Suzanne Nelson Karreman, Author at Reverence Farms

Diet by addition: Healing, hope, breakfast by the fire

January 6, 2021January 6, 2021
by Suzanne Nelson Karreman

“There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.”
Aldo Leopold, “A Sand County Almanac”

I think about the above quote a lot, even though keeping our home fire burning in the winter does more for my soul than for frigid finger tips, as it’s not set up to really heat our home (although I certainly wish it was…). I have also been thinking a lot about adding things to my diet rather than subtracting them. I’ve been calling it “diet by addition,” and I’ve decided that I’m going to eat eggs, lamb or beef as the center of every meal. Sounds silly for a livestock farmer to say this, but I wasn’t doing this despite the food abundance in which I live. It’s been life-changing.

This morning’s breakfast, 5a. Reverence Farms’ eggs (2 whole, 1 extra yoke), spinach from Community Greens (get yours at the Saxapahaw General Store), Carolina Moon cheese from Chapel Hill Creamery, scallions from Dinner Bell Farm, mushrooms that I pre-cook weekly from my Haw River Mushrooms CSA (one of my favorite investments I make annually in my health), and butter that I made myself.

(YES! Eggs are back in stock and on sale!)

One of my most highly prized skills is that I can flip an omelet in a stainless steel pan. Get the butter adequate and the temperature just right, and a toxin-free nonstick pan is not only possible but preferable. I’ll always owe a debt of gratitude to my friend Andrew for teaching me to make a proper omelet. I eat an omelet every. single. day. Just ask my family what happens to my mental and emotional health when I don’t have one… Eggs are incredible.

What if we only ate food from people we knew? What does it meant to really support farms?

While by the fire last night I was watching a live video from Grass Grazed Farm and thought something they said was amazingly right on, and I’m glad someone is saying it: If we want to support farms, we have to eat farm food. This sounds simple, and it is, but they were very clearly articulating why that doesn’t mean going to the farmers market for “onesie-twosies,” a bunch of flowers, a piece of meat and a couple of vegetables. Is that all you are going to eat for a week, really? Where are the rest of your meals coming from? They spoke about when they are out of bacon, they don’t eat bacon. Radically simple concepts, but totally transformative.

How to talk to a farmer? Ask her what she needs to move and learn to cook it.

I remember reading something Joel Salatin wrote years ago in one of his books about how radically different our landscape would be if we bought most/all of the food that we eat from farmers. That means, just for my little family of three, that we buy carrots, celery, sweet potatoes, etc by the bushel full. It means we need an extra fridge in the basement just for produce. (I just picked one up another one on Craigslist last month for 50 bucks.)

It also means that for every single meal, I can share with Hue and Vivian every single ingredient and it’s source. It means we eat seasonally not because it’s trendy, but because it’s what our friends are harvesting right now. It means that when the peaches are coming off the tree, we better get preserving, because the harvest will last only a week or two. And when we have that peach jam later in the year, we are going to eat it in moderation. Why? Because it’s limited and we know what went into making it. When it’s out, it’s out.

Diet by addition makes life deeply satisfying

I have started to call it “diet by addition,” and what I mean is this: if I fill our plates and mugs (1-2 pints of bone stock per day is part of this) with nutrient-dense food three meals a day, and source 90+% of our diet locally, I can eat all the snacks and have my little cheats to my heart’s content and still stay in the same belt loop. Why? Because my body and soul are satisfied enough to not want much of those things. It’s not the discipline of saying no so much as the much easier discipline of saying yes to the right things.

Have you considered how being deeply satisfied with your food affects your health?

Cooking

How to make bone stock

December 29, 2020December 29, 2020
by Suzanne Nelson Karreman

Stock is the foundation of all that is good and holy and I can feel worn down, depressed, grumpy and out of every form of energy, and I can have some homemade stock and immediately I feel like a new person again.

We always have soup in the freezer and fresh stock in the fridge, always. I make it a point to at least drink a pint of salted, warm stock every day day. It’s a great pre-breakfast pick-me-up when the day starts earlier than breakfast, or an afternoon snack, or a late, late dinner or a tonic after I’ve eaten junk food to immediately set me right. I really believe that well-made stock could transform the world.

Everyone should know how to make stock. It’s up there with balancing a checkbook, knowing how important it is to vote, riding a bicycle and brushing one’s teeth in life importance, in my book. It’s incredibly healing to the gut, the seat of the immune system. Giving stock in the form of homemade soup is a wonderful way of being neighborly. Chicken soup really is for the soul.

A friend got this mug for me as gag gift and I love the orange color on the inside. See my stock quaffing in the cold, winter air?!

