Buff Orpington rooster - Photo by Mark Robinson

Jeremy was doing some internet surfing a while back and came across Eastern Plains Natural Food Co-Op.  The Co-Op mostly provides heritage breed turkeys, chickens, ducks, geese, and eggs but also provides some pork products like bacon and sausage and also lamb. If you have read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, you’ll remember Barbara Kingsolver talking about trying to raise heritage breed turkeys, and how most conventional turkeys can’t breed on their own.  She talked about her struggles to get hers to breed and delight when they were successful at it. Well, ever since reading that book along with a few others, Jeremy has been trying to find pastured heritage breed birds, so he was really excited to come across this co-op and talked me into joining.

The Co-Op was formed by Tedach Ranch outside of Bennett, Colorado and it costs $85 to join, but with your initial buy in you get the option of several membership gifts, and we selected the 4 whole heritage chickens for our gift.  If you renew for a second year, you get additional products as well.  Then you can purchase as much for the rest of the year as you want.  We purchased some packages of BBQ’d turkey, several whole chickens, some chicken breasts a couple of turkeys for around Thanksgiving, eggs, and a bacon value pack. While it is a bit more expensive than the grocery store, it is not much, and you are guaranteed the animals are humanly treated, they even have a humane certified slaughtering process.

They have several drop off points around the area but we actually went out to Tedach Ranch which was about an hour from us, to pick up our products because we were hoping to see the farm.  Dallas Gilbert who runs the farm immediately offered to show us around when we got there and we got to see the chickens, turkeys, ducks and geese all around his property.  They all had tons of space, seemed happy, and were pastured.  He was hoping to show Jacob some baby chicks that had just hatched but couldn’t find them under the brush where the chickens live.  The turkeys lived in a big old open barn with a large pasture surrounding it and came complete with two guard donkeys.  We thought he was joking about the donkeys being guard donkeys at first but then he said coyotes are scared of donkeys and he hasn’t had any trouble with coyotes getting his turkeys since he added the two donkeys to the pasture.

All in all it was a very cool operation, the birds were very pretty, the turkeys were blue and the chickens we saw were gold, he had descriptions and pictures of all the breeds on the website: http://albc.easternplains.com/breeds.htm .  We forgot to bring our camera with us so don’t have any pictures of our own.  He also just installed a wind generator that powers his whole farm and even generates enough power to sell back to the electric company.

So far we’ve tried the barbecued turkey, the chicken breast tenders, and a whole roasting chicken.  The BBQ turkey and chicken breast tenders were good but didn’t taste a whole lot different than normal chicken, but when we roasted a whole chicken, it was delicious.  It was so much tastier than normal chicken you get, we had it the first day with roasted vegetables and then made some soup from the leftovers, and chicken stir fry from the rest.  We can’t wait to cook another one and are really excited we have three more of them!

If you live in the Denver metro area and have the freezer space we definitely recommend checking out this co-op.  And if you decide to join drive out to the farm and check it out, it was really cool to see everything and Jake loved seeing all of the chickens, ducks, geese and turkeys.

Very Cherry Chutney

We are just at the end of cherry season here in Colorado.  Along with our vegetable CSA from Cure Organic Farm, we also purchased a fruit CSA.  Cure Organic Farm doesn’t grow the fruit themselves but partners with other farms mostly on the western slope of Colorado that do grow fruit.  So far this year we have gotten strawberries and cherries, and this week we are getting peaches.  The first couple of weeks of both strawberries and cherries Jeremy and I were very excited about the fruit and ate most of the 2-3 lbs a week right away.  However, now that this was our 4th or 5th week of cherries we weren’t digging into them right away like we had at first.

To use up our abundance of cherries in the fridge the past couple of weeks, I’ve been experimenting with cherry sauces for meat, and this week I wrote down what I did to share with everyone, and also so I can remember next year when we have a ton of cherries.  We’ve had this cherry chutney on both pork chops and chicken and it is delicious with both.  If you are a vegetarian it would also be great as a sauce for rice.   In fact we had grilled chicken with brown rice and this sauce and that alone felt like a pretty complete meal.  Last night we had grilled pork chops with this chutney, roasted potatoes, and roasted asparagus as you can see in the pictures.

2 cups cherries (pitted, destemmed, and roughly chopped)

1/2 onion (chopped)

1 garlic clove (minced)

1 shallot (chopped, optional)

1 tablespoon olive oil

1/2 tablespoon chopped basil (we used some cinnamon basil we are growing but regular basil is nice too)

salt and pepper to taste

dash of ground cloves

dash of cayenne pepper

2 tablespoons of maple syrup

1 cup any combo of vegetable broth, chicken broth, white wine, water (i used vegetable broth this time, last time white wine, but whatever you’ve got would work)

Heat olive oil on medium high.  When it is warm add the onion, garlic, and shallot and salt and pepper to your liking.  Stir frequently until onion is translucent (about 4-5 min).  Add the cherries, and your cup of broth / water / or white wine.  Add a dash of ground cloves, and a dash of cayenne pepper (don’t overdo it, you can add more later). Reduce heat to medium low and let simmer for about 20 minutes until cherries are soft.

Add 2 tablespoons of maple syrup and 1/2 tablespoon of chopped basil.  Taste and adjust seasonings if needed.

We used about half of this for two people and froze the rest in an ice cube tray so we can heat it up in a saucepan in the winter.  Hope you enjoy!