A real treat!

I thought I'd share what a great Mom I have. Not only does she read my blog, she takes some of my cues by hanging her clothes out and starting a compost pile, and now she's hooked her "little" boy up with some winter goodness! Check these out...Huh? Was I lying? My mom sent these to me nearly two months ago (actually could be longer, I can't remember the date.) out of the blue. When I was 15 and we moved into the house they live in now there was what I remember thinking was probably the ugliest, scraggliest little tree in the corner of the parking area to the side of the house. I later learned that it was a pomegranate tree and that I liked pomegranates! I didn't live there for too long after high school and really didn't pay attention to it the last time I was back there, but that sucker is now taller than the garage!

According to Mom, they got 140 pom's from the tree this year! She sent me a few along with a note that I could store them for a couple of months very easily. I, of course, figured that that was worth a try and they've sat in the back of the fridge since I got them. Today I decided the time was "ripe" and dug one out for a taste test. It was perfect just like she said.

I also thought I'd pass on the tip that she included. Cut them open with a knife, but peal and separate the seed pods gently under some running water to keep from staining your fingers. Miracle of miracles, I can go to work tomorrow after having handled pomegranates without looking like I killed someone the night before!

Thanks for sharing Mom! Now I just need to establish some good lemon tree root stock so I can cut a grafting from your lemon tree. The lemons you brought me last year are still the best ones I've ever had!

Love ya Ma!
See the rest of you tomorrow...
P~

Breaking in a new toy

A while back, before Christmas actually, I treated myself to a little present. It's something that I've been looking for here and there, but it hadn't ever presented itself at the right time. This time however, during a trip to Ikea in Salt Lake City, I found this awesome clay cooking vessel and it was gonna be mine!There were only displays left of the shelf but I would not be deterred. After not taking the standard "We don't sell the displays" line to heart, I found another member of the sales staff and HE agreed that they would since it was the only ones left. I had to pay full price, but really all I was missing was a box...no biggie!

So, what's the big deal? Bread baby...bread. Last year, along with I think everyone in the homesteading blogosphere, I got hooked on the NY Times no knead bread. My problem was, my cast iron pot was 1, too stinky to use in the house (don't ask, long story.) and 2, too big to use in the oven very easily. I have heard of a "la Cloche" to bake in, but that's a tool that can only be used for baking where as this one can serve multi purpose. Also it was cheaper so that was a big selling point as well.

So tonight I christened it, and it baked a bread with a crisp crust, that looks great. I can't wait to get into it.I've been reading about the five minutes a day bread recipe too, any one have any experience with it? I'm not sure it would really fit our needs as a day to day bread. We have three kids in school that need lunch time sandwich bread mostly, but I'd still like to try it out perhaps.

I look forward to playing with this further throughout the year. I'll keep you posted.
Till tomorrow.
P~

The hardboiling dilemma

I learned something kind of surprising over the holidays. Although fresh eggs are tastier, healthier and just generally all around better eggs, they do have one shortcoming. They don't hard boil worth a D***!

A couple of days before Thanksgiving A~ and I began trying some different methods of hard boiling them so we could have some deviled eggs with some semblance of a decent appearance. It wasn't happening. You may know what I'm talking about. That incredible stick to the shell power of fresh hard cooked eggs is more that my usually nimble fingers could work around.

So I consulted one of my go to people for all things chicken, or egg.. or whichever came first.? Anyway, Laura over at (not so) Urban Hennery comforted me with the knowledge that her eggs do the same thing. and her most consistent solution; old eggs. That's right, old eggs. It seems that as the eggs age, the proteins in the egg kind of mellow out and let the shell go. Huh? Maybe that's the reason eggs bought from store shelves average 30 days old already? Anyway, we decided to start saving a bunch of eggs separate from the rest so we had them available when we wanted hard boil some for whatever reason.
As you can see, we came up with a really technical way of coding them as well. 1-1 in our code means the eggs were set apart during the first week of January. It's rudimentary I admit, but it works well. I now have a bag of hard boileds in the fridge at work to eat for breakfast and they slide right out of the shell!

