October 21, 2009 at 1:34 pm (Cooking, Food origins, Food preservation, Food security, local food)
Naming our food is a long tradition in my family, starting with Boris the Bull, who I believed would cause my parents’ divorce (do YOU really understand how large a whole steer is? Yeah, us neither…). Last year we bought half a hog and named it Eric. This year’s participant has been dubbed Señor Porcus. No absent referent here!
We picked up our 1/2 hog from Old Pine Farm on Oct. 17th. They have a very nice farm – hogs are pastured with some supplemental feed, not confined to a muddy sty. They are slaughtered on-farm and then sent to the butcher, so there’s no travel stress for the pigs. I feel extremely grateful that we have such a farm near us, and that we can afford to buy our food from them.
Looks like we ended up with about 85 lb of meat (for $300, including cutting and smoking, so somewhere around $3.50/lb). Old Pine Farm is unusual in that they charge a flat price for your hog, no matter what size, and they do not charge extra for cutting and smoking. You get to pick how you’d like your meat cut up. Here’s what we got – showing our strong preference for sausage and pulled pork in this house! My only complaint so far is that the meat is wrapped in Saran Wrap, which I find hard to remove from the meat. Hopefully it will fend off freezer burn – since there’s no air inside the wrapping, it should do that. So long as the wrap is thick enough. We’ll see.
- Loin roast: 10lb in 3 large packages. Wonder if we should have gotten this sliced into chops?
- Shoulder roast: 20+lb in about 10 packages (will become pulled pork)
- Bulk Sausage: 18 one-pound packages
- Smoked kielbasa: 10 – two to four links per pkg
- Ground pork: 6 – 1.5 lb packs
- Bacon: 5 lb in one-pound blocks
- Smoked hocks: 8lb in 2 hocks
- Ribs, pork butt, other misc: 8lb
- Plus about 5 pounds of soup bones and 5 lb of fat for lard
- The tail, the bladder, and possibly the squeal for the Cooking with Laura Project, which I will get to in a few weeks
This filled 2 large coolers and a paper grocery bag; it takes up about 2/3 of our tiny 7cu ft chest freezer and close to half the space above the fridge.
I think this was a steal for $300. I think prices are going up for next year, and they will be worth it.
4 Comments
October 17, 2009 at 10:53 am (Cooking, green living)
A couple weeks ago, I finally bought a thermal cooking pot. It’s been on my radar for a long time, and I finally splurged. The basic idea is that it’s a pot-in-a-Thermos. You put your ingredients in the inner pot and bring it to a boil on the stove, then put that pot into the insulated outer pot, close the lid, and the food cooks using the retained heat. It’s sort of like a countertop version of haybox cooking, and the idea is to save energy and keep from heating up your kitchen when cooking.
I’ve learned that this gizmo has definite strong and weak points. I’m honestly not sure I’d recommend buying one; they are pretty pricey and it doesn’t do everything I’d hoped it would. Still, it works really well for some things, and I can’t stop experimenting! I thought I’d post the results of my experiments to date, so if you’re considering getting one, you can make a really informed decision. Details after the cut: Read the rest of this entry »
3 Comments
August 15, 2009 at 9:48 am (Food preservation, recipes)
I’m starting to think that maybe – just perhaps – I have planted too many cucumbers this year. I’ve never grown them before, and I had no idea what kind of yields, I’d get, so I put 3 “tomato” cages in a 3′x6′ bed and planted 2 cucumber plants (var: Little Leaf from Johnny’s) on each side of the square cages. Not all 24 plants came up, but I’d guess 15 or so did.
We are now harvesting, on average, a quart of pickle-sized cucumbers a day. I only harvest every 2-3 days, so I’m usually getting at least 2 quarts every time I pick. We eat very few cukes fresh, so we’ve been making a LOT of pickles. Here are a few we’ve liked:
- Half-sours – probably our favorite, definitely our “go-to” pickle. Just cukes, garlic, bay, peppercorns, and dill, covered with salt brine and fermented.
- Hungarian summer pickles – not bad, once we added some garlic, but they often taste…fizzy. Literally like there’s carbonation inside the pickles.
- Vinegar garlic dills – first batch had a little too much vinegar and haven’t tasted the second batch yet, but these are closest to Scott’s favorite store-bought pickles
- Mustard/horseradish dills – FABULOUS. Maybe my new favorite pickle…my sweetie hasn’t tried them yet and I hope he hates them.
Weirdo pickles
The following were Pickles of Desperation, made when we just couldn’t think of what else to make. We actually haven’t tried most of these yet…I’ll let you know if they’re any good.
- Curry pickles – these were actually quite good. Fermented in salt brine, with a tablespoon of curry powder and a teaspoon each of whole corriander, cumin, and black pepper
- “Kitchen sink” pickles – faced with too much vinegar brine and too many jars with spices already in them and not enough cucumbers, we frantically searched the kitchen for anything we could pickle. The result? A pint of pickled kohlrabi, and two mixed pints of kohlrabi, cabbage, carrots, and apples. We plan to serve it with pork.
