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!

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.

Grate up the soap with a cheese grater, then throw it in the pot of boilin' water

Well a few months back I mentioned my homemade laundry detergent and bragged about what a great job it did getting our clothes clean. There was only one problem: it was lumpy. This must be because I used half a bar of Fels Naphtha soap ( which I completely forgot to use this time). I made some more laundry soap on Saturday, and this time it’s smooth as silk. This is because I used a whole bar of Dove soap, which Jessica doesn’t like becuase it makes her feel greasy. Maybe because it’s one-quarter moisturizing cream? Hopefully it doesn’t make our clothes feel like that, but it’s SOAP for heaven’s sake. Soap is supposed to remove grease. How they ever make soap out of one quarter moisturizing cream I’ll never know. Of course I also add borax to the mix, and if Dove soap is sweet and fluffy moisturizing cream, borax is the sandblaster of the detergent world. (At least I hope it is.) Dove vs. sandblaster? Borax wins. I’ll let you know if I feel greasy.

Here’s the REE-sype (adapted from The Simple Dollar, thank you!)

1 pot boiling water

1 bar o’soap (as discussed above. Also, Jess and I save all those thin little soap slivers from when the bar of soap gets too small to use in the shower. They dry up and we keep them in a box until soap making time. Better’n wasting them.)

1 cup borax

1 cup baking soda

Grate the soap on a potato grater. (The grater gets all soapy, but you can just throw it in the dishwasher when you’re done.) Sprinkle the soap particles into the boiling water and stir them up into mush. Use a metal spoon—easier to clean. When it’s all stirred in, turn off the heat and go fill up a 4-gallon bucket with hot water in the tub. Throw in the borax and baking soda while it’s filling.

Leave enough space at the top for your pot o’soap, dump that in, and cover it up. Trent says to let it sit for 24 hours, but who has time for that? I used mine on a batch of laundry the same afternoon. Nobody’s mentioned greasiness yet.

This makes enough laundry soap for 64 loads of laundry if you use a cup per batch, but at our house we’re cheapskates who also have a front-loading washer so we don’t need much soap to begin with. Maybe 1/3 cup, maybe 1/4. The former will stretch the bucket of soap to 192 loads, the latter to 256 (1 gallon = 16 cups). Granted, with 9 people living in a house surrounded by animals and dirt, we probably do more laundry than some people, but still. Cheap covers a multitude of sins.

And thanks for your input on the frequency of posts. As you’ve noticed, I’m moving to three posts weekly for now. Thanks for your comments and support.

Or more accurately, I got the sheet metal for it at Home Depot. The pop rivets and tools I already had, and Jess and I put it together in about 15 minutes.

A killing cone just holds the bird motionless for the coop de grace.* Its body goes upside down in the cone, its head comes out the hole at the bottom, and a rubber band holds its feet together. You slit the throat and in about two minutes you can withdraw the body from the cone and begin skinning. The bird just goes to sleep, and that’s it.

In case you’re still reading, here’s how I made mine.

In the home heating and ducting area of Home Depot you can get a sheet of 16” x 30” stainless steel for about $6. You’ll need a sharpie marker, a straightedge/ruler, tinsnips, and gloves. Mark the center of the long edge (at 15”). Make another mark about 5” out from either side of this center mark. Connect the two side marks with the opposite corner of the metal and cut along your lines. (You’ll need gloves; the cut metal is rather sharp.) You’ll now have a trapezoid that’s 30” wide on one edge, 10” wide on the other, and 16” deep. Then, with a helper, curl the two diagonal edges together to make a cone. You’ll need to predrill in order to rivet them together. We put duck tape* on ours to soften the cut edges.

Hang the cone small side down and secure with screws near the top edge. I hung mine from an old pallet, leaned up against the poultry fence. I positioned the wheelbarrow filled with wood shavings (usu. used for duck bedding) to capture the blood, which makes excellent fertilizer. Jess put it around our fruit trees in the garden area.

Sorry, I’m not meaning to be graphic here. But if you eat meat, it was alive once, and it came to you in roughly the same fashion. Still, I’d guess that animal wasn’t home raised, and it wasn’t held in the arms of its owner before its demise, and it didn’t hear him thank it for its sacrifice before it died.

*yes, that is a pun.

Absalom met his Maker on Saturday morning. Here’s the fixin’s for rooster soup, just before Jessica bagged them to put in the freezer:

It was not a pleasant end. I’m really sorry, Absalom, but I didn’t know what I was doing. By the time I was finished skinning him and the four Mallard hens I was much more comfortable with what to do and how to do it, but Absalom was first.

No gory details (sorry if you think that picture’s gross, but that’s what skinned chicken looks like anyway), but I do think it’s a good thing to see—not just know—where the meat comes from. I don’t know that it’s healthy to be too removed from the creation of what we eat. I remember my dad saying his mother used to send him out to the hen house to bring back a chicken for Sunday dinner. That’s the way it was, folks, for most of earth’s history.

I know ‘bout fruits and veggies, I know ‘bout milk and eggies, but meat—that’s a different story. I didn’t want to go through the hassle of boiling water and plucking feathers, so I just skinned them out and sent them up to Jessica at the house. She cut the meat off and threw it in the freezer. I started a fire outside to burn the feathers and other things (just to keep wild animals away from the site) and it burned for six hours. There’s a lot of fat in there since the animals were trying to keep warm.

