The Self Reliants » Canning & Recipes

Granola

admin — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 17:48:29 +0000

Some time last year I was crunching a box of spendy store-bought granola and thought, “Waaaait a minute; I can make this stuff! I don’t have to waste all this money on corn syrup and BHT and methylchloroisothiazolinone*.” (Ever wonder how the stuff you buy in the store stays fresh in the months between the time it’s manufactured in the factory** and the time you eat it? Eew.)

Granola has acquired something of a bad name because of its association in the vernacular with vapid environmentalism. While I don’t hug trees, I do love granola. It’s cheap, healthy, cheap, delicious, cheap, filling, and cheap; and its variety can be almost infinite. (I grew up on unbaked granola and never liked it; but that’s okay—it’s still granola.) And did I mention it’s cheap?

After months of experimenting, here’s the variety we like best.
Heat 1/2 cup butter, 1/3 cup honey, and 3/4 cup of packed brown sugar and heat until it’s melted together.
In a large bowl combine the following:
7 cups rolled oats (not Quick Oats)
1 cup chopped pecans (or almonds: we have a nut-chopper so can buy raw whole nuts at the store)
1/2 cup raisins or dried cranberries
1/2 cup coconut

Mix well and add the liquid mixture to it, toss to coat, and bake at 325 for 25 minutes on two well-greased cookie sheets. This yields enough to feed our army for some time, so you may want to half the batch. When baked, remove from oven and scrape immediately into a non-plastic bowl and let it cool. Store in an airtight container. If you try to scrape it off the cookie sheets once it’s cool, you won’t be able to. You’d need methylchloroisothiazolinone to get it off.

*I learned this word from my friend Jeff when I was about 15. It’s one of the ingredients in shampoo, but it’s not the longest word I ever learned. That honor belongs to pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, followed by floccinaucinihilipilification, and then that old chestnut, antidisestablishmentarianism. “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” doesn’t count.

**Now really, do you want to eat food made in a factory? Blah! (Froot Loops don’t count; I have a bowl of those once a year or so, and by the time I’m done with it I’m good for another year.) I smirk every time I see the word “natural” or “healthy” slapped on a tray of frozen goo. Did I ever tell you about the time I was at corporate headquarters of Kraft “Foods” in Illinois? No? Half the employees were walking around in white lab coats. They were chemists, not cooks!

Green tomato/raspberry jam alchemy

admin — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 23:43:56 +0000

When the cold weather hit a few weeks back, Jess was forced to pick all of her tomatoes, even though few of them were ripe. The adolescent fruit* huddled in the mud room for a few weeks, huddled together in boxes and buckets, awaiting their transition from green to red.

Then they started all turning red at once. They made for fabulous eating, but they’d ripen and go soft before we could eat them. In this case, there’s only one thing to do: Make them into raspberry jam.

How? Well, first you have to turn them into Green Tomato Glop, as pictured above. That’s easy; just run ‘em through the blender. Then you add raspberry Jell-O powder according to the following top-secret alchemy:

2.5 cups Green Tomato Glop
2 cups sugar
1 3-oz box raspberry Jell-O
Bring tomatoes and sugar to a boil, reduce heat and simmer 20 minutes. Remove from heat, stir in Jell-O, skim off the foam (you can use this as a fireproof coating for little kids’ jammies) (kidding), pour the mixture into little jam jars and freeze. Tastes great. I had some on my toast this morning. No wait, that was the pear-cranberry jam.

Our tomato harvest this year produced some 25 pints of raspberry jam. (We didn’t make the real stuff this year because our raspberry plants were very sad in all the rain.) It tastes great, with the color, consistency and approximately the flavor of raspberry jam. It even has little seeds that stick between your teeth, except the seeds are mushier and don’t wedge so tightly.

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* Yes, botanically speaking, tomatoes are a fruit. If you’ve had a rich and fulfilling life believing tomatoes are a vegetable, and my shocking assertion has caused your worldview to come crashing down around your ears, and you think there’s no further meaning to existence except nihilism or hedonism (the one leads to the other), well, sorry. Try Mormonism: it works beautifully for me.

The Case of the Elderberry Placebo

admin — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 00:28:27 +0000

Do placebos really work against illness? And if they do, who really cares if they’re a placebo?

