(Almost) Instant Homegrown Pizza Sauce

Pizza is a standard at our house - Saturday night dinners alternate between spaghetti and pizza. Everyone likes them both, and it seems to be a good lead-in to our "family night."

I make pizza sauce by the quart all summer long as the tomatoes are coming in, then freeze them in 1 cup portions. This works great, until I forget to take sauce out to thaw and dinner needs to be on the table in half an hour. So tonight, I improvised, and the result was so yummy I thought I'd share it.

Here's how to have "fresh" from the garden pizza sauce in less than five minutes.

Use half a quart of canned roma tomatoes. (Yes, half a quart is a pint. However, I can my tomatoes in quart jars, so I call it half a quart.) Squeeze most of the juice out. Put them in a bowl, cup, something that you can use your stick blender in.

To the tomatoes, add a couple cloves (or more) of garlic, a tablespoon or so of dehydrated onions, and a good bit of whatever Italian-ish spices grew successfully for you this year. I used dried basil, oregano, and rosemary.

Now mix away with your stick blender until it's pretty much smooth. If it's too thin (mine was) add a small handful of dried tomatoes to the mixture, and blend them in really well. It'll thicken right up, and add really rich flavor.



And that's that. Super simple, and super fast. I think I might actually like this more than the sauce I've been using for the past three years, it was that good.

An actual "recipe":
1 pint canned roma tomatoes, drained
2 cloves garlic
1 Tbsp dehydrated onions
2 Tbsp. mixed dried Italian herbs
1/4 c. dehydrated tomato slices

Blend all ingredients with an immersion blender until smooth.

Building habits

Each year, I try out a few new "homesteading" skills. Mostly just to see how it goes, learn something new, and stash any knowledge gained away for some day when I might actually need it. But some of the things I've learned over the past few years have become habit: homemade laundry detergent, homemade sausage and pepperoni, homemade noodles and bread, canned tomatoes and fruits and jams. These things have become habit, in the same way we form the habit of making our bed each morning or brushing our teeth, or fixing lunch.

Each year, I add a few new habits. Homemade dishwasher detergent is a new one in our home, and after trying out a few different recipes I'm finally satisfied. All it is is washing soda and borax (also ingredients in laundry detergent) and the secret ingredient: citric acid. Without the citric acid, dishes come out spotty and cloudy. I tried lemon juice and it helped, I tried white vinegar and that wasn't bad, but powdered citric acid turns out dishes that are beautiful and sparkly every time. I found that I can buy citric acid online in bulk for far less than what our local health food store carries it for, and citric acid is the same thing as Fruit Fresh, meaning I can also use it in my canned goods. Fancy. :o)

The chickens are another habit we formed this year: never again will I be able to imagine life without laying hens. No one ever could have convinced me I'd love having chickens as much as I do, but man are they great. Not just for the eggs they lay, but for the compost they produce, and for the fantastic entertainment value. When you don't watch TV, you learn to find amusement by watching other things... like Two Little Girls and the Adventures of the Four Chickens. Chickens take hardly any time at all to care for - five minutes a day to feed, water, and collect eggs, and an extra five or ten minutes a week to clean out the manure and compost it. Of course, this isn't including the hours that Two Little Girls spend outside holding and rocking and petting and combing their hens. But that part isn't necessary, it's just bonus. And even through winter, our girls are providing us with a couple of eggs a day still. We're already looking forward to brooding a new batch of chicks this spring.

On my list of things to try out next year (or some year thereafter):
*Making soap. I'd love to try it with elk or goose fat, just to see how it turns out. I also want to give castille soap a try, since it's the basis for so much everyday cleaning.
*Pressure canning, so I can put up more vegetables without having to worry about running out of freezer space.
*More homemade dairy. I've gotten pretty good at farmer's cheese and yogurt, but I'd love to try out some mozzarella or colby. I'd love it even more if the milk came from our own goats...
*Homemade oils and herbs for medicine. Feverfew was a success this year, and I know certain herbs and teas work great for different minor ailments. I'd love to have my own "medicine garden".

Any other homesteaders out there forming habits, or trying out new skills? I'd love to hear about them, so I can start adding to my list!

Homemade Chicken Soup - for Marcie

My sweet friend Marcie is "afraid of soup." Her words. I keep trying to imagine this chilly fall weather without the warmth of soups, but I just can't.

