food

...now browsing by tag

Making cheese

Tuesday, August 12th, 2014

One thing we have good access to here is goat’s milk. And what better to do with that than make chevre or goat cheese, so I decided to give it a try.

It was very easy and yielded great results.

To start, you heat the milk to about 86 degrees. You then add a very small amount of mesophillic culture (available for about $1 per batch) and let the whole thing sit overnight. The result is a big cake of cheese floating in whey. (For those interested, the whey is good for making bread or smoothies.)

You then strain it with cheesecloth. The amount of time you strain for determines how soft or dry the cheese is. I like mine fairly soft, so I only drained it for about an hour.

After that, you can add flavoring if you like and shape it if you like. I made plain, honey lemon (blintzes?), and fresh herb chevre and rolled them in waxed paper to make logs like you get at the store.

Overall, this was an easy process and was cost effective vs. buying premade cheese. (One gallon of milk yielded about 7 of these good sized logs.) And most important of all, it was delicious!

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Responses »
Tags: cheese, food

Garden update

Friday, August 8th, 2014

Despite the trials and tribulations of this summer, most of our garden is doing quite well. The monsoons have been good and steady, and after a very hot stretch in May, it’s been more moderate.

This is what the beds look like full of plants. They grow to fill the shape of the netting.

The tomatoes have done especially well. I’m not sure what to attribute this to, but possibilities include good seed (all locally seed saved), continued enrichment of our soil, new organic fertilizer, the weather, and/or a new method of watering which involves not only drip, but a low level sprinkling (generally sprinkling is thought to be bad for tomatoes, but we speculate that this cooled the beds, possibly allowing for fruiting during hot temperatures, which is normally our biggest problem).

We are currently getting a good size bowl of tomatoes every other day, and the bulk of the tomatoes are not yet ripe. There must be well over a hundred green tomatoes with some getting quite large. Definitely the best tomato crop so far here.

Other crops are doing well. We continue to eat lettuce and have had yellow squash and cucumbers as well. Cantaloupe and watermelon should be ready soon. The beans are thriving as usual. Even the sweet potatoes appear to have come back from their run-in with the javelina (though it’s hard to tell with the actual potatoes being under ground, but the greens look very healthy). Barring any particularly bad insect invasion, which could come any time now, we should have a lot of food here.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Responses »
Tags: food, garden, tomatoes

Is it too much?

Saturday, May 10th, 2014

[edited to include pics…it wasn’t too much]

A tapas-style locally sourced meal:

Grilled asparagus and garlic scapes

Fresh fava hummus and sourdough toasts

Spinach dip with goat cheese and bread

Chipotle sweet potato bisque

Salad with poached eggs on garlic bread

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Response »
Tags: food, Growing

Homemade seitan

Friday, May 9th, 2014

We really like seitan. If you’re not familiar, it’s a meat substitute made from wheat gluten (the protein part of wheat). You can cook it pretty much like chicken. It’s more flavorful and has a better texture than tofu.

Unfortunately, like many things, it isn’t easy to get here. It’s mostly available at health food type stores, which are in short supply.

Imagine my delight when I found a recipe for making your own in one of my new slow cooker books!

The first recipe I found described what seemed like a complicated method for getting gluten out of regular wheat flour by rinsing and kneading a dough several times to separate the gluten. Then I discovered you can buy wheat gluten. I was able to get 5 pounds for about $13. Pretty cheap.

Last week I tried making it. The process was quite simple. You mix wheat gluten and a few other ingredients (in this recipe, chickpea flower, nutritional yeast, soy sauce, onion and garlic powder, salt and pepper) with water. You knead the resulting dough for just a couple minutes. It was quite springy unlike usual bread dough. Here’s what the dough looked like before cooking.

Then you cook the dough in the slow cooker in a broth of water, soy sauce, and onions for a few hours. Here it is what it looked like after that – pretty much looks like what we buy at the store. (Note: You cook it again after this to make the final dish.)

