Respect For Your Farmers
I have a large amount of respect for the farmers who grow our food. It’s hard work. There are long hours in the sun planting, weeding, harvesting and then getting out to markets to sell the produce. Right now I’m learning about all of the planning that must go into the off season in order to have a chance at a successful growing season.
I’ve been staring at seed catalogs over the past week trying to decide what kind of produce we should grow this year. We haven’t been able to grow any food for the past two years due to selling our old house and purchasing a new one. At our previous house we had built four 4’ x 4’ raised beds and one 4’ x 8’ raised bed. We mostly dabbled in trying to grow a number of different veggies and we found a lot of success with cherry tomatoes, beans, and garlic.
Now that we’ve moved, we have more room to garden due to the configuration of the yard and a second story porch on which we can container garden. We built eight 4’ x 4’ raised beds. We have room for a whole lot of five gallon containers on the porch. This gives us a fairly large amount of room to grow a lot of different vegetables. The Square Foot Gardening book recommends eight 4’ x 4’ blocks as a maximum for a family of four. We’ll shortly be a family of five and we want not only fresh vegetables, but vegetables for preserving as well. I’d say that the amount of space we have will work quite well.
I’ve come up with quite a large list of different vegetables to grow. Looking at the list, it seems that the only way we’ll be able to keep on top of planting and harvesting so we can get the maximum benefit out of our garden is to pre-plan everything. Plan out what seeds will go where and at what times during the season. This will hopefully get us fresh veggies all season long and still allow us to preserve a bunch. I’m quite certain, though, that we’ll still need to purchase extra vegetables. Some veggies I’m not going to bother growing because it’s either not worth it to try to grow them, or we don’t have the room to grow enough.
Hopefully I figure all this out soon. We’re going to have to start some seeds around the end of March.
Mmmmm. I can already taste delicous, fresh veggies!
Potato Storage Fail
One of the things that we started to dedicate ourselves to this year is food preservation and storage. Saving the bounty of the harvest when produce is in-season and cheap so that you can eat good food all winter. One of the toughest things for us has always been winter root vegetable storage. We’ve never had great luck storing vegetables all winter long, mostly because we had previously lived in a newly built house. You know, one of those energy efficient things with very little air circulation and a fairly warm basement. Now that we’ve moved into a right proper nearly 100 year old house, we decided to really tackle the problem head-on.
There are a number of different ways to store root veggies all winter. A root cellar would be nice, but that would require a lot of digging. We thought about the possibility of just burying some garbage cans; but again, too much digging. Another possibility would be to build out and insulate a small room by one of the basement windows and rig up a system of circulating and letting in cold air to regulate the temperature. That would take a lot of work and use up too much basement space.
What we ended up doing is taking a freezer that has a slow refrigerant leak and converting it into a refrigerator through the use of an external thermostat. This works quite well. The downside is that the thermostat we picked up isn’t as accurate as we’d like. It was expensive enough and buying a better one would mean shelling out 100 dollars or so. We may end up doing that for next year. But, all in all it isn’t too shabby of a setup.
We experimented with putting carrots into small, trash bag lined boxes and burying the carrots in damp sand. This works fantastic. I’ve only found a single rotten carrot in the lot. The rest have held up great. We threw a bunch of cabbage heads in there. The outer leaves look awful, as one would expect. I’ll be interested to see if the rest of the cabbage has held up. Then we put in about 150 pounds of potatoes. That was the cause of much sadness.
My wife noticed that some of the potatoes were moldy when she went to pull some out of storage. I checked them all out today. All the potatoes were a loss.
I’m trying to figure out what went wrong. We stored the potatoes in a mixture of sand and peat. It seems like that was a big mistake. One of the boxes had more sand than the others and the potatoes looked much better, but still moldy. I think next year we’ll try all sand and slightly less moisture in the sand.