So Marcie, here's a good, standard chicken soup recipe. From scratch.

Start with a whole chicken. (Don't panic. You can so do this. Nothin' to it.) Open the packaging, remove the giblets (if it comes with them, they'll be in a plastic bag stuffed inside the chicken. If it doesn't come with them, don't worry about it.) Rinse the chicken with water inside and out, just to get the excess juice off.

Stick the chicken in the crock pot (I use a 5 qt crock pot, which leaves room for lots of broth.) Fill the crock pot with water. Put the lid on, turn the crock on high, and walk away. Thoroughly ignore your chicken for six hours.

An hour before dinner time, chop your veggies. Start with some kind of onion (or scallions. Or leeks.) Dice up the onion, and dice some kind of root vegetable. Carrots are good. Or parsnips. Or both. In a big soup pot on the stove, heat a drizzle of olive oil. When it's hot, add the root veggie and the onion. Stir and cook until it's soft. Expect about 10 minutes.

Now add some other yummy stuff: a cup of frozen corn, a chopped green bell pepper, some diced zucchini, handfuls of shredded greens, a couple of chopped tomatoes, some diced celery stalks. Whatever you have is great. You want about four cups of this stuff, but don't measure, and don't sweat it. Use up leftover bits of fresh veggies in the fridge or freezer. It'll be fine. Stir it all together and let it cook for another couple of minutes.

While that's cooking, go to your crock pot. Measure out six cups of the broth. Pour that into the pot with the veggies. Simmer it on medium high.

Using a slotted spoon, take out the chicken legs and thighs. Your chicken should be falling apart by now, so this shouldn't be hard. It's not an exact science. Put the legs and thighs on a plate and use two forks to sort out the meat from the bones. Put the meat in the pot with the veggies and broth. Toss the bones in the trash. Oh, and turn off your crock pot. You're done with it for now.

Let the soup simmer for the better part of an hour. Season it with salt and pepper, and whatever sounds good. I like thyme and basil and garlic powder. Taste and season, taste and season. You'll know when it's right.

When the veggies are just about soft, if you want to, add in some kind of grain. I love brown rice (already cooked, usually leftover from some other meal) or you can use a package of egg noodles if you want chicken noodle soup. Continue simmering until the noodles are soft, or until the rice is heated, about 15 minutes.

So it takes about an hour and a half, not including the time spent sticking the chicken in the crock pot. But you don't just have to stand there for an hour and a half. Check it every so often, stir a bit, and leave it again. It's really pretty simple, and you'll have plenty leftover to reheat.

This makes 6-8 hearty servings.

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After dinner, go back to your crock pot. Use your slotted spoon to remove the rest of the chicken carcass. You can pull the breasts off to use in another meal, and whatever other bits of meat you find. Put the rest of the carcass in the trash. You've gotten good use from it.

If you have a strainer, put it over a glass jar. Ladle the broth that's still in the crock pot into the glass jar. You should get about another quart of broth. Let it cool for a couple of hours, then stick it in the fridge. The next morning, skim off the solid fat. Now you have a quart of chicken broth to either use, or freeze for another time.

Garden to Table Challenge- Rhubarb Pie

It's no secret that I am a Pie Making Failure. There are a lot of domestic, housewife-y things I do a good job of, but making pies has never made it on that list.

But lo! What's this?



I've made a pie! A pretty one. And even better than being pretty... it tastes good, too.

I bought some rhubarb at the Farmer's Market, since it was about the only thing I could find that I hadn't already grown myself. I've only ever purchased rhubarb one other time, and the resulting cobbler wasn't all that good. But I gave it another go, and I'm glad I did.

I also (gasp) turned my back on the pie crust recipe my mother gave me, the same recipe every woman in my family uses to make incredible pies. It felt a bit like sacrilege, but I had to do it - mine just never turn out like hers do. This time I followed the recipe from my red and white checkered cookbook. The only change I made was using whole wheat flour. Which was probably pointless, considering the other main ingredient is Crisco. Pretty sure Crisco negates any health benefits of whole wheat flour. But whatever. It was really good.

The recipe:

Strawberry Rhubarb Pie

Filling:
2 cups chopped rhubarb
2 cups sliced strawberries
1/4 cup whole wheat flour
3/4 cup raw cane sugar

Mix it all together until the fruit is well coated. Set aside.

