Talking Turkey

Thanksgiving Thoughts With and Update

Fall in New England is by far my most favorite time of year. I will endure the piles of dirty snow all long winter long, the endless cold spring  rains and the hazy, hot humid long summer daze just to be able to enjoy the glorious, golden days of fall. I live for the memory invoking smells of hot chocolate, homemade bread, pumpkin spice and crackling  warm fires.  This time of year calls you to the kitchen to create comforting dishes to share around the hearth with loved ones after a Sunday afternoon of leaf raking, apple picking or pumpkin carving.

For Thanksgiving it has been a 20 year tradition to spend the night at the restaurant camped out and preparing the Thanksgiving dinner for forty some other families who are tucked in and dreaming of buttery mashed potatoes smothered in rich turkey gravy with no dirty pots and pans to scrub. The boys hook up the video games and pump up the air mattresses while the grown ups rotate turkeys through the ovens through out the night. At the break of dawn the stuffing is basted and bronzed in the oven while the chef potatoes are boiled and ready for the mashing. Every family has their own traditional method of preparing turkey, stuffing and side dishes. For some it is not complete without the cranberry relish. My mom makes this crazy frozen cranberry ice and would never open a can of jellied cranberry.  I can still see my Dad tenderly shredding or pulling apart the Pepperidge Farm white bread without the crusts in front of the tv watching football. The pulling of the bread makes for a fluffy light dressing seasoned with sage cooked inside a capon, never a turkey. Which brings up the question to stuff or not to stuff?

 Stuffing your turkey is likely to cause stomach cramping. The internal temperature of your bird must reach 165* Packing the cavity of the turkey leads to the increase of bacteria that will make you ill. This culinarian recommends you cook your bird stuffing free with aromatics such as celery, onion and oranges lightly layered in the bird to promote flavor and moisture. Cook your stuffing in a casserole dish and baste it with the drippings from the cooked turkey. This method will also hasten the cooking process and prevent the need for cooks across America from having to rise before dawn to get that feast in the oven in time for the post football game chow down.

With Thanksgiving on the horizon and my staff Talking Turkey, I pause to offer up my thanks for enough leaves in my own back yard for the kids to jump in. I am grateful for children who are healthy enough for me to drag myself from bed at predawn five days a week to get them off to school with a hot breakfast and a bagged lunch. I am blessed with a loving husband of 20 years who is willing to complete my honey do list no matter how many times I revise and edit. I am lucky enough to own my own business complete with its own endless list of things to do. That in itself was a monumental undertaking these past two years.




 As you gather your loved ones around the table remember it is Thanks Giving. Take stock in all you have to be thankful for and pay it forward. Up your gratitude and perform a random act of kindness for someone or some organization in your community. At Rainbow Gardens we have spent the last 20 years preparing a Thanksgiving feast for the staff at the emergency room and the firefighters at Central Headquarters. The gratitude from these hard working people spending a day reserved for families away from their own is  boundless. The true gift in this spirit of giving is the lesson my children have learned over the years. They are not aware, but we are shaping their character... shhh do not tell them as they tend to resist any parental imposed self improvement projects.

Update Hurricane Sandy Damage

Before

During day time high tide

 After see link

u tube video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvhJw8o0eFg&feature=relmfu

I started this blog back in the beginning of October to Talk Turkey.

I had no idea what was in store for our small seaside community. When I wrote about paying it forward and being Thankful at Thanksgiving I had no idea I would be sitting here today in a snowstorm reflecting on this past week. Most fortunately my family home and business suffered no loss or damage. As most of you know, this was not the case for many people across the Tri- State region. In a minute my husband and staff and I decided to open our restaurant to the victims of Sandy to give back to our community. We served a free dinner buffet and collected storm supplies while most of my staff had no power. The City of Milford gave instantly. We decided to chronicle the events on our Facebook page and serve a breakfast on the following Saturday. I underestimated the power of social media; not the first or even second time in my life and a local tv station posted the details of what we were doing. This set off a flurry of giving that I was not prepared to receive. Complete strangers from hours away began to reach out to us and mail checks to cover costs and help complete strangers. I am happy to report that we kept none of that money and are continuing to make a difference right here in Milford Ct. with gift cards and suppliesdelivered directly to families in need.

