For the love of lavender August 1, 2011

This past winter marks the second winter lavender has successfully wintered in my zone four garden.  I had an abundance of blooms this year and here is the recipe for one project.  Unphotgraphed uses included lavender sachets, bottles, sugar, baths, and general enjoyment.

First the stems had to be picked just before the blooms opened.  The buds are deep purple but they’re still buds.  I have another variety that flowered so quickly I wasn’t able the harvest in time and I had to just enjoy it in the garden.  The buds retain their color and fragrance better than opened flowers.

Once the harvested stems had dried I stripped off the buds.  It’s tedious work, but I just picked up a stem here and there for several days and managed it with very little direct effort.  Now you can use the lovely lavender for whatever you want!

I made ice cream!  I brought 2T lavender buds, a 1/3C honey, and 3 C cream to a boil and then let it cool, stirring occasionally, to room temperature.  I put it in the refrigerator overnight and strained out the buds.  I wisked 1 C milk, 1/2 C sugar, and a splash of vanilla into the cream and put it into the ice cream maker for 25 minutes.  The soft mixture is then frozen for 12 hours and voila!  Honeyed lavender ice cream.  Delightful.

A Homemade Christmas December 26, 2010

We had such a lovely holiday.  We had mountains of delicious food, cookies galore, and so many dear friends and family from both near and far.  Many of the gifts given and received were both thoughtful and homemade.  Let me share a few highlights.

P and I made and decorated sugar cookies using this recipe.  So, so good.

We made mint slice biscuits using this recipe, but omitting the chocolate coating.  They’re pretty good, although they’re a lot of work.

P’s family did a holiday gift basket exchange instead of individual gifts.  It was so much fun to put together a single basket rather than running around town to buy gifts for a dozen people.  I made a basket with a “winter warmer” theme and put in a handknit scarf, brownie mix in a jar, homemade hot cocoa mix, alcoholic whipped cream, beeswax candles, and a bottle of irish cream.  It was the one of the most frequently stolen basket during the swap, so I think it was a hit!

I made the beeswax candles from beeswax I brought back from Peru.  They smell divine.

The hot cocoa mix is made using unsweetened cocoa powder, vanilla sugar, salt, cayenne, and a little cornstarch.  I no longer buy commercial hot chocolate mix because this is tastier and more affordable!  The “brownies in a jar” recipe is found here.

My sister made this wonderful peppermint sugar body scrub.  I can’t wait to try it – yum!

My foster mom made these awesome pillowcases for everyone in the family.  Mine is this fantastic mushroom fabric.  I love it so!

P and my foster mom share a love of baseball, so it’s only fitting that his pillowcase is made from baseball fabric.

What were your holiday highlights this year?

Oyster Mushrooms! October 13, 2010

I just stepped outside and saw this

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Our oyster logs, inoculated waaaaay back in March, are fruiting!  We’ll be having homegrown mushrooms for dinner.  Awesome!

Down but not out October 2, 2010

Oy Vey!  This semester is a doozie.  I’ve either been in class 4-5 hours a day or working every day since… before Labor Day.  But let’s not think about such things.  Let us, for the sake of sanity, think about other things.  Wonderful things like…

Lard!  After some serious hunting around town I managed to track down some pure, unhydrogenated lard with no additives (and cost less than $8+/lb).  That stuff is hard to find.  But it’s worth it…

Have you ever had lard pie crusts?  Divine.  Rich, flakey, and easy to roll out.  We even made some teeny, tiny mason jar pies like this.

But lard has so many other good uses, too, including a batch of homemade soap.  I’ve made two in the past few weeks, but only one (on the left) has lard.  They’re both enriched with coconut, hemp, and cocoa oils to combat winter dryness.

Let’s think about apple picking…

and canning…

and freezing lots of produce.

Let’s think about knitting…

and knitting (this color show a brown hat.  It’s actually a lovely green)…

a wee bit of crochet.  I think I’ve been using the knitting needles for stress relief.  Fortunately, no one has been hurt.  Yet.

Let’s think about harvesting…

bok choi…

edamame*….

winter squash…

sweet potatoes (!!!)….

and watermelons.

While thinking about winter, I bound a piece of wool for a nice winter blanket.  It’s already in heavy rotation around here.