And finally here are a couple dishes made with seitan. The first is ropa vieja, a Cuban dish normally made with shredded meat.

Then there was this barbecued pulled pork…um, seitan.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Responses »
Tags: food, seitan, slow cooker

Garden update

Wednesday, May 7th, 2014

There’s been lots happening in the garden.

Here’s an updated map of the beds for this year.

Between many days of extreme wind, much of this has been planted already. The number of beds has grown to the point that it is a fair amount of work to keep up with all this. I find it very satisfying work and am increasingly more excited about the parts of the days I spend out in the garden than those I spend in front of my computer.

For most of the beans, I’ve planted half a bed now and am waiting to plant the rest until the monsoons come. (There is a school of thinking here that you should wait to plant everything with the monsoons. I’m unsure so am running some tests.)

The tomatoes are looking very good, though I unknowingly mixed in some hybrid seeds and so may get some odd results. (Long story, but we made a huge batch of salsa last year that included some neighbor’s tomatoes. I thought it would be fun to save a mix of the seeds, but didn’t realize that one of the varieties was a hybrid.)

The sweet potatoes are looking especially strong this year. We have over 40 slips (starts). I used a new technique of putting a small potato in a carton of sand this year (the leafy starts are pulled off and potted separately; then more grow):

This worked very well with each potato like this yielding many (20+?) slips. In the past, I’ve just pulled slips off potatoes in the pantry because that way, we could still eat the potatoes. :)

I think our starts in general look a lot stronger this year. I credit that in part to our new potting soil Happy Frog, which was recommended by a guest speaker from the county extension office who we had at one of our seed meetings.

We’ve also been continuing to improve the soil in the beds and are hopeful for a great crop this year.

We are eating a lot from the garden right now. Last night’s dinner was almost entirely grown here. We had:

Steamed artichokes with mustard aioli
Grilled garlic scapes
Apples (not grown here) and cheese
A big salad with homemade sourdough bread with scape compound butter

We’ve also been eating a lot of asparagus and spring onions. Yum!

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Response »
Tags: food, garden

The slow cooker period of karen’s cooking

Thursday, April 10th, 2014

As you might remember, a couple months ago, when the new kitchen provided more space, I got a slow cooker (aka a crock pot).

I started out slow with it, making some things you’d expect like soups and stews.

Then I started thinking about it as a way to save propane. (Since we’re on solar, using anything electric is preferable. And surprisingly, the slow cooker doesn’t draw a lot of electricity.) So I went to the library to get some books on what exactly you could do with one of these things, and I found two of the most amazing cookbooks ever (which I promptly ordered several copies of):

The Vegan Slow Cooker by Kathy Hester
Fresh from the Vegetarian Slow Cooker by Robin Robertson

Oh my gosh! I had no idea.

Here are a few of the things you can make with a slow cooker: granola (which I often make…it takes hours in the oven, not only using a lot of propane but heating up the whole house), baked breads and brownies, breakfast porridges, baked potatoes (which I love, but hesitate to heat the whole oven up for), enchiladas, eggplant parmigiana, curries, fruit butters, chutneys, and much more!

Here are some more pictures of things I’ve made so far.

I’m gradually working my way through many new recipes and will update this picture set as I do.

If you have a slow cooker and haven’t used it much, do yourself a favor and get one of these cookbooks and give something new a try.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Response »
Tags: food, slow cooker, solar

Another growing season

Monday, February 10th, 2014

This weekend we finally had some warm afternoons and took the opportunity to work in the garden.

Here is Brad working on the asparagus beds. With a little luck, we’ll be eating fresh asparagus in a few weeks.

My artichokes seem to have come through the winter nicely. We love perennials!

And we’ve been enjoying lettuce from the cold frame even with nighttime temperatures in the low 20s.

As usual, we put in two beds of garlic last fall. Until they’re ready, we’re still enjoying last year’s garlic.

And in the house, I have 30 or so tomato starts going. I’m also starting leeks inside this year. They are another crop that should last through the winter next year.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Responses »
Tags: food, garden, greenhouse