 

This woman is from another town a good distance away and she just wanted to help.

People logged onto our new website and bought gift cards and mailed them to us. Others came in for dinner with gift cards of their own and gave them back to us. Friends passed out coffee and soup and helped others clean up.

Power companies came from other states to lend a hand. Slowly the power came back on and people who were frustrated being without power felt guilty as they started to watch footage of New Jersey, Rockaway Beach NY, and Staten Island. 

The boardwalk

A week later people continue to drop off supplies and give us checks. I am blessed. I have posted my Thankfulness one day at a time on my Facebook page. People have lost tremendously. Just because the power is back on for most of us, this is not over for a long time.

Like Doll Houses

 So what does it all mean? I am still trying to figure it out. Life is full of surprises. It is what you choose to do with challenges and set backs that define your legacy. Before this blog was posted I hinted about shaping the character of my children without them knowing. What I did not know was that I had accomplished just that. One thing that caught me off guard this week was when my oldest son texted me several times to say how proud he was of what we were doing. I didn't think he would even take notice, but he must have  been paying attention all these years in spite of all my nagging. 

I love my family, I am proud of my staff, I am grateful for all the wonderful friends in my life I will always love fall in New England. I am Thankful for this week of HOPE and I will still continue to pay it forward throughout the month of Thanksgiving and beyond. I ask you all to do the same.

Bee El

No Bacon For You

No Bacon For You

Say What?

This just in.. There will be a bacon shortage next year! What? Stop the presses. We cannot deny the American public to their  first amendment rights to bear bacon with their eggs. A collective groan was heard from sea to shining sea as the latest news hit the smokehouses and diners across our great Motherland. Apparently drought and lack of feed has led to the decrease in hogs available for slaughter. I asked my esteemed colleagues why only bacon? How about sausage and pork loin?

 On a busy week our restaurant cooks up to three cases of bacon. Each case contains 15 pounds or 300 slices of this crispy, salty , porky and don't forget fatty condiment. You will find it is featured at Rainbow Gardens on over six standard menu items and countless additional specials. If you want to sell it add bacon. Chop bacon on a salad, slip it on a club with three slices of perfectly toasted bread spread with blue cheese mayonnaise and you have a hit. Angels on Horseback is the name of a British appetizer that consists of bacon wrapped around oysters. This odd delicacy combination was made famous and given it's official name in our country in the 1960s when a DC socialite served it at many parties during the Kennedy regime. Although we have not ventured there with that food combination, our chefs have endeavored to wrap, Filet of Beef, Chicken Breast, Scallops, Shrimp, and tantalizingly hot Jalapeno Peppers stuffed with cheddar cheese. If you wrap it, they will come.

 Hoarders Are Us

 So now we are all counting our chest freezers wondering how many cases of bacon we can stock pile for this predicted shortage just a mere 365 days away. My Ziploc bags full of crock pot dinners may have to move over and make room. It may even be more cost effective to purchase a new walk in freezer dedicated just to bacon. Years back when the news was all aflutter over the avian flu, they were instructing us to make a stock pile of food and water in our basements for the doomsday when we would not be able to leave our homes for fear of contracting the deadly bird disease. I found this to be absurd reasoning that we would simply move into the restaurant and live off the stores of food in our basement and walk ins. That brilliant idea was put aside when a regular customer  pointed out to me that the entire town would be smashing the front picture windows to confiscate our hoarded supplies.

You Never Know

  As I rewound my memory clock regarding threatened food supplies I recalled that as a teenager I had a poster on my bedroom wall with a guy reading the headlines " Beef Shortage Critical" His dog had his muzzle resting on the kitchen table, while the man spooned a can of Alpo over his spaghetti. I just spent an hour trying to find a picture of this poster to no avail which is a check mark on my hoarding is a good thing side of the page. You never know when you are going to need that awkwardly sick poster that hung in your teenage bedroom next to the hand written lyrics to Meatloaf's  Two Out Of Three Ain't Bad. A funny side note here is that our Meatloaf dish on the menu is topped with bacon. And stockpiling food is just an extension of hoarding.