Whenever we cook a chicken or turkey, I aways use the bones to make stock. Sometimes I’ll roast chicken backs or turkey necks specifically to make stock, but oftentimes the stock parts are the byproduct of other endeavors (sometimes roasting poultry to make soup). Beef stock usually is a separate affair that I roast marrow and soup bones for specifically, but the principles are the same. It’s a simple process that adapts well to whatever you have on hand.

I used to make stock by simmering several birds worth of bones in my 25-quart stockpot for a day or more, but these days my 8-quart Instant Pot is much less fuss (and more energy-efficient to run for 24+ hours than our gas range, plus the very real fire safety issues of running too low on water if you neglect the pot for too long).

Whether you use your Instant Pot, crock pot or a pot on your stove, the important thing is just to make bone stock!

The bones of one chicken work perfectly in the 8-quart model. When I make turkey stock from the carcass, I usually do it in two batches. One 2.5-lb bag of chicken backs and a package of feet (I always add a package of feet…) makes one batch. Each batch makes about a gallon of stock, which I store in 1/2-gallon mason jars in the fridge. We easily consume a gallon of stock a week, both as a hot beverage and in soups and braises. If you are going to freeze in glass, do so in pint containers with 3/4″ gap from the top and the wide-mouth containers work best. Any other sizes will crack in the freezer.

No truly worthy stock with ample gelatin for your tired bones and soon-to-be radiant skin can be made without feet. Double bonus if you use turkey feet, as they are like adding dinosaur bones to your pot and are full of nutrients. Chicken feet are also amazing.

Roasting the bones in advance isn’t absolutely necessary, but it will make the flavor much better, and then you will have pan drippings, which are a sine qua non of good stock in my book. If you are using a chicken carcass, the bones are already roasted, and definitely save every bit of those drippings!

Pan drippings are your friend in stock

To get all the precious browned bits off the roasting pan (you want to do this), put a little water in the pan and heat up on the stove until you can dislodge the last bit of juices and bits with a wooden spoon. Add this flavor-water to your stock pot.

Rinse the feet well and add them to your stock pot. Add 2 T. of organic apple cider vinegar, 1+ T. of real salt and enough water to reach within 1.5″-2″ of the top of the pot. Ideally, this mixture of bones, salt, water and vinegar would sit unheated for 30 min. The acidified water begins the process of extracting the minerals from the bones. Sometimes I don’t have time for that. It’s more important to make stock at all than to make perfect stock!

Simmer the pot of stock parts (do not boil) for 12+ hours, but definitely at least 5-6 hours. I usually set my slow-cook setting for 20 hours, with the keep-warm setting on after that, which buys me 10 more hours before I strain the stock. (The 140 degrees maintained in that setting is more than enough to keep extracting goodness out of the bones for your stock, and it’s also a food-safe temperature to hold poultry.)

These regular-mouth jars are more apt to crack in the freezer in my experience, so I often use wide-mouth jars. A cracked jar can of stock can be rescued with a fine-mesh strainer.

Upping your game with aromatics

If you are really on your game, add a couple of carrots and a couple of sticks of celery and a yellow onion, peeled and quartered, to the pot anytime within the last 2-4 hours of cooking. Sometimes I don’t do this, and the stock will just not be as aromatic. For bonus points, add parsley stems (up to a bunch of parsley) to the stock 30-60 min before completion. There’s lots of minerals in parsley and it adds great flavor. I rarely get to do this, but when I do it’s amazing. Adding vegetables too early in the process will create off flavors, and the long cooking times are necessary to get all the gelatin out of the bones.

I use a cone shaped fine-mesh strainer to strain the stock, but you can use anything you have. Even just on the keep-warm setting, the liquid in your pot will be hot enough to crack a glass (ask me how I know!) if the ambient temperature is sufficiently cold, so I usually strain into a large bowl and then ladle into the mason jars with my indispensable wide-mouth funnel. (Splurge and get a stainless steel one. I use it almost every day.)

Remember: it’s more important to make good stock than to make perfect stock. Just make stock!

A word about pressure cooking

The most flavorful stock I’ve ever had was made with the pressure cook “stock” setting on my Instant Pot, and it’s done in an hour or two, but there’s a lot to be cautioned about this approach, as many stipulate that it destroys nutrients. I will say that the stocks I’ve made this way had more gelatin, so who knows. There is not a lot of good science on the subject. My general rule of thumb is that if my grandmother didn’t have it in her kitchen, I best use the precautionary principle when deciding whether a particular ingredient, tool or method belongs in my kitchen, so most of the time I just use the “slow cook” setting, which is like a long simmering pot on the fire. The bonus with this approach is that I can fill the pot past the pressure cook line and get another quart of stock in the process.

Scenes from a real kitchen: turkey stock x 2 and chicken stock in 1/2-gallon mason jars with simple masking tape for labels. (Lacto-fermented carrots and ‘kraut on the right.)

