The Simple Woman’s Daybook

FOR TODAY
Outside my window...crickets chirp, albeit a bit slower than usual as the Hurricane has brought some welcome cool days and even cooler nights
I am thinking...that I wish I could find more time to sew and that I was better at it so that I could sew faster
I am thankful for...K eating her hot dog, even if she didn’t want it to begin with and threw a gigantic tantrum which ended up in a time out and a lecture before she calmed down and enjoyed the toasted wheat bread makeshift bun with, for the first time ever, absolutely no ketchup in sight and the by-her-request double servings of cinnamon drenched applesauce
From the kitchen...3 pints of creamed corn canned, 2.5 quarts grape juice strained and resting, 1 bag green beans roasted, 1 tray of roma tomatoes slow roasting in a 180 oven overnight
I am wearing...my usual capri yoga pants and tank top, despite the chill temperature
I am creating...good smells from the kitchen
I am going...to bed, hopefully soon
I am reading...The Core, chapter on math
I am hoping...the cool weather continues all week long
I am hearing...my book on cd playing and occasionally skipping on the cd player, needs to be replaced soon and this time with something better than the cheapest thing on the shelf
Around the house...the floor is clean except for a cleverly designed Lego birds nest to mirror the one that k saw on our hike yesterday evening but was unable to replicate with colored pencil in her nature journal this morning which resulted in many tears and a stubborn insistence to see a real bird
One of my favorite things...a crispness to the air that makes me want to be crawling out of a tent in my pajamas with a  bad case of bed head to find that I need a jacket and mittens in order to open the hot chocolate packet to mix with my first cup o’joe fresh off the Coleman stove
A few plans for the rest of the week: Herndon Labor Day Wine (and now some beer!) Festival, School Orientation, First Day of School, a completely new routine to get used too
Here is picture for thought I am sharing...

Find more at The Simple Woman's Daybook. (http://thesimplewomansdaybook.blogspot.com/)

LiveJournal Tags: Simple Woman's Daybook,journal,thoughts

1st canning of 2010

On a rainy Saturday I realized that with the garlic and sweet red peppers I had picked up at the farmers market and the tomatoes, peppers and onions I got in my CSA share I had the makings for some salsa. I had recently purchased the Ball Home Canning Discovery Kit, a pretty neon green plastic basket with handles meant to can small batches (3 jars) in regular old pots, so I set out to make the basic salsa recipes. I swapped out sweet red, red bell and a banana pepper for the spicier options in the recipes and used one roma that I had leftover from the store.  It went quite quick with the help of my electric hot water kettle to boil water to remove the skins of the tomatoes  and before I had imagined it I had 3 jars of salsa cooling on the counter. The measurements were precise, fitting in the three jars that came with the kit. I had forgotten to even taste how the salsa came out on canning day but I opened the first jar to serve with taco salad and it was perfect, sweet and mild like I like it.

While I was at it I diced up some of the over ripe peaches and mixed up 2 quarts of peach freezer jam that I intend to use as pie/tart filling in the fall.

LiveJournal Tags: canning,salsa,preserving,food,cooking,peach,tomato,freezer,Ball

Canning Citrus

I've challenged myself to take my canning to the next level by participating in the Tigress' can jam run by Tigress in a Jam (more info the challenge here). The theme for January was Citrus.

The obvious choice would be either a citrus marmalade or canning sections of citrus but since I don't really like either of those I was at a lose. After spending may rainy, drizzly, sleety weekend afternoons browsing my canning books I came across a couple of recipes in the Ball Complete book of Home Preserving that seemed worth a try: Cranberry-Oragne Vinegar (p277) and Honey-Orange Slices (p163). With the vinegar recipes was also a recipe for using the vinegar as a poultry marinade. I could use up the cranberries that I froze at thanksgiving and the last of my large jar of local honey that was starting to crystallize.

