going to be part of the Hearth and Soul blog hop this week... make sure to check out all the other entries for some great and fascinating food-related articles!

Emus at the Fair

Tea or Coffee, anyone?

Tea at Sweet Simplici-Tea

A few years ago when we returned from Europe, I noticed that a tea shop had opened on Main Street in Sykesville. The street extends a few blocks from the Patapsco River and the railroad tracks, which provide a beautiful backdrop to the mid-nineteenth century architecture in the historic center. This isn't much here: a few good restaurants, salons, specialty gift stores. Back in the day, I hear Sykesville was a bustling small town, hosting grocery stores and even a bowling alley. But in the mid-1980s, they moved Rt. 32 to bypass the town and things changed. The town is still lovely and the setting perfect. It is one of the reasons we were attracted to the area. But in the tough economy we were particularly worried about waking up to find a clapboard town that would eventually follow the path of so many other small towns. We decided to try to frequent the Main street businesses when we could. So I was delighted to find Sweet Simplici-Tea.

Main Street, Sykesville, MD

Historic Rail tunnel at Sykesville, MD

My son and I first entered the tea room on a late September morning in 2008. The place that day was empty and it gave us a chance to really talk to our waitress and eventually the owners. The restaurant had not been open long at that point, only a few months. Two sisters, Lisa and Robyn, had joined forces to bring tea and scones in a period setting to the town. The tea room is distinctly feminine, with lots of purples and pinks adorning the walls. But the scones we tasted that day were unbelievably delicious, and our waitress, Robyn's daughter Lauren, was enchanting. She had returned from teaching in Africa not that long before and carried in her an energy that was infectious. Her ability to relate to children was amazing. My son and I were hooked, and we decided we'd go to tea every Saturday morning after we swam. And we did for nearly a year. In the first few months some days we'd be the only guests and we would be anxious for them. But as the New Year turned, so did the business, and it seemed to catch like wildfire. When our schedule took us away from our weekly visits, we no longer had our guaranteed spot! The tearoom was full most Saturdays and evolving.

Sweet Simpli-Tea storefront, Sykesville, MD

Lisa runs the front of the house. She's the face and the savvy businesswoman. In the last year or so, they began having their own teas blended from a company in Pennsylvania. Of course, you can't really buy local tea leaves or coffee beans, but you can carefully choose your supplier and look to support the local business that bringing those products into the area. Lisa has focused on providing the highest level of service to her guests where they can relax and enjoy an unfettered drink and a bite to eat with friends. She has partnered with other local businesses to find ways that they can gain from each others clientele. And she loves the tea.

Robyn is a nurse who works full time at a local hospital during the week. Then she shifts her attention to the food for Sweet Simplici-Tea for the weekends.  Truly amazing. She likes to cook and experiment. Her scone selections vary depending on the season, as do the jams or creams that they are served with. My personal favourite is cherry chocolate chip, but there are other great ones and seasonal choices like pumpkin. Sometimes there are savory scones like rosemary parmesan. I haven't had one I didn't like. Robyn is goofy and full of goofy ideas. She likes to wear themed aprons and decorate for the occasion. She loves planning for birthday parties at the shop. She also plans and makes all the "full teas", which are really full meals of bite-sized food. You get a tray of little goodies with quiches, small tea sandwiches, little desserts, all generally planned around the season, in addition to scones and tea. For the really hungry, they even offer choices that include salad and sorbet. A full tea will take a couple of hours and normally experiment with a few tea choices while we talk between courses, though truthfully we always come back to our favourite, Buckaneer.

Nowadays, you are wise to have a reservation for Sweet Simplici-Tea on the weekend. It is almost always full for the 11-4 opening time. Special events too mostly sell out, but are a wonderful way to spend the evening. We no longer go weekly because of other things in life, but when we do visit, we love it. and it really connects us with local business in an empowering way. It reminds me of Cheers - it's really nice to go somewhere that everyone knows your name.

Baldwin's Station Restaurant on the tracks, Sykesville, MD

What you won't find at Sweet Simplici-Tea is coffee. The smell of coffee is too overpowering, so they won't carry it there. I try to buy my coffee from Fair Trade suppliers and small roasters. That really isn't that easy locally, at least not out in Carroll County. I can get Zekes, which is a Baltimore roast, from the organic market, Moms, in Jessup, but I hardly ever go there.  I guess that is my problem, I don't have these fancy organic markets nearby and I'm not really willing to drive all over just to go to them. This is why I've never entered a Whole Foods. (gasp)

In any case, coffee. I like good coffee in the morning so I was thrilled to find a coffee roaster at the Wesminster Farmer's Market in September. Dave Baldwin and his daughter, Erin, were there greeting customers and selling their Furnace Hills coffee. The coffee is all grown using organic methods and at high altitudes. They are using an experienced supplier to connect them into the fair trade market (though I'm not sure if they are using certified Fair Trade supplies) and using a dollar from each bag to support various charitable causes.

Erin of Furnace Hills Coffee

Dave has taught Erin, who has Down Syndrome, to roast the beans to perfection in small home roasters. As a young developmentally disabled adult, this gives her a real avenue to a productive life, to provide for herself essentially, and to help others at the same time. And guess what?? That coffee is really good! I'm all for a great charity, but I still want a good cup of coffee in the morning. :) I personally have tried two of their five blends and enjoyed them both: Telunas Beach Blend and the Black Diamond Blend. When I met them at the market they made a great impression. Dave is very engaging and someone you want to support. I was surprised and delighted a few weeks later when I returned and he remembered not just my face, but my name. Recently I ran out of coffee and went to their house on Christmas Eve to pick up a few pounds. This is the kind of experience that drives home how directly your supporting your neighbor when you buy locally. The Baldwins live in an average neighborhood of row homes outside of Westminster, an area called Furnace Hills. Nothing fancy. Indeed, I had originally hoped to get some photos for the blog with Erin and the roasters, but for lack of space, they had to put up all the roasters from the dining table to get ready for Christmas! The good news is that in the next month or so, Furnace Hills Coffee will get a storefront on Main Street in Westminster. I'll be back to visit them and snap some photos then, and I'll post an update with the address.  In the meantime, check them out online. If you're a coffee fan in Carroll County, invest your indulgence locally and give them a try.