This and that

Just a little bit of this and that today.

Check out the girls at the buffet...

This is a backyard lawn view of the Chicken tractor moving along the lawn. It's amazing how well they will scratch up the dead grass and thatch, and will spread their manure. Our back lawn has loved it this summer!


This years trial plant was a little different. We usually try a new veggie, but this year, a new melon made the list.
It was the "melon charentais". An heirloom french melon that gets great reviews and for good reason; this is a great cantaloupe and it's a actual cantaloupe too, not a musk melon being "called" a cantaloupe like the things we here in the US get in the market. I made sure to save a good bit of seed too. This one's a keeper!

And thought some of you out there from back east, or from abroad may enjoy a look at the fall in the Rockies.
I was out hiking this weekend, scouting for the upcoming Deer and Elk season.
These pictures are from about 2.5 to 3 miles into the back country and after climbing from about 5200' elevation to 7200 feet. It was NOT an easy hike, but I'm happy to say that I've fared alright for as bad of shape as I expected to be in.
I'm thinking that this year, I'm going to camp under stars in the back country for a couple of days during the hunt. I've never pack hunted that far in before, but I've always wanted to. Hopefully the weather will cooperate.

Hope all's well with you.
Till next time.
Paul~

Rhubarb-aide

A~ was reading something or other online a while back and read about an interesting thing called... Rhubarb-aide?!
I'd never heard of such a thing but as we had a big harvest of Rhubarb that - coincidentally - needed to be processed and since I'm always up for something new and interesting, well, here we go...

The way we like to process our rhubarb is to clean cut and sheet freeze them. Doing it that way allows us to store the frozen rhubarb in bags and lets us take out only what we need for a recipe.

In the back of this picture is a couple of the sheet pans that we filled with our cut rhubarb. In front is the cuttings and little bits that didn't make the cut... Didn't make the cut... hee hee.. get it? OK, I'm a dork.. anyway, they're in the food processor where we pulverized them with a little water, into a thin completely pureed slurry. We then filtered that slurry through some cheese cloth until we had this...

Essence of rhubarb. To which we added water and sugar to taste and voila.

The strangely iridescent green color that is Rhubarb-aide.

I'm not sure whether to say we loved it or not, but I'm gonna go ahead and add it to the list of at least once a summer tonics that we'll tweak and work with over the years to come. It certainly holds promise.

Have you tried it before? Any hints? recipes? Care to share?

Best to you all til next time.

P~

Kombucha Making

I spoke some time back about how I was experimenting with making some kombucha and I realized that while I had taken pictures of the progress I hadn't shared it with you, so I thought I'd take a minute to bring the blog up to date with the progress on that front.

To start with I needed to get a SCOBY started. For those not yet initiated in the ways of kombucha, a SCOBY is an acronym for Sybiotic Colony Of Bacteria and Yeast.
This was the "mini"-SCOBY that I started with. It was collected from a store bought bottle of kombucha that a friend of mine gave me. To grow it into something that I could make a sizeable quantity of Kombucha from I placed in this bowl full of sweetened green tea. The Yeasts in the SCOBY consume the sugars in the tea and ferment it producing alchohol. This alchohol is then consumed, through further fermatation, by the various (beneficial) bacteria to produce acetic acid. An additional by product is the Cellulose that makes up the body of the SCOBY.

Now, biology lesson completed, I was successful in culturing my SCOBY into a nicely formed disc of Bacteria and Yeast which I would now send forth to do my komucha bidding!
That white color is from the cellulose that I was talking about.

Although you can't really see the bacteria, being microscopic and all, if you look in the photo below you can see the whispy tendrils hanging from the main body of the SCOBY. Those are mainly yeasts. Many of them being the same types that do our work for us in other goodies like Sourdough and kefir.
In fact, I was successful enough in culturing my SCOBY that I am now able to have two gallon Suntea jars going constantly brewing for me.


Now that only problem I have is that I'm running out of bottles. These bottles were from my Mr Beer experiment last year and have come in handy for bottling the finished product.

