Salsa

It's so hard to find a USDA approved recipe for the kind of salsa I want. I don't enjoy very spicy food, so it's tough to know if the recipe will be too spicy with the amount of peppers it calls for. 

Last year I made "choice salsa", but that ended up being heavy on the onions and bell peppers and not enough tomato for my liking. This year, I tried paste tomato salsa. The recipe seemed to make a huge amount, so I halved it, especially not knowing if we'd like the end result. I like it much better than previous recipes I've tried, but G says to keep looking. It's not chunky enough. 

I thought the spice level was good. One resource on the USDA website said that if a recipe calls for long peppers or chili peppers, bell peppers can be substituted. So I used a quarter cup of spicy peppers in my seven quart recipe with bell peppers for the rest and the spice was perfect. 

 

Garden Update

I spent some time in the garden to pick my plethora of tomatoes. It was so nice out and Jaron stayed asleep long enough, I was able to do some weeding too.

I uncovered a patch of onions I forgot about. I don't know when onions quit growing, so I left a couple green ones in the ground.

Most of my carrots aren't peaking out of the soil, but I did find a couple big ones. A fresh carrot straight out of the ground is one of my favorite garden treats. 

The seeds on my cilantro plants are dried now. I wasn't sure if they'd fall off or stay on the plant. They stay on the plant. I was able to pick them and store them for next year. 

Believe it or not, my mildewy squash plants are still producing! I got three nicely sized zucchini and two pattypan squash. I haven't picked beans in weeks, so the beans I found were large and coarse. A few smaller ones are coming, so I picked the big beans hoping that would cause more to grow. G isn't as picky as I am about beans, and the goats can always eat them if he doesn't. 

This little guy woke up right at the end and still somehow ended up with a mouthful of grass and seeds...

Make Your Own Melties

Jaron loves melties. I finally made him a batch of homemade using pear sauce, freeze dried bananas, blueberry powder, a can of coconut milk, and dried mango. It tasted so good on its own, I could've eaten the whole thing myself. Maybe I'll make a batch for that purpose. 😅

I put the blend in a ziplock bag and cut the corner to pipe dots on a silicone mat. They ended up pretty small. Next time I'll make them bigger. 

I popped them in the freezer until my freeze drier trays were open, then used a cookie scraper to relocate them to the freeze drier trays.

They didn't puff up at all after freeze drying. The flavor wasn't nearly as strong as it was pre-drying. I wonder why. 🤔

Duck Door Adjustment

Our sneaky goats keep going through the duck door to get to the duck feed any chance they get. We've been letting the ducks out to the pasture, so it's been a daily thing lately. 🙄

G and I finally adjusted the door by screwing two thin boards over the top of the opening. Hopefully now it's too small for the goats to fit through but big enough for the ducks! 

Freeze Dried Pears

This handy kitchen gadget makes prepping pears much easier. 

I bought it for apples, and the blade is getting dull, but it's still sharp enough for pears. The tomato corer on the right of the cutting board makes cutting out the seeds super easy too. 

I packed as many as I could on the freeze dryer trays. Once both of my sets of trays were full, I arranged slices on cookie sheets lined with silicone mats and put two more loads. The freeze dryer will be active for a while!

For canning pears, I blanched, peeled, and cored pears. I ended up with 7 quarts. 

 

Battling Fruit Flies

Our house has been overrun with fruit flies. Just when I think I have a handle on them, there's another influx. It doesn't help that I'm in the midst of preservation... apples, pears, tomatoes... My kitchen is a fruit fly's dream come true. 😜 

It got bad enough G joined the battle. We cleaned all the kitchen surfaces, tucked fruit in the fridge, took out the garbage, and cleaned the sink drains. 