Crumb topping:
1/2 cup whole wheat flour
1/2 cup brown sugar
3 Tbsp. butter

Cut together with a pastry blender until crumbly.

I'll let you find your own pie crust recipe... mostly because I can't remember exactly how much of everything I used, and also because pie crust recipes are easy to come by.

Press the crust into a pie plate. Dump in the fruit. Sprinkle with the topping. Cover the edges of the pie with foil, bake for 30 minutes. Take off the foil, bake for another 30 minutes. And there's your pie.

Garden to Table Challenge - Week 3

This week's recipe comes (again) from the Food Matters Cookbook. I'm starting to feel a little Julie & Julia-esque, except that I'm serving Mark Bittman recipes every night instead of Julia Child. I suppose I could rename these posts "Julie & Mark"... except that reminds me too much of my ex-husband, and that creeps me out.

So we'll stick with The Garden to Table Challenge.

In keeping with the Bacon Makes Everything Taste Better theme, I present to you:



Asparagus Gratin.

It's wild asparagus season again. We're lucky in that we can spend twenty minutes driving down a country road and come home with enough asparagus for two meals. Tonight's original meal plan was grilled snow-goose breast with wild rice and steamed asparagus, but after an afternoon spent thinning carrots and weeding in the hot sun, and Daddy not being home for dinner, I decided to go for something lighter and simpler.

Asparagus Gratin (I'm not copying this word for word because the book is in the other room and I'm lazy.)

1 1/2 lbs asparagus (I did about half a pound for the girls and I.)
3 Tbsp. olive oil
salt & pepper
2 slices bacon, chopped
1 Tbsp. minced garlic (I used fresh. Well, garlic from last year's garden, which isn't actually fresh, I suppose, but seems to be holding on pretty well after being stored for nearly a year.)
3/4 c homemade breadcrumbs

Roast the asparagus in a couple tablespoons of the olive oil and some salt and pepper. The book says 400 degrees, but I had potatoes in the oven at 350, so that's what I did and it worked. While the asparagus is roasting, cook the bacon in the last tablespoon of olive oil til crisp. Then add in the garlic and breadcrumbs and cook and stir until golden.
When the asparagus is tender, sprinkle the topping on it, then broil it for a couple of minutes until the topping is nice and toasted.

I served this with Parmesan Potato Rostis.



I'm not going to give you that recipe because it has absolutely nothing to do with local, seasonal food, and honestly I'm feeling a little bit funny sharing so many of Bittman's amazing recipes here on my blog. Once again, check out his book. I realize that rostis and asparagus gratin probably don't go together. But I promised The Oldest that I'd make rostis again sometime this week because they are her New Favorite Food.

And for dessert:



Homemade vanilla pudding with fresh fruit. In addition to it being strawberry season, raw milk is also in abundance at our house. Pudding uses it up nicely, and is a little more of a treat than plain yogurt. I had no idea how easy it really is to make pudding from scratch until I gave it a go. Try it. You'll give up Snak-Paks for good, I promise.

I used this recipe I found on allrecipes.com and was really happy with it. It doesn't involve egg yolks, which was a plus.

What are you cooking this week? If it's from your garden, or is local and seasonal, Wendy wants to hear about it at the Garden to Table challenge. Come join in the fun!

No more cardboard!

My family has been eating muffins that resemble the consistency of cardboard for three years now, since I first started realizing whole wheat really is better for us. They haven't complained. In fact, I think they may have forgotten that muffins can actually taste better than that. I find myself saying, "They're pretty good, in a healthy sort of way." You know what I mean, don't you? You can taste the "healthy" in whole wheat baked goods. Where you might be able to eat two or three light, fluffy muffins, one whole wheat muffins sits something akin to a brick in your stomach.

I have exciting news to share with you, oh healthy-muffin-makers! There is a way to have lighter, fluffier muffins and still use whole grains. In fact, I actually used half stone ground spelt flour, and these are the lightest muffins I've had in years.

The secret? Soaking the flour. I've been reading back through Nourishing Traditions and tried the muffin recipe in there. It starts with soaking your flour in plain yogurt overnight (or longer.) Then you add the rest of the ingredients to the mushy sort of dough that it becomes, and then you bake them at a lower temperature, for longer. They look funny, these soaked-flour muffins. They are sort of marble-y in color, though that may come from the cinnamon I mixed in. (Our muffins were apple-cinnamon, but the options are endless.)

