We harvested our first head of broccoli today. Isn’t she a beauty? We sauteed her in some fresh chicken broth, garlic, and a little bit of anchovy paste. Delicious! Next up, cauliflower.

Colhemos nosso primeiro brócolis hoje. Ele é lindo, não é? Cozinhamos o brócolis com caldo de galinha, alho, e um pouco de pasta de anchova. Uma delícia!

Our coffee trees flowered in late November. It’s now February and, thanks to some great summer rains, our beans are turning into big boys (and girls).

About 6-8 weeks after a coffee flower is fertilized, cell division occurs to make a tiny coffee fruit. It’s as big as a pin head at this stage, but depending on climate, it can grow pretty rapidly. Coffee beans should ripen 30-35 weeks after flowering, turning from green to red. If this calculation is correct, that means our harvest will start at the end of June. This is much earlier than previous years, when we’ve started picking as late as August. But when I was a kid, June was always harvest time. Hopefully, we’re returning to our normal cycle.

Here’s a great little animated diagram of coffee bean development. I’ve linked to this before, but it’s so good, I can’t help but do it again.

Agora em português!
Nossos pés de café floresceram no final de novembro. Graças umas chuvas fortes esse verão, os nossos grãos de café estão ficando graúdos.

Cerca de 6-8 semanas após uma flor de café é fertilizado, ocorre uma divisão celular e nasce um fruto de café pequeno. (É tão grande como uma cabeça de alfinete.) Dependendo das chuvas, esse pequeno grão pode crescer rapidamente. Grãos de café devem amadurecer 30-35 semanas após a floração. Se este cálculo está correto, isso significa que nossa colheita começará no final de junho. Nos anos anteriores, começamos colhendo em agosto! Mas na minha infância, junho sempre foi o tempo de colheita. Pode ser que estamos retornando ao nosso ciclo normal.

Aqui está um link que mostra desenvolvimento do grão de café .

Suma de Letras has released “La Costurera” in Spain. I’m very excited to see the book translated into Spanish, and love Suma’s cover artwork. For all of you Spanish speakers, I’ve included Suma’s book summary below. Felicidades!

A editora espanhola Suma de Letras lancou “La Costurera” na Espanha. Estou super feliz para ver o livro traduzido para o espanhol, e adorei a nova capa. Para vocês que falam espanhol, incluir o resumo do livro da Suma. Que felicidade!

Una saga épica sobre la vida de dos hermanas
en el Brasil de principios del siglo XX

Frances de Pontes Peebles nos demuestra con su novela la importancia de los lazos familiares, inquebrantables incluso en la distancia y en la adversidad. Su cuidado estilo, su sensibilidad y su facilidad para contar grandes historias de sagas familiares, le han servido además para que numerosos medios la comparen con Gabriel García Márquez e Isabel Allende.

Descobrimos um ninho com esse passarinho dentro. Ontem, ele voou. Acho que ele estava pronto para brincar carnaval, e queria sair de casa!

This week found a nest with a baby bird in it. Yesterday, he flew away. Carnaval begins on Saturday, so maybe he was hoping to get a head start on the fun.

We haven’t done a Dog Profile in a while, and the remaining dogs are feeling slighted. So, here’s the Pivot Questionnaire filled out by Negão, our oldest gentleman. We don’t know his exact age—thirteen or fourteen, most likely—because we got him when he was already big. Negão spent his young life chained to a mango tree. So, when we got him, he was prone to biting people. With us he has always been a sweetheart. (I trust him more than I do Oscar.) But with strangers, Negão is a “red-zone dog,” which is what the National Geographic Dog Whisperer guy calls dogs that pose a danger to people and other animals. Because of his temper with everyone outside of our immediate family, we’ve always had to walk Negão on a leash (unlike our other dogs, who roam free) and keep him in a kennel with a dog run. Also, he is Lorenzo’s father! (But they have a strained relationship.)

