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...

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. 😅