I was Just Thinking

  Here are some menu ideas inspired by a flurry of slightly sarcastic texts between a few of us kitchen folk. You have to bear in mind that to enter into the culinary world as a professional chef requires a undaunting sense of humor to keep your sanity while toiling away endless hours of stressful time deadlines. A quirky personality is a prerequisite for a career in food service. When your sense of humor is gone it is time to pack your knives and leave the kitchen.

• Panko Crusted Bread Sticks and Toast

• Smoked Panko crumbs to make our own Facon

• Panko crusted Ham Balls wrapped with Bacon

• Bacon Wrapped Prosciutto Ham Balls with Bacon Bit Dip. We are going to call this one The Heart Attack

• Apparently you can make your own bacon wrapped Christmas ornaments as well.

• I am planning on wrapping myself in bacon for Halloween

• If we could just figure out how to make a Panko costume 

 Panko is a light crisp Japanese bread crumb used for  coating foods for deep frying. The word is a combination of the Portuguese word pao for bread and the Japanese ko meaning flour or crumb. The loaves are cooked with electric current, so no dark crust forms and the result is a dry crumbly white crumb. This breading absorbs less fry oil so the final product is crispier and less greasy.

 Don't be sad cause two out of three ain't bad

Standard Breading Station

If you are not going to wrap it in bacon then bread it. No one can resist the delightfully crisp standard breading procedure. Flour, egg, bread crumb and fry! The idea of setting up a standard breading station for any menu item makes this obsessive compulsive neat freak run for the exit. Dipping raw food into pans of each item and coating your fingers in thick raw egg, flour and bread crumb makes this culinary sanitation grad raised by a surgeon father cringe times three. The microbial cross contamination factor must be what makes breaded fried food taste soooo good. You can bread just about anything. If you form it in a cutlet or a ball then you have a breaded home run.

  As we enter into October the garden gives off unripened green tomatoes which beg to be breaded and fried. On a whim we paired them with what else? BACON and created a Fried Green Tomato, Smoke House Turkey Club that is an absolute home run on our specials menu whenever we feature it. After  you have mastered the Bacon ornament, you can move onto the bacon basket weave. This handy dandy little creation tops a club sandwich like a crown and showcases this vanishing commodity like a queen. The bacon potholder will most definitely be featured in some alternate applications. The possibilities are endless... A bacon lattice crust begs for a filling of something Panko crusted. By October 2013 if the price of bacon surpasses that of tenderloin and scallops then chefs will be forced to find more creative ways to display bacon in order to command higher prices to cover those costs. If this said chef begins fashioning stellated octohedrons from pork belly than it may be time to pack it in.

Stellated Octoherdon

"Two Out Of Three Ain't Bad"

Meat Loaf's Lyrics

Baby we can talk all night But that ain't getting us nowhere I told you everything I possibly can There's nothing left inside of here

And maybe you can cry all night But that'll never change the way I feel

The snow is really piling up outside I wish you wouldn't make me leave here I poured it on and I poured it out  I tried to show you just how much I care I'm tired of words and I'm too hoarse to shout  But you've been cold to me so long I'm crying icicles instead of tears  And all I can do is keep on telling you  I want you I need you But there ain't no way I'm ever gonna love you Now don't be sad 'Cause two out of three ain't bad Now don't be sad 'Cause two out of three ain't bad You'll never find your gold on a sandy beach You'll never drill for oil on a city street I know you're looking for a ruby In a mountain of rocks But there ain't no  Coupe de Ville hiding At the bottom of a Cracker Jack box I can't lie I can't tell you that I'm  something I'm not No matter how I try I'll never be able to give you something Something that I just haven't got  There's only one girl that I will ever love And that was so many years ago And though I know I'll never get her out of my heart She never loved me back, ooh I know I remember how she left me on a stormy night  She kissed me and got out of our bed And though I  pleaded and I begged her  Not to walk out that door She packed her bags and turned right away And she kept on telling me She kept on telling me She kep on telling me I want you  I need you But there ain't no way  I'm ever gonna love you  Now don't be sad 'Cause two out of three ain't bad
  Don't be sad 'Cause two out of three ain't bad
 Baby we can talk all night But that ain't getting us nowhere.