- “Thanksgiving” pickles – fermented with garlic, sage, rosemary, and chives.
- Thai basil-chili pickles – lots of Thai basil, 2 chili peppers, and garlic
Lessons learned
- Cherry tree leaves work better than grape leaves for keeping pickles crunchy
- We like them sized 2-3″ best. At 4″, they can’t keep their crunch, and larger than that, you really have to cut them into “coins.” (I do flavor experiments with these bigger pickles. If the flavor works out, we’ll do it again with tiny premium cukes.)
- If fermented pickles don’t taste fabulous after 3-4 days, just leave them out of the fridge another couple days. The flavors will continue to develop a *lot*.
- Wear sturdy gloves when picking cucumbers!
9 Comments
July 31, 2009 at 8:54 am (recipes)
This time of year, I take most Fridays off to work in the garden and put up the harvest. This helps keep it somewhat fun, and keeps me from getting totally burned out.
Yesterday, I harvested the first zucchini and potato from the garden, so I decided to make these for breakfast. They take some time but are really easy.
Zucchini-potato pancakes
- 1 medium zucchini
- 1 large potato (you should have equal parts zuke and potato)
- 1 small onion
- 2 Tbl flour
- 1 egg
- Salt
- Dill (optional)
- Oil for frying
Shred the zucchini, potato, and onion. Sprinkle well with salt and put it in a sieve to drain for about half an hour. This is really important – if you don’t do this, the pancakes will be too wet and will steam into mush rather than frying up crispy.
After 20-30 minutes, squeeze as much water as you can out of the veggies. It’ll be a funky brown color; no worries – that’s just the potato starch reacting to the air. Put the veg shreds in a bowl, add some more salt, the flour, egg, and dill (or any other herbs or spices you like).
Heat a frying pan (cast iron is the best) and a couple tablespoons of oil. (I used bacon fat I’d been saving in the fridge.) When it’s hot, drop about 1/4 to 1/2 cup of the batter into the pan and shape it into a pancake about 1/4″ thick. Fry until golden on one side (6-7 minutes) then flip over and cook until it’s done (another 6-7 minutes).
The best topping for these, in my opinion, is raw sauerkraut. The plain cakes are a little bland, but the salt and crunch of the kraut makes them shine!
2 Comments
July 13, 2009 at 8:42 pm (Cooking with Laura)
So I’ve decided that this whole “cooking my way through the Little House Cookbook” project would be a lot more fun (and a lot less daunting) if it were collaborative! I want y’all to cook with me, and to blog about the recipes. I’ll keep a running list of all the posts, and maybe between all of us, we can cover the whole book! I know *someone* out there has access to a wild turkey…
This is me, so of course, I’ve made a spreadsheet. (It’s shared in GoogleDocs; you might need a free account to see it and sign up.) This lists all the recipes in the book (over 100!), the page number of the recipe, and notes about which ones I especially need help with (most often for reasons of food allergies). Feel free to add your name to the “cooks” column if you want to volunteer to take on a recipe. When you’ve finished cooking, post a link to your blog entry about it. Pictures are encouraged but not required! I’m going to start this weekend, probably with a preserving or cornbread recipe.
I’ve also noted a rough estimate of the season certain foods should be cooked. Many are listed as “any,” which means the ingredients could be had easily year-round. Other foods must be prepared at certain times of year – dried apples, for example, or fresh tomatoes with cream. There are some things that are available to us year-round, but wouldn’t have been for Laura. Use your discretion about when you’d like to prepare those.
A note about recipes: I’m not going to be able to copy out recipes for everyone who wants to participate. You’ll have to borrow or buy a copy of the book, or see if you can find the recipe online.
So, onward! Who’s in?
7 Comments
July 7, 2009 at 12:47 pm (Cooking with Laura)
You may be familiar with the blog, book, and movie about the “Julie and Julia Project,” in which Julie Powell cooked her way through the first volume of Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking and blogging about it.The book was a fun read, and I have even higher hopes for the movie. (Mom, it comes out August 7th…is it a date?)
A couple weeks ago, I was inspired to do my own take on the project. I’m calling it the Em and Laura Project, and I plan to cook my way through most of Barbara Walker’s Little House Cookbook, which collects recipes from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books.
I’m not going for 100% here; I’m not sure I can procure a prairie chicken, for one thing. But it will be fun to try to cook simple foods with simple pantry staples. Sometimes, I’ll use the stove and oven. Sometimes, I’ll try to cook in the fireplace (which is very differently-equipped than any of Laura’s fireplaces or cookstoves). Some of the recipes will require scouting or making some ingredients – salt pork, for example. I may just have to use bacon. On the other hand, we’re getting half a hog this year; maybe I’ll cure my own? I’ll try to stay true to the original recipes, though I will probably use my grain mill instead of a coffee mill for Long Winter Bread, and while I’ll try home-ground germ-in cornmeal for some recipes, by the fifteenth cornbread variation, I’ll be using store-bought.