When I checked my supplies I found that I had used up most of my jars on a pantry full of stocks, jams and canned single ingredients but I had several dozen 4oz half jelly jars empty. Since I was likely going to be using the vinegar for dressings and marinades it was the perfect combo to make a bunch of single serving jars. I luckily also had just enough regular lids to match my needs.

The recipes calls for reducing 3.5 cups of cranberries to make 1 cup of juice and then simmering the juice with white wine vinegar, sugar and a cinnamon/clove spice bag. Once the sugar is dissolved you add in a reserved .5 cup of whole berries.

I found that I needed far more water than called for to make sufficient juice but that was at least partially due to the dehydration caused by freezing the berries. I also ran out of white wine vinegar so had to substitute about 1 cup of apple cider vineger which I actually rather like.

At the end, to jar up, you place an orange slice and a few of the whole berries in the jar with the vinegar and process in the water bath for 10 minutes.

For the honey orange slices you start with 2+ lbs of oranges and slice them thinly. This goes a lot faster if you get a seedless variety.

Cover them with water and boil for 10 minutes, or until the peel is soft, and then drain and set aside. Meanwhile, bring 1.25 cups of honey and the same of sugar to boil with 3 tbsp lemon juice and an allspice/cinnamon/clove spice bag until the sugar is dissolved and it makes a nice glaze.

Add the drained oranges back and simmer until the oranges are nice and glazed.  The smell is wonderful.

My only complaint is that the softened oranges started to fall apart if you stirred too strongly. I almost think the end product would be better without the pre-boiling but I don't know.

Anyway, you pack them up and if I had the time I might have actually arranged them nicely but as it is i just shoved them in, covered them with the syrup and processed them for 10 minutes.

Challenge months completed: 1 -- 2 recipes I would have never tried -- 14 jars (11 jars of vinegar and 3 jars of orange slices) on the shelf

Stocking-up, Dark Days Style

My feet are killing me and my knees ache but it was well worth it for I am now fully “stock”-ed up with local, home-canned stock. I spent the better part of the last 2 days boiling, reducing, straining, de-fatting, and  pressure canning 4 batches of liquid gold totaling 13 quarts of chicken stock, 6 quarts of vegetable stock, and 5 quarts of pumpkin chunks.

I made the chicken stock from 5 local, responsibly raised, raw chicken backs I picked up from the Purcellville Smart Markets and a some bones I froze after roasting whole birds from the farmers market.  I also added 1 local yellow onion, a handful of yellow onion skins to add color, and a bunch of local, organic celery (the really dark green, pungent kind, not the pale, blanched, scent-less kind). I boiled it down in my large water bath canner, my biggest stock pot, to get it all cooked in one batch. It simmered and reduced over 5 hours  before I strained out the bones and meat and did a little fat skimming on the first half. The second half went into the fridge overnight before canning to make the de-fatting easier. I put it in my pressure cooker at 10lbs for 25 minutes but I could only fit in up to 7 jars at a time. As it canned I pulled the little bits of meat from the remaining carcasses.

I needed more room in my freezer so in addition to pulling out most of the chicken bones I also pulled out the veggies. The vegetable stock was initially made last month and frozen, until today when I it was re-boiled and canned. I have been saving up what I call vegetable remnants, the bits of veggies that don’t get used for their original purpose but are otherwise perfectly good. Woody broccoli stocks that I didn’t use in stir-fry, onions ends chopped off to get a flat edge for slicing, the large white end at the base of a celery stock, mushroom stems leftover from a mushroom cap appetizer, and other bits and pieces all got tossed into several Ziploc bags in the freezer over the summer. I started building the base by sautéing local carrots, celery and onion and then dumped the frozen veggies along with any extra local veggies that were languishing in the fridge at the end of the CSA season (cabbage is the only one i can remember) and covered with water. I boiled it most of the day, reducing it by about half to concentrate the flavor. The smell of if it reheating was heaven.

