Freeze Drying Kale, Fermenting Pickles

I recently listened to a homesteading podcast about freeze drying. The interviewee said she loved freeze drying kale and then using it in lasagna as a layer (letting the sauce rehydrate it). Seemed interesting to try, and kale does happen to be growing in our garden. 

It's a pretty quick cycle, just a few hours - not much moisture to take out. 

The hardest part is putting it into jars without it crumbling. 

G brought home a ton of cucumbers, purchased at an Amish produce auction by his boss/coworker. They were a larger size than I typically like to eat, but they weren't bitter. We also happen to be running out of my homemade sliced pickles, so I decided to pickle as many of the cucumbers as I could... 

These pickles are actually made from cucumbers from our garden before the squash bugs destroyed them. 

I tried this recipe first. 

G wasn't a fan of the flavor. So I tried a different recipe from a fermentation cookbook. Actually, two recipes. 

I like them both a lot. G hasn't sampled those yet. I made a gallon of whole pickles, a gallon of spears , and a gallon of slicers. 

There were still cucumbers left, so I made half gallons each of spears, slicers, and pennies of the recipe I know G likes. That one uses vinegar. 

It wasn't until I mixed up the last batch that I realized what I thought was a bottle of vinegar was actually water. 🤦‍♀️ I had saved distilled water in a vinegar bottle to use in our chicken incubator. Ugh! 

Thankfully they had only been in the fridge a few hours and the spices hadn't leeched all their flavor into the liquid. I strained the not-brine out and remixed up the vinegar salt brine. 

It actually was resolved quicker than I thought. The strainer worked perfectly to keep the spices inside. Back into the fridge for pickling. 

A neighbor of ours gave me a gigantic tub of dill (before we got all the cucumbers). I collected quite a bit of it, more than I thought I would use. And it ended up being just enough for all these pickles! 

The same thing happened with coriander, except those were from cilantro plants that had gone to seed in our garden. At the time, I had no clue what I was going to do with it all. I just collected it and tucked it with our spices. And it ended up being just enough for all the pickle recipes!

All together we have five gallons of pickles at our house right now. 😵‍💫 Now I need to remember to eat them! 

We still have some fresh cucumbers lingering in the fridge. I wanted to give them to the chickens and ducks. G says he's going to eat them. As for me, I am pickled and cucumbered out. 😅

Golden Beets

Turns out you're supposed to store beets somewhere humid. I left mine on the counter, so they lost a lot of moisture and got pretty shriveled. I figured you could do the same thing to rehydrate them as you do with cucumbers, and I cut the tops and bottoms off and put them in some ice water in the fridge for a few hours. 

Well, a few hours turned into a few days before I finally got to them. 😅 However they did rehydrate well! 

I steamed them for about half an hour and then rubbed the skins off. It was supposed to be an easy peeling process, but I didn't find it to be easy and quick.

I chopped these small ones up for pressure canning. The gigantic beats will be blanched and cut up for freeze drying. Or shredded for the freezer. 

Here are my four pints of beets about to go in the pressure canner.

I'm left with one mega, semi shriveled beet I'm not sure what to do with. Will it rehydrate? Or is it too big?

Hairy Carrots

My container carrots have long passed their prime. I finally got around to harvesting them today. 

Not a great yield. I think I planted two varieties in the bin- a traditional orange variety and the last of my dragon's blood carrots. The dragon's blood definitely grew better, i.e. larger. 

They also had a ton of side roots. They came out like hairy little gnome beards...

All cleaned up and looking normal. 

I laid them out to cure on a screen in the garage for a few days before I'll transition them to long-term storage. 

 

Goat Milk Tomato Basil Soup

I am not a tomato soup fan but there is one recipe I do enjoy. I've never made it for myself before and I wonder if I wrote down the ingredients incorrectly. 

One cup of tomatoes with two quarts of dairy? Seems a bit imbalanced. As you can see, the soup doesn't look very tomato-y. 

It also got too hot which made the milk curdle. All in all, not the best. I served it to our Japanese students and they actually liked it! 

As a side, I made grilled cheese with the leftover  home milled flour focaccia bread. 

