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We moved back to Whitley County 5 years ago, and so I haven’t paid much attention to the Harrison Square debate in Ft. Wayne.   Since I no longer paid taxes there, I wasn’t much interested.

We were in downtown Ft. Wayne Friday for a wedding (Andy and Megan, congratulations!).  The wedding was at the west end of downtown, and after the wedding we walked down to the Indiana Hotel lobby for the reception.  After the reception we of course strolled back to get our car.

I was amazed and pleased at the change in downtown Ft. Wayne.  It was a perfect June evening, but still, the sidewalks were full of people.  The outside seating at the various restaurants and bars was full.  The TinCaps had a game, and there was a concert at the plaza at the library.  I wasn’t so surprised at a bunch of people at a ball game, but the plaza was full of people enjoying the evening and the music.

It reminded me of all the cities I’ve traveled to, big cities with lively downtowns.   I’m generally libertarian in my opinions on the government’s role, but doggone it, the tax money spent it downtown Ft. Wayne is working.

Not as hard to find as the Italian Connection, but still if you don’t know where it is, it’s hard to find even in these days of Internet maps.  Here’s directions: go to Warsaw, turn left, wander about in various horrible strip malls and declining industrial areas, make a U-turn, another left, park in a grass and dirt lot, and you’re there!

We went to Noa Noa on a whim one Tuesday evening.  Friends had told us years ago it was good, and we finally got around to going.

Waited way too long.  It was exceptional.

I had Cajun oysters as an appetizer.  They were plump, tasty, fresh.  Oysters lightly breaded with Cajun spices and fried.  Debbie got satay beef skewers, also perfectly spiced, tender and tasty.

Dinner was a wood grilled marlin with curry sauce on rice for me.  Deb continued a Thai theme with grouper sauteed with Thai spices.  It was all so, so good.  The menu is centered on West Indies and Thai flavors.  I’m not a huge fan of that, but this was all so well prepared with good ingredients that I’d recommend Noa Noa to anyone.

Dessert was a key lime pie.  It didn’t disappoint.  A nice crust, a tart lime filling.  Perfect.

As good as the food was, the service was even better.  We’ve dined at amazing places, Charlie Trotter’s in Chicago, Pigall’s in Cincy, Rockpool in Sydney, and let me tell you, the service at Noa Noa was better than any of those.  We’ve only been to Noa Noa once, so maybe we got their one and only perfect server (Stephanie).  But it was crazy busy, even though it was Tuesday night, Stephanie was taking care of many tables, some of them both large and ’special’, and she never missed a beat for us.  Everything came up right when it should, she was attentive, and the bill handled right on cue.  It was the single most impressive display of restaurant service I’ve experienced.

So get yourself to Warsaw and hunt down Noa Noa.

In March we had 6 inches of rain over 2 days.  That resulted in our river bottom ground flooding, and all the good no-till residue on those fields washing up in a mat on the edges of the flooded area.  We had about 4 acres covered with anywhere from 6 inches to 18 inches of corn stalks and soybean fodder.

What to do?  You can’t plow it under that thick.  You can’t run the no-till planter through stuff that thick.  This is high organic matter soil, (think of peat bogs and Ireland where they cut this stuff into bricks and burn it), if you burn the residue you risk setting the soil itself on fire.

So we borrowed a couple big manure spreaders from our dairy farmer neighbors and started loading and spreading residue out over the field.  40 hours and some 400 loads later the job was done.

That’s me on the loader. Like the cool hat? After days out in the sun I was getting majorly sunburned and seeking shelter however I could find it.

Dad likes to tell the story about how he shot the balls off the lightning rods on the barn. He was young, maybe 10 years old, and he shot one off with a .22. Grandpa came out and said, “What the @#$% are you doing?” Then he said, “Well, you’ve shot one off, might as well finish the rest.”

This year for Dad’s 78th birthday we got him a replacement set of lightning rod balls. I put them on today. First I tied a rope on a clevis and threw it over the roof and tied it on the other side. Safety First is our motto. The roof looks flat in the pictures, but it seems straight up and down when you’re on it, and there’s nothing at all to grip with your hands, so without a rope one slip and you’d be over the edge.

It all went without a hitch, except after I got down I realized how crooked the rods were. You didn’t notice it without the balls on them. Someday that will bother me enough that I’ll climb up there and straighten them. Today is not that day.

Fall is the time to preserve meat.  In the days before refrigeration you could kill an animal, hang it to cool, and process it in the cool weather.  (Try cutting a piece of warm raw meat, you’ll get the point.)

We haven’t butchered our own meat in years, but this year I was talking about it with my mom and dad.  Nostalgia for the good ol’ days impelled me to cure a ham.