I made some spore prints to verify that our Garden Giant mushrooms were actually what I thought they were.  All tests checked out and we ate them right up.  Yummy!  We’d eat more but the squirrels keep digging up the mushroom bed to plant their fall harvests.

We took a little trip to visit P’s grandma for her 80th birthday party.  Fun was had by all.  These bottles were in the restaurant and, thinking they were silly things, we picked them up for a photo.  They were made of glass and filled with liquid.  SO HEAVY!  But hilarious nonetheless.

I’ve even found a few minutes to enjoy the late fall garden

Sunflower Heliopsis

Hazelnuts

Jacob’s Ladder

and some lovely roses.  As a side note, this rose plant came to me free last year because it was so poorly pruned and heavily diseased.  A little TLC this year and I’ve been richly rewarded.

And, sadly, now it’s time to think about homework.

*I was super geeked out to find rhizobia nodules on the roots of the soybeans.  If you’re wondering, it a bacteria that lives in symbiosis with legumes (beans/peas/etc) and allows the plant to get its’ nitrogen needs from the air rather than the soil.  A huge advantage and much exploited in organic farming.

What’s Up? August 2, 2010

I love summer, even if it doesn’t include much blogging time.  I have managed to snap a few photos of what’s happening around here.

My ten year high school reunion!  Here is P and I all ready to get drunk at noon on a Saturday.  I was hung over by 10pm, and felt like a million bucks by 6:30am Sunday morning.  Sure glad we don’t do that every weekend.

Homemade caramelized onion, beet, and goat cheese pizza.  We grew the onions and beets!  But not the goats, unfortunately.

P has been up to his eyeballs in house projects.  Most recently he’s replacing our 80+ year old windows.  We’re sad to see them go, as they’re gorgeous, but they just don’t hold in enough heat during our brutal winters.  They’re also going to get new (homemade) curtains – one day.

The garlic has been grown, harvested, and now cleaned and stored.  We got over 80 heads when all was said and done.  I put away 15 heads for planting this fall and we’ve been steadily eating the rest.  It’s our first crop in our new house, and it was a bountiful one.  I think that bodes well.

We went to a potluck BBQ this past weekend and I, thanks to Cook’s Country, made these super fun hostess cupcake knockoffs.  They’re filled and everything!  Someone even thought I bought cupcakes, unwrapped them, and served them.  haha.  The most remarkable part – they tasted very similar, in both flavor and texture, to the originals.  But they had real ingredients, which counts for something, right?

I’ve been drying all kinds of herbs from the garden.  Here a bunch of mint is drying out for tea.  There is also sage, thyme, oregano, and basil hanging from hooks in the kitchen.

We harvested potatoes the other day – about 13 pounds of them!  Aren’t they beautiful?  There are Purple Viking, All Blues, and Carola (I think?).  We still have about 2/3rds of the patch to dig up, so I’m hoping for a 40 pound harvest from our little 20 square foot potato plot.

This one was so fun to find – a 1 pound purple potato!!  You’d never find this in a store.  Too much fun.

Oh, Summer. July 22, 2010

I don’t know about you, but I seem to have a hard time blogging when summer is around.  It’s just so distracting – and short.  It’s really too bad because summer is when there are so many interesting things to blog about…

Recently we had a glut of small onions from thinning the onion patch.  And so I made caramelized onions.

I used the paella pan as I needed maximum surface area to facilitate evaporation.  I used a mix of fats (butter and olive oil) totaling 1 Tablespoon for every two cups of onions.

At first, they barely fit in the pan, but soon they started cooking down…

and down….

and down…  Although I was so excited about eating them, I didn’t get a final picture.

After 2 hours, the giant pile of onions had cooked down to two cups.  They were a rich brown and very sweet.  I say “were” because they are no more.  We ate them in crepes with goat cheese, spread on sandwiches and in hot dogs.  I froze a bit of them to use on some pizzas.  Delicious!  What’s your favorite thing to do with caramelized onions?

100! My, where as the time gone? June 27, 2010

Why hello there, friends.  It’s been a while, although I certainly didn’t mean to be gone this long.  Every single time I’ve tried to start a post in the past few weeks, wordpress has reminded me this is post 100!  I kept thinking I needed something more… exciting… and kept walking away meaning to do it better next time.  Well, sometimes you’ve just got to forge ahead.