I know you all sang those corny lyrics just now and back in the day. And I can go on all night about bacon, but without the corn, there ain't gonna be no bacon in the bottom of our Cracker Jack box. We will have pork loin and sausage, so two outta three ain't bad.

Bacon Rules Bee El

Heyyyy Chowda' Here!

 Do I have 365 days of crock pot cooking in me?

  I am a Culinary Institute of America graduate from many years back and I must confess I never cooked anything in a crock pot. Not ever.  Unless you have been living off line, you know that crock pot dinners are all the rage online and especially on Pinterest. My boys love to tease me for gawking on Pinterest... "yellow shades of egg yolk" or "Outdoor Storage lockers Painted in Shades of Grey" Or " Hey Mom Pin This!"

Dinner In An Instant... Not Really

So I endeavored to cook something every day in the crock pot. Well, I have a full time job as most of you know, and then after I get my kids off to school I go to my part time job which has a schedule of seven days a week 360 days a year. My father refers to the restaurant as 365 days of slave labor, but actually we take New Year's Day, Memorial Day, Fourth of July, Labor Day and Christmas off. That being said I cannot begin to fathom blogging or detailing every recipe. My solution to the time crunch will be to chronicle the best of the week. That will give me 52 outstanding crock pot recipes with honorable mentions and white ribbons stamped "certificate  of participation" to the failures and near misses.  I do realize this makes me somewhat of a crack pot, but it simply gives my husband and my children more material for future sarcastic jabs against me. So I began carting my sexy, sleek black and silver, $40.00 crock pot back and forth from home to work and even out to the beach house for a two day break.

Only 3 clams= 1 Cup Chowda'

Plugged in and ready to cook, the first notable experiment was an all day project. I woke at dawn to forage in Cape Cod Bay for about three dozen chowder clams. The tide waits for no man or crock pot, so dig while the digging is good. Campbell and I raked the dead low eel grass tide line fighting off the mammoth  sized crabs and spider crabs. Each scrape of the rake produced a clam and sometimes two. We stuffed the giants into backpacks used for this task since 1974. I kid you not vintage ,sea worn, hand me down, multipurpose ,repurposed backpacks are making a come back on the fashion runways of Europe, and I know where you can find two. On the way back to the beach through the throngs of vacationing tourists we carried only three clams in our hands and when asked by the family from Ohio " how many didya get?"  we replied " Not so many left out there these days." in hopes that they would not make the trek to our sweet spot.

The chowder begins by boiling the white and purple bivalves open in a pan from the 1950s used just for this task. The heat steams the clams open and then you can scrape out the muscle. Being a retired surgeon, Campbell has to go one better and remove the abductor muscle from each clam. For this chowder we diced the cooled clams, but when the boys were little we had to grind them with a meat grinder from the  1940s because there is a collection of them on the kitchen counter and inquiring little minds need to know what you do with those silver dragons. Thus creating my all time favorite photo that I would post on Pinterest and they would never know because they won't look there and everyone else on there would go awww he's so cute.

 My Chowder Recipe For The Crock Pot

18-24 Quahogs Steamed open and prepared A La Campbell
Reserve the liquid
4 Slices Bacon rendered crispy  saved for later
1 Medium Onion diced
3 Stalks Celery diced
2 Medium Chef Potatoes peeled and diced
1 1/2 Cups Half and Half
1 1/2 Cups Heavy Cream
1Cup Reserved Clam Juice
1Tbl. Black Pepper Ground
2Teas. Sea Salt
1 Bay Leaf
Chopped Fresh Thyme and Fresh Parsley

 I used my Bed Bath and Beyond 6 quart Crock Pot that ironically had wedding wrapping paper on and was restocked after being returned by a former bride. Did she get two? Did she not want one or know how to cook? Did she call off the wedding?

