Big Batches

I've been on a mission to use up goat milk so it doesn't go to waste. First recipe was to make two batches of a quadruple recipe of cream of mushroom soup for freeze drying. That used 8 cups of milk. 

It worked much better this time. I sauteed the mushrooms in a little bit of butter, scooped them out of the pot and then melted the rest of the butter for the roux. After the flour mixed in, I added the mushrooms back to the pan. I ended up with a gallon of soup. 

Next was to make a double recipe of lemon raspberry cottage cheese pancakes. Each recipe uses one cup of cottage cheese and just under 2 cups of milk. 

This time I used lemon infused oil to boost the lemon flavor. I also added a bit more goat milk since my raspberries were freeze-dried and would soak up moisture. 

These cooked better than last time and the batter was thicker too. We ended up with about 35 five inch pancakes for the freezer. 

I still had goat milk left in the fridge... More ice cream! I redid the first recipe we tried, the one with honey and arrowroot powder, but I cut the honey in half. Double recipe again, so that's another 8 cups used. To activate the arrowroot powder, it needs to heat on the stove. Then it has to cool before churning. So, it's mixed up in the fridge to churn sometime. It tastes great unfrozen! 

Quest: Banana Muffin #7 (and #8)

G is getting muffined-out. When he found out I made another recipe, he said I should quit looking and settle on one of the ones I've made before. Good thing this is the last recipe I had on deck to try. 😂 

Pros- it's gluten free, hearty because of the almond flour and oats, uses maple syrup and bananas as sweetners. 

Cons- I've been putting off making it because it seems putsy. I had to grind oats to make flour for the recipe, melt coconut oil, and a number of ingredients need to be room temp. Also, it says it only makes 10 muffins. Lots of work for a few muffins. 

The oats ground up fine once I got the mill out. I did a bunch to speed up the process for future recipes. 

I didn't feel like dealing with coconut oil, so I substituted grapeseed oil. And since the oil doesn't solidify when cold, I didn't worry about having room temp ingredients. 😅😜

It didn't make any difference in the recipe. 

They turned out great. I baked them without muffin liners in my copper muffin pan. That probably accounts for the low height. There was enough batter for 12 muffins plus a mini cake. 

I enjoyed the flavor and thought they were nice and moist. G didn't like the gritty texture, but I think that's from the home ground oats and the brand of almond flour I used. I could sift both and get a much smoother texture. 

So this recipe is a keeper for sure. 

I have three keeper banana recipes, each with a slightly different purpose. This is a good gluten free recipe. The one with hemp hearts is G's favorite. And then the one I made twice without realizing it can be our normal standard. 

But... 

What if I don't have any ripe bananas?? The way Jaron ears them, it's pretty tricky to have any around. Maybe I could sub applesauce for bananas? Chat gpt thought so. 

So I whipped up a batch using a 1:1 substitution of homemade applesauce for bananas. 

Very liquidy. 

I debated adding more oats or almond flour and decided against it. Another factor I threw in the mix was baking it in the toaster oven instead of the regular oven. The way the pan fits inside brings the batter close to the heating element, which could impact the bake. I also filled the muffin wells fuller and still had a good amount of batter leftover for my little cake pan. 

As you can see, they ended up with dips in the middle. Too much moisture. 

Still, they taste good. Extremely moist, so I should tweak that next time.  

And bake them in a regular oven to see if that makes a difference. 🙃

Lemon Raspberry Goat Cheese Pancakes

Another recipe from the recent cookbook perusing. It uses both milk and cottage cheese, so it's a win for "milk season". 

It came together quickly, always a plus. Pretty liquidy. 

We fried them in a cast iron. It took a little to figure out the best timing and temp for flipping. 

I had the idea to toss in some freeze dried raspberries... 

They all floated to the top. I waited a few minutes for them to rehydrate, but probably not long enough. 

The batter cooked up just fine! And actually, we liked the flavor with the raspberries added even more than the original recipe! I froze the leftovers and Jaron has already had a couple of frozen ones as a quick snack.

 Definitely a recipe I'll make again. 

Small Batch Egg Salad

We planned a suppertime picnic for Thursday night, which meant I needed to come up with a good meal to eat cold. So I tried the small batch egg salad recipe for myself. 

