Catching my breath after the holiday

What a busy month! I finished up the Fall semester well, with an A in all my classes. I also managed to get some more organization done in the house, and moved some projects further along. We also made our first wheel of Farmhouse Cheddar cheese (it's lopsided, but we have high hopes for the flavor!) and are planning our next batches in the coming week. The vinegar was a real success, especially the plum vinegar. The apple cider vinegar was a bit weak, but usable for marinade. I added some more cider and a cup of sugar to the vinegar crock to work some more, and hopefully come out with a bit more kick. The wines have all moved downstairs to finish settling. The beer turned out beer-y, although not quite what I had expected! I'm going to try another batch soon, and use a lighter malt.

With the new year, I'm trying to increase our consumption of local foods from our current 25% to 50% or more. It's been a challenge, but some new research over the past three weeks has yielded some great resources - and some change to my mindset. Up until about a week ago, I had been concentrating on finding local resources for the things I would normally purchase in the grocery store - especially the meats. While looking around for local meat dealers, I had a sudden epiphany - why not put some effort into finding products that this area naturally grows? Instead of beef - why not elk? Why not buffalo? And, while on the subject, why not try using farm raised trout instead of eating other fish? A little more searching led to some good local sources for these meats, at prices not too much more than what I'd pay for beef (at least some of which is probably grown overseas in sensitive environments by the most destructive means) in the grocery store, and in some cases actually less!

For instance, our family loves a Basque dish called pickled tongue - but beef tongue in the grocery store (if you can even find it these days) is extraordinarily expensive. Buffalo tongue, which should be pretty much the same in taste and texture, apparently sells for about half of that or less. Buffalo and Elk chuck roast can be had for about the average on sale grocery store price. Shanks for stew, a bit less. Ground elk, about the same as average priced extra lean ground beef. Buffalo or elk short ribs, a bit less than average sale prices. The meat, from what I've been reading, is much better for you, with less fat and more protein than factory beef, with fewer hormones and antibiotics, if any. Overall, it seems to be a very environmentally sound, healthy, and budget-conscious choice for local eating.

It actually makes sense - what grows naturally here *should* be more efficient, and as a result, less harmful to the environment. It also has to travel much less distance from the ranch to our table. In addition, what grows naturally usually has had fewer intrusive inputs - less conventionally farmed grain, fewer hormones, little by the way of antibiotics. All of these are good reasons to eat more from the local food chain.

So now I have to wonder why it took me so long to make this connection.

Homemade Kraut, version 2.0

The first batch of our homemade kraut is finished, and wow, it is good! I love kraut, but even I have never had kraut that tasted this good before! I'm on the web tonight trying to find tasty recipes for it. We all had some plain, and I put the rest of the half gallon jar into the fridge to prevent any deterioration. We're declaring Kraut version 1.0 an official and unqualified success! I'm under orders from the rest of the crew to find and secure several more good kraut cabbages this week so we can put a whole bucket of the stuff on to ferment for Kraut version 2.0.

The first batch of wheat beer (the half gallon that didn't have raspberry in it) has been primed and bottled, and is sitting in a dark covered box on the counter for the next week, after which it will go down into the storage room for a couple or three more. After that, it should be fully carbonated, and we can bring a bottle up to chill and taste. Woohoo! On to the next batch, which will be a dark nut brown ale for my sweetie. I'm just waiting for the dark malt extract to come in and we'll be ready to start.

The mead is clearing out nicely, and the raspberry and cherry wines are just about finished with their main fermentations. The plum is still going - however it is clearing out really nicely too, and it *is* slowing down finally. I'm hoping to rack the mead this weekend and then take it downstairs to the dark storage room to settle for a month or so before bottling. With luck the plum and raspberry will be ready to go downstairs, too. I'll also test the vinegars this weekend again, and see if I can tell how many more weeks they might need. After that, they will also be bottled for aging and storage, and their glass crocks cleaned and ready for the next project. I'll admit, it'll be nice to get that part of my countertop back!

I had a really interesting experience a couple of days ago while scanning the grocery store ads - I realized that there was really very little we needed to buy this week. Now, I am going to buy a few sale items that we will stock up on, but there is really nothing much that we *need.* We've finally arrived at the happy point where most of our buying now is mainly for the purpose of stocking up on cheap basics as replacements and not because we have an empty pantry. That means that our food bill should be going down a bit over the next few months, which will be a welcome change. Buying everything in bulk costs extra up front and storing that much stuff has its challenges, but after a while it means you reach the point where all your meals are made with cheaper ingredients.