Mmmm, Mmmm Fresh

In a sautee pan brown the bacon and remove it to a paper towel for garnish later. Sautee your onion and celery in the bacon fat to impart the flavor. Add everything else except for the clams and fresh herbs and bacon to the crock pot. Cover and cook on high for 4 hours.... or not* (see below) About 30 minutes before service add the clams and let them come to temperature. Serve the chowda' in cups with crumbled bacon and chopped fresh herbs for garnish.

We left the house for some Cape Cod adventures while our chowder Crocked? Potted? What is the verb for food cooking in a crock pot? Wandering around Welfleet Harbor and poking through a used bookstore looking for summer reading book club books, time wandered off. The natural light on Cape Cod is intoxicating and whether people watching or inspecting the rise and fall of the endless tides, time sails by.

 HACKED

Special Bulletin: Warning: Warning: The blog was left on the computer screen and the Husband has stepped to the keyboard. Ok so lets be honest here...I supported the Crock Pot thing but in the 
back of my head I am thinking 365 days, I don't think so. But as the norm with guys, I was wrong, again. I can honestly say there has been nothing out of that Crock Pot that I haven't enjoyed. Predictably for me, the sugar addict, it was the blueberry coffee cake out on Cape Cod (She did tell you the Crock travels with us like our 4th kid). Feel free to fire that one up again before the 365 days ends. If that is allowed of course. Love you!! Small children can now safely return to the room.

Aforementioned coffee cake from hacker husband

By the time we returned from the afternoon of leisure which is also known by my staff as my vacation; all 36 hours of it, the crock pot had gone overtime* and the creamy white chowder base was a separated, ugly mess of curds and whey gone way overboard. I frantically surfed the web for interesting help factoids on how to repair my failed cream soup only to find one helpful suggestion to throw it out and start all over. That wisecracking helpful webbie does not know, or has not read that I come from an extremely frugal and penny conscious childhood only to be recreating the same thrifty home environment on overdrive, so throw it out is not in this hoarder's vocabulary. I settled on the tip that suggested I warm some heavy cream in a sautee pan and whisk the offending broken mass into the warm cream a little bit at a time until it comes back together. I was able to achieve success with this hint. 

My experience with clam chowder in a crock pot has led me to the one conclusion that it is simpler to just make it in a soup pot  on top of the stove and turn it off before you leave the house. A point my mother made to me the minute I announced I was about to make chowder in a crock pot. I have never been one to live by the old adage that mother knows best, because in my home it is my way is the only way simply because I am the Queen Bee.

 Hey Mom, Pin this!

Bee El

Everything Old Is New Again

Add caption

That's two years of my life I will never get back...

 Like a slow cooker, the days and months in the last two years have come to a final full boil and I am slowly regaining the components of my former life. If you find yourself trying to survive a stressful patch of time, go back to the basics. Replant the roots that kept you grounded and you may be surprised by your harvest.

   I discovered that everything old is new again through planting a simple back yard garden. The obsession started with an abundance of compost in tubs mounded full of fruit and vegetable detriment generated in the pursuit of peeling and trimming to uncover the perfect form of the plant to present to our guests. I simply could not heave the scraps into the dumpster knowing the power contained in all those decomposing cells. I felt like my husband and I were being peeled and trimmed, yet our perfect selves were buried in the  legal compost of our lives.

We are going to need a bigger, better garden next year.

Note the boots

  Nothing says I love you at Christmas like a stacking compost bin called The Organic Choice Biostack from your boys.( Second only to the thigh high chicken boots from my Mother In Law Honey). Funny thing is that it is a summer gift that you can actually use starting in December unlike the trampoline: although that did not stop us from setting them both up on Christmas Day. It snowed continuously starting the next day and both toys were abandoned until the great thaw of April. Maintaining our delightful sense of humor and waiting out Mother Nature were priceless  lessons in patience. You know how you get patience? You wait for it. Not funny when you are in the waiting room of life. But I suggest you find a joke or 100 jokes to laugh at and something to do with all that time.