I cooked the eggs in a bain-marie, made homemade mayo with an immersion blender, and chopped up homemade pickles to make dill relish. 

It turned out very good. G said not quite as good as the large batch for Saint Mark Summer Nights, we think because of the pickles. 

 

Chicken Nesting Boxes

Battle of the nests is going on in our shed... The chickens love to lay their eggs up in the haymow, but they keep scratching all of the straw down so there's no bedding for them to lay in. I'm attempting to solve this problem by building a few more nesting boxes - some up in the haymow, and some down below. We'll see how they like their new options!  

It was a pretty quick build- leftover wood scraps screwed together into a box. Jaron handed me screws. 

Here are the haymow nesting options:

Now filled with straw to entice them in:

Since we have so many layers, I added a few more boxes next to their favorite laying spot. I'm hoping the taller wood will entice them in. 

To further entice them, I had my little helper "seed" the nests with fake eggs. 

 Do you think it will work? Which nesting boxes will become their new favorite?

Applesauce

My favorite way to make applesauce these days...

A five gallon pail of apples fits in one roaster. I used a hand held apple slicer to quickly cut them into smaller pieces. I don't need to peel or core them because I have a food strainer that filters all of that out. 

I left them in the roaster at 250° pretty much all day. This temp required little stirring. I stirred it when I thought about it, but it wasn't hot enough to burn the apples if I left it too long. 

Normally I like to run the apples through the food strainer right away after cooking, but it was bedtime so I let it cool down overnight and ran it through in the morning. Doing an entire roaster full of applesauce takes a while! 

Here's my setup:

My plan for the applesauce is to eat some fresh, make more fruit roll-ups since those are Jaron's current favorite snack, and try freeze drying some applesauce bites. Stay tuned for the applesauce bite experiment!

Fast Food

My cookbook sharing friend let me flip through a few of her current cookbook finds the other day. "What to cook when you don't feel like cooking" was the theme. The cookbook was neat because it had recipes organized by time needed to cook. 

This one caught my eye because we have a bag of tator tots in the freezer (leftover from tator tot hotdish). 

It was super easy and only used one pan, so cleanup was a breeze. 

I used freeze dried peppers instead of fresh, and they seemed to rehydrate okay. 

I left it sit in the cast iron too long after cooking... It didn't stick, but the moisture reacted with the metal and gave it a slight metallic taste. At least for my taste. That's happened with other foods too (that have sat too long and are acidic). G hasn't noticed, so maybe I'm just sensitive. 😅 

Definitely a recipe I'd make again!

Tomato Basil Soup Upgrade

Remember that failure of a soup I made about a month ago? The tomato basil goat milk soup that split and wasn't tomatoey enough? 

I had frozen the leftovers, thinking I'd make a pasta sauce sometime. Today was that day. 

It was so liquidy, I knew it needed to be reduced by quite a bit. Therefore, frying pan for more surface area. 

I thought about cooking noodles directly in the sauce to try to soak up some moisture, but I wanted to use rice noodles, and because they don't have the starch regular noodles have, they could turn soggy and gelatinous instead of a nice firm texture. (Thank you AI for the information). 

So the noodles cooked separately. 

The sauce took a long time to reduce, as I suspected. I added some tomato peel powder to thicken it, more salt, and a splash of lemon juice. 

Noodles added once cooked, and voila. 

It would've tasted nice with chicken, but I didn't have any around (besides our live ones outside 😅), so I served it with ground walnuts on top. Wow, did that elevate the flavor! 

Not a bad meal! 

RMH Meal

Jaron is almost two years old. How did that happen? 🤯 Isn't that always the case though? Time flies by. 

We had appointments in Rochester the past three days- general checkups, all went well- and we served our annual meal at the Ronald McDonald House to celebrate Jaron's birthday and give back to the organization that helped us so much when he was in the hospital. 

Our menu was the same as last year: homemade goulash soup, homemade bread, lettuce salad with tomatoes and cucumbers, homemade applesauce, and cookies. 

This year we used tomatoes from our garden and I made gingersnaps from scratch. 