Full name: Negão
Nick-names: Neguinho, Nego

Pivot questionnaire:
1. What is your favorite word? Walk
2. What is your least favorite word? Oscar
3. What turns you on creatively, spiritually or emotionally? A stranger’s upper arm. My teeth sink in so nicely there.
4. What turns you off? My kennel.
5. What is your favorite curse word? Why curse when I can bite?
6. What sound or noise do you love? The sound of my extendable leash being clipped to my collar.
7. What sound or noise do you hate? The sound of Oscar traipsing around outside my kennel, peeing on my turf.
8. What profession other than your own would you like to attempt? Airline pilot. Sushi chef.
9. What profession would you not like to do? Monk. Cosmetologist.
10. If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates? ‘Negão, no more gates or doors or leashes for you. Oscar, on the other hand, is tied up out back.’

What’s in a cup of coffee?

Tasting coffee to understand its flavors and aroma is called “cupping.” At the most basic level, cupping coffee involves putting 2 tablespoons of ground coffee in a 6 oz cup, pouring hot water directly over the sample, and then tasting it. There’s no filtration in cupping. Coffee should be roasted light and several samples should be compared in one cupping session. Here’s a great step-by-step guide on how to cup coffee.

Why do roasters, buyers, and growers, cup coffee? It’s a way to evaluate the merits of one coffee over another, or one roast over another. Cupping helps define a really great coffee. Coffee cuppers are like wine tasters—some have such refined palates they can detect blueberry flavors, cherry notes, anise, molasses, baked apricot, blackberry jam, and other flavors in coffees. As a novice cupper, this kind of specificity intimidates me. I have to take a deep breath and remind myself that, yes, great coffee can be just as complex and exciting as wine, but its basic attributes aren’t hard to understand.

1) Aroma: Most of our sense of taste comes from smell. This is aroma.

2) Acidity: It’s not a bad thing. Actually, it’s pretty good. A good level of acidity in coffee is kind of like the acidity in red wine, or that charged feeling on your tongue when you eat a section of tangerine. Some coffees are called “bright,” which means they have a kick, or a bit of fruity acidity. The darker the roast, the more you lose acidity. Also, espresso is a very concentrated drink, so most roasters and coffee drinkers don’t want a lot of acidity in their shots.

3) Body: This is acidity’s friend and opposite. Usually, the more body a coffee has, the less acidity. What is body? Basically, it’s a coffee’s fat content. It’s the viscosity. What the heck does all this mean? Just how the coffee feels in your mouth. Does it have the thickness of water, or of milk, or of heavy cream?

4) Sweetness: This speaks for itself.

5) Clean cup: Does the coffee taste muddy, dusty, or dirty? Are there any negative flavors that block your perception of how the coffee should taste?

6) Aftertaste: What lingers in your mouth? Professional coffee cuppers spit out their sample after tasting it. What stays after the coffee goes away? Does it linger? Or is it short? Is it a good taste (like chocolate or smoke) or a bad one (like medicine)?

7) Flavor: This is the subjective category. What does the coffee taste like? How do you know? Everyone has different flavor references—what does sour taste like? Salt? Sweet? The more you taste throughout your life, the more you remember that taste and sour it, the more references you have to look back to. So maybe a coffee tastes like the pecan pie you ate as a child, with that molasses-like sweetness? Maybe it has kick to it, and that kick reminds you of a jolly rancher candy? Or maybe it has a weird, bad taste, like sucking on an aspirin? All these flavors are subjective and depend on references unique to the taster. After talking to a few professional cuppers, they’ve told me the best practice for training your taste buds is, simply, eating and drinking a variety of things, and filing away those flavor references in your memory. When you cup coffee, your personal library of flavor references will come in handy.

It’s cashew season! The cashew is a tree in the Anacardiaceae family. The pulp is sweet but very acidic. We drink a lot of cashew juice this time of year, but it’s available year-round in frozen packets in the grocery store. The cashew nut is actually a seed. It’s surrounded by a shell lined with a highly toxic anacardic acid, so you can’t eat the nuts right off the tree. The acid must be burned off first. Some people use the seed’s acid to create home-made tatoos on their skin, but I don’t recommend this. (I have yet to see a really pretty caju-tatoo; they all look like burns.)

We feed the pulpy parts to our pigs and goats, and then collect the seeds. In the past we’ve sold the seeds, but this year we hope to roast them and feed the finished nuts to our pigs. This will, hopefully, give their meat a nice flavor.

The simplest of bridges, a promise
that you will go forward,

that you can come back.
So you cross over.