So much has gone on I’m not even sure where to start.  I hope to be back soon to post some pictures of all the house projects, garden projects, craft projects, etc.  But for today, I’ve got a pic of the enormous garlic our garden is growing right now.  We have almost 60 bulbs planted.  I’m hoping for a good harvest in a few weeks!

Cupcakes! May 8, 2010

It’s the baker in me.  Most of the time I stick to breads, but every once in a while I let my inner confection-creator loose.  I can’t do it very often because I enjoy eating the goodies almost as much as I love making them.

I’ve been perusing the fun, whimsical cupcake books by Karen Tack and Alan Richardson as of late.  I eventually decided to make a knock-off version of the sunflower cupcakes.  They didn’t come out like sunflowers, but they were still pretty.

And delicious.  Oh boy, were they good.  Here is the recipe for their homemade chocolate cupcakes.

Chocolate Cupcakes, makes 16

1 3/4 C all purpose flour

1/4 C unsweetened baking powder

3/4 t baking soda

3/4 t baking powder

1/2 t salt

12 T unsalted butter, softened

3/4 C lightly packed brown sugar

2 large eggs, room temperature

2 ounces bittersweet chocolate, melted

1 C buttermilk

1 t vanilla extract

Preheat the oven to 350F.  Line the muffin cups with paper liners.

Whisk together the flour, cocoa powder, baking soda, baking powder, and salt in a medium bowl.  In another bowl, cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy, about 3 minutes.

Add the eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition.  Beat in the melted chocolate.  Reduce the speed to low and add the flour mixture alternately with the buttermilk in batches, beginning and ending with the flour.  Stir until just blended.  Stir in vanilla.

Spoon the mixture into a quart ziplock bag.  Snip a 1/4″ off one of the bottom corners.  Fill the paper liners 2/3rds full.  (this is one of the most helpful cupcake tips ever.  No mess.  I use old ziplocks that have small holes so I don’t feel so guilty about the waste!).  Bake 15-20 minutes, until an inserted toothpick comes out clean.  Remove and cool completely on a wire rack.

Frost as you see fit.  Enjoy!

Genuis, I tell you, pure genius. April 17, 2010

Can  you imagine growing greens this gorgeous in the depths of a MN winter? (Zone 3-4)

In quantities big enough to provide for 18 families?

In a greenhouse that uses almost no supplemental heat?

and that is small enough to fit on the back of a garage? (18′ x 24′)

Well, that’s what the fine folks out at Garden Goddess in Milan, MN are doing.  (they’ve just finished their 5th winter season).  And they’ve written a book with all the details.  And they were kind enough to let P and I come out to see “winter’s tastiest miracle” for ourselves.

Through “passive solar” technology, the greenhouse is heated  from the bottom up.  The sun passes through the poly, heats the air, the hot air rises and is collected in stove pipe that is blown 4′ down into perforated drain tile in a bed of gravel.  The air rises through the gravel and the heat is collected in the rocks, providing the thermal mass that radiates heat back upwards when the greenhouse cools down at night or in cloudy weather.

Not only is it genius in theory, it actually works.  By growing cool weather crops that can tolerate dips down into the 40s,  they’re able to provide a winter CSA, even when outside temperatures drop below -30F.  Although, during a string of sunny days in January, when snow is piled in huge drifts and the wind hollows outside, it can be 85F in the greenhouse!

I couldn’t believe it, so yesterday we drove 3 hours away to see it ourselves.  I’m convinced.  And if we can work out the financing, we’re hoping to build one of these in our backyard this summer to provide enough for ourselves and  a small CSA.

Take that, winter!

Waste not, want not April 9, 2010

Nothing says, “baking time” like the smell of over-ripe milk!

Ask P, (much to his disappointment) I almost never make a recipe twice – even if it’s amazing.  Every trip to the kitchen is an experiment.  I have different ingredients on hand and different inspiration.  But this recipe is special.  I usually improvise a little bit, but I basically follow it everytime.  It is, by far and away, the recipe I’ve made the most.  It’s our bread recipe and it supplies nearly all of the bread we consume.