Here's the recipe I used:

1 1/2 c. whole wheat flour
1 1/2 c. spelt flour
2 c. plain yogurt (I used homemade, but I assume store bought would be fine. But homemade is cheaper!)
Mix together the above ingredients, cover the bowl, and sit it in a warm place overnight.

In the morning, add

2 eggs
1 Tbsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. sea salt
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1/4 cup maple syrup or honey
3 Tbsp. melted butter (or other fat of your choice.)
And anything else you might want to add - we did a good sprinkling of cinnamon and some chopped green apples.

Don't expect it to resemble muffin dough. It's almost sort of like a really gooey yeast dough after soaking in the yogurt all night. Mix it well - it takes a bit more work that your average muffin dough.

Be sure to butter your muffin pan really well. Fill the cups almost full, but not quite. Bake for about 40 minutes at 325 degrees (or until a toothpick inserted comes out clean, yadda yadda, you know the drill.)

To me, these tasted only barely healthy. The texture was to die for. If you've got a sweet tooth, you'll want to add more sweetener.

Soaking flour is a great habit to get into. It requires more preparation and planning than whipping up a batch of muffins or pancakes the morning you want them, but it's worth it for the health benefits - and apparently for the quality benefits, too!

Notes on Self-sufficient eating

Tonight's dinner: wild Nebraska pheasant (procured on our recent trip to the miserable, flat prairie-land of Nebraska) with wild rice and home-grown steamed kohlrabi and carrots.

The carrots are stored in the basement in a plastic tub full of damp sand. This seems to be a fairly useful way of storing fresh carrots, the benefit over freezing them being that we can grate a fresh carrot on our salad even in the dead of winter, or have carrot sticks with our sandwiches. I froze some and stored some fresh this way, and I'm glad for it.

However.

Always wear gloves when digging blindly in a sand bin full of carrots. Not all carrots come through this storage process in as great of shape as we'd like, and grabbing a handful of sand mixed with rotten, slimy, mushy carrot is unpleasant. Really, really unpleasant. At least gloves decrease the gag factor a bit.

Another note: If you're going to be eating wild meat killed with a shotgun, buy a shot detector. How cool is this? It's a miniature metal detector that you use to 'scan' your meat to check for little bits of shot. Side note for those with less experience: a shotgun shell (not bullet, as my husband will surely correct you) is used for killing small game and wild birds. It's a little round packet of tiny little BB's that spread when the shot is fired, thus effective spraying the animal as it tries to get away. Very useful, but it has a tendency to leave little bits of metal scattered throughout the bird that you're going to be serving your family for dinner. The little shot detector thingamajig makes breaking one's tooth a bit less likely. Good investment.

The food I've put by for winter is holding up quite well - I was afraid it would be gone by January, but there should be enough in there to last another few months at the rate we're going. We eat something self-provided for most every meal. The grocery bill is surprisingly low, even for the fairly healthy diet we eat. I'm afraid we're going to drown in apricots if we don't start eating them faster though, and I'm pretty sure everyone will be getting a jar of peach salsa for Christmas next year. On the other hand, we're working our way through the strawberry jam at an alarming rate, thanks in part to the fact that we discovered how tasty it is when mixed with homemade yogurt. It's such an interesting process, seeing how much of each thing we need to have on hand to last a whole year. Some day - maybe - I'll have it all down to a science, with written records of exactly how much of each thing I need to make. Until then, we'll try mixing canned peaches with the yogurt instead, and maybe back off the PB&J's just a little. :-)

What are all my other homesteader/foodie friends doing to keep their bellies full this winter?

I roasted a goose!

Two goose posts in two days...

There have been two whole snow geese in my freezer since March. For eight months, I've feared preparing a Roast Goose. Have you ever read up on how to roast a goose? Virtually every article and recipe start out the same: "Roast goose has a bad reputation. It can be greasy, fatty, and livery, unless you know how to do it right."

That's not encouraging. I've never roasted a goose - I sure as heck don't know how to do it 'right'.

I checked in the Little House Cookbook. It involved seventeen hours of cooking on a wood stove with the draught open. I have a good supply of kitchen appliances, but a woodstove with a draught is one thing that's missing.

My Better Homes and Garden cookbook - the standby for everything I could ever want to cook - doesn't actually have even one goose recipe.

