Cheap fruit dehydrator

October 8, 2008 at 2:34 pm (Cooking, Energy, Food preservation)
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So I read about Alton Brown’s box fan food dehydrator and decided to try it with some apples I’d gleaned from local parking lots. I actually like it better than my food dehydrator!

I peeled, cored, and sliced the apples with one of these, then spread them out on furnace filters. I actually put the box fan on its back, blowing upward, on top of a wooden crate so plenty of air could get underneath. Stacked the filters on top of the fan, turned the fan on medium, and 12 hours later – perfect dried apple slices!

They tasted much more like the apple slices I get from the co-op than ones I’ve dried with heat. Anything I’ve dried in the typical hot-blowing-air kind of dehydrator came out with some too raw and some crispy. They always had a weird taste that might have been related to the heat, or might have been from previous exposure to Grandad’s Secret Jerky Marinade.

I’m still experimenting with how dry they need to be…are these going to get moldy? They feel like the ones from the store, so I’m hoping they’ll be good. It’s sure easier than the other one, quieter,  uses less electricity, and with better results, so I’m sold!

6 Comments

Blueberry and black cherry conserves

August 2, 2008 at 6:24 pm (Cooking, Food preservation, recipes)
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Blueberry and cherry preservesI think I can say “I can can” now. I’ve done a couple small batches of jams so far, but I think I finally have the hang of it. And I did two full canner loads of pints today – a total of 15 pints and 2 half-pints. And this after helping a friend do something like 15 quarts of pickles this morning.

I’ve got a nice rhythm down: Prepare all the fruit. Fill the canner with water, load with clean jars, and start bringing it up to heat. Put the lids and bands into the electric hot pot (there’s only so much room on the stove) and turn it on. Put the fruit, sugar, and lemon juice into my 2 biggest pots to cook. At this point, I find it makes little difference if the pots have the same fruit or two different kinds. Once the jars and lids boil, turn those burners off.

Simmer the fruit as long as is necessary – I find blueberries will gel if you simmer them 10 minutes after they come to a rolling boil. Strawberries and cherries need more like 15-20 and are often still a bit runny – which is fine by me. I stir constantly and never really leave the stove. When they are about gel, I turn the canner full of jars back on to a boil and plug the hot pot back in.

Canning setup - dramatic recreation(Click the pic for a larger, annotated version.) I fill jars one at a time. I place a silicone hot pad on the counter next to the stove and use the jar lifter to get one jar out of the simmering canner. I dump the hot water out of it, place it on the hot pad, and fill it with jam using a big spoon and a canning funnel. Place the funnel aside on a plate, wipe the rim of the jar, place the lid and band on it, and settle it back into the water bath. By the time I’ve done all 9 jars, the water bath is almost boiling again. If it needs more water to cover the jars, I dump in the water I used to sterilize the lids, which is very hot. I pop the lid on the canner, bring it back to a rolling boil, and process the jars for 12-15 minutes.

Any cold, clean-ish water (e.g., from washing the fruit) gets caught in a dishpan and dumped on the garden or fruit trees. Any scalding-hot water gets dumped on the thistles trying to grow in the mulch near the foundation of the house.

Now that I know how it all goes, I don’t feel rushed or hurried. I’m not very worried about gelling, as these preserves will go into yogurt, so it’s pretty no-muss, no-fuss.

And now it’s dinner time. What’s your favorite dinner to eat after an afternoon of canning? I’m tempted to go out, but that seems…wrong somehow.

Yields and recipes:

  • 10 lb blueberries = 3 batches of 8c. blueberries + 3.5 c. sugar + 2 Tbl lemon juice = 3.5-4 pints per batch (3 cents per 1 Tbl serving)
  • 3 quarts black cherries + 4.5 c sugar + 7.5 Tbl lemon juice = 4.5 pints (7 cents per serving)

8 Comments

Crazy accomplished

July 26, 2008 at 6:57 pm (Changing habits, Cooking, Energy, Food origins, Food preservation)

Man, it’s nuts how good I feel when I Get Stuff Done. Highlights from the last couple days:

  • Strawberry and blueberry preserves (I wanted to crawl face first into the pint of strawberry)
  • Chopped holes in clay and planted 5 tomatillos, 4 tomatoes, and 1 pepper plant that I got for free Friday at an end-of-season sale
  • Good yard sale find: down/feather “mattress” or super-thick comforter
  • Cut and burned all the Canada thistle that was going to seed in the back (witness the ten thousand minute puncture wounds on my forearms)
  • Good-bye and good riddance to the hot tub, my most expensive mistake to date
  • Great conversations toward some very interesting consulting work
  • Started playing with the Kill-A-Watt and discovered that toasting my breakfast uses more power than leaving the fan running 18 hours straight
  • Made sag daal for dinner…oh so tasty! And just for fun, figured out that it costs about 50 cents a serving, including rice. I think I paid $7 last time I had it at a restaurant.

