Cheeeeeeeeseheads

I recently took a soft cheese making class with Herbalist, Linda Conroy. I got some milk from Grassway organics and tried out my hand at feta cheese. Here is the process after the heating, rennet, and culture steps.

"Cutting the cheese"

Draining the whey

"Cutting the cheese"...again

Draining the whey...again...after salting heavily

The final cut

We stored some in the fridge like this.

The rest is stored in olive oil in the cupboard. This is my preferred method, but we ran out of olive oil.

And, finally, Neal reading for our book discussion. He set the thermostat himself, so no comments about me being a meanie by keeping it cold in there.

Kitchen farming

We have been busy micro-farming lots of little bacteria and yeasts. Here are some of our most recent adventures:

Carrot,beet,cabbage, burdock-"kraut". Nice sweet-sour flavor

Brusselini ferment (like cabbage kraut but with Brussels sprout tops instead).

One of 2 crocks full of green cabbage sauerkraut. My friend Mercedes and I had a preservation day so we could combine efforts and socialize. We will hopefully be continuing that trend.

New experiment here: lactofermented chutneys. This pear version is less than a day old. It will sit out for one more day before I move it to the fridge.

Apple chutney. We did two quarts of this.i hope it's good because I'd like use up some of our apples.

Neal is making apple cider vinegar from apple cider. It should be almost done.

Oatmeal porridge. The oats soak for 24 hours before you cook them. It is supposed to be sour.... We will see how it goes.

Neal continues to tend the sourdough starter. I want him to diversify and start making sourdough crackers in edition to bread :)

Cream cultured with piima. Turns more sour than whipping cream but less sour than store bought sour cream.

We used some of the cultured cream to make cultured butter. Look how yellow it is!

Tis the season...

for foraging and preservation. Here are some photos of our labors.

This is high bush cranberry sauce in the making. We harvested the berries with my herbal group. Then I took off the stems and boiled them til they were mashable. This is them going through the food mill. If we had a more heavy duty mill, we could have skipped the boiling step.

This sauce is SOUR! We add a tablespoon to a couple servings of applesauce for a hint of flavor without making it unpalatable.

We also harvested hazelnuts during the herbal apprenticeship. It took hours to get them all out of their shells. 

We added some peanuts and hickory nuts to make Linda's homemade seaweed,syrup, and nut bars. They are a bit too sweet for me, but neal loves them. I may substitute peanut butter for some of the syrup next time. Anyone have other suggestions. Linda's recipe is on her website: http://www.moonwiseherbs.com/trees-as-food-and-medicine/

Neal took on apple butter as his project. We ended up with 18 pints. Some slightly sweetened and some left tart.

Beautiful, right?

We made "meatloaf cupcakes" with sweet potato "frosting". Omg it was so delicious. Here is the website for that recipe: http://wellnessmama.com/4759/meatloaf-cupcakes/

The current project is apple leather. We skipped the lemon juice in the usual recipes because that is just for preventing browning. We also ditched the sugar. This leather is plenty sweet on its own and I don't want it to be any closer to a dessert than it already is. 

We have batches going in the dehydrator and oven. We will try storing the leather at room temp, in the fridge, and in the freezer to compare how well they last and texture.

An apple a day... For the next 3 years

We have so many apples right now!! It's the year of the apple, the apple moon, the apple village, or something along those lines! We got 1.5 bushels for $7 on Craigslist, 2 bushels from some new friends, and then probably 2 to 3 more bushels from a friend who let us use his cider press and apple orchard (that is in addition to 10 gallons of fresh cider we took home. We have given away 3.5 gallons to friends and family and will probably freeze the rest of it. We are grateful of all the generosity we have been shown these last few weeks. So many apples! Here are some pics of the bounty and our preservation efforts.

Check out all the apples. We did apple sauce in the crockpot... We will be stepping up our game by using Catherine's Nesco next time!

4 trays in the dehydrator. Half peeled and half not. We will see which win the taste test. If it is close, we will do peels-on in the future because it is easier.

This batch started off in the sun oven, but then it got cloudy. The regular oven is faster anyway.

This batch was done exclusively in the regular oven. It is the fastest method by far.

Some of the cider crowding up the fridge. Hehe.

Neal is experimenting with inoculating the cider with lactobacillus. We are hoping for vinegar based on Greg's recommendations.

Harmony fun

Below are some pictures of a recent evening at Harmony house. It was fun to listen to music and work on projects together (although I will admit that I was mostly just taking pictures this time around).

Mikaya and Catherine peeled and sliced so many sweet potatoes.

I believe they came in a huge donation of produce to Casa. The frozen, prepped sweet potatoes will be much appreciated come winter.

We ate many of them as scrumptious fries that night however. Hehe.

Neal and Cullom bottling some beer.

These bottles are waiting to be filled.

"Fall is the most wonderful time of the year"

Neal's uncle cliff visited over the fall equinox. Here we were particularly impressed with his opened faced grilled cheese sandwiches.

We got 30 lbs of "damaged" apples from an orchard 25 minutes away for just $7.50, and Cliff helped us process them into applesauce.

We love this tool for coring, peeling, and slicing all at once.

If we had felt really motivated, we could have used these apple peels to make apple cider vinegar. Maybe next time...

Recently, we have been experimenting with ferments. This is a typical saurkraut here. We also made sour beets with burdock root.

These are traditional style cucumber pickles (the type people would have eaten before canned dill pickles were invented). The little cukes sat in a salt water brine for a few weeks and naturally fermented on their own. We like the book "Wild Fermentation" by Sandor Katz for ferment recipes. Apparently other people love it to because there were 15 holds on the library copies we wanted to check out. We opted just to buy the book online since it was apparently so awesome.

Catherine graciously shared her Concord grapes with us and we used them to make juice. There was originally talk of canning some of the juice for later, but we drank it all before that happened. Hehe. We also made a wild grape juice to share with folks at Casa. It was so intense and sour that it required dilution and sweetening to be palatable to most folks.

There will probably be lots more pictures of our fall harvesting and preservations in the coming weeks, but I'm thinking the posting will be more sporadic. Hang in there.

September harvesting

Here are some pictures of what we have been harvesting these last couple weeks.

Warted green Hubbard squash. I think there are four or five more out in the garden yet.

Popcorn. It's drying in the potting shed now.

Burdock root. We have added it to kraut so far, and we will use it in stirfrys and pickles in the future.

Beets still making it in the garden bed.

Ever bearing strawberries from the crowns we planted this year

More cucumbers. Next year we will just pick one type of cuke.

The tomatoes were late, but they've been consistent since August.