Drink your stock!

Stock isn’t just for soup anymore. Every morning I drink a pint of heated, additionally salted stock poured over a teaspoon of minced ginger (one of the only prepared foods that I buy because it’s so gingery!) and a tablespoon of coconut oil. This tonic helps me think clearly and gives me nourishment to head to the barn before breakfast.

On living well

This is for all the farming mamas — you got…

December 26, 2020December 26, 2020
by Suzanne Nelson Karreman

Vivian at about six months old while I’m holding a goat named Doodle. Most days weren’t this picturesque, but the time Vivian spent on my back was foundational to our relating now.

This is for all the mamas out there farming and doing your best to raise a kid with all the modern expectations of child-rearing layered over the increasing clarity you get from every day pursuing a more simple life. You feel torn because you are torn. And you are not alone. All of your efforts towards finding a place to stand between the world you were given and the one your heart longs to create will amount to something, and with the abundance of God’s grace your kids will learn from you to also find a place to stand in truth and love, straddling the world that is crumbling and, with better skills than you had because you taught them by doing, a place of more solid footing.

This is my proud-mama post. Pregnant with the idea of this farm and Vivian at the same time, I learned to milk a cow with her in my belly. I carried her as an infant everywhere for five months on my chest (it’s like being pregnant for 14 straight months…), until one day I threw the guidebooks and modern caution to the wind and realized that if indigenous peoples carried babies on the backs from birth, I could certainly learn to do it at 5 months.

That’s when I got my chest and arms back and could really work again (but that’s also when she figured out she had her own hands, and grabbed branches and gates and animals everywhere we went). Despite 11 months of being attached to her, I still needed to put her down sometimes, and my mom made it all possible with her devotion to me and to Viv.

Having a baby and birthing a farm: twins!

Having a baby and birthing a farm together was like having twins, and the farm often stole my attention and time because its demands are always immediate and the bedtime stories and meals together often had to wait indefinitely. If I didn’t tend to the newborn lamb, it may die of hypothermia. Bedtime stories are important, but they are also too easily put off. Vivian learned an important lesson early — she’s not the center of the universe. None of us are. That’s one of the core deceptions that modern conveniences allow us to harbor: if I need/want it right now, and I get it right now, if my desires for comfort and ease can be met, I must be really important.

Life in the dirt teaches otherwise. But the historically abnormal practice of putting children in the center of our worlds is pervasive in our culture and I often had deep pain that I somehow wasn’t giving her enough of my attention.

From one working mama to another, if you are feeling that guilt, let it go. It’s going to be okay. You’re giving your kids the gift of observing you do something hard and worth doing, and doing it anyway, even when you don’t feel like it.

Grit meets grit

On her own a couple of months ago, Vivian decided that our 25-yo horse needed more care than she was getting, so she set up a feed room, begged for a way to have a sliding door that she could operate to get Shauna in/out on her own, and set her alarm for 6a every day to go feed her before school. She isn’t a morning person. It’s often cold and wet and unpleasant at that hour. Still, she does it, and again after school, without prompting. Kids see your grit and meet it. Keep going. They are expectantly observing and readying themselves for their own purpose-filled life.

Farming

When rainy days aren’t office days: A day in…

December 17, 2020December 19, 2020
by Suzanne Nelson Karreman

Blue rounding up the sheep to show them the barn. Not pictured: cold rain.

Let me just start off by saying that getting to spend our days toiling to leave the ground better than we found it, care for critters and work amongst a team of people who also pursue such as life calling is pretty awesome. Please also indulge me to add the following: If you are ever interviewing for a farm job at Reverence or anywhere else, pretty much the worst answer you can give to an inquiry as to why you want to work on a farm is “because I really want to work outside.”

I guarantee you that any farmer hearing that is going to think of days like yesterday and struggle to maintain composure. On days like yesterday (34 degrees and raining in sheets with just enough of a breeze to make it interesting), we work outside because our work is outside. Outside is not an attribute.

Our goal, every farmer’s goal, is to get our outside work done when the sun is shining and it’s pleasant-enough. The day before yesterday, I was walking the farm with Niti Bali and I distinctly remember informing her what a miracle it was that we were getting to enjoy a beautiful, crisp, sunny winter day. My dream of doing desk work on rainy days and outside work on amazing days has a way of not always aligning. I guess I had a premonition that the following day would be the kind during which my hands could somehow simultaneously be both numb and very painful.