Another positive thing I've noticed while scanning store ads this week: I'm definitely losing my taste for overprocessed junky food. Which is good news for a lot of reasons, one of which - I hope - is that it will help me to lose some weight!

View From the Kitchen Today, Nov 17

Two large crocks of home-made vinegars sit on the counter - and the plum is almost finished! We tasted it a bit the other day and it's developing a wonderful flavor - as good as last year's, I think. It should be ready to filter and bottle by the end of this month, or a week or so into December. That means a few of the folks on our Christmas list will be getting a bottle. The apple cider vinegar is about halfway finished, so it will probably take another month before it is ready. The temperatures up here on the top floor of the house are on the lower end of where acetobacter likes, so it takes a while to brew. But I wonder sometimes if the long, slow ferment isn't part of what's helping to keep so much of the original fruit flavor in the vinegar.

Three jugs of wine sit next to the two crocks - all topped off with airlocks and covered with clean white kitchen towels to keep out the extra light. All three are still slowly fermenting, and have been racked at least once - the cherry and plum have been racked twice now. The mead is finally starting to clear a bit, and it looks like it will be a nice golden color when finished. I'm going to be starting a raspberry wine later this weekend - and then I'll move on to my very first batch of homebrew beer! I'm making a light wheat beer for my very first batch. The recipe I'm using only has 6 ingredients, and a simple wort boiling routine, so I should be able to handle it without much confusion. When it has finished its first really hard fermentation, I'm going to rack it into two half-gallon jars and let one proceed without extra ingredients and add some raspberry juice concentrate to the second. The neat thing is, beer brewing is fast when compared with winemaking, so I should be able to haul a bottle out, chill it and taste it by Yule.

Next on the list will be a nut brown ale for my sweetie. He likes his beer strong and dark. No pale ales for him - he says if you can see through it, it's just not worth drinking! So after I see that my first batch is doing okay, I will start a second, larger batch for him as part of his Christmas present from me. I plan to try to keep him in homebrew as much as possible during this next year. I'd love to eventually come up with a handful of tried and true recipes we can make here at home that are just exactly the type he likes. Then maybe next fall, if I'm feeling ambitious, I'll try a batch or two of barley wine - something that he just adores, but we don't often buy because it's fairly expensive. That will have to age for a while, but I think it would be a really cool project.

After these five batches of brew, I have plans to make an apricot wine and an apricot wheat beer, and an apricot melomel (we have a bunch of frozen apricots on hand that need to be used up) some "kosher type" concord grape wine, a blackberry wine and some carrot/raisin sherry. After those are finished, it should be April or May and just about be time to start the gardening year over again. That means I'll have to put away the brewing stuff (except for the occasional bottling weekend as things mature and clear) until next fall. But by this time next year, I expect to have quite the collection of homemade wines maturing, stacked in boxes on their sides in the storage room.

That's one of the nice things about growing older - one finally develops the patience for this sort of thing.

Dogs! (Gollum!)

Our two newest canine additions are an interesting set of contradictions at times. Sometimes they behave almost like furry little toddlers - they follow me around, beg for food and want to be picked up and carried all the time. They have decided that civilized animals sleep on beds, so if they both disappear in mid-day, that's where I usually find them napping. They also "talk" - I swear Rugby almost has "mamma!" down pat now - and whine and generally do everything they can to communicate in "our language." But then there are times when they are just very doggy.

Take the other day. Our big male cat, Aramis, brought in a mostly-dead vole. He wasn't all dead yet, just mostly dead. Although I didn't get the bellows out and ask him what he had that was worth living for, his condition was pretty apparent. Anyway, I looked up from doing homework (it seems I do little else these days) and watched as Aramis came trotting proudly into the house with his prize - closely flanked by two small dogs who were very intent on finding out just what he had in his mouth. I could almost hear them say, "what's it got in its mouthses, Precious? Is it crunchable? Is it tasty? Is it juicy? GOLLUM!"

