Finishing Touches

With the weather turning once again bitterly cold and snowy, this week was time to complete some finishing touches inside the manor. Now that the paintings, mirrors and all light fixtures are up, the Tucker team (our local contractor) was keen to have a photographic record of their good work. So we had two days with a pro (local photographer Esther van Geest) meticulously staging our home. I have to admit the results look better than real life....or seem to. Perhaps we have grown a little too acquainted with our surroundings.

It was time for a pro (Esther van Geest) to record the inside of the manor

We hope to use these photos with a re-write of the manor's history. This we expect to post on our website this year.

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Although there are a few things left to do, this year we will now be concentrating on the outside of the manor, including landscaping.

Last year we took the Winter months to begin work on our barn kitchen and store. This year we have started another phase of this work: the dining veranda. The objective is to make it a little more comfortable for our patrons. In effect, we hope to provide a little bit more shelter from the elements by replacing the old blinds....while still providing an eating environment with an "outdoor" feel.

Starting work on refinishing the veranda

We are also taking the time to replace the ceiling lattice work. Although this looked clean, it was the perfect place for bird and squirrel nests, which were rather unpleasant to remove.

On the farming front, it was time to prepare for Spring....and this means ordering our seeds and plants for the new year. To begin, we had to measure our new rows. It turns out that our measuring wheel was not accurate so we have reverted to a 200 foot tape measure (we should have done this a long time ago!).

Measuring our new rows.

With row lengths recorded and visions of large new raised beds in our heads, we were keen to scan the web for this year's seeds. I thought we went a little too far last year, but I think we really went overboard this year. We now have well over 50 different varieties of herbs and vegetables on order; we will also be introducing a new berry to our offering: the Haskap. We will also be increasing our inventory of raspberries (adding Black Raspberries to our fields) as well as Black Currants.

From a vegetable point of view, it will really be fascinating to see what works out now that we also have our Growing Dome greenhouse to get things started.

On the dome front, we are now ready to commit to a final internal configuration. Our hydroponic bed concept seems to work so we ordered another 16 beds from Northern Lights and took delivery of the majority this week.

With the hydroponic beds in...it's time for wood working.

Now it's time to do a massive amount of woodworking.

We will close this week with a special event announcement: Chef Ryan Beck will be a guest Chef at Oast House in Niagara-on-the-Lake every Sunday in February. So if you want a taste of Ridge Berry Farm....while the Tea Room is closed, a good venue to taste Ryan's cooking for the next month will be at this great local micro-brewery.

Pruning Kiwis

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With the family just recovering from the flu, the past couple of weeks have not been very productive. However, with the weather warming up, it was time to start some work outdoors.

We started by cleaning the remnants of the ice storm. In particular, it was time to clear an old willow which had fallen. It turns out this wood is harder to cut and heavier than we had anticipated. In fact, the willow's trunk is beyond the capacity of our small chain saw.

One massive willow to clean up

It turns out the best we could do was to trim the spurious branches. We now have a large bifurcated trunk sweeping over the creek.

Cleaning up the willow proved a lot more difficult than planned

From the willow, we returned to pruning our Kiwis. These have taken very well to the horizontal trellises we built last year. Evidence of this is the tight "pig tailing" of the vines on our polyamide cables.

"Pig tailing" trellised vines (with old never pruned vines in the background)

With the trellised vines, our pruning time has been brought down to 1 hour per plant. Because they are not yet trained (we are aiming for 5 nice longitudinal vines, one per cable), it is still difficult as spurious growth tends to wrap around itself.

Although neater than their old counterparts, pruning these is still a difficult process

Our polyamide cable has proven itself. It has maintained its tensile strength over the seasons and it is easy to deploy. We have however encountered one minor problem: it is also easy to cut with plain old shears....and not being careful enough, this is exactly what we did!

The result is not as dramatic as you would expect. Instead of re-stringing over a 100 feet of cable, we simply used a "splicing" tool normally reserved for metal cables.

Cut cable...no problem, just splice

With the flu, we also decided to do as much indoor work as possible. This week, this has entailed cleaning, organizing and decorating the house and our gallery for a photo shoot. We hope to use some of these photos for a "before" and "after" review of the renovations as well as on our web sites.