A perfect day

Anticipating the incoming freezing rain, two days ago, Hue, Jake and I sorted some heifers out of a group across the creek from the dairy barn so that the 35 ewes with the ram and the heifers could get in the hoophouse. The heifers have been hogging the shelter during recent inclement weather, and we knew yesterday was supposed to be particularly nasty. We ended up peeling 8 yearling+ heifers out of that group and had a very pleasant walk over the creek and through the woods to reunite them with the main herd. It was the kind of farm day that dreams are made of. (Hue even carried me over the creek, which was spontaneous and amazing, because I wasn’t wearing my tall boots.)

8 heifers cross Hobby Creek from the Austin Quarter side of the farm to the Haw River side.

Yesterday’s walk to the barn started off easy enough. Just feeding our 25-yo horse, Shauna, with Viv, and straight back to the house, I told myself… Didi (the 3-legged pit mix) and Dolly (the Blue Tick Hound) — our normal 7a companions to the barn — elected to stay home. Dolly wouldn’t leave the porch even with a coat on.

While Vivian was with the horses, I decided to take a look at the 50 or so sheep in the market group — they are apart from the main group on a separate property so that the ewes in the group don’t get bred to the ram, as these are sheep that haven’t made the grade as breeding stock and will become part of our grassfed lamb program. They were in the rain. They didn’t look terrible, but nor did they look especially content. We had specifically given them access to what we call the Long Barn (a run-in shed where we store equipment and straw but that also dubs as shelter) for weather like this.

Okay, I thought, it’s time for you guys and gals to learn that the barn really is accessible to you, even though the entrance appeared obstructed by one of our mobile shade structures. Blue — the rescued Border Collie who is not a perfectly trained sheep dog but whose instincts are pretty dang good — and I successfully had the sheep down to the barn in two minutes. And then we waited.

The sheep could get in this barn, but they’d rather stay in the rain. Why? Lots of folks think sheep are stupid, but we just don’t see what they see… The only area around the shader has a puddle, and puddles reflect light in a way that is often scary to livestock. With the water continually hitting the puddle from the roof, it can appear like a hazard to them.

When working with livestock, it’s best for them to move along in their own will. When you start forcing them to go where you want them to go, you better have good handling equipment to keep them contained. We rarely do, and we mostly rely on good stockman-ship, which is better for everyone anyway. Just because you can force livestock doesn’t mean you should…

Sheep have their own notions

They wouldn’t budge. Blue was perfect and twice went out to bring back an escapee on his own, no words from me. Clearly the shade structure was too much of a visual barrier.

So now I’m going to move the shader. No problem, really. It’s super easy to move with our UTV. But then one of the poles got stock on the barn post, and so now I need a second person to hold it back while I drive it out. No problem. Fred happened to arrive for morning chores at the same time Hue came out to help, so now I have two sets of hands. Easy. Then the UTV lost it’s little bit of charge while I was waiting for them (we are in process of repairing it’s electrical connections). Farming…

So now we connect it to the truck, get the shader out, and planned to just get it backed into another barn so we are ready for the next impending ice storm. But turns out the shader’s wheel base wouldn’t fit in the barn unless we re-organized the barn, which I’ve been meaning to do anyway, yet it’s still 34 degrees and raining, and now I can no longer feel my hands.

This was a sunny-day project

Fred and Hue ended up backing the shader into the barn by hand because double-axeled wagons are really challenging to back up with tinted-windowed trucks in the rain into a really tight space. My job was to prevent the shader poles from getting stuck on the barn posts on the way in (yellow arrow, below) — for which I was about 50 percent effective, because by now the only time I can feel my hands is the acute pain when they try to hold something. I had not worn gloves as a hopeful measure to prevent any kind of unnecessary activity at the barn that morning … so determined I was to come right back inside!

It’s now 10a and the barn is clean and I’m spent. I should have just given myself a 30-min respite and TLC, but now I’m several hours behind on office work and so I foolishly pushed ahead and got myself feeling pretty tired and overwhelmed, an unwelcome friend that pursued me until 10:30p last night when I finally collapsed after making some soup. We did have a fire, and the soup was amazing.

Truthfully, I didn’t need to put the shader in the barn yesterday (although it did need to be moved out of the other barn). It could have waited for another pleasant-enough sunny day. But sometimes it’s worthwhile just to get something done so you don’t have to come back to it, because 14 other things will come up in the meantime, and when an object is in motion, it’s best to just keep rolling. Some of it was just stubborn persistence.

Can you see the canine? Blue is proudly looking over his good work. You’re a good boy, Blue.

Lesson? When the sheep weren’t going in the barn at all, even when it was just a little crummy out over the previous 7-10 days, that was the time to listen to the quiet inner voice that said, “I wonder why the sheep aren’t using the barn?” The next pleasant-enough day would have been a perfect time to move the shader and reorganize and clean the barn, instead of lamenting that I was looking at spreadsheets when it was 60 degrees and sunny.

The other, and bigger, lesson? Like Eisenhower said, planning is indispensable, but plans are useless.