I finally took the now completely dead vole away from all three of them (I had to actually pry Rugby's mouth open and remove the saliva-slicked corpse) and soothed their wounded sensibilities with some treat bribes. We have a lot of voles in the garden and they do a tremendous amount of damage and breed like, well, like voles. Because of this, I really don't want to discourage any of the pets that have a mind to hunt. But I also don't want to have to deal with parasites, so that's our compromise.

This propensity to want to eat nasty stuff is just one of the many reasons why, although I do tend to baby my dogs, I still recognize that they are dogs. Although... a friend of mine once told me a story about herself as a baby. It seems her mother came in one day and found her crunching something. Something that was sticking partway out of her mouth. Something that had long, waving feelers. Something that looked an awful lot like a super-sized cockroach. Ewww.

So maybe there aren't that many differences after all. But at least I don't need to worry about sending the pups to college.
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Attack of the Butt-Cracks

(Or, how your being a slave to fashion may have people laughing at you behind your back[side].)

I see it nearly every day - otherwise attractive looking young women wearing stuff that is either 1) totally unsuited for their body type, or 2) just plain fall-on-your-ass-laughing silly.

Case in point, "low rise" or "hiphugger" jeans. Girls, let's face it - even though your fashionista idols on TV may wear this type of pants, only maybe one in every hundred women looks decent in them. The rest of us look like we're five months pregnant - or worse. These pants make even normally curvy women look like overweight, hugely love-handled, binge beer-drinking trailer park refugees.

Then there is the butt-crack issue. You simply cannot bend over even the slightest in these pants without your backside hanging out. If you haven't noticed this "feature" you really should. There have been times I've literally felt compelled to cover my eyes out of embarassment for your unwitting humiliation. I'm sure that most of you just don't think about it, but please - the next time you put on your midi tops and your low rise jeans, do all of us a favor and bend over in front of a mirror and have a good look at what you're flashing at the world. And then for goodness sake, if you agree that's not putting your best side forward, go put on a longer top or some jeans that aren't about to fall off! Have some respect for yourself and everyone else. Okay?

Second case in point: wearing really high heeled stiletto pumps. With jeans. At school. In the rain. I call these "silly shoes" and when I see them I always wonder about the mental health of the woman wearing them.

I saw a young woman today that I could tell was wearing these killer shoes before I even could see her feet. She had that choppy, ungainly, clown-on-stilts walk that one can spot a half mile off. She was wearing what had to be 3- inch pencil thin heels to walk around on campus. In the rain. In a place and a season where one can encounter ice on the walkways, not to mention the cracks in the concrete and uneven joins in the pavement. This gal was a broken leg or busted face waiting to happen. So if you can't bring yourself to wear sensible shoes for walking around outside on uneven ground in all weather, you might consider keeping the heels to under 2 inches. Then at least maybe you won't look quite so much like a badly-strung marionette as you mince around campus on your shoe-stilts.

I know silly fads in clothing aren't anything new - I have several books in my personal library on fashions throughout history. I've always considered it amazing what people will wear if someone convinces them that it's "posh" to do so. But I think sometimes that we here in the good old "modern" U.S. are just as silly and superficial as any of these fashionplates from the past. I wouldn't be surprised if in a few hundred years people are writing books about what passes for fashion now, and having a huge belly laugh at our expense.

So, you might want to do what you can now to make sure pictures of your butt-crack don't end up on those yet-to-be-written pages. I'm just sayin'...

Tempeh, Part II

Well, I'm munching on my first home-made batch of tempeh right now! It turned out to be not terribly difficult to make, and the flavor is good - very mild. I cut half of one of the slabs into "fingers" and deep fried it in a bit of canola oil. Half of it was briefly soaked in chicken bullion before frying, the other half was fried without any treatment and lightly salted. I think the soaked came out better - the bit of extra flavor is nice and the extra moisture seems to have made them a bit more tender inside.

So far I've munched on it plain, with a dip of soy and ginger, and dipped into some Thai peanut salad dressing I like to make. It's good with all of them, but I think I like it with the Thai peanut best. I'm also thinking they would be good lightly breaded with a spicy breading before cooking. I still have 3/4 of the batch I just made, so I will try it in different dishes over the next few days and pick out my favorites. I think the bullion soaked and deep fried version would make a tasty wrap samich with lots of veggies and some spicy mustard...