I’m also not sure what I’ll do about beans and dairy yet. I’m allergic to them, but some of the bean recipes are the ones that appeal to me the most. Maybe I’ll have people over to help me eat them, and serve other things alongside. And I think there will be a fair few recipes that we won’t really *eat* much of…hardtack, anyone?
I’m aiming for a one-year timeframe, but I reserve the right to leave off if it just gets to be too much! I’ll probably do 2 days of cooking a month, with one or more recipes on each day.
So, who wants to come over for dinner?
10 Comments
June 7, 2009 at 5:13 pm (Cooking, Musings)
- TT Supper Club Saturday night. I don’t even know where to begin. So much fun. Such fabulous food. I really, really wish you’d been there.
- Adventures in Food Bastardization! It started by realizing that chicken salad, cole slaw, and potato salad are more or less the same idea, with different main ingredients. (And mayo need not be primary among them…) So…why not make a salad that combines all three? It worked quite well. Started with a base of finely-shredded cabbage and carrots and a bit of raw kraut, marinated in kraut juice. Then added diced cooked chicken and potatoes, chives, chive blossoms, and sage blossoms. Dress with mustard, a little mayo, and enough kraut juice to make it salty and not gloppy. Quite nice. Though in the future, I might just do chicken/potato or chicken/cabbage.
- Next bastard food idea…potato/zucchini pancake + meatball?
- The rye field is gorgeous.
- My brassicas have aphids. I shall cry now.
- I made chicken stock in the solar oven on Friday.
- Soon I will begin experimenting with schmaltz. (This chicken fat kind, not the other kind.)
- I whined about cooking dinner all week. Then today, I made soup, meatballs, veggie pancakes, and am about to go help the boy making dinner. Well, at least I know there’ll be good stuff to eat for lunch this week!
5 Comments
May 12, 2009 at 8:54 am (Preserving Traditions, recipes)
Seven people joined us at the Preserving Traditions event at the Grange last Sunday to learn to make yogurt and granola. Yogurt, as a process, takes time but not much attention once the milk has come up to temperature. Granola is also easy, though you really need to watch the timer once it goes into the oven.
We made half a gallon of plain yogurt and three batches of granola: pineapple/coconut, sesame/currant, and “the kitchen sink” with wonderful crispy walnuts, sesame seeds, and several kinds of dried fruit. Even after our yogurt parfait buffet, there was plenty for each person to take home.
There’s lots of variation in recipes for both yogurt and granola. The instructions below are a good set of guidelines – don’t be afraid to play with them a bit to suit your taste.
Yogurt
- Heat one or two quarts of milk to 180 degrees. If you don’t have a thermometer, heat it until just before it boils. You want steam and a few bubbles, but not actual boiling.
- Cool it to 110 degrees – just barely warm to the touch.
- Take about 1/2 cup of milk out and dissolve your starter. You can use prepackaged starter or existing yogurt.
- Add the starter back to the big pot of milk and mix thoroughly.
- Pour into containers and keep warm for 4-8 hours. We used a cooler with a hot pack – you can use any method you can think of to keep the jars at around 90-100 degrees.
- Once it’s thickened, store in the fridge.
Yogurt notes:
- You can use any kind of milk: skim, whole, creamtop, powdered, ultra-pasteurized, and even soy.
- There’s a lot of variation using yogurt as starter. Best results come from homemade yogurt started with packaged starter, but you can also use Dannon plain yogurt – about 2-3 Tbl per quart of milk.
- The thickening of the yogurt comes from keeping it warm during the incubation period.
- The yogurt will reach maximum tartness (and lowest lactose levels) after 3-4 days.
- It’ll keep at least 2 weeks in the fridge.
Granola
You can mix an match any flavor combination you like, but keep these proportions roughly equal:
- 5 cups dry ingredients: rolled oats, other rolled grains, puffed grain cereal
- 1 cup nuts or seeds
- 1/2 cup oil plus 1/2 cup honey or other sweetener
- 1 cup dried fruit and/or coconut
Method of assembly:
- In a large bowl, mix together all the dry ingredients and the nuts.
- Heat the honey and oil until it’s very liquid.
- Pour the honey and oil over the dry ingredients and stir to coat thoroughly.
- Bake at 350 for about 25 minutes, stirring every 5-10 minutes.
- When the nuts start to get toasty, or the oats start to brown, remove from oven.
- Stir in the fruit and coconut while it’s still warm.
- Cool and eat!
2 Comments
I’m doing my first workshop on stocking a pantry to live out of! This workshop aims to appeal to a variety of folks: those who want to save money, those who want quick meal prep, and those who think the economy is going to collapse but aren’t quite ready to join a peak oil group or move to a commune. Here’s the announcement: [EDIT 8-13 4:30pm - revised location]