And we made a ton of traps. Some have kombucha and some have apple cider vinegar. It's actually a batch I made years ago from apple peels/cores that had been used to make apple cider vinegar once before. The cores/peels still had so much juice in them, I couldn't throw them out! But the ACV ended up as something else, more alcohol scented and flavored. It's been sitting on the shelf and I haven't been able to bring myself to throw it out. Good thing I didn't! The flies like the vinegar best. 

I tossed the kombucha traps and made all of them vinegar. Some have paper cones and some have plastic bags with holes poked in the top. The paper cones are winning right now. 

 

Moving Kittens

A few weeks ago, Mopsy, our mamma cat, had her second litter of kittens this year. SIX healthy kittens. She had them up in the haymow, which is a good place, aside from the gaps in the 'floor'. Somehow they all survived, even if one of them needed to be helped back up into the haymow after falling down. 

Well, she decided to relocate her family to the side of the garage where hiding places abound. 

My father-in-law keeps a close eye on them. He started feeding them hard food and all the kittens are eating it. No doubt Mopsy is already teaching them her hunting ways ...

Bigger

The pullet eggs are getting bigger! The green ones are from Dixie, our full grown hen. The white are from the leghorns we got earlier this year. 

A couple of the eggs are very dirty. That's because those hens choose to lay their eggs in the duck pen where mud is abundant. 😐

Ruling the Roost

The ducks like to sleep outside and rarely go into the goat shed, however, most of the chickens go inside when night falls. Not this guy. He found his own ideal night perch. 

That got me thinking that our trampoline chickens don't have anywhere to roost. Well, that can be easily fixed.

I started by sticking an old wooden baseball bat through the goat fencing reinforcing the trampoline. You can see that was a hit (pun intended). 😉

Not much room for them all. 

How about some logs? There's plenty of firewood against the garage; it was easy to find two with crotches a longer branch could bridge. 

The curious chickens checked it out right away! 

At one point, six of the seven birds were on at once, but I didn't get a picture; they moved too fast. I didn't use anything to fasten the wood together, just gravity. So far it's still standing!

 

 

Taste of Freedom

Goats are pretty smart. They remember stuff too. I.e. how good the food on the other side of the fence tastes.

Of course that makes them try harder to escape.

We've had a few mishaps with the fence this summer and unfortunately our fruit trees and bushes have suffered. G thinks they'll make a comeback next year and the damage isn't severe. All I can see are my poor hostas nipped to the ground yet again. It seems like every time they get going again, the goats sneak out. "That's what you get for having goats!" people say. It's a good thing they're cute...

The latest round of chicks are enjoying trampoline life. Jip was interested at first, but now they're background noise. The goats love sitting on top of the trampoline soaking in the sun. How many can you see in the picture below? G says he's seen as many as six on there at once. 

They love rubbing against the sides. We've had to reinforce the chicken wire with goat fencing to keep the chicks in. 

One chick has tasted freedom. She figured out how to get out through a gap in the chicken wire. It's covered with goat fencing, but she's small enough to fit through those holes. She is also smart enough to find her way back inside the trampoline. I've given up trying to keep her in. 

The chicks are getting close to being able to be with the rest of the flock. I'm not sure how we're going to meld our flocks together. They said do it in the middle of the night so the chickens can't see anything and move them all to a neutral place. They wake up in the morning and their cliques are all messed up, so they form new ones. 

The thing we're missing is a neutral place...

Asking for Work

I'm a little crazy...

Apples from my brother's tree, a laundry basket of pears from a friend, and a few bags of sweet corn. 

Some of the corn got cooked right away for supper. Unfortunately, the ears that didn't get cooked dried out before I could get to them. G fed them to the chickens and ducks who thoroughly enjoyed them. 

The apples are still hanging out in the garage. They should be good there for a while. The pears on the other hand... 

Pears ripen from the inside out. They also ripen within a few days of being picked. I sorted through the laundry basket organizing them by ripeness. I ended up with a small bucket of green, a slightly larger amount of yellow green, and a big tote of ripe and ready. Less than half a five gallon pail had bruise marks and less than half a gallon were completely bad/tossed out. 

