Today we pulled the Walla Walla Sweet onions. Last Sunday I knocked over the rest of the tops and then let them sit for a week to finish off, per Steve Solomon’s advice. I intended to pull them today and spread them on a tarp by the barn to cure, but we’ve been having unpredictable showers the past few days. I mentioned to Mike that I was going to put them on the porch and he offered to make me a drying table.

And there it is! Isn’t he handy? And isn’t that a shitload of onions?!?! To give you a sense of scale, the drying table is 5′x3′ and sits 8 inches off the ground. Mike made it from 3 2×4s and some left over chicken wire. I’m not sure how many onions are there, maybe 40? Mike thinks it’s about 40 pounds of them, but since we weren’t weighing I’m not really sure. Suffice it to say that it’s likely more than we can eat before they go bad, Walla Walla’s don’t keep that long. Next year we’ll plant half as many and eat half of that as spring onions…

I’m going to turn some into pickled onions, we’ll eat as many as we can and I think I’m going to have my first farm stand to sell the rest. Or really I’m going to offer them to friends at the going rate for organic onions, now I just have to figure out what that is? Anyone bought onions recently?

Here’s another couple of photos for you. In the first Mike is holding our biggest onion. It’s bigger than a softball, although it’s hard to tell in that shot since Mike has really big hands. We put it next to a Sessions bottle in the second - that’s a stubby 11 ounce beer.

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We had another very local dinner this week, but this one actually got photos, so I guess that it’s our featured meal of the week. Mike was just about to dig into a plate of local roast beef and homegrown mashed potatoes and peas. We also had cucumber onion salad, an old family recipe from my side.

The roast was a bottom round left from last year’s cow. I came across it digging around in the freezer last night and have to hope that it was the last of that steer considering I already made one pass to be sure…

I decided to make it easy on myself since there’s not that many ways to cook bottom round well and made a simple roast beef that we can use for sandwiches the rest of the week. I lighted salted and peppered it and then roasted it in the oven, fat side up, at 500 degrees for 15 minutes. Then you turn the oven down and roast it at 325 until it reaches an internal temperature of 120 (about 45 minutes for our 4 lb roast). Let it rest for 15 minutes and then slice it thinly across the grain.

The potatoes were mashed with butter, cream and fresh garlic. The peas steamed and tossed with a touch of butter. I ate my roast beef with a simple cream, garlic and wasabi sauce. And the cucumber salad was just as good as I remember, I can’t wait to have it in my lunch tomorrow.