Here’s the fresh cheese I made out of Home Made, a cookbook I’ll be reviewing for Bookslut later this week. It’s a good simple cheese that doesn’t require any special equipment. It is even better topped with the Apple Chutney I made (sort of a mashup between the recipes in Put ’em Up! by Sherri Brooks Vinton and in Tart and Sweet by Kelly Geary and Jessie Knadler). I put up 10 half-pints of this one, and had a tiny bit leftover for an afternoon snack, which was delicious.
-
-
It’s that time of year, the time of year when there’s suddenly a dearth of canning jars in my house, when I run out of white vinegar, when my sweetheart comes in each night and looks at another stack of jars and just shakes his head at my propensity to stock up for winter. “We do have supermarkets, you know,” he’ll note. Yes, yes, I know — but we have all this lovely produce right now, and I have a cookbook review to write this weekend, so I’ve been playing around. This week I put up eight beautiful (and gigantic)…
-
Farewell, Delaware from Charlotte Freeman on Vimeo. Miss Delaware is the bigger of the two Delaware chicks I raised this year, and although I hesitate to say it, she’s my favorite chicken. I never thought I’d be a person who could tell the chickens apart, much less the kind of person who has a favorite. But she’s kind of hilarious — for one thing, she’s very very vocal. And curious. Even when she was a little chick, she’d come over to see what you were doing, or rather, would come over to supervise whatever you were doing. She’s also pretty funny…
-
The new chickens have finally started to lay — one wee pullet egg a day. They’re about the size of bantam eggs — maybe half the size of a normal egg. But lovely bright marigold yolks that stand right up off the surface of the white. It’s such a relief to be getting my own eggs again. No offense to any of the very fine ranch egg purveyors here in the valley, but I there’s no comparison between an egg from your own backyard to an egg you buy from someone. Next chore, sending the rooster off to his new…
-
Now, it feels like summer. That’s eight pounds of cherries from the empty lot down the street, preserved in four pounds of sugar. It’s not jam, because I don’t really like jam that much, and don’t use it (I tend not to like sweets in the morning). What I do is pit the cherries (while staring out my kitchen window and listening to a book on tape — takes a while, entertainment is good). Then I weigh them, and put them in my big French Copper Jam Pot with half as much sugar by weight. I bring it to a boil,…
-
A couple of years ago I blogged about how great straw mulch was in my veggie beds, but I stopped using it because I got so much wheat and grass seeded into my beds that it became unmanageable. This spring though, I was having trouble with weeds in the long tomato beds along the back fence, so I turned over the soil, put down a layer of paper weed cloth, and mulched with a couple of inches of grass clippings I begged off the nice older man who cuts the lawn at the Baptist church on my corner (he told…
-
A couple of weeks ago a post from Daily Yonder came up on my RSS feed about chicken waterers. It promised a way to water chickens without them wallowing in their own filth. Chickens will shit on anything, including the open water lip of their water container — which has always grossed me out. Plus, you waste a lot of water dumping out the dirty stuff for them and then they just make it all dirty again. The Daily Yonder article was about a couple, Mark Hamilton and Anna Hess who came up with a way to economically and hygenically…
-
I pretty much quit making yogurt when I stopped buying raw milk from my rancher friend. However, this spring, I’ve been craving yogurt again — on fruit in the morning after my bike ride, and mixed with Aleppo pepper, salt, herbs and olive oil on almost everything else. So I’ve been buying yogurt, which bothers me on two fronts. For one thing, the plastic containers — they add up. I don’t use plastic anymore for food storage, and we don’t have good recycling here, and it just seems unnecessary. The other problem is that commercial yogurt has weird things added…
-
Here’s my first real harvest — I’ve been eating a little bit out of the hoop houses, some spinach here, a couple of scallions there, some komatsuna as it came in, but this is the first real harvest of the season. Today I picked a big bag of scallions, probably the equivalent of two big supermarket bunches, a huge bag of spinach, a big bag of arugula, two re-purposed tortilla bags full of broccoli rabe thinnings, and a big bag of mixed Chinese greens. Enough for the week at least. Here’s to give you an idea of the difference the…
-
There’s a great piece over at Civil Eats this morning, Our Deadly, Daily Chemical Cocktail on the sheer amount of chemicals in the food most people eat. Here’s the quote that got me: Based on the anecdotal information I see in my client’s food journals, people eating processed and packaged foods are taking in exorbitant amounts of artificial ingredients and additives. Typically, a client will say something like, “I eat a bowl of cereal with low-fat milk, have yogurt for a snack, and a Subway sandwich for lunch.” While this sounds relatively harmless, here’s what it might actually look like…