While I had the pressure canner out and while the broth was cooking I skinned and chopped 3 small pie pumpkins. I have already made 10 quarts of pumpkin puree but that went into the freezer because, according to every respected food preservation reference, winter squash (pumpkin included) is too dense when pureed to allow for the necessary heat distribution for food safety and shelf storage. The chunks were covered with water and brought to a boil for 2 minutes before being hot packed into quart jars and pressure cooked at 10 lbs for 90 minutes.

3rd Annual Dark Days Challenge

I’ve signed up to participate in this years Dark Days Challenge put on by (not so) Urban Hennery. It starts today and runs through March 2010. Essentially, the challenge is to cook one meal each week that is focused on sustainable, organic, local and/or ethical (SOLE) ingredients and blog about it. I find it easy to pull together simple meals with few frills and even less ingredients. This year I’d like to find some new sources for staples that I still get from the supermarket and make a better effort to prep more variety of meals with more ingredients. 
My version of local is going to be within 100 miles if I can, up to 200 where I can’t and exempting salt, some spices, coffee beans (not the roasting), chocolate, and cooking oil. I’ll also be including things that are produced and finished locally but the base ingredients are produced elsewhere, if there is not an alternative that is entirely local. A perfect example is coffee; the northern Virginia hills are not known for their quality beans and I’m not even sure if they would even grow if planted here. I have, however, found a number of local roasters that take pride in their work, use care when selecting their sources, pay a fair price for quality ingredients and roast and package the final product nearby.

Retrospective

On the last days of December 2007, a little under 2 years ago,  I started sporadically posting to this blog . It was a year after K and I had moved to the northern Virginia area and though I had made time to explore the local farmers market scene, I had only just begun to research what CSA is and theoretically explore what impact it might have on our lives.  Though I was philosophically onboard, I was still concerned by how I would achieve my objectives and plagued by questions like, what would I do with 5 lbs of Kale and could I really handle making meals out of whatever came in my box. I questioned my skill, know-how, energy and time.  I wondered what place supporting local food endeavors would have in my career-focused life and how I would balance the mental split between what I saw as key to my life and happiness and what I had to do to get by and improve my long term employability.(Just Starting)

It’s almost hard to remember this time in my life when I wasn’t relying on my share to feed me through the summer and supplementing with food from the farmers markets all year long, especially in the winter.  Don’t get me wrong, I eat out more than I’d like to admit, splurge on convenience food when I’m at the grocery store, and waste too much of the bounty I receive because I either don’t like it, i don’t know what to do with it, or are just to tired to cook it before it goes bad. But there is something important that happens when you consciously connect yourself to nature and the benefits extend well past the nutrition that ends up on your table. I’m luckier than most of my colleagues; I was raised in and around gardens and other sources of fresh food and I already new the childish pleasures of tasting fresh sun-ripened strawberries right from the plant. I knew, on an instinctual level that only comes from early childhood experiences, that taking the time to reconnect with my food sources was the right thing to do but I had forgotten how much you gain. 

I have found that I look forward to the nuances of the seasons to bring a vast variety new flavors and smells unlike anything that comes in a box, can, or bag from the supermarket or can be chemically mimicked in a scented candle. The palate of colors is ever changing beginning with the red of spring strawberries, the blues and blacks of berries, moving through the yellows of summer peaches and corns, the oranges of fall pumpkins and squash and the only constant is green. It also means that I’m never stuck with anything for too long, with the exception of kale which is available for the better part of the year. I also lament this passage of time for it brings not only new foods but also signifies the end of them, some of my new favorite foods like asparagus and rhubarb are only available for that short window in the spring.(First Bite From Farm) Once they are gone I remember them fondly and look to their coming after the desperate days of the more barren winter as a signal of good times ahead. (End of the CSA Season)

On one hand, I'm almost ashamed to admit that I am no further along in many of my goals than I was on that cold day 2 years ago when I decided to try blogging as a catalog of my attempts at change and reminder of the things which I wish to explore or accomplish.  On the other hand, thanks to the inspiration of many a blogger who is either an example that I strive to meet or fellow traveler on the path to finding happiness, I continue to grow and explore the path ahead.  So, as a reminder, here is a list of things that I have changed, begun, restarted, found, grew, baked or did.