I’ve been reading a Nancy Drew book to Abby and Katie every night; last night we finished The Secret of Mirror Bay. The question posed above sounds like a question for Ms. Drew (avoiding all questions of equivalent complexity). So when I pulled up this picture from last month’s elderberry harvest (and this is only half of it) and thought how my morning swig of elderberry juice & honey has seemed to keep all this season’s sniffles away, I thought, Is it real, or is it Placebo-x?

I don’t know whether a few daily tablespoons of elderberry juice really does keep a cold away. Maybe it’s all in my head. I don’t even like the taste of it (too sweet. Blech. I don’t really go for sweet things). All I know is, it seems to work. The kids bring home all kinds of bugs from school, but I take elderberry juice and I don’t get sick. That’s a trade I’m willing to make. This medicine is insanely cheap; it does the job; and in taking it, I’m not supporting any inane pharmaceutical commercials (not that I see them anyway). And that’s worth it to me, placebo or not.

Hold the onions

admin — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 19:44:22 +0000

Noodles the cat turns her back on some of this year’s onions, just like many a child. I grew up with onions in my food, so I like them. Jess didn’t discover cooking with green onions until she married me, and now she’s a devoted fan. (Thus the next generation is unwittingly drawn in to the onion-loving cabal.) In fact this is not all off them; Jess harvested green onions throughout the season, and yesterday pulled out all the remaining ones (a full bucket-load) since the frost has arrived. She’ll slice and freeze those stalks for use throughout the winter.

Most of the yellow onions in this shot went into the salsa she canned two weeks ago (the salsa also involved tomatoes from the garden and peppers from the greenhouse, of which there were apparently many more than I thunk). The red onions are bundled up and sitting in the root cellar, alongside the 150 pounds of potatoes given us by friends (we have yet to see how well our own did) and the thousands of other denizens of our rapidly filling root cellar.

Greenhouse update

admin — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 21:48:00 +0000

I don’t think I’ve ever posted a picture of the inside of the greenhouse, at least once it started making things green. Here you see the wraparound shelves made of office light fixtures; Emma and I completed the shelves on the right after I wrote about them, but Jess found to my consternation that not enough light penetrates to the lower shelves to grown anything there. So we use them for storage.

If you were to see the greenhouse in person you would see why I say it looks like it was built by Robinson Crusoe. Bent nails, irregular angles, used lumber–kind of a mess. I did much better building the bike shed. But the greenhouse hasn’t fallen down yet, and I bet the bank windows prefer being out here to being in pieces in a landfill somewhere. (You can still see the bank hours silkscreened on one of the windows at the top of this shot.) As for the rest of it, you see that we just wrapped the walls in plastic and that was fine. Maybe we’ll have the money to replace it someday, but not today. And plastic seems to do just fine, ‘cept in a high wind.

Way back when we started growing things in the greenhouse, ‘long ‘bout May, we had scores of little plants out here. Tomatoes, peppers, beans, celery, cantaloupe, watermelon, cucumbers, I don’t know what all. As the plants got bigger and the summer got warmer, Jess gradually moved them outside. Eventually all that was left in the greenhouse were the watermelon, cantaloupe, and peppers. Our cantaloupe did better this year: It managed to produce twice as many fruits as last year (for a total of two), one of which was twice as big as last year’s effort (baseball sized, instead of egg sized). The watermelon did about the same. The peppers look fabulous but there’s not a whole lot of pepperage on the plants. Lots of great leaves, not lots of great peppers. Well, we’ll try something different next year. That’s gardening’s theme: There’s always next year.

Interestingly, our celery did surprisingly well. We had five or six plants, and they flourished in the greenhouse until Jess took them outside, and then they flourished outside as well. They never got the big tall green stalks you see in the trucked-from-California variety, but their stalks were six or eight inches long and good eatin’. I just had some in my soup for lunch.

Spring music

admin — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 19:12:20 +0000

It’s a bit like Satie. Or, in our case, Satie played by daughter Emma on our old piano. On a fresh Saturday morning, spring sunshine gleams in the dining room windows (which you can tell I’ve washed, not altogether effectually, with my homemade window cleaner) (It’s the squeegee’s fault!). These cold jars of cider have just emerged from their long winter’s nap in the root cellar, and are basking in the morning light prior to joining us for breakfast. Jess is making breakfast, the kids are upstairs breaking something or other, and the morning sun is angling up from the southeast, at an angle just steeper than the ridge. The jars catch the light and turn incandescent. They’re filled with homemade sweet cider, pressed from the apples we gathered last fall, canned at home, and packed in the cold root cellar under the kitchen. It’s like health in a jar.