All in all, another successful Mad Kitchen Scientist project! The hardest part of the whole thing was finding a nice warm - but not too warm - place for the inoculated soybean mush to incubate for 24 hours. After hunting all over the house, I found a nice warm spot on top of one of our fluorescent light fixtures in the sunroom. I actually had to put several layers of terry toweling above the "hot spot" to lower the temps a bit, but it worked like a champ.

If anyone is curious, here are some links to nutritional information on Tempeh:

Tempeh, on the WHFoods site.
Health Benefits of Tempeh.
The highest level of soy isoflavones is found in Tempeh.
Tempeh won't make you as gassy as other soy or bean products.

And, here are some recipes!
Recipes from Tempeh.info.
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View From the Kitchen Today, Nov 11

Well, it's been a good week, if you're a mad kitchen scientist like me. The apple cider and plum vinegars are souring nicely. I siphoned out a small taste of the plum last night with a sterile straw, and so far it's promising to be as wonderful as the small batch we made last year. The apple cider vinegar was a bit slower to get a good thick coating of "mother" on the top, but it's also moving along well.

The mead is in its third week of primary fermentation! But to give it credit, it didn't go quite as strong as the plum and cherry did at first, so it's not surprising that it's taking longer to finish up. I also added a bit more honey a week ago, because I wanted the honey taste to be stronger - so that probably lengthened this first step out a bit as well. The plum is showing signs of allllmost being ready to rack again. The cherry is still cloudy, so I'm leaving that one be for now.

My newest project is the home fermenation of soy foods - I'm doing tempeh, miso, and shoyu during the coming weeks. I did some research and found that okara actually makes great tempeh (at least, according to some folks) and since it's a byproduct of soymilk making, which I already do, it gives me another use for the leftovers. I also found a tip online about adding a bit of oats to the soybeans to make the milk "creamier" and better tasting, so I tried that today. It worked great, but it's actually a little *too* thick for my taste. So next time, instead of using one cup of old fashioned rolled oats per 6 cups of soaked soybeans, I'll use 1/2 cup. That should be plenty, judging from this batch. But the beany taste I sometimes still have in my soymilk was nearly completely gone this time and it did taste richer. Plus, if oats are a grain, and soy is a bean - doesn't the combination make a "complete protein?" Maybe. But in any case, I think the oatmeal trick is here to stay.

I kept the okara/oat leftovers, rinsed them through once to get rid of the oat starch goo (saved the rinsings for the whole wheat bread I'm going to start this afternoon) and then rolled it all up in a clean terry towel to dry a bit before mixing in the vinegar and tempeh starter. I'm trying to find ways for us to eat less meat, and do more good food here at home, so tempeh seemed a natural choice. I was thrilled to find that it also helps me to use up the okara. Okara is good for a lot of things, but it's hard to keep up with it. If you make soymilk more than once a week, it really seems to pile up. If we had chickens, I'd give the extras to them - I'm sure they'd love it. But we don't at the moment, so as much as I hate to, I'd have to compost it or we'd be eating it breakfast, lunch and dinner! Making tempeh is a good compromise - we don't get tired of okara this and okara that and less of it goes into the compost bin.

My next experiment will be making koji rice for making miso and shoyu. I'm really looking forward to this part! I've wanted to make miso for a long time, and the shoyu or tamari is a welcome bonus. I think tempeh is as far as I'll get this week - but next weekend begins my Thanksgiving holiday break where I"ll have about 10 days off from school to "play." So I think I'll wait till next weekend to start the koji, since it requires a lot more watching and preparation. In the meantime, I need to find or buy some miso crocks. I don't expect to find any actual miso crocks, but I think I can find some straight sided glass cannisters at the store that will do really well as replacements.

Another project for the upcoming holiday week is starting our first batches of homebrew beer. I'm going to start a very small wheat beer batch for me, and a larger nut brown ale for my sweetie. He's brewed before, but I haven't - just the wine and vinegar and such - so I'll be doing most of the work and he will be there to supervise and help out. We've probably got 20 dozen beer bottles in the storage room that I've saved over the years, so we have that covered! I also bought a corker/capper the other day for sealing up all these goodies, so we're covered there. All we need is a larger carboy (3 gallon) and the ingredients. So I'm going to start gathering those last few items up this coming week, and if I have everything I need, I'll put at least the wheat beer on next weekend while working on the koji.