• Found a CSA and became a member. I get a half-share, one box, for 20 weeks from spring to fall. We drive 45 minutes every weekend to pick up our share and also take advantage of the bonus u-pick (I really should calculate how much we get back for that bonus) and the free play space. K knows her fruits and veggies and where they come from, even if she doesn't eat them much. (CSA)
• Found some of our favorite foods grown, produced and sold by the farmer at some great local Farmers Markets. Bacon, chibatta bread, apples, onions, garlic, pears, bell peppers, and ground beef are among the items that I only purchase at the markets, if they don’t come in our share. Many others things I try to get but may substitute based on toddler necessity and poor planning/timing on my part, like bread, chicken, beef, butter, and many other assorted veggies. (An Apple A Day)
• Found a creamery that delivers our diary to our back porch. Milk, yogurt and cheese are our regular products all made from their dairy cows, but we also get all manner things like butter, cream, bread, granola, and this thanksgiving well try turkey that they source through local small farms and add to their deliveries. (We've Got Milk)
• Began sewing more of Ks clothing and repairing things, eventually, so that they could be used again. (Thanks mom for fixing the machine and helping out for Halloween)
• Started knitting again and found a circle of supportive women that I don’t spend enough time with, and yet the still say hi when we meet. I have completed scarves for everyone in the family but me (50% done), working on some hats and fingerless mittens, learning how to do socks and looking forward to more projects(Fiber and Needlework Update)
• Learned to crochet and made a sampler scarf and am no longer afraid when a pattern calls for a crochet needle. (Yarn and Rhubarb)
• Restarted old needlework patterns and began to relearn cross stitch. Nothing is completed yet but I hope to use this to embellish other projects soon
• Started to try to bake more bread and other things. I’ve only been partially successful but I wont let that stop me (Honey Wheat Bread)
• Relearned how to preserve food by freezing (perfected my freeze-drying technique) and canning. Put by all manner of cooked and raw veggies, raw fruits, chicken and vegetable stock, canned corn, canned jams, applesauce, peach halves and slices, bbq sauces and ketchup, salsas, and brandied apricots. (Summer Preservation)
• Kept up with One Local Summer, making and posting an entirely local meal once a week, for twice as long as I did my first year, though still not the whole way (One Local Summer)
• Participated in some of last years Dark Days Challenge but only blogged about the first few weeks. I’ll try to do better this round. (Dark Days Challenge)
• Began gardening again. I thought it was near impossible to do any productive gardening, beyond a few tomato plants in 5 gallon buckets like back in college, with a poorly exposed porch, no access to water outside, a full time career and a toddler. I proved myself wrong by turning to self watering containers, intensive planting methods, dwarfed species and a lot of blind faith.  What I got back was an intense satisfaction at growing something, my hands in the dirt again, a forest of tomato vines and a few precious tomatoes, lots of herbs, a little lettuce, flowers from March until November, fresh peas off the vine, lemon cucumbers, and green space all to myself. It was less about the output, which was way more than I expected but way less than is cost effective, and more about the pride of having a garden and sharing that experience with K even though we don’t have a yard.(Starting Seeds)

Now that I put in writing, it seems like a lot, given where I started from. I guess all I can hope for is to keep progressing.

One Local Summer Week 15

This week I cooked up a local breakfast hash that was very yummy. I diced up a whole red bell pepper and half of a red onion and sauteed it with a bit of olive oil and a drop of bacon grease. Then I tossed in some diced up leftover home baked 4 potato (red, blue, yellow, white) oven fries coated with salt, pepper and paprika and chopped cooked bacon. The seasoning was just right and the salty bacon gave it a bright crunch. I served it with fried local eggs, sliced local apples and a cup of locally roasted coffee. This would be just as good in a scramble or a breakfast burrito. I think I've stumbled onto a new day-after trend.