Cow AngelIn other news, he doesn’t know it yet, as he’s been out all afternoon, but my sweetie’s first batch of homemade yogurt came out really well. I bent the no-sugar rule to sample one spoonful topped with the cherry preserves I made last week. His assessment of “almost obscenely good” is pretty spot-on.

I did the math, and a quart of homemade yogurt comes to about $2.25 plus the price of homemade preserves. Enough to flavor a quart runs from 35 cents (blueberry) to 85 cents (organic strawberry). A quart of his old favorite yogurt – available only in 6-oz cups – would be $5.50; the price of my favorite just jumped to $6/quart. With the quantities of yogurt we eat in this house, we’ll easily save $20-25/month.

The homemade yogurt and preserves aren’t organic, but they are local (including the sugar) and made with essentially no waste. The milk even comes in glass bottles. The real impetus for doing this was to quit throwing out all those little plastic cups. In addition, his fave is trucked in from California and mine from Pennsylvania. By switching to homegrown, we’ve cut about 3000 food miles per quart.

9 Comments

Locavorious: Ann Arbor frozen food CSA

July 1, 2008 at 5:20 pm (Changing habits, Cooking, Food origins, Food preservation, Food security, nalofoomo)

This is about seven kinds of wonderful. Rena at Locavorious has expanded on the idea of a CSA in some really interesting ways. First, instead of a box of fresh vegetables, these CSA shares are made of frozen fruits and vegetables. All products are sourced locally within a short distance of Ann Arbor, Michigan, from existing farms (either by contract or U-Pick). After prep and freezing, Rena stores the veggies in a commercial-quality “community freezer” until November or December. There will be four monthly pick-ups, so there’s no need to buy a freezer to be able to enjoy locally-grown, frozen foods in the middle of winter. Not to mention the labor savings for folks who don’t have the time to tramp to half a dozen U-Pick places and then process all the food!

One of the things I like most about this kind of business is that it really is helping to build an interdependent local economy that’s accessible to mainstream culture. Let’s face it; most of the current US society isn’t going to cook every meal from fresh vegetables just harvested by Farmer Joan down the road. But they might serve a side of frozen green beans harvested by Farmer Joan and frozen by Rena two months ago.

Shares run for 4 months and will probably yield a total of around 30 pounds of food. The “early bird” price for 2008-09 is $100. Sounds like a great deal to me! I’ve already signed up. See details at http://locavorious.com/Eaters.html

Are there other innovative local food businesses out there that I’ve missed? Please let me know if you know of more innovators!

4 Comments

Why I’m not buying a freezer

March 31, 2008 at 10:00 am (Changing habits, Cooking, Food preservation, Organic gardening)
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Freezer.Well, after much thought and some excellent input, I’ve decided I am not buying a freezer at this time. Here are my reasons:

  • I have tried for years to grow enough veggies in my garden to freeze the extra. So far, I’ve not succeeded; I just don’t think 150sf is enough space to grow a year’s worth of vegetables. Buying things at the market to freeze is sometimes cost effective (like that 5-lb head of broccoli I once got for $2), but in general, it’s a losing financial proposition. In any case, I can keep several months’ worth of local produce in the freezer atop my fridge, so I can freeze some local produce. (Corn, especially!)
  • If I have a freezer, I will feel compelled to fill it up. This is an invitation to buy things I don’t need, especially meat. I would rather not buy as much meat instead of being tempted to buy a side of beef because “it’s much more economical that way!” Yes, I am a strong enough person to fight this temptation, but honestly, I have better things to do with my energy. :)
  • A freezer will encourage me to eat more locally, but less seasonally. Yes, it’s lovely to have peas and green beans all year long, but philosophically, I’d rather be eating things out of my root cellar – the kinds of foods that are traditional “winter” foods specifially because they keep without a freezer.
  • A freezer is another thing that needs attention. I need to fill it, defrost it, pay for its electricity, and worry about it when the power goes out.
  • It does not simplify my life, and the increase in complexity is not offset by a greater worth to the common good (achieved in this case by eating locally for more of the year).

[UPDATE: And then...I changed my mind and did buy a freezer. Here's why.]