If you build it...

  As we prepared the boxes and filled them with beautiful black restaurant and chicken coop blended compost, the days grew warmer and it was almost time to get the early peas and beans under their cool blankets of spring dew. I contemplated my situation as I emptied potting soil into the re-purposed plastic mixed lettuce bins and inserted each cherry, plum and golden tomato seed. Slowly the days marched on and the beautiful little shoots from the Jalapenos and Habeneros emerged out on the sun porch. Is it killing me or is it making me stronger ?; I kept wondering as I kept watch over these delicate early plants. I lost myself in seed catalogs and kept looking to the future of what this garden would produce.The only time we were not discussing the details of how to save our family business from our family was when we were planning rows of vegetables or working out how to build support structures for the peas and tomatoes.
 
Thankfully I had the strong support of my friends and employees to remind me to keep fighting the slugs and garden pests. Somehow we were all working our gardens and following our paths through various challenges. Whether we were running away from, or running towards our final destinations depended on the day and the crisis. I think it was Angelo's triathlon that got the TEAM RAIN spirit train rolling. Before you know it we were in three hour spin challenges and spartan races. Who could forget the New Year's Day Polar Bear Plunge? I think Color Me Rad was one of our highlights. I found me again and I knew I was here to stay.Wild Ones Color Me Rad Video Diary.

Thanks Kate for the tutus.

 Whether you are fighting for that last mile, or the extra reserve tank, your last chance, or the day's last hope.. Dig in, fuel up, cover yourself in the compost of friends and people who believe in you, take stock in your family and focus on what really matters. Grow your garden with the people and the things that make you happy. Do not be afraid to take a chance and laugh at yourself whenever possible. We are not perfect beings, but rather powerful cells waiting for our chance to blossom forth for the ultimate harvest. I want my legacy to be that I went hard and now I am going home.
 

Well two years gone is two years older, but never felt newer than this.

I chose My Path, and I will keep on it!

Summer Daze

Here now and gone so fast

Is it possible that summer is almost gone? I think back on June and July and try to remember my promise to sit back and enjoy the splendor of the no school year routine, but all the day trips and activities are making me tired and in need of a long nap. With the older boys away at summer camp we were able to take our days off and spend some lovely quality time on The Cape with my parents.

Our beach house is old Cape Cod with rooms packed to the rafter with memories, flea market and tag sale finds and childhood treasures dragged up from the beach and enshrined in the front yard garden. It is not one of the Bostonian rebuilt Mcmansions complete with landscaped yards and watering systems, but rather the small quaint, sandy, musty cottage of years gone by with beds tucked in rooms and under stairs so the whole family can come for the weekend and everyone has a couch a bed or an old camping cot to sleep on.


The best part of going to the beach for me is waking up to morning coffee on the front deck and watching the tide go all the way out and come all the way back in. The peace and serenity is a complete turn around from my real world life. I get strength and creative energy from the simple wash of the waves on the shore and the sound of kids playing wafting up over the bluff. The light on Cape Cod is positively pure and sparkles like polished glass on every surface. When the sun sets the whole street stops and drinks in the glorious colorful display of day turning into night. No charge for this light show, just the cost of one more summer day slipping past.

The middle of the day is filled up with a sail when the wind wants to cooperate. We were fortunate enough to be gifted a Sunfish sailboat from 1963. A fellow Caper had it in storage for decades and wanted to see life back in the sails and we were happy to oblige. As kids we sailed the waters of Cape Cod bay for endless hours. Our sail was blue and we took it out with the tide and back in over the sand bars. We had more fun flipping the boat and turning the turtled craft right side up so many times tourists on the beach would come out and try to rescue us. We snickered and sneered at them the way only teenagers can and kept right on causing Rescue 911 meets Baywatch. Believe it or not we used to take a fishing pole with us and occasionally hit on a school of feeding bluefish. That was some advanced sailing to keep on the wind and drag in a fighting blue. This summer we had no wind, too much wind and no fish.