Working on the gallery 

We now have a really nice display of our Schneider collection

We concluded this week with the bottling of our last batch of wine for the past year (2013): an Arctic Kiwi wine.

This was our second attempt at a Kiwi wine. The first turned out quite well, but we did it using a kiwi "mash" which was a rather messy process. This latest brew used whole fruits...and the results were just as nice. No matter which way it is done it reminds me a lot of a late harvest white wine with a strong hint of pineapple.

Straining and bottling the last brew.

Closed for the Season

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With a very wintry week as a backdrop, we've decided to close Ridge Berry Farm for the Season. With the exception of special events in the coming two months, we now expect to reopen to the public this March.

Our objective is to be open year-round. However, as new restaurant operators, we've learned a lot in the past 6 months. We also have a lot of ambitious plans many of which need prioritization. So this short closing provides us with an opportunity to regroup and prepare for a bigger and better year.

Although the operation will be closed for a short period, this blog will continue. We still have a lot of work ongoing on the property and many more local food experiments to share with our readers.

This week, like everyone in the north east, we were greatly hampered in our work by bitterly cold weather. Although not amazingly cold from a Canadian point of view, we did manage to reach -18 deg. C. With the wind, we were not very keen to work outside.

So our attention turned to the Growing Dome. Everything on this front has been working against us. First we filled our water tank (the thermal mass of the dome) in the fall. Next, we had an early winter with snow falling in mid-December. Now, we have a cold front from the arctic dropping temperatures rapidly. To further aggravate things, we have had very few sunny days.

The result is that temperatures in the dome have been dropping to below zero at times (we have on record -3 deg. C). While our tank water temperature did reach 0.

Water freezing in the hydroponic beds

What is amazing however is the significant changes in temperature as soon as the sun hits the dome. On a sunny day it will reach above 20 deg. while the average daytime difference is +10 degrees. The impact on the plants is mixed. Our large fennel plants have suffered and are wilting. Meanwhile, some of our seedlings, including lettuce, seem to be in reasonable shape (although their growth has slowed).

Seedlings still in reasonable shape

The bottom line is that we still have a lot of hope for next season, once the dome has a full summer of operation. So it's now time for us to use the winter months and quickly build up our complete system.

Part of our indoor work this week has also involved bottling one of our raspberry wines. Our first wines were dry and tart. Our new recipes have become a lot sweeter. The wine actually tastes like raspberry candy making it easy to forget that it is a full bodied wine with all of the expected alcohol content.

Part of this batch we've actually set aside for secondary fermentation to see what it will produce. In fact, we also hope to use some of this wine to create a real (not just flavoured) raspberry vinegar.

Some raspberry wine ready for secondary fermentation

We will continue to refine these recipes but we have also learned that one parameter controls our process....and we have not been controlling this parameter: temperature.

We started fermenting in the back of our barn this summer. In this environment we had no temperature control. As the weather cooled, we noticed an important slowing of the fermentation process so we moved the remaining fermentors to our house cellar. The cellar temperature however is still rather cold (particularly these past few days).

It is clear that as we progress in our process, a proper facility will require stringent temperature control. We now only have one more batch in process and that is an Arctic Kiwi wine.So for the meantime, we've decided to stop our experiments until Spring.

Given this week's weather, I will leave you this week with a picture of the dome in all its winter glory.

Our First Wedding

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Since we opened the restaurant this summer, we have had a lot of people ask us if we host weddings. It seems a lot of folks appreciate the quaint environment of the Tea Room and Chef's skills in the kitchen. The land and the property also provide a beautiful backdrop for photos....sometimes living here day in and day out, we forget what we have to offer.

So the short answer is yes, although our capacity is somewhat limited.

Already, earlier this year, young newlyweds Jessica and Scott decided to take some wedding photos at the farm....and they really made it all look so good.

With Jessica and Scott, our raspberry canes never looked so good!

This week it was time for us to host our first wedding at the restaurant. Although the weather has not cooperated greatly in the past few days, the day was perfect for Cathy and Dominic who wanted to take their vows and hold a small reception at the farm.

We were really happy to share this moment with Cathy and Dominic this week.