I got a 17 pound fresh ham from Egolf’s IGA in Churubusco.   If you’ve never seen a fresh ham, it looks like a big ol’ roast:

You take that fresh ham, and rub it all over with salt (a pound for a ham this size), pepper, brown sugar, and saltpeter:

After carefully packing the spice mixture around the bone, under the skin, and all over, you wrap in brown paper.  I tied it with kitchen twine because I was doing it by myself and in the next step having the twine holding it together will be handy:

Then you put it in a muslin sack.  It’s important to keep it wrapped in the brown paper to keep the salt around the ham. That’s why I tied it up, so as I wrestled it into the sack the brown paper wouldn’t come undone. My mom gave me the sacks, they’re old clover seed sacks.  You could make one out of a couple of kitchen towels if you’re short on clover seed sacks:

Then you hang it in a dry dark space until August.  (Yes, this is November.  It hangs for 9 months.)  Hang it somewhere where the varmints won’t get it.  This is hanging from a beam in my garage.  It’ll drip (ewww) so don’t hang it over anything.

Check back in August 2009 and we’ll dine!

Now you too can sing:

“Hey I’m a country man a city boy can’t do the things I can
I can grow my own groceries and salt cure a ham
Hey baby I’m a country man”

A song by Luke Bryan, in case you don’t listen to country music radio.

An update as of June 7th.  The ham is hard as a rock, which is a good thing.  The idea is to desiccate it with the salt and saltpeter.  It’s hung in our garage where you’ll hit your head on it if you’re not paying attention, and both Deb and I can attest it is getting hard.

In my software job we spend lots of time worrying about the system, the entire combination of hardware, software, processes, people, and everything that works together to make a successful deployment of a software product.

Here’s what happens in the farming world when you (or your vendor) don’t take a systems approach to setting up a corn drying system and instead just look at each piece on its own.

In this case the auger that was taking the corn away from the dryer hadn’t been checked to see if its speed (determined by the pulleys in the silver frame on the auger.  If you look closely you’ll notice the belts are gone, burned up trying to keep up) was fast enough to keep up with the dryer.

A bit of time figuring pulley ratios, 3 trips to town for parts and belts, 2 man-hours of shoveling corn off the ground and we were back in business and dried corn without incident the rest of the season.

Harvest is underway! We ran 30 acres of beans on September 22, as early as I ever remember getting started. We have about 50 more acres that are ready, and then it’s probably going to be a week or so (i.e., about normal harvest time) until more are ready.

On the ‘Home’ farm, the farm my great-grandfather bought in 1917, there’s a bank barn.  I don’t know exactly when the barn was built, below is a picture dated 1907 showing threshing wheat with the barn in background.

The foundation on the south side of the barn was going, so this summer we had Tim Reynolds of Reynolds Construction rebuild it.  Below are a few snapshots of the wall going back up.

The handsome kitty in the first picture is Elmer.

Great-Granddaddy, this one’s for you.

Charles W. Zumbrun, taken in 1936.

I’m too lazy to upload the pictures again, see them here: http://picasaweb.google.com/chuck.zumbrun/WheatHarvest

A very good wheat harvest in 2008.  Good yields, good prices.

In 1919 my Grandpa followed the wheat harvest north from Kansas to the Dakotas.  Every time I’m out in the wheat I wonder about what he saw and thought and felt during that time. 

December 08 - Cerca Trova has closed.  R.I.P. 

Seek and you shall find… I’ve traveled all over and in cities all over the world there are tiny Italian neighborhood restaurants.  Pa cooking, Ma (or the neighborhood girl or boy) serving fantastic fresh food, and tasty and modestly priced wines.  Other than the absolutely delightful Italian Connection, Fort Wayne had been lacking these sorts of places.  No more.  Cerca Trova, located on East State in a strip mall, is just that sort of place.

Cerca Trova might be a bit more upscale than your typical trattoria, but it’s still a gem.  Dinner started with a complimentary garlicky aiola and bread with fennel seeds, followed by a tiny meatball with pickled Italian vegatables.  (What exactly are Italian vegtables?  Beats me, but they were tasty.)

I had gnocchi for an appetizer, and to put it simply, it was the best I’ve ever had, and I’ve eaten a lot of gnocchi, bucko.  Debbie had fried artichokes that were very tasty.

For a main course I had a ravioli duo, one was ground beef, one was cheese and spinach.  The ground beef was so good, it was coarse ground, like sausage, so flavorful and such a pleasing texture. 

The one sour note in the evening was Debbie’s pork milanese.  The pork tasted strongly of refrigerator (never order pork on Tuesday?  to pun on Anthony Bourdain, though I don’t think he can claim to be the first to say, “never order fish on Monday.” And it was sadly lacking in the lemony bite I’d expect in a milanese style dish.

Desserts (key lime cream and cannoli) were splendid, as was the espresso I had to go with it.

Despite the flub on the pork milanese, everything else was so good I don’t hesitate to recommend Cerca Trova to you.