Kombucha is a naturally effervescent drink because as the yeast comsume the sugars, they also "breath" out CO2 as a by-product. After bottling the kombucha, I let it sit at room temperature for 3-4 days during which time it continues to brew and breath. The bottling holds in the CO2 and when it's opened. Phzzttt... Carbonated!

It's an acquired taste, I will say that for it, but once you've acquired it, you gotta have it. There's been some issues with the labeling on some of the store bought Kombucha out there lately and some of it has been pulled form the shelves. The nice part about making your own, as with all things, is that you always know what's in it, and more to the point that you can always get it!

You should try it out. You may not even like it after trying, but it's a great science experiment and fun to watch progress. If you do try... good luck!
P~

Fermentation Friendly Home(stead)

Yes, I think I can safely say that we are a fermentation friendly home(stead).
We've made home-made lacto-fermented sauerkraut, traditional sour brine pickles and pickled corn,
We've grown Lactobacillus cultures to ferment milk into yogurt,
We've brewed our own beer,
We've kept our sourdough starter as a member of the family for nearly the last three years.
Now... well now it's time to welcome "Mother" home.

I'm talking about a Mother SCOBY for kombucha of course. If you're not familiar with what Kombucha is, it's a fermented tea that many claim has many healthful properties. I cannot speak to that yet, but it is a good tea from what I've had of it... good enough to try making some on my own! My kids really seem to enjoy what we've had of it; we've tried a few different varieties from our local health food store.

The first thing we needed to do was to start a SCOBY of our own. SCOBY is an acronym for Symbiotic Colony of Bacteria and Yeast. It contains the different bacteria and yeasts that consume the sugars in in the sweetened tea and create the acids and bubbles that are indicative of good kombucha. There are places, I'm told, where one can purchase a Mother SCOBY, but me being me, I had to try to start on on my own.
This is a bowl of tea that I made from Jasmine Flower Green tea and added about a third of a bottle of RAW kombucha that had a small piece of culture starting in it. This little piece was about the size of a quarter and I hoped it would have enough of the live micro-organisms and yeasts to start a new SCOBY.
I left it, covered with a towel, for about ten days on top of my refrigerator and it bloomed very nicely... for lack of a better definition.

Here you can see the new home that I moved it over to this weekend.
It's a two-gallon FOOD GRADE plastic bucket. I brewed a large batch of the same Jasmine Green Tea and sweetened it with about a cup and a half of sugar. To that I added about a cup of the tea from the small batch that I used to grow my new Start and slid the new SCOBY start into it.
And here's the new SCOBY that I have so far. It's darker than most that I've seen, but it's also just started. My hope is that as the new "daughter" SCOBY grows it will form the typical whitish cellulose SCOBY that I've seen before.

So then, I know some of you have made these before, can you tell me if I'm on the right track? How's it looking so far. With any luck, I think that in the next week and a half or so I should be able to drink it!

Are you a fermentation friendly home(stead)? I'm thinking I need to come up with a neat little side bar banner for that? what do you think?
Well, best to you... till next time.
P~

Finally - homemade mozzarella

This last weekend A~ and I finally tried our hand at making our own mozzarella. It was fun, interesting and didn't taste half bad. Add to that the fact that we got enough cheese from one $2.80 gallon of milk that it would have equalled what we would normally have spent $6-$8 on. There are still some finessing things that we have to work out, like the exact amount of rennet to add, how long to knead it for, and the proper amount of salt to add, but we ate it, and I think the boys are looking forward to more of it.
It all started with a gallon of milk poured into a stainless steel pot. The milk was then heated slowly to 55 deg F.



When the milk gets up to 55 F we add some citric acid diluted in water and continued heating until the milk had risen to 88 deg F, stirring occasionally. At this point the milk has started to curdle slightly and looked almost like cottage cheese sitting in yogurt.




