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!