So, if your new to raising your own eggs, save yourself the frustration of sticky shelled eggs and let them chill out for a week or two in the fridge. You'll be much happier with the results. I promise. Have any other ideas for ways to hard cook fresh eggs that works well for you? Leave a comment share it with the rest of us would ya?
Catch you tomorrow.
P~

interesting thread...

This was supposed to have been posted this morning... Guess I was tired and didn't click the publish button, OOps.

Just wanted to drop a quick FYI out to you this morning. As you may or may not know, I also write for Grit Magazines blog section of their website. The editor posted a great blog up yesterday and another last night based on some commenting that we had had between us. Both are well writen and very worthy of a read.

My response to both is also up and I invite you to take a jaunt over and check it out.
I'll be back up here again tomorrow.
All the best
P!

Creamy Curry Butternut Bisque

I decided to so a little food experimenting the other day. I put up a few good sized butternut squash this fall, a first for me, and since I really don’t have any experience cooking it I felt a little experiment was in order.

Ok, ok, you caught me... I have cooked it before. But only like once and it was just steamed with some butter and brown sugar and wasn't really very good at all, so I don't count it. I decided to try something a little different with two of our butternuts and went with a creamy, bisque-like, curry soup. I'm happy to say that it came out much like I had imagined that it would. I don't often cook, and even at that I don't often cook with a recipe. A guideline yes, but a true recipe not so much. It's a blessing and a curse to be so comfortable winging it and it has re payed me with both some very tasty dishes as well as some real dogs! This one falls into the former category.

So then, first and most importantly, let me introduce the main stars of this show. A couple of nice sized home grown butternut squash and some smallish but very tasty homegrown storage onions from the cold storage.I might mention that I decided to try storing my butternut squash outdoors this year after reading about someone else that uses their front porch as their long term storage option. I kept them out back inside of my small metal shed and well, they froze. It was just too cold out there. The good news is that they seem to have frozen once and then stayed that way so the damage to the texture of the squash was minimal. After a couple of days on the kitchen counter they defrosted nicely and were still very firm.

The ingredients:
•2 med - large butternut squash peeled and chopped to about 1 inch squares.
•Approx 2 cups of onion sliced evenly
•5-6 cloves of garlic. Peeled and rough chopped
•Curry spice and seasoning mix in a small dish. (The seasonings contained about 80% curry seasoning, and the remaining 20% as a mix of onion and garlic powder, pepper, some ginger and a couple pinches of cinnamon.)
•One can or approx 1 1/2 cups of chicken broth.
•Cream or milk or both as you prefer.

Cook the onions with about 1/4 stick of butter tempered with a bit of olive oil in a good sized sauce pan until they are nearly translucent and then throw in the garlic. (Tempering the butter with olive oil raises the temperature the butter can reach without burning and lets the onions cook better at this point. Tempering is a fancy pants term that just means putting the oil in the hot pan first and then adding the butter.) When the garlic gets to the point that it's softening and getting well cooked in, toss in about 3/4 of the curry seasoning mix. The heat releases the oils and flavors in the spices and sort of "wakes them up" for the most flavor.

Cook all of this over medium-high for a few minutes stirring occasionally to keep it from burning or sticking too much then add about a half cup of the broth. Stir this really well and make sure to scrape up any little bits of the onion, garlic, curry that may be sticking to the bottom of the pan. This is called deglazing a pan and will get you lots of good flavor for whatever you are cooking.Now add the chopped squash, the remaining seasonings and the rest of the broth, turn everything together, cover and bring to a slow boil. When it starts to bubble, reduce heat to a simmer and cook covered until the squash is completely soft. I added some more butter at this point, but I'd say that was entirely optional, I just like the buttery flavor with squash.

Once the squash is soft, I used a potato masher to break up and mash all the ingredients together. Once you get it well mashed, you may find it to be like a thick applesauce consistency and want to add either some water, or better yet more broth, to thin it a bit. (Don't make it too thin, because we still need to puree and add cream.) You'll also want to add salt to taste at this point as it will still be rather bland. Cook it for another 15 minutes or so on low, and get out either a food processor or stand mixer. If you use a stand mixer you may need to do it in two batches. Pour everything into the processor leaving a little bit of room at the top. Blend until mostly smooth. Now add the milk or cream or, as I did, about even of each and mix further until your happy with the texture and flavor.