The bruised ones got cleaned up and cooked into sauce. I might turn them into freeze dried melties for Jaron. A load of pears is in the freeze dryer with a second load in the freezer to go in next. I'll probably can the rest if Jaron cooperates. He's been under the weather and therefore doesn't want me out of arms reach all day. 😵‍💫

Buckwheat

Buckwheat is one of the foods on the first 100 foods list for babies doing baby led weaning, and it's one food we haven't had Jaron try yet. 

I whipped up a batch of buckwheat pancakes. There was a simpler recipe, but I didn't have any bananas. This one calls for either bananas or applesauce, so I used applesauce. There is a variation for eggless pancakes substituting chia seeds or flax seed for the egg. I made a second batch using chia instead of egg. Egg batch on left, chia on right. 

The batter on the left was runnier and easier to pour. 

The texture is pretty similar, although the egg batch is a little more spongy and smooth. That chia seed makes the batter a little bit more grainy. Top- egg, bottom- chia. 

Left- egg, right - chia

I tried pouring some of the batter into strips to make it easier for Jaron to grab onto and eat. The egg batter made this easier as you can see from the pancakes pictured below. Chia- left, egg- right. 

It made plenty! They're all in the freezer for the days we need a quick breakfast. 

Jaron was a neutral about them. He got tired of the plain ones pretty quickly. I put almond butter and coconut flakes on one and he liked that better. Strawberry jam on mine was delicious! 

What's Growing?

My cilantro took off and left me in the dust. It flowered and went to seed before I could use any. I put a mesh bag over one of the seed clusters to see if I could collect any of the seeds for next year. 

I harvested a few turnips and rutabaga along with some garlic and small onions. And as you can see I have plenty of tomatoes coming in.

Found this cool dragonfly as I picked tomatoes.

Unfortunately, our spicy pepper plants are super abundant. Neither G nor I love spicy peppers. I only wanted to plant one spicy pepper plant, thinking that amount would be perfect for making salsa, but G got some for free from the garden center and we planted all of them. I planted a bunch of bell pepper plants too, but they have not been doing much of anything this year. 

As you can see the ratio is way off. The peppers I'm holding in the right of the picture are the only bell peppers we have. Everything in the green tote is spicy!

Our cucumbers are done. The strange mildew has won and the vines are giving up. 

The carrots are growing but not ready to harvest yet. We're still getting a few zucchini and it looks like we might have a couple watermelon coming. Otherwise, it's all tomatoes!

Inaugural Candy Run

G and I are not big candy eaters, but we know candy is popular with many of our family and friends, so we did our first try of freeze drying candy.

I searched up what candy is most popular freeze dried: Skittles, mini Starburst, and carmel stuff. So I bought the first two. G also bought a giant bag of Nerd Clusters to test out.

The Harvest Right app is super handy and gives suggested temps and times for each candy, plus recommendations on which candies dry well together. 

It shows before and after pics too. That made me realize I can't crowd the trays as much as I do for fruits and veggies. We don't want an explosion! Here are our loaded trays about to go in:

I didn't have quite enough Skittles for a full try, so I used up my old Cream Savers on the other half. Their drying instructions aren't similar, so it was an experiment to see what happens. 

Candy doesn't take that long to freeze dry, play a few hours generally speaking. Nerd Clusters took the longest at 9 hours. They also got the puffiest.

The cream savers definitely exploded. They puffed up so high they touched the heating element above the tray. We canceled that load before it was done just in case they would expand even more. That resulted in candy that seemed crunchy but was still squishy in the middle. Kind of fun to eat, but doesn't keep well. After a couple of hours, the cream savers looked like cotton candy that has gotten wet. 

Aside from that, I would say our first run of candy was a success!
 

Freeze Dried Elderberry Juice

I found a bunch of elderberry juice taking up space in the freezer waiting to be turned into elderberry syrup. Let's freeze dry it! 