Clearly a different day

My youngest son's favorite past time is roaming the sand flats digging up cherry stones or finding the errant Wellfleet oyster. He has no intention of course of eating any of them, he just likes the hunt and the joy it brings Campbell and Grandmother when he returns with a sack full of what we call free sunset hors d' ouevres that would cost you $12.95 a dozen plus a drink in any Cape Cod restaurant. An old timer taught my sister the raindrop method of
finding exactly the right spot for the perfect clams. Cooking at the summer house is not a chore. You have all day to plan dinner and everyone makes a dish a course or a dessert and it all comes together whenever.
For the fourth of July we had heirloom tomato salad with balsamic glaze, brown sugar bbq ribs, sweet local corn (" How many ears are you going to eat?") and chocolate decadence cakes with black raspberry ice cream. That menu salutes America with all my favorites and might possibly be a runner up for my death row meal. Just make sure you spread my ashes across the sparkling bay.


September has come and we send them all back to school. I may be crazy not wanting the boys to go back to school, but the laid back lazy days of summer are precious and life just moves too quickly these days. We go back to school and back to alarm clocks, packing lunches, making the bus in time, homework and all the scheduled nonsense of the academic year, and yet I realize that most of my best life lessons were learned on family vacation time. Still to this day the beach house brings me clarity and puts my hectic world in perspective. While we race toward next summer with our harried school year life, that tide is still coming in and going out and I cannot stop thinking about the beautiful reflection of that perfect orange light slipping into her ocean bed.

Happy back to school
Bee El

Goodnight Sun

Who is that kid?

Harvesting Gold

Save the Bees
Save The World




Last spring I had this great idea to start a beehive. As simple as that. Well not really simple as it turns out. First I had to run the idea past my husband. Keep in mind both of us have one of those childhood nightmare on elm street stories of being attacked by bees. My personal encounter was with an under ground nest of yellow jackets that settled in to our backyard while we were summering in Maine. I ran through that part of the yard and suddenly was assaulted with angry yellow jackets defending their stores. Running in terror was most likely not the best recourse. Needless to say there were multiple stings and a long running fear of any flying stinging insect. All bees are not created equally. Honey bees rarely sting haphazardly. One sting from a honey bee signals the end of that bee's life as part of the bee body is dislodged with the stinger and she gives up her life for her colony. A yellow jacket has the ability to sting and sting repeatedly. Bees have a dark and dangerous reputation to overcome.

Sadly, the honey bee population worldwide is declining at an alarming rate. Disease, pesticides, paving paradise , mites and colony collapse disorder among some of the factors threatening the safety of honey bees. So what say some. Well I say, save the bees, save the world. Without the bees our flowers, trees, fruits and vegetables will not survive. Without trees, fruits, and vegetables the animal and human population of this planet will no longer exist. No, my lone hive in my small corner of the planet will not save the world, but having a healthy hive in my garden will make my flowers, plants and vegetables stronger, more vibrant and twice as abundant. Furthermore I have read that consuming local honey and pollen can lessen the effects of pollen related allergy. This was the selling point for my springtime sniffling, sneezing, snorting spouse.

April of 2009 we set out for the hills of Connecticut to consult a local treasure by the name of Ed Weiss. It seems he is the leading guru of beekeeping in our area. He wrote the book The Queen and I and assisted Martha Stewart in establishing her hives. What can I say about Ed? A true old New Englander with endless stories to tell if you have all day to listen. He set us up with our first build it yourself kit complete with the hooded veil, smoker and tools. We had to assemble our hive from the bottom up constructing each layer and hammering the fragile frames together with tiny nails . Each outer box was constructed followed by ten frames with wax foundation sheets threaded inside.. The assembled hive was painted and set out in a strategic location on cinder blocks back by the chicken coop and under the mulberry bush. Now we need to get the bees.