It says you can come back.
So you go forward.

But even if you come back
then you must go forward.

I am always either going back
or coming forward. There is always

something I have to carry,
something I leave behind.

I am a figure in a logic problem,
standing on one shore

with the things I cannot leave,
looking across at what I cannot have.

Antônio Gedeão, Poema de Domingo

Aos domingos as ruas estão desertas
e parecem mais largas.
Ausentaram-se os homens à procura
de outros novos cansaços que os descansem.
Seu livre arbítrio algremente os força
a fazerem o mesmo que fizeram
os outros que foram fazer o que eles fazem.
E assim as ruas ficaram mais largas,
o ar mais limpo, o sol mais descoberto.
Ficaram os bêbados com mais espaço para trocarem as pernas
e espetarem o ventre e alargarem os braços
no amplexo de amor que só eles conhecem.
O olhar aberto às largas perspectivas
difunde-se e trespassa
os sucessivos, transparentes planos.

Um cão vadio sem pressas e sem medos
fareja o contentor tombado no passeio.

É domingo.
E aos domingos as árvores crescem na cidade,
e os pássaros, julgando-se no campo, desfazem-se a cantar empoleirados nelas.
Tudo volta ao princípio.
E ao princípio o lixo do contentor cheira ao estrume das vacas
e o asfalto da rua corre sem sobressaltos por entre as pedras
levando consigo a imagem das flores amarelas do tojo,
enquanto o transeunte,
no deslumbramento do encontro inesperado,
eleva a mão e acena
para o passeio fronteiro onde não vai ninguém.

Caul fat is a membrane of fat that encloses a pig’s intestines. Fat, unfortunately, has a bad reputation these days. We tend to think of it as greasy, unnecessary, or harmful. We might not think of fat as being beautiful, but caul fat is just that. It looks like lace. It is blindingly white and not at all oily.

In Jennifer McLagen’s book “Fat: An appreciation of a misunderstood ingredient, with recipes,” the author argues that, if used properly, really good animal fat gives food incredible flavors. About pork fat, she writes that, depending on the breed of pig and their diet, “pork fat is mostly monounsaturated in the form of oleic fatty acid, plus it contains palmitoleic fatty acid, which has antimicrobial properties…Pork fat’s low levels of polyunsaturtaed fatty acids means it doesn’t turn rancid easily and is very stable when heated.”

Caul fat turns a lovely golden brown when cooked and is indicated for wrapping around lean cuts of meat. So, when baking our Christmas turkey, I decided to try something new—in order to keep the breast meat tender, why not cover the bird in caul fat before slipping it in the oven? (We just happen to have an excess of caul fat around here from our pigs.) I draped that lacy membrane over the bird, and the results were incredible! The fat melted to a thin, crispy webbing. The breast was extremely tender and juicy. Caul fat is my new best friend.

Here’s the turkey recipe. I’m not specific with amounts because it really depends on the size of your bird. You can ask a local butcher to get you some caul fat, especially if you live in Chicago and have access to places like the Paulina Meat Market.

In a small bowl, combine the following:
Minced garlic
Kosher salt (not too much, because the fat will add some saltiness)
Fresh rosemary
Black pepper
Lime/lemon/orange zest (again, not too much)
2 bay leaves

Rub the bird with lemon juice and olive oil. Give her a good Swedish massage. Then apply the garlic-spice rub over and under the skin. Slide the bay leaves under the breast skin; when the bird cooks and its skin becomes transparent, the leaves look very pretty underneath. Let the bird sit, unstuffed, in the fridge over night. The next day, let the bird get nearly to room temperature (so you’re not putting it in the oven ice-cold.) Stuff the bird if you like. Give the bird a generous coating of honey or maple syrup. Soak the caul fat in lukewarm water to loosen it. Stretch it out carefully, place it on a towel, and pat dry. Drape your bird with the caul fat. (I had to carefully cut my piece of caul fat in half, because it was enormous.) Then place the bird in a roasting pan with a rack, and cover in aluminum foil. Cook depending on the turkey’s weight. In the last 30-or-so minutes, take off the aluminum foil, brush on some more honey/maple syrup, and let it get nice and golden.

If anyone actually tries this recipe, let me know how you like it. I’ll be making it again next year for sure.