Saturday mornings usually mean a big day ahead: lots of cleanup, lots of laundry, some special projects inside, and a couple of big projects outside. I may have to tinker with the cars or swing the ladder up against the house; I will have to make bread and refill the woodpile on the back porch (36 cubic feet of wood for a week’s heat—not bad, I’d say). Saturdays are always busy. Later on maybe I’ll take the kids exploring or settle down for a little reading. But at our house, it’s work in the morning, play in the afternoon. The morning sunshine feeds ambition—I’ve got things to do.

But just now, on my way past the dining room, I see these cold jars basking in the fresh sunshine, and I have to grab for the camera. It’s like music in the light. It’s analgous to our lives, maybe. It’s a homemade life, but it’s as fresh and delicate and real as a piece by Satie.

Mmm, Homemade Whole Wheat Bread for Dummies

admin — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 22:18:56 +0000

Well, practice makes perfect. And this, my friends, is as perfect as I’m likely to get making bread. Not to brag or anything, but I FAR prefer our bread to the sliced mystery you get at the grocery store. I like this stuff so much I’ve asked Jess to pack two slices (with homemade butter, of course), into my lunch every day. Nummy!

It’s a modification of my old bread recipe. After lots of practice and many mistakes, I’ve found some things that work. No doubt I’ll come up with other shortcuts in future, and probably ruin it in the process, but for now it works pretty well. And for somebody who isn’t much smarter than bread himself, well, I like it.

Put 6 cups hot (116°) water in a measuring bowl and add 1/4 cup (4 T) yeast. Then combine the following in the bread mixer:
12 cups whole wheat flour
3 cups white flour
1 1/2 T salt
1 cup brown sugar (I like mild honey instead, but we ran out)
1/3 cup oil
3 T dough enhancer (this is the ticket, friends, to good soft bread)

Pour the yeast mixture in and mix the whole schmere for 10 minutes. While it’s mixin’, grease 6 bread pans. When it’s done mixin’, grease your (immaculately clean) hands and divide the dough evenly among the pans. I twist the lumps of dough a little to smooth them out. Set the pans in the oven to rise (don’t turn it on; but flip on the oven light so you can see when it’s riz). It takes less than an hour for the bread to rise up big and puffy (at least I think it does; I’m always off doing something else while the bread rises). At that point, turn the oven on to 375° for 30 minutes or so, and remove when the loaves sound kind of hollow when flipped with a fingernail. Slather with homemade butter and enjoy.

See, it’s not an exact science. You may want to divide this recipe in half or even thirds (I tripled the batch from the cookbook, along with other modifications). But hey, our forebears didn’t have timers and thermostats to make their bread. Just kind of wing it, learn from your mistakes, and enjoy. I sure do!

Spring canning

admin — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 20:07:37 +0000

Wait a minute …Doesn’t canning happen with harvest? Like fall time? Yup. But it also happens whenever a surplus of empty jars coincides with a big sale on frozen chicken breasts. Jess had me pick up some meat on Monday, and when I got home on Wednesday there were 25 quarts of canned chicken (and beans; she likes to pre-cook beans for her recipes) ready to go down into the root cellar.

Of course sometimes we will go through that many jars of canned food in a single week. (Remarkable, isn’t it? Almost as if we had seven children.) At that rate the pantry can fill up pretty fast with washed and empty jars. We tranfer the empty jars back down to the root cellar, but with hundreds of jars to store, that fills up too. So Jess likes to keep the jars circulating. And canned chicken and canned beans are a great first step for a hot supper, too.

Since beans start out hard and chicken starts out raw, you have to pressure can them for a certain amount of time to make sure they’re safe. Jess has the Ball canning book that imparts all those secrets. I know that if you don’t can meat correctly you can get salmonella or other nasties; but as far as I can tell none of us has died yet from eating home-canned meat.

