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.