On the second serving of the soup, I used my immersion blender to blend up the soup (chat GPT suggestion), and surprisingly it broke up the curdled milk and made it very creamy. 

The leftovers went into the freezer and sometime in the future I think I'll turn them into a pasta sauce. 

Goat Milk Ice Cream

We finally got around to making goat milk ice cream. 

The recipe we used was: 

3c goat milk
1/2c honey
2T arrowroot powder 
2tsp vanilla extract 

And we doubled it since we were going to all the work. Our ice cream maker was big enough to hold a double batch. I got the ice cream maker for free from someone in a local Facebook group I'm part of. I originally asked to borrow one, and a lady offered hers up for free. 

When I picked it up, she said she had gotten it from her mom (who never used it), and she had never used it either, so she was glad it was going to someone who was planning to use it. 

Unfortunately, it didn't work. 😕

The motor sounded like it was running, but nothing turned. I troubleshooted a few things that didn't help, and then G had the idea to use a screwdriver to turn the dash. 

So that's what he/we did for thirty minutes until the ice cream got harder. 

Definitely soft serve ice cream. It tasted way too sweet; I'd definitely cut the honey in half. Or use maple syrup instead. 

We have plenty of goat milk, so I'm sure we'll make another batch of ice cream. The question is, do we borrow someone's ice cream maker or buy our own?? 

Watermelon

The net bag works! Look at this beautiful watermelon growing on the trellis. Unfortunately, the day after I took this picture we had high winds overnight and it blew the watermelon down. 

Fortunately, the watermelon didn't split. 

Unfortunately, I don't think it's ripe. 

I chopped it up for the chickens, ducks, and goats to have a treat. And I guess Jaron too. 😂 He ate the piece he was supposed to give to the goats.

Gerda gobbled it up. The other two tend to be hesitant about scraps we offer.

Goat Milk Cottage Cheese and Yogurt

I took a virtual class on making "wild fermented" products from milk and finally put the information to use. Wild fermentation is just using natural yeast and good bacteria in the air to ferment milk products to get cheese, yogurt, sour cream, and the like. You don't need renet or a starter culture. 

Since we have so much goat milk right now, I started both cottage cheese and yogurt. They are super easy- put raw milk in a jar, leave it on the counter for a period of time, strain it. Done. 

The cottage cheese is yogurt left long enough that the curds and whey separate. Very easy to tell that stage. Yogurt gets paused before the separation occurs. 

Unfortunately, or fortunately depending how you look at it, my kitchen has plenty of wild yeast and bacteria, likely from the kombucha and sourdough I have going. So my yogurt fermented a lot quicker than expected. 😕 

I was supposed to check the yogurt yesterday afternoon, but I missed the window and thought it would be okay until this morning. Nope. It already separated. Guess I'll have to start again. 

Cottage cheese on the left, yogurt on the right. Don't they look similar? Yogurt is supposed to be a thick liquid and no separation of the whey/curds. 

This is the old fashioned way to make cheese/cottage cheese. So that's fun! And I do have more milk to use in the fridge, so the extra cheese is not the end of the world. 

Quest: From the Box Brownies

I love the texture of brownies baked from a box. Horrible for the from-scratch-baker, I know. I've been searching for a scratch recipe for a while and a 4Her had one that came pretty close. Of course I saved the recipe!

It was so tempting to change the recipe... Less sugar, fresh milled flour, etc. But for the first time trying it, I figured I should stay as true as I could. 

I did substitute duck eggs for chicken eggs. 😜

They came together fairly quickly. Not sure about the bake time. I set a timer on the early side and ended up adding minutes until I got to the full bake time the recipe said. 

Cutting them up sure looked like the gooey box mix. 

They tasted great. Still not perfect, but that could be my error. I think I either over stirred or overbaked them. Or both. It's a little strange because the bottom of the brownies has a cake like texture, which makes me think over stirred or overbaked. But the top of the center pieces are verrrry gooey, like it's under baked. So who knows about that. It reminded me a little of chocolate lava cake. The recipe does call for lots of butter and melted chocolate chips, so I wonder if it's meant to be underdone. 