We also have some pie pumpkins and butternut squash. Those we just left in a box out in the basement. Our basement is well under 60 degrees, so the squash is quite happy. We packed sweet potatoes into small, trash bag lined boxes, buried them in a sand/peat mix, and left them out in the basement. So far, so good with them.
I think next fall I’d like to get a lot more carrots, some turnips, and rutabaga. Those should all hold up in the fridge-freezer.
There are certainly other ways to preserve root veggies, but they’re a lot more labor intensive and would require shelf space for canned items or freezer space. We wanted to go the low labor route since we have many other things to cook and preserve at that time of the year.
Food Blogging Reboot
Late in 2010 I started a food blog on Tumblr called Eating Like We Live in the 1800’s. It was made in response to some requests that I start blogging about my family’s experiences with cooking all our food from scratch and dealing with the numerous anaphylactic food allergies my youngest has. I made a few posts now and then, but things languished. I decided that I need to reboot the food blogging this year.
I want to share our experiences with food in the hopes that it helps other families in similar situations.
We have one son who has anaphylactic (the kind that could kill you) allergies to peanuts, tree nuts, coconut, sunflower seeds, and corn. Yes. Corn. Our other son is on the autism spectrum and tends to have issues with different foods. Different tastes and textures can either make him really like the food item or turn his nose up. It’s a strange guessing game trying to figure out what he’ll eat and not eat, especially with various proteins.
Throughout navigating what each of our children will eat and not eat, we have solidified some goals about our food habits:
- Everything is made from scratch
- We must avoid the allergens
- We want to eat as local as possible and as organic as possible
- We want to get the best price we can for our food
- We want to buy in bulk to save money
- We want to preserve the harvest to lower our food costs
- We want to eat healthy, delicious meals
All of this combined is kind of a tall order. What I’ve found out is that it really comes down to what your priorities are in life. We are determined to make this work. It has been a gradual lifestyle change on our part, but a good one.
These are the topics I’ll write about much of the time since it’s near and dear to my heart. It’s something I believe in.
All food postings will be cross-posted to my Tumblr blog at http://eatinglikethe1800s.tumblr.com/
That’s Just Plain Vanilla
One of the issues with avoiding corn is that corn is in EVERYTHING. Many pre-made items that you wouldn’t think have corn do have corn. Like one of the most delicious liquids used to flavor baked goods. Vanilla. Vanilla is basically alcohol flavored with vanilla beans (well, it is if you get the higher quality stuff). The only problem is that the alcohol used is corn alcohol because it’s dirt cheap. You can purchase vanilla that is not made with corn alcohol, but it’s about $10 for a small bottle.
So, we make our own.
Yep. Vanilla is really easy to make. Here’s how we do it:
Find a dark colored bottle. We use an old wine bottle with a screw on cap. Be sure to clean it out really well. You don’t want any old wine flavors in there.
Go buy three vanilla beans. You want to use as high quality beans as you can find. We get them from Penzey’s. They come three to a container and cost somewhere around $10.
Slice the beans in half lengthwise and put them in your clean bottle.
Buy some vodka. We found a brand called Luksusowa. It’s made from potatoes, so no corn contamination. It’s surprisingly tasty vodka, which is good because if you buy vodka that you wouldn’t drink by itself, you probably don’t want to use it to make vanilla. It’s $24 for a one liter bottle.
Fill the bottle with the vanilla beans to the top with vodka. Cap the bottle. Shake the bottle up and put it on a shelf. Feel free to open up the bottle after that first shake. The liquid will already smell awesome. Shake it up every few days for three or four weeks. By that time most of the vanilla flavor will be extracted from the beans and the vodka should have a nice brown color.
There you go! For about $28 you can get 750 mL of high quality vanilla. It’s very cost effective. Do be aware that this will make vanilla with about three times as much alcohol as off the shelf vanilla. Vodka is usually 40% alcohol.
Enjoy!
Pancakes
Ah, breakfast for dinner! What could be better? I don’t know. There’s something delicious about hot buttermilk pancakes drenched with maple syrup. Yum!