Last year we made way too much food, so this year we made half as much and it was just the right amount. Six batches of soup, six loaves of bread, one roaster of applesauce (same amount as last year - a 5gal pail of apples), and four batches of gingersnaps. There were a lot of cookies leftover, but we did that on purpose so we could bring them to the NICU nurses. 

We started cooking around 2pm Thursday after a stop up on the NICU floor to visit our nurses. That timed out very well. Last year we paused cooking to visit and cooking got rushed in the end. This year was much more relaxed even with the extra from scratch item. 

Jaron fell asleep on the way back from the hospital and snoozed in the car seat while we cooked. 

I made the bread and cookies. G bought the groceries and made the soup. One of our favorite house volunteers had signed up to be the scheduled host for us (they always have someone familiar with the kitchen/serving help with the meal). She made the salad and helped get our serving line set up. 

Mimi and Papa showed up just in time to entertain Jaron when he woke up from his nap. He had a blast playing with them outside, in the gym, and in the toy room. 

They also helped serve the meal. 

Here we are, ready to go! 

We served about 65 meals, which was our estimate of how many. Lots of positive feedback on the food. Guess we'll keep it the same for next year. 😉 

Breakfast Cookies

I was super excited about this recipe... Breakfast Cookies! 

I didn't have any sliced almonds, but I did have some chopped walnuts left from a different recipe, so I swapped those. Instead of the craisins, I did a combo of dried mulberries and dried berry mix, which includes pepitas. 

They turned out great. Very hearty, just sweet enough. They hold together well and aren't crumbly.

A perfect filling breakfast before a day of appointments! 

Deodorant

G used to make his own deodorant. He only stopped because it was messy to scoop it out of a container and apply it under the arms. That didn't sound appealing to me either. I wondered if we could reuse our empty deodorant stick containers. 

I tried that in a past experiment. The only way the plastic ones work is if you leave some deodorant in the bottom before any holes appear, otherwise the liquid deodorant runs right out the bottom. 

So we bought deodorant for a while. Then we found some cardboard deodorant tubes from that company. I bet those could be refilled! 

We had some jar deodorant in the bathroom drawer, so today I pulled them out and set them on this ancient heating pad I keep in the craft room. Worked like a charm to melt them! 

We had enough empty deodorant sticks around to fill. 

And voila! Homemade deodorant able to be applied cleanly! 

I wonder if G will notice a difference in the store bought vs ours... 🤔

Freeze Dried Tomatoes

Lots of green tomatoes on the vines, not many red. Certainly not enough to do a batch of canned tomatoes or even a freeze dryer batch. So, I've been cutting them in half and freezing them for later freeze drying. 

The deer have discovered the garden, not that there's much for them to eat. They sampled a tomato and didn't care for it (the green one below). 

I've debated pulling out plants already, but my stubbornness kicked in and I'm going to leave them in for a while longer. Maybe we'll have a mini heat wave and get some more tomatoes and peppers. 😅

Green Beans

I've always loved dilly beans but never made them myself. With all the beans G brought home from the garden center, I figured it was time. 

They're pretty easy to make (recipe from Ball.com). A clove of garlic, tsp of dill in each jar. Cut your beans to 4in, mix up brine. Hot water bath can. Done. 

The recipe suggested adding some red pepper flakes for a bit of a kick. I did that for three of the jars (wide mouth so I'd remember which was which). 

I did one batch of beans in my little pressure canner. 

The rest of the beans ended up blanched for freezing. 

Quest: Banana Muffin #7 (aka #2)

I mean... #2. 🤦‍♀️😅 I had this post all typed out and then I found my original banana muffin notes and realized I had previously baked this recipe. But it still holds as a nice banana muffin, so I'll share the post anyway. 😉

Recipe #7 is from Kristine's kitchen and uses the ingredients you'd expect and maple syrup for sweetener. There's milk in this recipe, which you can sub for other liquids. I did use milk since we have plenty of goat milk around. It only calls for 1/4c, so it's not like I used up a ton. 😅

The most putzy thing for me was melting the butter (since we don't have microwave). It wasn't until I had the muffins in the oven I saw the note you can sub applesauce for the butter. I had just made some applesauce too! 🤦‍♀️ Oh well, next time. 