Will I make them again? Yes. Will I tweak it more than I already have? Quite possibly. 

Much Ado about Garlic

The garlic has been curing in the garage for plenty long. Time to finally get it ready for long-term storage. 

Some garlic (soft neck varieties) you can braid and hang. We have a hard neck variety which I tried to braid anyway. You can see how well that worked below. 😅

So I clipped the tops off and the roots for alternative storage.

Then I had the idea of making little bundles to hang up. 

Here they are in the fruit room!

 Cute and tidy!

Got Cabbage?

It's absolutely amazing to me how God provides.

Here I was, subtly lamenting how little produce our garden was producing this year (although also thankful for the lighter workload), telling myself it would be a good year to eat down what we have in the fruit room. 

Then G comes home from the garden center with this: 

His boss/coworker went to an Amish produce auction and came back with humongous quantities of veggies, all at very cheap prices (sold in bulk). Cabbage, cucumbers, beets, green beans, potatoes, sweet corn. 

What was I saying about that lighter workload? 😅 

We plugged in an extra fridge out in the garage and loaded it with cabbage. The heads are so massive only 20 fit. 

This is the entire fridge portion of the appliance. 😂I was able to fill the door with apples, so it's not just cabbage in there. 

G ate the last of my homemade sauerkraut, so I'm due to make more. These will keep for a long time in cold storage, so we'll be able to pull from them for months. If they get a little gross or wilted, just peel off the outer layer!

Potato Harvest

Out of potatoes in the house? No problem! Time to see what's in the potato containers.

G moved them into the garage a few weeks ago once the tops of the potatoes died off. We didn't want the containers to get waterlogged in the rain and rot the potatoes, but we weren't ready to dig them up yet. So they've sat in the garage until now. 

I had to dig down quite a ways to get to the potatoes. 

Not a super gigantic harvest, but the potatoes are much bigger than last year's (for the most part). 

I chopped them up and cooked them in New England Boiled Dinner (cabbage, potatoes, sausage, carrots, water to cover, and salt and pepper to taste). So tasty! I wish I remembered which variety these are... I'd definitely plant them again. 😅

 

Smorgasboard Post- Garden, Mildew, Sybil, Jaron

The soup bean plants have been flowering for a few weeks. G thought they weren't actually going to produce any pods, but Jaron found one. He really wanted to pick it. He's a picking monster. Anything he thinks he can pull on in the garden, he does. 

I thought we had escaped the vining plant mildew this year, but it has appeared. G thinks it's because it wasn't very windy for a number of days so the plants stayed damp. I sprayed them with neem oil, which Google says is supposed to help. 

I did another search and apparently mixing milk with water and spraying it on also does the trick. Hmm... we do have an abundance of milk right now...

Speaking of milk, Sybil has been seen eating in the pasture! She still would rather eat hay from the shed. Her milk production seems to be picking back up a bit. 

For a while, she did not want to put her head in the milking stand; my theory is that it was too tight on her neck. I adjusted the stand- pounded in a fence staple a little further in to give her another inch of neck space- and since then she's gotten a little better about putting her head in. 

Still, for a while it took both G and me to convince her to stick her head through. We actually resorted to using an old sheep halter from my 4H days to pull her head through once she was up on the stand. But, it seems we've turned a corner. The past two milkings G has been able to get her in there himself without help. 

A few fun Jaron moments from the past week: 

 

Apple Pick

Apple season! It's so fun to watch Jaron get excited about picking apples. He did pretty well putting them in the basket and not taking a bite of every single one (though he did take some bites). 

Our apple trees are pretty young still; the oldest has been planted for about three years. That means we aren't getting a huge crop of apples yet. This tree's branches are pretty spindly and you can see how weighed down by the fruit they were- almost touching the ground!

Since we were picking things, we checked out the garden too. 

I planted these beets last fall and thought none of them had come up! Lo and behold, two grew to a pickable size- candy cane beets. They certainly live up to their name!

We did another apple pick this past weekend at my parents' farm. Their apple trees were all ready to harvest, so we brought our students along to give them the apple picking experience.