When the milk has risen to 88 deg F, we stirred in our rennet with an up and down motion. (Don't ask me what that's supposed to mean that's just what the recipe said to do). It's at this point that we lost our way a little. The recipe that we were following called for 1/4 tsp, and the package for the rennet called for a different measurement. We added the packages quantity and it didn't seem to be getting the curds and whey to split so we added a little bit more and continued heating. We were supposed to heat it until it reached near 105 deg, but ended up having to go to nearly 120 before we saw any real separation. I don't know if it had to do with our elevation or what, but this is the main area that we need to play around with to perfect it.



Now you can see the curd separating pretty well. You need to let it continue to separate until the whey is mostly yellowish/clear.



It's now that you ladle the curd out of the whey with a slotted spoon. After you've done that, and drained off as much whey as you can, the curd needs to be microwaved for 1 minute, knead and pour off excess whey (don't throw that whey away, you can make ricotta with it) Do this at least two more times for 35 seconds each times, lightly salting after the second time, and knead the cheese until it is stretchy and shiny then roll into balls and set in ice water bath if you are not going to eat it right away.

And there you go. approximately 3/4 to 1 pound of finished mozzarella. You can eat it right away, or let it cool and store in a lightly salted water in the fridge.
It was fun and tasty, although I think I needed to knead it a little longer. The finished product was still a bit "wet" for lack of a better description, and was breaking down slowly in the water bath.




We did enjoy it with a few homegrown tomatoes and basil and some olive topenade that A~ made, and the next day put slices on top of some eggplant Parmesan.


We'll be tweaking this recipe to make it work better for us, but I think we're onto something good! I'm consistently amazed with how possible it is to make some of the dairy products that seem to mysterious like this cheese or the yogurt that I love to make. Give it a try, it's not that hard, costs very little for the supplies and is a great skill to have in your quiver.

Enjoy.
P~

Local Salt??

Yes...LOCAL SALT!!
One of the truly great benefits of being in a place famous for it's Salt Lake is that there is easy access to an abundance of salt! A little over a week ago, A~ and I took our bi-annual trip out to Wendover NV. It's relatively close, and it gives us a chance to just be together and be grown ups. We weren't sure if we would be able to make it this year due to expenses, but since the hotel sent us a coupon for a comped room we figured it was a sign.

On our way home we decided to stop and gather ammunition for a little experiment, naturally evaporated "Salt Lake" salt. Here's what I had to work with. It's beautiful in its way isn't it? Just to be clear... that's not white sand on that shoreline, and it sure the heck isn't snow. That's all salt! Take a look below at the slabs that were forming and jutting up into the air right there on the shore.
Oh yeah, and by the way, any Salt Lake readers that get inspired to go out and collect themselves some salt slabs bring some mud boots. That salt ain't solid. You may be able to tell below that I am above ankle deep in the salt. What it does is to form a heavy salt crust that is darn near impermeable, unless your a crazy road traveler that like to try to make their own stuff. I saw those heavy slabs though and of course I had to get a couple of pieces of it. (didn't want to let you down after all.)
And there I am...digging away for a little saline goodness. Funny thing was that it was near to or maybe even over 100 deg. this day and yet the white salt was fairly cool to walk on. The pavement leading up to it was another story!
After grabbing a couple of the slabs of salt from right near the shore, I decided to scoop up some of the Fleur de Sel, (Flower of salt) At least that's what I believe it is called in this form. It was in the coolest flaky form. Almost like snowflakes but hard and crystalline. I scooped up a couple of cups worth.
Another picture of the flaky salt that was nearer to the road and was dryer than the other salt which was still slightly damp on the underside.

Finally, this is a good closeup of the salt that was carved off of one of the larger chunks that I grabbed. I crushed it up by hand into a pile of broken salt chunks. These I weighed and then processed into finished table salt. But that is a post on it's own. Soon to come, so stay tuned.

P~

2008 Garden Update - Potted Potatoes

I've been planing to plant potatoes like this for a couple of years now, but have never gotten ahead of things early enough to do it. This year, thanks to a little planning and some good luck, I will get it done.

