Herb Salt

I've been listening to a new-to-me podcast lately, The Splendid Table.  I love it and am getting lots of great ideas.  I immediately jumped on an idea for herb flavored salt.  I'm throwing a little party in a few days and want to offer different artisanal food products for sale, like a mini farmers market, and this salt sounds like a perfect product!

1/2 cup Kosher Salt
3-4 cloves of garlic
1-2 cups of chopped herbs

Dice the garlic then begin to chop the salt into the garlic.  Next chop the herbs into your salt mix until a sandy consistency is achieved.  You can create all sorts of herb combinations.  I used fresh herbs from my mom's, my local farmer's, and my own garden.

Rosemary
Tarragon
Oregano
Sage
Lavender (just a little)

Photo to come...

Granola

Light, crunchy and tasty, this granola is divine!

I found this granola recipe and used it as my jump off point.  I had made fresh yogurt for the first time and wanted something special to eat with it.  It was easy and made my house smell great!  I choose what I had, so feel free to change this recipe to suit your needs and resources.  Combine the oats, nuts and cherries.  Stir together the oil, syrups and vanilla and then mix that into the oats.  Spread out on a cookie sheet and bake for 10 minutes, remove from the oven and mix up then bake for another 15 minutes.

2 cups of oats
3/4 cup coconut flakes
1/4 cup hazelnuts
1/4 cup candied pecans
1/2 cup dried cherries

1/4 cup melted coconut oil
1/4 cup maple syrup
1/4 cup honey
1 teaspoon vanilla

Here's how it looked before it was baked.

It was delicious served warm over fresh yogurt.

DIY Home Made Yogurt

Fresh yogurt in a glass jar, soon to be repeated!

Yogurt is really easy to make, I tried it yesterday for the first time and it turned out great.  Tangy and thick, almost like a sour custard.  Making yogurt is similiar to making goat cheese, which I have been playing with lately.  The final product comes from your precision of technique and not the ingredients in that there are very few ingredients.  In stead it is temperature and time control that bring so much distinction between different dairy products.  To make yogurt you need some milk and little bit of all ready prepared yogurt which is called your starter.  That's it!  But you'll need a lot of kitchen equipment, mostly basic stuff.  Very important is a cooking thermometer to measure the temperature of the milk.  You need covered glass containers for your yogurt like mason jars.  You need a container to incubate your yogurt, I used a big pot but read recommendations for using a cooler.  And you need a pot to heat the milk.  Similar to making cheese, it is important to sanitize everything that comes in contact with the milk.  I do this by pouring boiling water from an electric kettle I have on hand all over everything I use prior to letting it touch the milk beginning with the pot I will heat the milk in.

1/2 gallon milk
1/4 cup organic plain yogurt
4 12 ounce jars with lids
2 pots that fit into each other
thermometer
big spoon

sterilizing the yogurt jars

heating the milk to 180'

Begin by heating the milk slowly over a low flame until it reaches 180'-185'.  While heating the milk stir it gently to prevent scalding or coagulating of the milk.  As it got close to the desired temperature I slowed down the process to promote evaporation as I wanted a thick yogurt if possible.  While the milk is heating you can prepare the jars by filling them with boiling water to both sanitize and heat the jars.   When the milk reaches 180' remove it from the heat and allow the temperature to drop to 115'.   Remove one cup and blend it with your starter (get your yogurt out of the fridge early so it has time to warm up to room temperature) and then stir this back into the milk.  Pour the milk into the jars and cover tightly.  Submerge your jars in water at 110'-115'.  Hold the yogurt at this temperature for four hours adding more hot water from time to time to keep the temperature at 110'.  When the yogurt has reached a consistency you like remove from the heat and place in the refrigerator and allow to chill before serving.

Submerging the yogurt in warm water to maintain 110'

The cream top milk pastured milk gave me cream top yogurt!

Under the cream cap the yogurt was firm, white and tangy. 

The first serving looks great! 

Topped with granola warm from the oven was AAAAmazing!

News from the Homestead

I haven't sent an update to my Kickstarter followers in awhile.  As I interact in the community, surfing, going to events, it's amazing how often people ask me how things are going with the beehives or with the chickens.  It's like another unexpected effect, the parade of families or folks walking dogs who make it part of their journey to give the chickens a visit.  I see children talking to the chickens every day!  So to my community of readers on the internet...whomever you may be...here's the update.

Topbar Hive inspection with friends from the Bee Society

The bees have proven to be a complicated and slow endeavor with much wonder and exploration but very little honey.  You can catch up on my bee chronicles by reading this post and this post and this post and this post and this post.  Where we stand today is total loss of Hive #1.  It has been dismantled and awaits a new colony next Spring.  Hive #2, the topbar hive, is thriving.  The bees have built out several new frames of comb and the Queen is busy laying eggs.  There doesn't seem to be a lot of honey, so I haven't harvested any comb and have basically left this hive untouched.  My plan is to give these bees this first season to establish themselves and then next year I'll probably be able to harvest honey twice, once early in the season and a second time towards the end of the season.  There is a little bit of a mothy, sticky insect laying eggs with little white worm larvae.  I am encountering them in the spaces between the wooden bars, the area where the bees fill in with propolis.  I seem to split the little larvae's bodies open when I use my hive tool to pry the bars apart.  But it is so far only a minor infestation and I have left the bees to deal with the problem themselves.  This weekend I will be getting some much needed training.  A topbar hive specialist, Les Crowder is coming to San Diego to offer a two day workshop for members of the San Diego Bee Society.  So I will spend the weekend immersed in all things bee and I will have a lot more to say about my own hive next week after an inspection with all my new bee knowledge.