There was enough batter for one pan of full sized muffins and a little leftover. I put the leftovers in a tiny cake pan and it hardly coated the bottom. 

They turned out nice and moist! I would definitely make this recipe again, doing some Emily tweaks next time. 😉

Goat Milk Ice Cream Take Two!

I borrowed an ice cream maker KitchenAid attachment from a friend of mine so I could continue using up my goat milk. 

The recipe: 

4 cups of milk

1 tablespoon vanilla paste (I used regular vanilla)

1/4-1/2 cup maple syrup (I used 1/4c)

6 egg yolks

Blend everything in a blender and then pour into ice cream maker.

I also added a cup of cream I had skimmed off the top of milk we had collected over the week. 

The ice cream maker is super easy to use: Put the bowl in the freezer 24h ahead of time (she did this so it'd be ready to go for me). Attach the bowl to your mixer, set the dasher inside, attach the converter to the mixer shaft, turn the mixer on the stir setting and dump in your ice cream mix. 

I had trouble getting the converter to attach. My mixer is just a little too new or old for this model of ice cream maker. I was able to get it to work, but the bowl sat out and lost some of its freezing power by the time I got it to work. 

The batch did freeze, but it was pretty soft. I quickly scooped it into an ice cream pail and transferred it to the freezer, but it had begun to melt already. 

I tried another batch of the same recipe after another 24h of freezing the bowl and that one worked much better since I knew how to get the converter attached. 

We haven't tried it yet (aside from licking out the bowl 😜). Once it was at the softserve stage, I put it in the freezer to harden up a bit. 

Cottage Cheese Straining

The first time I tried making cottage cheese was a month before Jaron was born. I had just done the straining portion before the ultrasound that showed my cervix was shortening. The cheese sat out for a few days and lost quality. G still ate it and said it was good, but I stayed away from eating it just in case. 

This time, no medical emergencies! 😅 

The recipe said to use a cheesecloth that had been boiled for 20min. I used the old apple strainer stand to hold the cloth in place while I dumped the curds/whey into the cloth. 

I didn't want flies getting in that she used, so I tried to gather the cheesecloth at the top so I could rubber band it. Unfortunately, one of the sides of the cheesecloth slipped out before I could grab it and all of the curds dumped back into the whey. 🤦‍♀️ 

Try again! 

I was able to salvage some, so I tied that portion in a rubber band and hung it over a bowl. Once I had restrained everything, I carefully tied that bundle together to also hang.

Here's my hanging mechanism: 

The curds hang for 12h. At that point you can add a half a teaspoon of salt per cup of curds and hang it again to take out more moisture, or you can move it to the fridge and eat it as is. My timing resulted in the Kurds being ready to process around bedtime, and I was over messing with them by that point, so I just added salt and stuck it in the fridge. 

Stirring the salt in broke up all the curds, so the consistency is more like a soft cream cheese / sour cream / ricotta cheese. Very pleasant tang! We added some to a beef-tomato crockpot meal I made the other night and it really elevated the dish! 

It's a good thing we like this cottage cheese because I attempted to make yogurt again and the milk split into curds and whey before I could pause it at the yogurt stage. 

What to do with all that whey? I put some of the whey in the beef-tomato crock pot meal. The rest of it is going in the freeze dryer to make whey powder. After our next baby comes, I'll add some of the powder to my favorite protein ball recipe for an extra boost. 

You can use whey as a substitute for liquid in any bread or muffin recipe. I might try that sometime too! We have plenty more whey coming with this next batch of cottage cheese!

Quest: Banana Muffin #6

This recipe came from Scientifically Sweet. 

It calls for room temp eggs. All my eggs were in the fridge, so I did the quick egg warming trick of putting them in a bowl of warm water for a few minutes. 

I didn't have oat flour on hand, so I had to drag out my mill and grind some quick. 

The recipe calls for frozen blueberries, which I didn't have. I left them out and didn't substitute anything for them. This is a quest for banana muffins after all, so they should be able to stand on banana alone. 

They turned out a little dry. I thought they were fine; G wasn't a big fan. I wonder what adding a little applesauce would do...