Why did I butcher the mallard hens as well? They weren’t producing any more—they really haven’t done much since last spring. They just eat the duck food, which costs money, and make messes, which we have to clean up. For the money and labor we expend on them I’d like to be getting something in return.

I guess not too many chickens (or ducks) die of old age on the farm.

And death? That’s part of life.

Is it working for you? Drop me a line and let me know. I’d love to hear whether your results are anything like ours. Maybe our clothes are no cleaner; they just seem that way because our brains are scrambled from drinking ground-up worms with our homemade cider.

(And maybe normal people eat ground-up worms in their store-bought Low-Fat Nukeable Chemistry Set Insta-Food Product, only they’ll never know it, ha ha ha haaaaaaa!)

Here is Sarah examining the first batch of laundry washed with our homemade laundry soap. It was just coming out of the dryer (no clothesline; autumn is pretty rainy around here) when Sarah, age 2, came galloping in to help. She put her head into the dryer and –which is cuter, a dumb old batch o’ laundry or a two-year old getting into the job? So you get Sarah instead of fresh laundry. (She’s a great little helper. Reminds us a lot of Becca at that age.)

Well anyway, homemade laundry detergent. I got the recipe off the internet somewhere; I can’t seem to find it again or I’d give credit where credit was due. I was a little apprehensive about trying it out, but it seems to work beautifully. All our clothes are getting clean, nobody’s breaking out in hives, and best of all, I made about several gallons of detergent for less than a dollar’s worth of materials.

Here’s what I did:
Bring about six cups of water to a boil on the stove. Using a potato grater set on a plate, grate up a bar of soap or so and throw it in the pot. (I’ve been saving those little soap slivers that are too small to use in the shower, so I grated up about five of those plus half a bar of Fels-Naphtha.) Stir the whole schmere until it’s big gloppy perfumey mess. While it’s simmerin’, go the the bathtub and fill a (clean) 5-gallon bucket about half full with hot water. Dump in half a cup of baking soda (I read you need to use washing soda, but I can’t find any of that around here. Huh.) and half a cup of borax. Take your boiling glop off the stove and dump that in. Stir the whole mess together (it’ll be watery). Put the lid on the bucket and the bucket in the laundry room, and let it sit overnight. Stir and enjoy.

We refilled our plastic commercial detergent dispenser and still have a bunch in the bucket. We do quite a bit of laundry and this stuff has worked well for us. I’m just sayin’, I won’t vouch for this stuff if you try it and it ruins your Aunt Maud’s heirloom tablecloth. But it’s pretty hard to beat it for the value.

We were running out of our previous batch of window/surface cleaner last night so I whipped up some more. Last time I refilled this commercial Windex bottle was the first time I had ever made my own concoction, and it worked so well I don’t think anybody noticed (except the color was a little different). Here’s the recipe:
1/2 teasponn dish soap
3 tablespoons vinegar
2 cups water

And a few drops of blue food coloring if you’d like. That’s what I did here. The bubbles will go down, and I haven’t noticed that the soap I add affects the cleaning power at all. (No soap scum on mirrors or anything like that.) Last night I cleaned a bunch of gunk of a dusty tabletop with this mix, and then I went and cleaned a swarm of kid-prints off of our bathroom mirror, and it shone good as new. The whole thing smelled …fresh and clean as a whistle! (sorry, wrong jingle.)

The point is I like making my own goop if it’s good as the commercial stuff and 99% cheaper. I think I spent less than a penny’s worth of ingredients on this whole batch; by far the expensivest ingredient here is the food coloring, which is unnecessary. In this day and age, I think the less we have to depend on the grocery store for what we need, the better.

I dumped granola into my bowl and overshot. Then I was in a rush to eat and get out the door, so here you see some granola on the table. That’s my impatience at work (it would have taken three seconds to scoop it off the table, but who has three seconds?).

You also see our pine table from Ikea, a box of corn flakes, and dishes. Eggs and butter came from the store. Everything else in this shot is a result of our own work. Beautiful made the granola (we like it better than the stuff I used to make, but that’s because she’s a phenomenal cook). I made the bread–the one food in the house Beautiful lets me make instead of her. It’s half-white/half wheat and improbably simple; I’ll show you how I do it sometime. The huckleberry jam came from a patch on the mountain 15 minutes above our house. The yogurt is homemade, flavored with peaches we canned last summer. The apple cider is from apples gathered last fall, crushed into cider on a Mennonite press north of here, and canned in our own kitchen. Let’s see, anything else?

Butter & eggs: I don’t mind boiled duck eggs, but I forgot to remind Beautiful this morning. As to the butter, we made butter for a while too, but didn’t know to let the cream warm up before churning it, or to cleanse out the buttermilk when it was done, so the butter would go rancid. Now we know better. We’ll try again here sometime.

Huckleberries: We’ve wandered all over the area picking berries every year, but this patch, just up the road, was phenomenal; the size and the density of the berries strained belief. Huckleberries wax and wane by the year; we picked something over four gallons last fall in case this year wasn’t so good. Have you ever had fresh wild huckleberries, or huckleberry jam on hot homemade bread, or huckleberry pie on a snowy winter night? Better get started: we’ll be eating these things in heaven.