The newlyweds had some very specific requests of the meal to be served at this function. So they worked with Chef to create a menu with a bit of an Italian twist.

Using our principles (avoiding prepared "industrial" foods), Chef created from scratch a five course meal.

With sparkling wine, we served appetizers which consisted of home-made Goujeres (a cheese puff pastry), salmon and cream cheese as well as Duxelles (finely chopped mix of Portobello mushrooms) all wrapped in a filo pastry.

Chef's Goujeres are always a treat.

To begin the meal, Chef prepared an Italian wedding soup. A beautiful home made broth to which is added kale, meat balls, noodles and cheese. This was followed by an Arugula salad with home made croutons.

Chef's Italian Wedding Soup

The main course was a traditionally made Chicken Cacciatore on a bed of creamed polenta.

Chef's main course: Chicken Cacciatore

Prior to breaking into the wedding cake which was provided by the bride, the meal was concluded with a refreshing fruit salad composed of Papaya and Pineapple.

Plating the fruit salad.

We actually really enjoyed ourselves that evening, so much so that we do hope to host many more such events. In fact, it seems that 3 more wedding functions are already booked for 2014....it's perhaps time we create our own Ridge Berry Farm wedding album :)

Meanwhile, elsewhere on the farm, we still have a lot of work to do. This week, it was time to clean up the debris from the ice storm. The key problem are the trees around the manor and the barn.

Still encrusted in ice, some of the fallen branches were extremely heavy. It is no surprise that such large branches were literally peeled off their trunks.

Cleaning the debris of the ice storm proved to be heavy work.

We took the time to also prune some branches and clean up the resulting wounds. Our pole pruner proved useful although some of the damage remains on the upper most branches of our very tall pines

The pole pruner came to good use.

We still have some work to do, including an ancient, two trunk, 50 foot willow that straddles both our creek and path (half way down the farm). This one will prove to be quite a challenge. In the meantime, all of this work is generating a significant amount of fire wood and a massive burn pile.

Finally, we will conclude this week, by wishing all our readers a very Happy and Prosperous New Year!

See you all in 2014!

T'is the Season....

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We wish to take this opportunity to wish hall of our readers a very happy holiday season....whatever you may be celebrating. For us at the farm, the season is all about Christmas and as we prepare gifts for friends and loved ones, we ask everyone to remember those less fortunate.

Our Christmas has always been a family celebration centered around a Christmas Eve feast of roasted goose and for well over a decade, this has included a very special chestnut cake. This cake is decadent and yet, for those concerned, gluten free. So we thought we would share the details of our recipe in this week's blog.

Ingredients:

4 pounds of fresh chestnuts

1 pound of butter (room temperature)

2 cups of sugar

8 eggs (whites and yolks separated)

4 tbsps of rum (optional)

Process:

1. Score the chestnuts with a paring knife. This will prevent the nuts from literally blowing up during the roasting phase. We do this on two sides to make them easier to peel.

Scoring and peeling of the chestnuts is the most time consuming part of this recipe

2. Roast the chestnuts in a 300 deg. F oven for about 15 minutes or until the shells begin to peel away at the cuts. The chestnuts should not be overly cooked otherwise they will break up in the peeling process.

3. Peel the chestnuts. Remove as much as possible the furry skin that adheres to the nuts.

4. Grate the nuts to make a coarse chestnut meal. We use a food processor for this purpose. The aim is to get 4 cups of shredded chestnuts.

Peeled and grated chestnuts ready for the next step

5. Work the butter with a mixer or a spoon in a large bowl until it is "satiny" smooth, and slowly add the sugar. Add the rum and egg yolks to the mixture then add the chestnut meal.

6. In a separate bowl whip the egg whites until they form a firm peak.

7. Slowly introduce the chestnut mix to the egg whites by gently folding the mix together. Do this in parts (basically at most a cup of chestnut mix at a time). This process will dictate the density of the cake and it is most important to keep the mix as "airy" as possible.

The final batter ready for the oven

8. Prepare a spring form cake mold by buttering it and coating it with a thin layer of flour. This will prevent the cake from sticking to the mould. Since this cake is fragile, the spring form mold will allow you to easily remove the cake.