9 Comments

Should I buy a freezer?

March 21, 2008 at 4:04 pm (Food preservation, Musings)
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group pollSo, this whole “blogging” thing is terribly one-way. I think of something to say, write about it, and maybe a couple of you comment on it. I’m not even really sure how many of “you” there are. It’s like being on stage and blinded by the spotlights, and only occasionally do you hear someone laugh or cough or something.

So I’m throwing this one out to you all: should I buy a freezer? I’m thinking a small chest-type freezer, mostly for storing garden veg and perhaps some meat. We don’t eat a ton of meat, but whole pastured chickens are the way to go, and they don’t fit in the fridge-top freezer very well.

My initial list of pros:

  • Would make it possible to eat local veg well into the winter.
  • Cheaper than store-bought organic veg, especially for stuff I grow. (I figure a small chest freezer costs about $4/mo to run if it lasts 20 years.)
  • Would put more variety at hand for winter produce.
  • Frozen veg is waaaaaay better than canned and easier to put up.

…and cons…

  • I’d have to do all that processing!
  • I have not yet had a garden produce enough of anything, except tomatoes, that would fill a freezer. (I can get cheap veggies from local sources, though, and would do more if I had a place to store them. Probably.)
  • I’ve done just fine without one up to this point.
  • The power goes out frequently near us, but rarely more than a day or two. (The big ice storm last January knocked us out for 3 days and everything in the fridge-top freezer was still frozen solid.)

It’s funny; as I contemplate becoming more self-sufficient and putting food up for the winter, I get a little sad thinking how much I enjoy shopping at our local food co-op. I would actually miss grocery shopping. Especially when money is tight, it feels like a splurge to walk into this little bountiful shop and say, “What sounds good for dinner tonight? You can have anything you want,” and finding some weird little ingredient to build a meal around. I suppose I can still do that; green beans are rarely the “magic ingredient.”

So what do you think? Should I buy a freezer?

12 Comments

Family Food and Grain Mill Review

February 29, 2008 at 9:54 pm (Cooking, Food preservation)
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trio of ground grainsThis week, I’ve been playing with my new Family Grain Mill (known at Lehman’s as the “German-Made Family Food Mill”). I’ve been thinking about getting a grain mill for several years; what sold me on this one is its good performance and the fact that it’s not a one-trick pony. You can get attachments for this that will grind grain and beans, shred and slice vegetables, grind meat, stuff sausages, and roll grains (make your own oatmeal). It also has both electric and hand-crank bases, and when I bought mine, EverythingKitchens.com was offering a deal where you got the hand-crank base free if you bought the electric base. I did this, and got the grain grinding and vegetable attachments.

Overall, I find this machine a breeze to use and to clean. I will probably not use it for certain vegetables any more, but I’m definitely going to keep experimenting with making flour. Details after the jump… Read the rest of this entry »

17 Comments

Cheap pickling crocks

January 12, 2008 at 7:20 pm (Cooking, Food preservation)
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I love my pickling crock. I found a used 2-gallon crock at a local consignment shop for $10 and it’s worth every penny. It makes it so much easier to mix ingredients and keep everything submerged in brine. I also found a source for regionally-made (Ohio, I think) crocks, new, and today succumbed and bought a 2-quart one that will be perfect for pickling ginger carrots.

But what if you’re just starting out pickling and don’t want to invest in a crock that may only see a couple of uses? You could use a bowl or quart canning jars, but my friend Ken had another brilliant idea: use your Crock Pot. Since the key features of a pickling crock are that it’s a) cylindrical and b) non-reactive (so, not copper or aluminum or iron), the ceramic innards of a slow cooker are just about perfect. Chances are you have a plate that fits the inside, too, to serve as a weight and lid.

I was kicking around the weekly Kiwanis sale this morning, and I had another idea, too: a plastic ice bucket. They’re also cylindrical, non-reactive, and the right size, and you can find them for a buck at almost any resale shop.

That being said, I still love my crocks. Plastic is very practical (and oh so much lighter), but there is a grace and solidity of a stoneware crock that it can’t match. If you’re a geek like me, there’s a great (long) article called “Feeding the Family: Domestic Outbuildings and Traditional Foodways in the Blue Ridge” that explains how food was typically stored on farms before refrigeration was common. A good set of earthenware crocks and a spring house were key. It actually sounds like the advent of canning meant more work and possibly less-safe food, though it did increase variety.

In other news, I’ve now had two invitations to help kill chickens this summer. I probably will.

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