A nice sunny weekend! Part 1

Hi everyone!

Well this last weekend was great! Sorry about the long absence... no promises that it won't happen again, either :) I just don't have time while I'm still working but the good news is we probably only have another 6-9 months to go before I can officially be a STAY HOME MOM and won't that be great! I'm pretending that I'm one today... my little sister got married early last week and I took the entire week off last week and also today.

I've gotten a lot of project-y things done... mostly a lot of canning and we did some gardening in the beautiful weather. Sorry, no pics - my camera is officially kaput so I'll have to wait till I get a new one. I brought home the pressure canner from my brother's house (and alas, had to give him his excalibur dehydrator... sniff) and so I got lots canned. I canned up a bunch of ground beef, chicken, seasoned pinto beans and yellow potatoes.

So far we've tried the beef and the beans and they are both winners. I never thought I'd like canned meat and I don't know how well it would go over in tacos or something but put into a casserole it was quite good. And the beans were very good, lightly seasoned with salt, pepper and a shake of cumin but the flavor was light enough you could easily flavor them in any way you choose. I just wish I had some photos to share!

I also had gotten a new wheat grinder and so I tried that out, of course. The bread rose like it was no one's business! I didn't grind the flour quite fine enough for my taste so I used about 60% whole wheat and then 40% bread flour and it was great. I made just a standard honey wheat bread although I've been doing a lot of the "artisan bread in 5 minutes a day" breads and those have been delicious as well. I think I'll have a lot of fun with this tool once I get to stay home :)

Manure & canning jars

So yesterday after we finished at the pumpkin patch, I borrowed my sister's truck and went up and got a load of manure to put on the garden. There is a guy north of here with a horse farm who will give you free manure and he'll even load it himself with his tractor!

I, of course, just HAD to unload it myself. It was great fun! Some of you might wonder why I don't make my husband do things like unloading manure or building me garden beds... so I guess I should mention how much I love doing projects like that. I know it sounds odd, but if I let him build my garden beds or unload my manure, it would take some of the fun out of my project for me. With that said, he has been a big help in lots of ways, mostly though, just in tolerating me and my hare-brained schemes ;) Oh yeah, and he washed the truck afterwards for me :)

So anyway I just put the manure into a pile. I want to get the wood chip mulch in first and they haven't delivered it yet. I think I'll call again today and see what the delay is, since it was a week ago today that I asked for it. They might have not had any jobs in the area, but that seems odd just because the corporate office is just a few miles away.

Oh, and I also picked up some canning jars from a lady in Spokane via craigslist. She gave me 2 new flats of jars (pints and quarts) and also about 6 quarts and 6 jelly jars. Oh, and a jar lifter and funnel. I gave her $13 for it, it was all the cash I had left and boy it was a great deal! What a sweetheart she was! The other day I went to a garage sale and the lady had 18 pint jars in a box. They were really dirty, with mouse poop even, so she gave them to me for $2. I soaked them in bleachwater to get the crud off, and then ran them through the super hot sanitizing cycle on my dishwasher. So now I have plenty of jars! Especially pints. I might have to buy some quarts, though now I have about 18 of them so that might last me a bit. I'm hoping to get some grapes so I can try the method of making juice where you just put 1 1/2 cups of fruit in the jar, top it off with sugar and water, and can it. Wait 3 months and it turns into fruit juice :) We'll see, though.

Canning potatoes - Experiment # 1

So on Saturday afternoon I canned potatoes! I got a great deal on some nice clean small Yukon Golds the other day and I bought 15 lbs of them for canning. One of our favorite meals is fried potatoes with kielbasa sausage and some sort of veggie, usually broccoli. When I go back to work next week, it'll be Tommy's job to feed the kids and make dinner. Since he isn't really much of a cook I generally try to have easy stuff on hand for him to throw together. I had the great idea of cutting up potatoes and canning them and then all he'd have to do is drain them, throw in the sausage and veggies and voila - dinner!