One night this week I made pancakes for dinner. I like to use Alton Brown’s “instant” pancake recipe. I usually keep a large container full of the dry ingredients in the cupboard. All you need to do is add milk, eggs, and butter to some mix and voila! Pancakes!
I’ll mix in a package of chocolate chips (Enjoy Life makes chocolate chips that are free of all the allergens we need to avoid) to make the pancakes extra yummy. Many times instead of using buttermilk I’ll use a mix of yogurt and milk instead. I believe the ratio is 2 parts yogurt to 1 part milk to approximate buttermilk. We tend to have a gallon or two of homemade yogurt in the fridge so this works out well.
I always make a double batch. This will amount to 30 to 35 pancakes using approximately 1/4 cup of batter per pancake. Cooking the pancakes is always done on a cast iron skillet. We have a larger skillet that I can fit three pancakes on and a smaller one that fits two. Even with the ability to cook five at a time, it still takes a long time to get them all cooked. I’ll throw all the pancakes into a 200 degree oven to keep them warm. Remember to use a liberal amount of butter in the pan when you cook them. I know Alton’s directions say otherwise, but the butter gives the pancakes extra good flavor.
These pancakes are a family favorite and they really hit the spot!
A Birthday Weekend of Food
This past weekend was a birthday party for one of my children. When asked what he wanted for a birthday meal he said green tortelloni and chocolate cake. So, that’s what he got.
My wife made pasta dough from scratch. Some green (kale) and some uncolored. For the filling we used a few different cheeses: fontina, romano, parmesan, and farmer’s. There’s nothing like fresh pasta. The tortelloni was glorious.
The chocolate cake was made by my wife’s mom. She has a recipe for this super-duper triple chocolate cake. Three layers of chocolate cake with chocolate mousse between the layers and chocolate ganache poured over the whole thing. This time she made a fudgy chocolate frosting instead of using ganache. It’s chocolate overload, but divine.
Dehydrated Broccoli
As an experiment, my wife cut up the lone stalk of broccoli we received in our last CSA share delivery of the year and put the pieces into the dehydrator.
I can unequivocally say that I’ll be purchasing very large quantities of broccoli in the spring for dehydrating. It turns out great. The family ate it all up in minutes. Yum!
Rice Pilaf
Tonight we had a wonderful meal of rice pilaf and oven roasted split peas. I believe my wife used the recipe found here. She did not use green onions in the recipe like it calls for, nor green pepper. Instead of chicken broth she used our homemade veggie broth (ooh… that’s a topic for a different post. Homemade broth is easy to make and can.). And, instead of lentils she used split-peas. It was delicious! I’m a big fan.
The leftover split peas that weren’t used in the pilaf (soaked first to soften) were put onto a baking pan, coated with oil, and then backed in the oven until crispy. When they came out of the oven a liberal dose of zatar was added. The result is a crunchy treat that the entire family enjoyed.
Oven Pancakes
Oven pancakes are great for any meal of the day. They are very easy to make. Here’s the recipe:
3 eggs
3/4 cup milk
3/4 cup flour
vanilla
salt
3 Tbsp butter
10 inch skillet
450° oven
In a bowl crack the eggs. Stir them up. Add the milk. Mix. Add flour and mix. Add a splash of vanilla and a pinch of salt. Mix. Feel free to add any other spices or flavorings like cinnamon or nutmeg. Heat up the skillet and put in the butter. When butter is melted pour in mixture from bowl. Place skillet in oven and cook for about 11 minutes. Take out of oven, slice and eat!
We’ve topped oven pancakes with maple syrup, jam, even sweetened farmer’s cheese.
Enjoy!
Notes on Dried Squash
The previous photo is the result of the dried squash experiment my wife did yesterday. We now have 2 cups of dried squash. Just rehydrate with hot water. There is also a dessert squash rollup being made. A viable alternative to the standard puree and freeze. This will save a lot of freezer space since we still have many squash and pie pumpkins to preserve.
