sheet pan harissa chicken with potatoes, leeks & herby yogurt sauce

time to get cookin, good lookin!

Happy Friday friends!

First, let me say thank you for being here and for all the support after last week’s announcement about this brand spankin’ new newsletter. If you’re receiving this in your inbox today, it’s because you are a paid subscriber and get access to weekly updates, garden tips + resources, and new seasonal recipes. You also have access to comments on all posts + we get to hang out together over in chat threads.

If last week was all about getting my ducks in a row behind the computer screen and inside our house, then this week was for getting my hands back in the soil. It definitely felt good to move my body again, but dang if the past few weeks spent resting in my PJ’s has turned me soft… I gotta get back into farming shape!

I had two main goals for the farm this week, and first we had to put our final growing area (I call them quadrants) “to bed” for the winter. This involved pulling out some lingering plants (goodbye collards! hasta la vista cabbage! smell you later broccoli!), removing the irrigation, weeding, and then covering up everything with a big silage tarp.

(Ha! When I say it all in one sentence like that, it sounds like a breeze, but in reality it was pretty awful – everything was frozen, especially our fingers, and it was muddy and gross and the tarp we had to move was filled with frozen swamp water and weighed a thousand pounds and did I mention everything was frozen?) LOL that’s farming for you. Moving on!

It IS a great feeling to tuck the garden beds away until spring (see below for some before, during, and after photos) – it’s basically sweeping all the chaos under a rug and walking away for a few months, without any guilt. Tarps are an essential tool for our farm, as they prevent soil run-off, keep the soil warm and promote beneficial biologic activity, AND they’re excellent at killing and suppressing weeds. Even if you are growing on a much smaller scale, tarps can be a game changer and I highly recommend giving them a try if you haven’t before. We get our big tarps from Farmer’s Friend (linked here), but if you only need a small tarp then I know a quick google search will dig up lots of options.

The second big task on the to-do list this week was been hanging over my head for months… our apple trees were in desperate need of weeding and pruning! We have a small orchard of 15 apple trees that we planted 3 years ago, all sourced from Century Farm Orchards in Reidsville, NC, where they focus on heritage varieties that grow particularly well in this climate (which isn’t known for producing great apples). If you’re local-ish and interested in planting fruit trees, Century Farm is the place to go! They have a wealth of information on their website, and the owner, David Vernon, is an incredible teacher and is wildly generous with his time and he loves helping folks get started.

Anywho, back to our very neglected apple trees. I’ve done a terrible job keeping up with weeding our little orchard, especially because we have cages around each tree (as protection from deer), and it’s a real pain to get inside the cages to do a proper weeding. The problem is that when grass and weeds grow up the trunk of these young trees, it can cause some real damage, and the overall foundation/stability of the tree suffers. I’m hopeful they’ll bounce back now that they’ve been freed of weeds, and I’m making ALL the mental notes to not let them get so bad again! Below are a few photos of 1) our mini orchard, 2) a tree in *desperate* need of weeding, and 3) a happy tree after it’s been cleared of weeds.

So all in all, it was a good week of crossing some big things off the (ever growing) winter project list. Looking ahead to next week, we’ll be working on clearing out and prepping beds in our caterpillar tunnels, weeding our blackberry and blueberry patches, and maaaybe getting started on cleaning out the disaster that is our barn? We’ll see about that…

Keep reading for a this week’s recipe, Sheet Pan Harissa Chicken with Potatoes, Leeks with an Herby Yogurt Sauce.

If a chef knife is my #1 most used kitchen tool, then my beat up old rimmed baking sheet pans are easily the second most used item. I use baking trays/sheet pans for pretty much anything that goes in our oven – i.e. roasting veggies, baking focaccia bread, desserts (like Texas Sheet Cake), and I’ll even them flip them over and get them nice and hot as a cheap “pizza stone.” This past year for Thanksgiving, I even cooked our 14lb turkey on a rimmed baking sheet and it worked like a charm.

SIDE NOTE: You can tell my sheet pans get a lot of mileage, because they are basically blackened and look like they’ve spent time inside a volcano. Oopsie! Maybe I need to take some notes from this very helpful article about how to properly clean your baking trays? (Apparently baking soda and hydrogen peroxide are the secret)

As I wax poetic about my beloved rimmed baking pans, it’s only fitting that this week’s recipe is a sheet pan dinner – where the protein (in this case, chicken thighs) and veggie side (here, potatoes and leeks) all cook together in the same pan, giving you a complete meal in one.

This recipe for Sheet Pan Harissa Chicken with Potatoes, Leeks & Herby Yogurt (which I’ve adapted from Food 52) is packed with bright Mediterranean flavors, only takes a few minutes to prep, makes for an easy weeknight meal AND it feels special enough for a weekend dinner party. Quick tip – make sure not to over-crowd your sheet pan with chicken and veggies, to ensure everything cooks and browns evenly. See below for the full recipe (there’s also a one-page PDF version for easy printing) and happy cookin, good lookin!

Sheet Pan Harissa Chicken with Potatoes, Leeks & Herby Yogurt Sauce

Serves 4