People like different things from their bread, squishy, crunchy, full of spices, fancy, boring.  We like a workhorse.  It makes great sandwiches, amazing toast, it freezes like a dream, it stays soft for up to a week, the recipe makes three loaves, has a nice baking schedule, and it’s mostly whole grains.  The ingredients are simple, we always have them on hand, and it uses the milk that would otherwise go down the drain.  Did I mention it’s delicious?  Perfecto!

This recipe is loosely adapted from “Robin’s Bread” in “HomeBaking: The Artful Mix of Flour and Tradition From Around the World.”  If you’re a baker, or a want-to be baker you MUST own this book.  It is, hands down, my favorite cookbook ever.  Every recipe I’ve made from this book has come out well.  It also has wonderful travelogue and beautiful pictures.

6 Cups liquid*

1 t dry, active yeast

8 C whole wheat flour**

5 (or so) C all purpose white flour

2 T molasses (or a few glugs from the molasses bottle)

2 scant T salt

2-3 T canola oil (or a veggie oil.  Don’t skimp, it helps the bread stay fresh)

1 egg, beaten

Sesame seeds (for sprinkling)

Mix your water and milk in a large bowl (about 8 quarts).  I use a metal bowl and then heat the liquid (in the bowl) on the stove until slightly warm to the touch.

Whisk in 3 C whole wheat flour.  Whisk in yeast.  Whisk in molasses.  Whisk in 3 more C whole wheat flour.  Whisk in salt.  Whisk in oil.  Whisk in the rest of the whole wheat flour.

At this point, you’ll probably have to start stirring.  Get a strong wooden spoon and start mixing in the all purpose flour 1-2 C at a time.  When it gets too thick to stir, start kneading.  I usually knead it directly in the bowl, adding flour as needed.  You can knead on the counter (bigger mess) but you’ll need a bench scraper since the dough is soft.

Keep kneading and adding flour until the dough is smooth, cohesive, and forms a ball, but is still soft.  You don’t want it to get super stiff.  Don’t be neurotic, just knead until you get tired or run out of time.  It will be fine.  (you may not use all the all purpose flour)

Some people wash their bowls or coat them with oil or do other picky things.  I do not.  I just let it sit in the same bowl and cover with a cutting board, plate , or plastic wrap.  Let ferment for 8-12 hours.

Don’t punch down the dough.  It’s fun and satisfying, but it doesn’t make a great loaf of bread.  Instead flour your hands and gently scrape down the sides of the bowl, reflouring your hands as needed, to create a nice ball.  Turn it out onto a lightly floured surface.  Pat into a rectangle and cut into three equal pieces.  Gently roll each piece into a ball and let rest.  Butter three bread pans (generously.  You don’t want to ruin your beautiful loaves when you pry them from the pans.)

Pat a piece into a rectangle about 10 inches long and, maybe 7 inches wide.  This is not an exact science.  Roll the dough up from a narrow end and close the seam.  Place into the bread pan.  Repeat for remaining balls.

Cover with a tea towel for 40 minutes.  Preheat your oven to 400F.  Put a cast iron pan (we use a aluminum brownie pan that we were going to throw out) in the bottom of the oven as it preheats.

Slash the loaves if you’re into that sort of thing.  Brush the tops with egg wash and sprinkle with sesame seeds.  Don’t skip the brushing and sprinkling!  I skipped it for a long time until I realized the nice crust and extra crunch made the difference between good bread and amazing bread.

Place your loaves in the oven, pour two or so cups of warm water into the pan on the floor of the oven and close the door quickly.  Bake 10 minutes.  Turn down the heat to 375F and bake 20 more minutes.  Then rotate the pans 180 degrees and bake another 20 minutes.  If crusts look done and the loaf sounds hollow when you thump the bottom, you’re in business.  Let cool 10 minutes, turn out of pans and let cool completely on a wire rack.  If desired, put a loaf or two in a ziplock bag in the freezer for up to six months.

*a mix of water and milk.  Use at least two cups milk, and balance out the rest with water.  Milk that is ripe is fine, rotten milk is not.  Whole milk will give you a softer bread.

**We use fresh ground (yay for a flour grinder) hard winter wheat.  I’ve found fresh ground makes a softer, less dense whole grain loaf.  You may have to experiment with proportions depending on your wheat source.