The chickens are doing great.  With the weather getting colder and the days shorter two ladies have stopped laying eggs, but two are laying daily.  My babies have grown up so much.  They are almost 5 months old and so far it looks like they will both be keepers, I think they are both hens and not roosters.

Here's my Yellow Baby

And here's my Grey Baby

Eating fresh grass makes for deep yellow yolks rich in beta carotene.

Goldie is joining in the Fall Spirit with some pumpkin scraps.

A proud mom with her best egg layer, Goldie!

Pumpkin Pie

It's been about two months now since we joined a friends CSA program for his small farm.  It has been really opening up my creativity in the kitchen, challenging to cook with ingredients I might not normally pick out.  The last two weeks I have been delivered butternut squash, and last week I got a sugar pumpkin.  When I was a kid my mom would bake butternut squash and eat it out of the shell with some butter.  I hated the vegetable and she wouldn't force it upon me and just split the lovely gourd with my father.  I have tried baking them, as my mother would do, but they always seem to turn out a bit hard and dry and cooking them seems to take forever.  So when searching on the internet for recipes on making pumpkin pie from scratch and not from canned pumpkin pie filling, I stumbled upon this informative Pumpkin Pie Recipe that explained several different ways to cook pumpkin, one of which was steaming.  So I thought I'd give that technique a try.  I also read on that website that most canned pumpkin products are made of butternut squash and not pumpkin, so I went ahead and cooked one of each and decided to use a combination of the two.  

The first step to prepare my pumpkin and butternut squash was to slice them open with a serrated knife and scrape out the seeds and stringing fascia that coats the meat of the vegetable.  I separated that pulpy goop from the seeds and fed it to my happy chickens and soaked the seeds in some water to further rinse them.  Later I rinsed those seeds off, salted them and roasted them for about 10 minutes at 350.  I sliced the squash and pumpkin up into smaller chunks and steamed each separately for thirty minutes.  I was really happy with how they turned out, moist, well cooked, and not taking too much time!

My jungle fowl, Penny, snacking on some pumpkin scraps.

Butternut Squash cleaned and cut up and into the steamer for 30 minutes.

When finished cooking I allowed the squash to cool and then I removed the skin.  Next I mashed up the flesh with a heavy duty whisk.  You could use a hand mixer or blender instead.  I could see why butternut squash is used in canned pie filling instead of actual pumpkin.  It created a much smoother pulp with a more vibrant orange color.

Removing the skin from the pumpkin, let it cool first!

Mashing up the pumpkin with a heavy duty whisk.

Left: Butternut Squash, Right: Pumpkin

Once I finished my two squash pulps I got started on my pie crusts.  Pie crusts are made of pastry dough with is a rich but simple combination of mainly flour and butter.  Here is a recipe for Pastry Dough from Martha Stewart that I consulted.  I start by dicing up butter into little pieces and then place that chopped butter into the freezer for a few minutes to make it firm.  I used about:

1 2/3 stick of butter

2 cups flour, I sifted my flour for smooth consistency

1 teaspoon of salt

2 teaspoons of sugar

Once the butter is firm begin to work the pieces through the flour mixture, flattening and crumbling the butter and flour together.  You are looking for a bread crumb consistency.  Once you reach that add in 3-5 tablespoons of cold water, working the dough with your hands until a smooth even texture is reached but don't over mix.  Separate the dough in two pieces, form into round disks and wrap in saran wrap.  Let rest for thirty minutes.  If you won't use it all you can refrigerate and use in the next week or freeze and use in the next few months.  Just defrost or remove from the fridge and allow some time to soften before working the dough.  From this batch of dough I made four pies, two open topped pumpkin pies and two covered chicken pies.  

Once the pie crusts are ready, it's time to mix the filling I made a variation on the recipe listed at the top of this post.  I whisked together:

2 cup pumpkin pulp
1 cup butternut squash pulp
1/2 cup sugar
1 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground cloves
1 teaspoon nutmeg
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon ground ginger
2 eggs
12 ounces whipped coconut milk

And then I poured it into my pie crusts.  I made two small pies.  I baked them for 15 minutes at 400 and 30 minutes at 325.  We ate the pie with vanilla ice cream.  Delicious!  I made the two pies I second time the next week (because my farmer kept delivering pumpkins!).  I skipped mashing the pumpkin up into a pulp and instead I just placed the skinned pumpkin chunks in the blender with all of the other ingredients for the filling and gave it a whirl!  So easy!

Here's the roasted pumpkin seeds, I snacked on them as I finished the pie.

Showing off a pretty braid for a wedding...

Here's the technique for this lovely up-do.  I parted my hair in two and did two french braids with each section all the way down to the tips of my hair, binding the ends with little plastic rubber bands I buy at the horse tackle shop!  Then I tied the two long ends of my braids in a big knot (you need long hair to make this happen).  There was still a lot of braid left after I tied the knot and I continued the momentum of the braids, tucking the hair into a figure eight.  Then I secured all over with bobby pins and secured a big rhinestone brooch that my sister gave me years ago.  Hopefully the braid will be a blessing on the newlyweds, infinite love, infinite blessings. 

Vanilla Extract

Here's how it looked after only a few minutes.

Everything you need: vanilla bean, alcohol, & jar.

Some simple to do.  All you need is some vodka and some vanilla beans.  You can ouse other forms of alcohol, but vodka will give you a very clear flavor.  My mind is beginning to jump to the other flavor possibilities and I am imagining a tequila based flavoring extract I might be making later in the day!  Anyway, for this vanilla extract the quality and flavor of your vanilla beans is the key ingredient.  I use a whole vanilla bean, organically grown in India.  It has a glossy fresh look and when I slice them open the seeds form a dense moist paste inside.  I used ten vanilla beans, sliced open, and 16 ounces of vodka.  I let it sit for a week and then pulled the beans out.