9. Cook in a 350 F. oven for about 30 minutes, or until the cake is firm. A knife inserted into the cake should come out cleanly. Once cooled, these cakes freeze very well.

10. We typically ice the cake with a dark chocolate icing (icing sugar, sugarless cocoa powder and butter). We then decorate it according as we see fit based on what we have on hand. This year we used a mocca icing and crushed almonds.

This year's final product...the trick now is to keep it safe from the girls!

11. A great way to serve this cake is with a dollop of freshly whipped cream. Portions should be kept small as this is a very "heavy" dish.

Optional: 

You can use the batter to make 2 thinner cakes which in turn are used to sandwich the cream and the icing is then drizzled on top.

Note:

This is a great seasonal cake since fresh chestnuts are usually available in the Fall until about Christmas. However, it is not easy to find good chestnuts in Ontario. Most are imported from Italy and as a result most are far from fresh. You will find that many nuts are dry, attacked by mould or insects. 

Dry chestnuts will have the shell already separating from the nut on the store shelf. This can be seen when you squeeze the nut and detect an air pocket between the flesh and the shell. 

Insect infestation can be seen on the outside of the nut by simply looking for holes.

Mould is not at all evident until the nut is peeled. It typically resembles a dusty bluish-green coating on the flesh of the nut.

Having said this, we are often disappointed with the quality of the chestnuts available. It is frustrating since they are so expensive. 

This year, we had to double the weight of chestnuts used in order to get the necessary volume of chestnut meal. If you buy too many, they can always be used for stuffing (they are wonderful with goose, but will do just as well for turkey).

We're just happy to have planted our own trees this last Spring. In a few years we hope this will no longer be a problem for us.

Having prepared our cake, this week at the farm really felt like Christmas.

First one of our good neighbours and frequent visitor at the restaurant dropped by to give us a "mother". A mother is a term used for a vinegar bacterial culture. As the culture grows it tends to coagulate together into a mass with the consistency of a fragile raw liver.

Meet our new "mother": Sophie.

We had always intended to make our own vinegars but to do so this culture or a starter was needed. With a mother, all you have to do is keep it fed with an alcoholic drink (a good red wine is best) and time after time you will be rewarded with a wonderful home made vinegar.

Over time, the "mother" will grow and will need to be cut down or divided.

We discovered that the origin of our mother is Bordeaux. So for some reason Chef suggested we call it Sophie (which we now do) just as he has been calling his 6 year old sour dough culture Roxanne.

Another great surprise this week was the arrival of our new wine making equipment. A 20 gallon fermenter with a degassing vacuum pump. We have a lot of work ahead to put this system together, but with renewed confidence in our wine making skills, we are ready to scale up.

We're getting serious: the new fermentation system

We chose a system from Blichmann Engineering called WineEasy. We picked this system because it is scalable to 50 gallons but also because it integrates a filter which allows for the easy and clean separation of the fruits from the wine (our current process can be very messy).

To conclude our week, we also took delivery of new pieces for our gallery's art glass collection. This included a large and rare Emile Galle vase from the turn of the last century.

A welcomed addition to the gallery: a rare Galle cameo vase

We will close this week with the results of the ice storm most of us have lived through in Southern Ontario over the past 24 hours. Overnight we had many power failures but more concerning were the sounds during the night. We woke up to many damaged trees and had to quickly assess the state of the property.

Our greatest concerns were the Kiwi trellises. Luckily these held up very well. 

Luckily, our new Kiwi trellises held up ti the ice storm

This was not the case for an old willow which was uprooted and is now blocking our trail.

An old uprooted Willow is now blocking our trail

This was also not the case for quite a few trees around the manor. One of our last remaining old pines on the back ridge lost many branches and we may now have to remove the tree.

A Juniper and an old Birch also suffered badly with many broken branches. While our treasured old Yew has been literally flattened. Hopefully it will come back to life.

An old tall Yew was completely "flattened"

Luckily our prized European Copper Beech is in good shape. The branches however flexed so low to the ground, our cars were boxed in under the tree.

Boxed in by the drooping branches of the Copper Beech

When the sun briefly showed itself the entire scene was almost magical. The farm was an ice crystal wonderland.