And there you go. My Creamy Curry Butternut Squash Bisque.
I topped it with a few sliced onions and some paprika and it was really good.

I did make an interesting observation though, quite by accident. Although not a spicy soup itself, it compliments spicy food very well. We were having buffalo wings for lunch the day that I made this and I had a small bowl of it at the same time. It went really well together strangely? The next day when I ate it for lunch I added a few chopped pieces of a hot pickled pepper to it and it went good together as well.

I hope you give it a try. Let me know if you like, or as always if you have any suggestions that may make it better.
Till next time
P~

Where are all the plows?

As far as I can tell, my communities latest victim of the tight economy has been our local snow removal budgets. This afternoon graced us with a few new inches of the white stuff and this is what we have to show for it.
Ok, ok...so it's not a blizzard or anything, but it caused plenty of problems this afternoon. Before leaving work I got an email giving notice not to take the freeway either north OR south as there was a 16 car accident one way, and a 9 car mix up the other. Lucky for me, neither was required. A~ had called me before I left as well, to tell me that the roads were a mess and that there had been no plowing done in the 6 hours of snowing that we got, she was right. I crept home safely and was thankful for 4wd.

The thing is this, the snow wasn't really all that bad. Oh sure, it was like 6 inches all told, but for us that's really not all that much. The problem happens when people, who have become used to regularly cleared and salted roads are now thrust into the world of our fathers. I always wondered why my dad always packed chains when we would come to Utah in the winter to go skiing. I'm guessing that the roads weren't as consistently plowed as they have been in the recent past. If we just drive slowly there's no problem, but factor in too much speed, cellphones and texting and well, you get the drift.

I'm guessing that we may yet see more of this kind of cutting back in the future, particularly in the areas of public services. I mean when it comes to things like removing snow, funding schools or keeping the trash disposed of will probably take precedence as it should.

Just an observation of how the times are a changin'. Noticed anything like this in your neck of the woods?
All the best till tomorrow.
P~

While the kids aren't here...

Dad's make beer!!

Or at least that's the way it worked out this weekend while the boys were down in Salt Lake for a couple of days. A~ and I took the opportunity to stop off at our local thrift store the D.I. and I found this baby brand new, complete and from this year.(The malted hops in the kit were still fresh and the product catalog for ordering new supplies was for 2009.)I'm guessing someone got it as a Christmas gift and just couldn't see making the effort to make it themselves. Their loss, my gain. These retail normally for about $35.00 so, although home brewing is something I've been wanting to try and I think this will be a easy way to test it out, I wasn't willing to shell out forty bucks to do it. But $12.00...that I can do!

Besides the ingredients that came in the kit, I had to muster up some basic tools to use in the kitchen, all of which were chemically sanitized before using. I never thought about it, but I guess beer yeast are a pretty particular bunch. The purpose of the sanitizing is to keep any "rogue" bacteria from fouling the beer.
After sanitizing and prepping everything, the next step was to mix the "wort". This basically consists of mixing the packaged ingredients which include a premixed and hopped malted-barley solution that was a lot like molasses. One of the ingredients was a package called "booster" that was basically corn syrup solids. Not my idea of top notch beer making ingredients, but I figured that it's a first batch and this was what I had.
After mixing the wort all that was needed was to pour it into the keg with a few gallons of cold water and place in a 68-76 degree spot to allow fermentation to take place. That was the biggest challenge of the whole process, finding a place in the house that was that temperature. During the winter months about the highest that our thermostat ever adjusts itself to is 66 deg (F) but is usually set to 62. I did manage to find that the top of our refrigerator was about 68 deg this afternoon, so there it sits. I'm guessing that the fermenting in beer is a lot like that of lacto-fermentation. It will still work, but may take a little longer in the cooler temps.

So, in about two-three weeks, I should be bottling this up and in another couple of weeks should be enjoying some fine home-brew. Well, that's the plan anyway. Wish me luck!
P~