Putting the filled pans into the freezer was terrifying. Thankfully, I didn't spill! 

Since the past two liquids I freeze dried didn't need the silicone mats, I opted to not use them this time. Mistake! It stuck to the pan pretty bad. I needed to scrape all of it out. On the other hand, it did turn into a powder instantly.

Since the juice will be rehydrated to make syrup, I was careful to weigh each tray beforehand. I weighed it afterwards to find out how much water was taken out, i.e. how much water would need to be added back in. It ended up being about 3c per tray, and conveniently, one tray fit in one pint jar. 

DIY Bouillon

I made beef broth the other day from soup bones in the freezer. I had planned to can the broth, but the canning instructions said to cool it in the fridge to skim the fat and then reheat it to boiling, and I decided freeze drying might be a better option. 

So I skimmed the fat (which G fed to Jip).

Then spread it in the pans. It had the consistency of jello and evened out okay. 

The Harvest Right app recommends freezing all liquids before freeze drying so there aren't any explosions from uneven heating/cooling. 

Putting it in the freezer was the hardest part! I wanted it to be level so I ended up wedging a couple of thin items under the end of the pan to keep the broth from sliding to one side.

It freeze dried perfectly and left the solids behind in an interesting pattern. Like the cream of mushroom soup, it came off the pan perfectly even without the silicone mats. 

Did I weigh each pan to be able to tell how much liquid to add in? Nope. But I figure I can use the powder like bullion and the soup water will rehydrate it for me. 

Moldy Maple

I didn't realize maple syrup needed to be stored in the fridge. I learned that this past spring when my family made syrup for the first time, but I didn't think to relocate the maple syrup in my pantry. 

I pulled out the jar today to use some in a recipe and found a thin layer of whitish-yellowish mold floating on top. My first thought was, "no! I don't want to throw this away!" My second thought was, "maybe I don't have to..." 

A quick Google search later revealed that no, you don't need to throw moldy syrup away. Skim the mold off the top; it grows in one giant clump easy to pull out. Boil the syrup on the stove for one minute, pour into a clean jar, cool and return to fridge. Voilá! 

So, that's what I did. 

Instead of scraping the pan out with a spatula, I'll cook breakfast in it tomorrow. 

Maybe it's this particular jar, but as I reheated it, I caught a delightful bonfire smell coming from the syrup. It reminded me of cool fall nights and crisp autumn air. 😊 We're not too far from those!

Sourdough Pizza

I needed something quick for supper and it was also time to refresh my sourdough. Answer: sourdough pizza crust. I made this once before as a breakfast pizza, and I didn't have quite enough discard to cover the pan. My crust that time was very thin and not very big. To avoid the same thing happening again, I made a supplement of flour and water, 50/50. Total I had about one cup to deal with. 

You start by heating up your oven to 450° with the cast iron pan or pizza stone in the oven to preheat. While the oven is preheating, gently cook your pizza toppings in a separate pan. This is because the pizza dough will cook quite rapidly. 

When your oven is hot enough, take the stone out and simply spread the sourdough discard in a circle. Add layers if you want the crust to be thicker. Pop that in the oven for 10 minutes, then take it out to put toppings on. Cook until the cheese is to your preference. 

I did a faux Margarita Pizza with tomatoes from the garden, fresh basil from the garden, a sprinkle of salt, and whatever cheese was in the fridge.

There was a little dough left over, so I made a tea baby one for Jaron. I left the salt off and put just a tiny bit of cheese on top.

 They turned out pretty good! Jaron definitely enjoyed his. A few things I would change for next time: I forgot to put oil on the pizza stone before spreading my crust, and it was a bit tricky to get off. Also, I thought the sourdough crust was a bit bland and would have been improved by adding salt. Next time I will mix a little bit of salt into the dough before I spread it on the pan. But. It's so easy I will definitely be doing this again!