After scouring the internet, and finding several different articles and suggestions, I settled on this one from Hank Shaw of the blog Hunter, Angler, Gardener, Cook. Based on what I had on hand, and what I read in a few other blogs, I made a few changes: I stuffed the inside of the bird with apples and onions, and I let it roast til the breast was about 142 degrees.

One thing 'they' talk about with geese is the huge amount of fat in them. Apparently this isn't so much an issue with wild snow geese... at least, it wasn't with this one. Hardly a bit of fat on the silly bird, just barely enough to baste it with every 20 minutes or so. Because of this, I covered the whole roasting pan with foil, hoping to get some actual drippings. Not so much a success, but at least it wasn't dry.

So anyway, the verdict: roast goose is really good. It's tender, juicy, and has a mild but definitely distinct flavor. And it really wasn't that hard. Other than pricking the skin to allow the fat to drain (which was probably unnecessary with this particularly fat-less bird) it wasn't any different than roasting a chicken. I served it with basmati rice and home grown roasted beets. The carcass is in the crock pot now, hopefully turning into goose broth for soup this week.

I'm glad I finally sucked it up and tried it - it wasn't nearly as bad as I was expecting. I'm pretty sure it won't take me another 8 months to roast the next one.

Plan B

Well, big game hunting seasons are all over for us now, and no elk. Or bear. Thankfully, he brought home a doe one evening, so there is 40 pounds of venison in the freezer. Poor guy spent a LOT of time driving and hiking in the mountains to no avail aside from that one deer. And one deer won't feed us all winter like a big elk (or two) would have. I'm proud of him for trying though. You win some, you lose some, right?

So that means we move forward with Plan B. If we won't be able to eat wild game all winter, we'll start calling around to find a good price on a healthy, grass fed beef. There's a huge upside to buying half a beef: it's already processed. We don't have to stand in a barn for twelve hours cutting meat off of a carcass. We don't have to grind our own ground either, a process that takes at least another 12 hours, if not longer.

With the twenty five pounds of the venison we intend to grind, I'll make more homemade sausage. The sausage is the most important to me of everything - have you ever seen the price of natural, nitrite- and nitrate-free sausage? It's outrageous, and oh man, I love sausage! I'll share the recipe soon.

If all else fails and we really can't find a healthy beef to buy? Well, I guess there's always Plan C: become vegetarian. But I think my family would protest.

So what do y'all do about meat, if wild game isn't an option? Would love to hear how everyone else is faring this fall with getting meat put by.

Garden to Table Challenge - Week Eleven

Hey, look at that - I'm actually posting when I'm supposed to be!

This is the last week to enter the Garden to Table Challenge. Prizes will be drawn this week, so if you'd like to enter, this is the week to do it! Just share what you've been cooking, from your garden or locally purchased fruits and veggies, and link up with Wendy at Greenish Thumb.

This week's 'recipe' is a simple, high-energy, tasty, and mostly homemade snack. It's not really a recipe, and it's completely alterable, but here's what we had on hand this morning.

Spiced pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, dried apples, and dried apricots.



To make spiced pumpkin seeds (you have GOT to try these):

Wash and dry your pumpkin seeds. I scrub them over a colander, then spread them on a stoneware cookie sheet overnight to dry.

Mix up your tasty goodness: about four tablespoons of melted butter, a dash of salt, then cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves to your taste. (Or you could use allspice. Or you could use apple pie spice. Or you could use anything else that sounds good.) I added a pinch of stevia. If you're not on a no-sugar diet, you could add some sugar instead. Mix all that in a bowl to make a "sauce".

Put your dry pumpkin seeds in a plastic bag. (Or a bowl.) Pour the "sauce" over them, seal the bag, and let your small ones squish the bag to their heart's content. (Or stir in the sauce, if you're using a bowl.) Make sure the seeds are well covered, then spread onto a baking sheet.

Bake at 275* til golden, stirring about every five minutes. Mine took almost half an hour.

Then, unless you had no plans for them, hide them from your children, who will happily burn their tongues on the hot seeds in order to eat them as quickly as you'll allow.

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To the spiced pumpkin seeds, I added some dried apples (from a local farm), dried apricots (from a neighbor's tree) and sunflower seeds (some from our yard, some from the store.) Then I raided the cupboards to see what else would be good with them, and found some raisins, almonds, cashews, walnuts and dates.