You’ll note the jars of chicken appear about half full. They start out full; when she’s canning, she slices the chicken breasts into strips the long way and packs ‘em in. But they cook down to the quantity shown here. And since we don’t eat a ton of meat, one jar half-full of cooked chicken is plenty for a big supper for all of us, plus the portion I’ll tote to work next day for lunch.

Homemade sour cream

admin — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 00:43:30 +0000

One pint o'homemade sour cream. Would you like fries with that?

I promised you Homemade Week last week, and I made good on that promise by staying home on Friday. So no post. Actually I wasn’t home much that day, having accepted an invitation to spend my day off first at the local high school career day, talking up my career (such as it is), and later at the elementary school, losing a battle with the 4th grade class as to how to draw their self portraits. I had lost my voice. It is useless to go to war with 4th graders when one has laryngitis.

So it’s a new week, and I have to tell you about homemade sour cream. Jess made some last week and put it on potatoes she made, and wow! I was impressed. It was not as thick as the store-bought stuff, but I figure just about everything we make, grow, or raise at home will be different somehow from the store-bought variety.

Here’s the ree-sype. Or, I should say, the dee-rexions.

Get one pint of the thickest possible cream off your gallon of raw milk. Better yet, get one pint of cream off of two gallons of milk, to ensure that you don’t have any wimpy cream (or, horrors, actual milk) in your future sour cream.

Place the pint jar o’cream in a bowl of hot water to warm it up. When the jar is warm to the touch, add 3-4 tablespoons of buttermilk (“the fresher the better,” we’re told), depending on the desired consistency. Mix buttermilk with cream, cover, and let it sit out on the kitchen counter overnight. In the morning, you’ll have sour cream.

Once it’s sour cream’s sour, you’ll have to put it in the fridge. Otherwise you’ll have a Bad Thing.

The first time we did this, we had sour cream. And behold, it was yummy. The second, third, or tenth time, we do it, you never know. I’ve learned to make better bread by defying my own recipe, and Jessica produced yogurt the other day that had the consistency of actual yogurt (instead of yogurt-flavored liquid), simply by breaking the rules that came with the yogurt-maker. That’s how these things go. Practice makes perfect. If our recipes ever kill me, I’ll let you know.

It’s homemade week!

admin — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 22:38:43 +0000

Ingrediments for windshield washer fluid

Actually I can’t make weeks at home, so I can’t truthfully advertise homemade weeks. If I could, I would have made about a thousand of them already and quit my job. In the absence of that, however, I’ll document all the homemamde stuff I made this weekend. I’ll also try to document how those homemade things have panned out.

Today: Homemade windshield-washer fluid. (Really.)

Every day for the past two weeks when I’ve started up the Jeep, it dings at me and flashes the cryptic sign “LOWASH.” No pending engine failure here; I faced a more catastrophic disaster: LOW WINDSHIELD WASHER FLUID!! Being penniless and besides lacking the time to slog over to my local Schuck’s (unfriendly salespeople) or Wal-Mart (twenty minutes to park, thirty minutes to find product, seventeen hours to check out), last Saturday I thought, “Huh. Wonder if I could make my own.”

So I did.

Here’s the recipe*:
2 cups white vinegar
1/2 cup rubbing alcohol
3 quarts warmish water

I used this much liquid because I was very low on LOWASH fluid. It’s springtime around here (sorry, you east-coasters who are still buried in snow), and that means our local dirt road is a swamp with potholes. It makes for filthy vehicles, dirty glass, and consequently lots of used LOWASH fluid. If you live in the Clutches of Suburbia, you might not need to make so much. Reduce ingredients proportionately, and you may want to add blue food coloring so nobody drinks it. Or to make it look store bought. I assume no responsibility if your vehicle detonates halfway down the driveway. (Or if anything else goes wrong. Just so we’re clear.)

How does it work?

Perfectly. It cuts the mud, grime and smear from the glass, and so far it does not streak. I am one happy (and smug) customer. The alcohol lowers the freezing temperature of the water, and this morning I used it to clear the frost from the windshield. Wonder why I never tried that before.

We’ll see how it works in the summertime, when the bugs are out. Since spring is sprung already, summer is right around the corner, bugs included. If it doesn’t work, I’ll probably tinker with the recipe before I try to buy more at Schuck’s.

*This word is pronounced “REE-sype” in our house, since it’s actually spelled that way. Now you know.