Nocino and Squash Marmalade

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Once again the weather has been nasty in Niagara. Temperatures dipped to 15 degrees C below zero a couple of nights and of course we were subjected to our second major snow fall. This has meant that the crew has spent more time working inside and a lot of farm or outside work has been postponed.

Unless it rains or warms up soon, we are just about guaranteed a "White Christmas"

We decided to take this time to open up the experimental jars of Nocino. For those new to the blog, the making of Nocino was an experiment we started early this summer.

Nocino is a sticky dark brown liqueur from Italy. It is made using unripened walnuts. In our case, we used the Black Walnuts that abound in the region.

The basic concept is simple. The young walnuts are quartered and let to steep in a combination of alcohol (grappa) and sugar, to which flavouring is added in the form of spices (such as cinnamon) and some citrus zest (lemon and/or orange).

The process usually takes up to 6 months and is typically complete for Christmas celebrations.

Our experimental "Nocino" ready to crack open

We opened our jars and started to filter the quartered nuts. The results were surprising. First, something in our process or recipe caused the mixture to take on a coagulated consistency (not very appetizing).

The nuts themselves are not edible. Since they are not blanched, they do contain a significant amount of tannin.

The filtered walnuts are too bitter to eat

The liqueur is very strong. We start with over 40% alcohol so that is no surprise. In fact not being used to strong liqueur we had to water it down for the tasting.

The taste is nice (it is reminiscent of the scent or perfume of green walnuts) but it actually has a strong hint of bitterness. As a liqueur, it is certainly not our favourite. We can however see how this might be improved. Doing further research, it is clear that both recipe and process can be worked on.

So in the same way we attempted the Armenian Black Walnut preserve this summer - and failed, we will be attempting this next year in the hopes of refining the taste profile.

In the meantime, we bottled some of our Nocino to see how it might evolve over time.

Our bottled Nocino... not a complete success

This week, we also decided to pursue something we developed last fall: a squash marmalade. This was based on a classic French recipe (typically based on the Potiron squash).

Last year we used Blue Hubbard. With the quantity of Orange Hubbard growing on the property this year, we decided to try it with Orange Hubbard.

The result was a touch different but still very nice. For 3 volume of squash we blended 1 volume of organic oranges from Florida.

In fact, after making our first batch this week we're almost sold out (one jar left!).

A new Seasonal product: Squash Marmalade

We've decided to make this a seasonal preserve. Perhaps next year (to get right into the mood for Christmas) we'll blend the squash with Tangerines or Mandarins.

With the Holiday Season now fully underway, the team continues to be quite busy preparing both corporate and personal gift baskets.

Carol (the Elf) working away at gift baskets

We have had to produce so many of these, we no longer have sufficient space for storage. For the time being our gallery has been used for warehousing.

The gallery is rapidly filling up with gift baskets

Since we are also delivering some of these larger orders, we've discovered we may have another problem: transportation. Our Ford SUV is too small and our pick-up truck just won't do in this weather.

Next year, we're likely to participate in farmers' markets, so with this in mind, we've come to the realization we may need to equip ourselves with a van.

This being the Season of giving, we have also decided to process extra batches of our home made cookies for local charities. Weather helping, this is something we plan to deliver this week.

Our popular Christmas cookies are being readied for local charities

With the grey, cold and snowy weather, we have had some major concerns about the Growing Dome.

The water tank temperature has dipped to as low as 3 degrees and we have had two nights where the dome temperature has dipped to below zero.

Because of the lack of sunshine, snow has been accumulating on the panels and the water has no opportunity to warm up.

Snow slowly accumulating on the greenhouse panels (as well as the solar panels).

We believe we may have lost all of our fish. Nevertheless, the dome is still harbouring an environment conducive to plant growth.

In our hydroponic beds, seeds continue to germinate and seedlings are growing (although not very rapidly).

Beurre de Roquencourt wax bean seedling (still in fine form).

The end result is that we still have a lot of hope for year-round "off the grid" operation once our thermal mass (the water tank) is exposed to a full summer of warming.

So we leave our readers this week with a photo of the dome during our latest snowfall. It is amazing to think that this structure can still shelter life in these conditions.

All is white outside while things remain green inside