Getting the bees involved a series of phone calls and an appointment for live bee retrieval from Riley in Southberry Ct.. We set out with directions that included left at white mailbox and down the long driveway " don't turn around in the neighbor's yard" to this small goat farm in the middle of nowhere. The farm was made up of a cluster of ramshackle outbuildings that have been perched on that little hill for many generations. A large tractor trailer truck was parked with Georgia plates and thousands of packages of bees. You could hear a low buzz in the air and hitchhiker bees swirled around our heads. From across the yard came a seasoned woman covered in her bee "hazmat" suit complete with veil and gloves. She thrust her gloved hand our way and identified us as newbees, so she brought us around back to demonstrate how to load the package of bees into the hive
. Watch this video on how to install bees, or many like it on Youtube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJDDgxV-pLU&feature=related

The bees are kept in a screened box with a metal can of sugar syrup inserted to act as a feeder during their trek from Georgia to Connecticut. The queen has her own personal cage with five attendants. You prepare your hive set up at home and lift the cover. When you are ready to move the bees inside you spray them with a sugar water solution, open the can covering the cage and flip them upside down into the box. This is all to take place one two three easy as can bee! The queen is placed inside in her cage and the worker bees eat away at a candy plug to release her to begin her systematic egg laying. Of course we watched this procedure multiple times on Youtube in preparation for our own show. Our bee teacher loaded about six packages of bees into various hives in a matter of minutes making it look easier than learning how to ride a bike.

We set off for home with three packages of live bees in the back of the minivan; one for us and two more for a friend. Being the over committed mother of three I was late returning home and I promised my son I would take him and his friend to the mall for a 3:00 show. The bees went with us. Needless to say the teenagers were not excited about riding one row even closer to the live bees and could not understand why anyone would want to start this hobby. Our bees were successfully loaded in that night. We were racing the weather and trying to get it done before the rain came. I neglected to read ahead in my bee keeping book to note that they had to be checked on in a week's time to see if the colony had accepted the queen. We were leaving for spring vacation in two days, so I needed to find a bee bee sitter. Luckily the recipient of the other bee packages was willing to help us out.

As it turns out, last spring was the worst weather for starting a beehive. We had cloudy rainy weather daily and the bees never left the hive to forage for essential nectar to sustain the colony. Finally June came and brought clear dry skies, so our little tribe went about collecting pollen and nectar , building out foundation and setting up camp. Our queen was also a grand old gal and she set about producing good quantities of new bee subjects. This came back to sting us later on that month. It seems too many bees in one hive get together and have a meeting and set forth a plan to split in half and produce a new queen and split with as much stolen bee nectar booty their little stomachs can hold. It is called swarming, and boy did it happen to us.

I was in the backyard on a beautiful day in June throwing mulch by the wheel barrow full onto the back slope when we noticed that all the bees were leaving the hive and flying in swirling circles around it. The air was golden with their little bodies dancing through the sunbeams. The kids were returning from the back neighbor's yard and about to run through this curtain of swarming bees. Fortunately for them on that day they decided to finally take heed and listen to two parents screaming "STOP, DON'T!" to which they all froze in their tracks. The circling bees became more and more organized and concentrated and began to settle onto a branch in the dogwood tree. They follow the queen and encircle her in a big ball that hangs from a branch and pulsates like a heart beating inside a chest. At this time scout bees go out and look for a new home to move the cluster to.

When I was a teenager my father kept two beehives and I had seen them swarm one time. An old man from the orchard came with a sheet and an empty hive and caught the swarm and brought it to his farm. I knew we could catch it, but we needed an empty hive. In the meantime we got an old cardboard box with a house screen and a bottle of sugar water. My husband donned the bee veil and got the ladder out of the garage. With the box placed just so under the tree branch he climbed with a saw in hand and cut the swarm from the tree. The idea was to gently lower it into the box thereby capturing the swarm intact. A near miss caused the bees to panic and dart all over the ground, but the prized queen landed in the box, so all her loyal soldiers followed suit and joined her. A couple of shots of sugar water and the screen in place we were all set. Now all we had to do was locate a new hive body.

And this is where I will leave you now for the garden calls.

From A Child's Garden Of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson

Summer Sun
Above the hills, along the blue,
Round the bright air with footing true,
To please the child, to paint the rose,
The gardener of the World, he goes.