You can see the pots that I'll be using. They're approximately 18-20" in diameter, and about that deep. I was at a local small family nursery late last week, and asked the owner if he had any old large sized planters that I might be able to buy from him. As luck would have it, he directed me to the back of one of their workshops and told me I could have whatever I wanted from there. SCORE, recycled pot's for free!! Rule number one for effective scroung... er... um... acquisition of otherwise unused materials... (much better) is that you never know unless you ask. And please, ask before you take.

Anyway, so I got the pots. Now I needed some fill. I was able to get some fairly decent topsoil from a construction site that was in the neighborhood, and supplemented it with a nearly equal portion of compost. I also turned in a little vermiculite, and some straw to add to the tilth of the soil, and help with drainage.
Here you can see what I did at the bottom of the pots. I lined the drain holes with, and a placed a thin layer of straw at the bottom of the pot again to help with drainage. Soggy potato plants make for disease and poor harvest from what I've read.


Here you have a couple of the finished pots, filled halfway with the potting mix. I don't think I should need more soil than this, at least to start with. As the plants begin to grow, I will add more straw/soil mix on top to help to boost production, eventually adding a mesh frame to allow me to pack straw around the plants and continue growing up.

All together I have 9 pots to plant in. Here's my question for you; how many plants would you put in each one? I was initially thinking I could support three seed pieces, but is that too much? Any experience with planting taters in pots anyone? Comments are appreciated.

Till next time..

P~

What the? (That didn't work)

What the heck? Are they alien Spider Legs? Are they mutant man-eating worms? What are these fuzzy pinkish spine covered beasts??

Yeah your right, Their just really funky potatoes.

In case you don't remember, or have just joined me recently, I was testing the storage potential of our basement storage area over this winter and I guess you could say it didn't work out so well. We bought these "storage" potatoes in mid to late October, and wanted to test how they would do over the winter before trying to do this at a larger scale. The things I worried about were two fold; light and temperature. We regularly need to access the cold storage, so the lights are turned on often.

Also, after placing a thermometer in there, I found that the temperature stays at the high end of the 40 to 50 Deg F range. This is a warmer than I have read that potatoes like to stay in.

You may also be able to tell from the picture that these were a type of red potato, not the typical russets that are stored for longer lengths of time, that may also have played into the sprouting.
We're thinking of building ourselves some sort of in-ground storage option for this winter; something for storing potatoes and other root crops, but that's a long way away from now. I've shared a lot of success's with you, I guess I've been overdue for a new challenge. Note: I didn't say failure, that would imply defeat and I'll have none of that.

Finally I thought I'd leave you with this particularly funky tater. What shall we call him, Mr. Potato-Pinhead? Darth Tater? Call em whatever you like, one things for sure... He won't be getting called "dinner".

P~

Big Congratulations to K~

K~ won first place for his entry in the 5th grade science fair!!

I cannot tell you how proud I am. K~ came up with this project on his own, decided how he wanted to test it, and really had a passion for it all the way through.

The best I can figure, the seed for this project was planted last year when we accidently found an earth sheltered home a couple of towns over; he was fascinated with the idea of why people would build homes covered earth. He wanted to find out in this experiment which home might use less energy and would "Protect the earth better." I helped him to build two identicle homes out of hardboard and MDF, and then he covered one of them in a way similar to a typical earth sheltered home.

After the homes were built, we tested them by taking a base temperature and then putting them under a heat lamp and taking measurements at 1 and 2 hours both inside and outside the homes. We found that the earth sheltered home inside increased to 53% of what the outside temperature was, but the standard house increased to 61% of what the outside temperature was. In other words, even though the earth sheltered home's temperature had a greater gain, the inside maintained a more even temperature throughout the test. This is one of the reasons that this type of home is considered to be one of the most eneergy efficient types of homes that can be built.

Anyway, all details to the side, K~ did an awesome job, and made me very proud. I like to hope that I had a bit of influence in his interests, but I certainly had a great time helping him with the project either way. He's already thinking about improving the project for next year; one teacher that was over the fair singled K~ out to tell him that with a little bit of effort, next year he could easily take this project to the regional competition.