One of my most despised kitchen jobs is scrubbing potatoes. That's one of the reasons I'm going to grow mine in straw or some sort of mulch next year - I just really hate getting potatoes that are covered in dirt to scrub off. The potatoes I bought for canning were actually pretty clean (and to my delight, all pretty small). However, I still didn't want to take chances and I needed to clean them myself, right? Well, forever searching for an innovative way to make my life easier I thought about THIS:

I did some googling and turns out the Washington State Potato people actually say it's fine to clean potatoes in a soapless dishwasher. Who knew? :) In any case, it made my life much simpler. I wouldn't do it except for canning because the cycle heated up the potatoes a bit which would really reduce their shelf life I imagine, but for this purpose it was great. I wasn't planning on skinning them so it went really quickly.

I basically just cut them up and threw them in quart jars with a tsp of flaked canning salt and covered with boiling water. You are supposed to process them at 10 lbs for 40 minutes... I think I had too much pressure. I couldn't seem to get the burner on the right temperature and so I ended up overprocessing them a bit. I only made 8 quarts since that's all the jars I had at the time, but since then I've gotten more jars. I still have a few pounds left, and actually I might go pick up more potatoes since they were so easy to can. So I'll try it again... the ones I have now are sort of disintegrated. I'm sure they will be great for mashed potatoes or whatnot, just not the frying potatoes that I wanted.

Of course, I'll update when I do those as well.

Current Projects

I've got a couple projects going right now. Actually one is ongoing and the other I did yesterday. I make homemade pizza probably once a week. I have this great pizza stone I got from my mom and with it's help I've been able to churn out gourmet pizzeria-style pizzas on a weekly basis, much to the joy and delight of my husband. I generally make up a sauce fresh, especially if we want to have a white garlic sauce on our pizza (which is fairly often). However, I did buy a canned pizza sauce a while back and we ran out which made me think... gee, I'm a pretty good cook, why shouldn't I just make up my own sauce and can it into jars?

Bingo :)
So yesterday on our trip to Costco I bought a giant can of tomato sauce and made up some pizza sauce. I ended up making it pretty spicy, more heat that I'd normally like, which is great for Tommy (he loves spicy hot things) but that's OK, I usually prefer ranch dressing or even just olive oil for my pizza. It went pretty well, though added to the MESS in my kitchen (that I have yet to clean up this morning).


My other project is CHEEEEESE. I've been interested in making cheese for quite some time. In fact, a few years ago I made some but forgot about it back in the fridge and it dried out and crumbled. My mom got me Ricki Carrol's cheesemaking book for Christmas last year and of course I devoured it but it did take me this long to start. I'm pretty methodical and like to do lots of research and have my ducks in a row before I learn a new skill (for the most part).

I have already made mozzarella a couple times, and made Ricotta with the leftover whey (though still haven't gotten much from that, but I'll get there :). The other day I found out the Provolone is basically just mozzarella with sharp lipase enzymes added (gives it the distinctive flavor) and so I decided to make up a batch.

So of course I don't have pictures of the process but I took a couple photos yesterday. I don't know if it will be a true provolone since I never got the mozzarella to "stretch" like it's supposed to. I suspect too little citric acid in the recipe, I used a different one this time. In any case, I soaked it in a saltwater brine for about 22 hours. It looks kinda like a BRAIN, huh? heh. After that I rubbed it with olive oil and wrapped in cheesecloth.

Then I drew up the corners, tied them up with a pretty pink shoelace, and hung the whole mess down in my creepy basement. It's too warm in the main house to cure cheese, the basement is the right temperature though not the right humidity, but I'm sure it'll be fine. Edible, at least ;)


Looks kinda like one of those ghost thingies people hang in their yards for halloween, huh! :)

My next projects for cheese will probably be either a farmhouse cheddar or maybe a gouda. I'd also like to build a cold smoker (from a cardboard box) so I can smoke my cheeses. Tommy is a big cheese fan so I hope to be able to get really gourmet with them. I can only picture the smoked jalapeno cheddars I can make for him as my garden starts producing.

I don't have access to a source of raw or fresh milk (unless I want to pay $10/gallon, yech). But I just found out that Costco doesn't use hormones in their milk (rbst) and it's a lot cheaper than grocery store milk so I'll try using that next time.