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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

But enough about buckwheat already! This post was supposed to be about our butter. (Which is quite tasty, if somewhat chunkier than the storebought “bread spread”, which we have taken to calling PHVO at our house [for Partially Hydrogenated Vegetable Oil, which is what it is.]). (Can anyone suggest how I can avoid using parenthetical statements all the time? [I’m so distractable that I’m always inserting parentheses (which frequently have nothing to do with the subject [which in this case has become so lost that my (parenthetical observations have completely overpowered the post [Parentheses are neat. (You can keep stacking them inside each other [like those little Ukranian dolls (and at the end of the statement [they all unwind at once (like this)])])])])]).

Back to the butter. Since we now get raw milk from the neighbors (someone alert the FDA! Help! Help! I’m engaging in Non-Government-Approved Agricultural Activity!!!), we have plenty ‘nough cream to make bucketloads of butter every week. Last time Jess just gave a quart jar of cream to each child and had them shake it till it butterized, but I don’t see that activity holding its appeal for very long. It will quickly turn into Work. I can just hear the kids now: “Make bed, clean room, throw jammies on floor, practice piano, feed chickens, gather eggs, make butter. Mommmmm! Do I hafta?” So, being the good Dad I am, I called in the aid of the (dramatic music here) Power Mixer. Da da taaaaaa!

Rule Number 1 of making butter with the Power Mixer: Always Put a Lid On First. This is the sad voice of experience.

Rule No. 2: Get the cream out of the fridge first thing in the morning and don’t plan on making butter till sometime after lunch. This is because cream needs to be not cold if you want it to butterize. This is the impatient and frustrated voice of experience.

Rule No. 3: Send a couple of kids all the way down to the end of the driveway without a coat (and preferably toting something fragile) so that Mom will go running out of the kitchen when the cream turns to butter. This is because the butterization happens quickly, and the buttermilk will come spurting out of the holes in the Power Mixer lid, and your wife will be not happy with you when she sees buttermilk on her counter. Buttermilk is great for homemade biscuits. (Not for the Pillsbury Detonating Canister kind. If you add homemade buttermilk to those, the chemical reaction will cause your kitchen to burst into flame.) This is why you must distract your wife first.

Rule No. 4: Rinse butter. If you do not rinse butter with cold water until the water runs clear, the milk stays in the butter and goes rancid. This is icky.

Rule No. 5: Enjoy. It is especially helpful to get bread crumbs and butter globules all over your keyboard. You are not allowed to gloat at the wretched mortals who must eat PHVO on their Pillsbury Remotely-Resembles-Biscuit Food Product, since you yourself were eating PHVO not so long ago.

We’ll have to make do with our patchy snow and mud. In the mean time, not to rub it in or anything, we’re grateful to have a root cellar.

I was at the tax man’s the other day and saw his copy of the Wall Street Journal. The front-page, above-the-fold picture was of a couple of folks in a barren supermarket, picking up what they could get of what was left. It was just a few forlorn lemons, as I recall. I hear that back east the weather is so bad, people are burning all their books by Al Gore to keep warm.

In the meantime, we have our own grocery store at home.

This is an old picture of our root cellar. Now it’s so crammed with supplies that we have step up on the shelves and pick our way back like spelunkers to get to the dishwashing soap, say, or the condensed milk, which are on the back shelves. My orders are to go pick up 25 5-gallon buckets next week to store more of the staples up and out of the way. Okay.

It’s a nice feeling. Once our propane tank is refilled, we should have all we need to survive for up to four months should we be cut off from the outside world. Power, hot water, food, popcorn, and everything. Provided nothing breaks that I can’t fix, and my daughters learn to take shorter showers.

I hate to keep braying about this, but I don’t hate it so much that I won’t keep doing it. This is (Ta-daaa!) our first all-homemade meal. At least that I can recall.

Milk: neighbor’s cow. (I won’t be getting a milk cow anytime soon.)
Waffles: homemade from wheat we ground, oats from our storage, and various & sundry elements from Jessica’s apothecary.
Butter: homemade as detailed yesterday.
Syrup: homemade maple (from a bottle). This is Emma’s dish; mine has homemade apple syrup from the apples we pressed last fall.
Eggies: (not shown) home grown.

Yahoo!

Virtually all of our meals are made from scratch at home. The chief barrier to further gloating about all-homemade meals is those two culprits, butter and sour cream. They were always store bought (actually I guess what we call “butter” is actually Partially Hydrogenated Vegetable Oil, or Coconut Oil, or Motor Oil, or something. So that alone sets me at the edges of the Pre-Fab Food As Chemistry Set camp). But now that we’re scooping better than half a gallon off our raw milk every week, those two culprits shall FALL! And in my spare time perhaps I’ll have the generosity to document other all-homemade meals going forward.

I mentioned this morning’s homemade triumph to Jessica in the midst of the A.M. Rush and she whipped out her camera for a shot—which I promptly copied to the computer so as to commemorate for today’s post. (There will be no post for tomorrow; I’m off that day. Jessica has something special planned for my 40th birthday.)

What is going on in this video?! I am making bread in the kitchen (this is before I had learned to put Pam on my hands so you can tell the dough is pretty sticky) while the kids have the music on. It’s Abba, actually. I’m singing along in as obnoxious a voice as possible, making fun of the lyrics as I go.

The noise in the background is the wheat grinder, making wheat flour for next week’s batch of bread. The sound is in mono. The video is pretty shaky since Emma’s holding the camera in her hands (she actually drops it at one point). She’s sitting on the stairs behind the kitchen, trying to keep hidden behind the wall.

I am actually a classically trained singer. I have sung tenor for years as a solo performer, in small ensembles, and in choirs. I have individual voice and operatic training, and have soloed for oratoria and other classical works for audiences of hundreds and even thousands of people. But it’s fun to pretend otherwise at home. Nobody noticed except for Emma (and Jess, who told her to go grab the camera).

Poppy Seed Dressing (great for spinach salads)

3/4 cup sugar
2 tsp grated onion
1 tsp ground mustard
1/3 cup vinegar 1 cup oil
1 Tbsp poppy seeds

Add all ingredients to a quart jar and shake for at least a minute, until sugar dissolves. Refrigerate.

Blueberry Sauce (we use with powdered sugar or whipped cream on crepes, German pancakes, waffles, French toast…)

2 cups blueberries
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup water
2 Tbsp cornstarch plus 1/4 cup water
1/2 tsp lemon flavoring, optional

Put berries, sugar and water in a saucepan. Heat on med-high until boiling. Reduce heat and simmer for five minutes. Stirring continually, add the cornstarch-water mixture. Cook just until thickened, stir in lemon flavoring, and serve.

Tartar Sauce (we like lots of pickles and pepper in it)

2 cups mayo (you can substitute 1 cup with sour cream)
3/4 cup dill relish or chopped dill pickles
3 green onions, chopped
dill seasoning (I use It’s a Dilly)
pepper

Mix all together and refrigerate.