I make up little baggies of mixes like this anytime we're going to be out and about during the day. Inevitably, children end up starving dramatically as soon as we walk into a store. This seems to fend that off, and I can snack along with them and not feel too guilty about it.

And now, we'll take our snack mix along as we go parade on Main Street with the other kids in costumes, in hopes that my children will fill up on this wholesomeness before they have sacks full of candy to devour.

Garden to Table Challenge - Week Nine

I failed kind of miserably this week on this challenge. Cut me some slack, though - we were on a trip out of town for half of the week and I wasn't doing much cooking. So instead of talking about cooking, I'll talk about canning.

The bulk of this year's garden is just about finished. We're expecting our first frost in another week or so. The beans are yellowing and drying out...



I stopped watering the tomatoes so they'd start turning...



The pretty little garden from early summer is gone, replaced by a well-used, slightly neglected plot of land that's working hard to produce enough vegetables to feed our little family.

The peppers will be picked this week and put into the freezer. The last of the beets will be pickled. Only the broccoli, leeks, and greens will be left to do their best to survive. The cold frame is full of baby kale, lettuce, and greens for winter, and I'm starting to make plans for next year. I still can't believe an entire gardening season is already over! Where did the time go?

But just because it's starting to cool off doesn't mean we won't be enjoying garden veggies. The girls and I have been hard at work saving everything we haven't managed to eat fresh. The shelving unit my sweet husband built for me in the basement is piled high with yummy things that we'll be enjoying in the frozen winter months.



The bottom shelf is where I've stacked the tubs of beets and carrots packed in sand (which seems to be working out well, so far.) There will still be another half-dozen jars of pickles, some pickled beets, and probably more canned tomatoes, along with (hopefully) a couple bushels of local apples.

Here's the running total on canned goods so far:

Strawberry jam: 15 pints
Pickled asparagus: 6 pints
Apricots in syrup: 29 pints
Apricot jam: 5 pints
Tomato salsa: 16 pints
Peach salsa: 8 pints
Peaches in syrup: 10 quarts
Bread & butter pickles: 16 pints
Dill pickles: 8 pints
Whole tomatoes: 12 quarts

Many of the ingredients were grown in our own garden. Most of the rest were purchased from local farmers or gifted to us from neighbors. Maybe next week we'll talk about what's in the freezer... :-)

Are you still harvesting or eating local, fresh produce? Be sure to check in with Wendy at Greenish Thumb to share your successes and read about others' at the weekly Garden to Table challenge!

Pumpkin Cookies: Friend, or Foe?

I was going to post a quick little blog with pictures from our recent afternoon spent decorating pumpkin-shaped sugar cookies with a new icing recipe.



Because they were cute pictures.

And we had a lot of fun.

I was going to tell you how my sweet children do such a great job of eating healthy foods without complaint that I decided they deserved an "almost normal" kid treat.

But not anymore. No, this is going to turn into another boring, natural health blog. Sorry. But do bear with me.

My children have been utter spazzes for two days. They've been running and screaming through the house, pushing and shoving and fighting, jumping on (and off) of the furniture, and crying at the drop of a hat (or fork, as the case may be.) In short, these are not my children. My children may be energetic, but not like this. Even my hyper seven year old possesses more self control than this. I thought about posting a blog asking for someone to return my children and please take theirs back, because this wasn't working out for me.

And then it clicked.

Orange pumpkins. If you've watched Barney's Favorite Colors enough times, you'll know that if you mix red and yellow, you get orange.

Red dye makes my children - especially my oldest - absolutely crazy. They have it so infrequently that I often forget about it's effects, but it doesn't take me long to remember. She turns from a sweet, if energetic, little girl into Satan's spawn. (I'm convinced this is the primary reason devils are often depicted as being red.)

I had to get out of the shower four times tonight, sopping wet and naked, to ask (beg) my children to calm down. This is not normal. The evening culminated in tears for everyone (myself included in that,) with Littlest One (thankfully) falling asleep fairly quickly, and Biggest One throwing a full-blow, out of control violent tantrum.

The difference is like night and day. Since we've started eating real food, these episodes have diminished significantly. We went to a birthday party back in February where the main color was pink, and we had a meltdown that day, too. But it seems like if I think about it, I can always trace this rotten, scary behavior back to the evil Red Dye.

So while my kids definitely deserve a yummy treat once in awhile, we're going to stick to natural colors from now on, thanks.

If your kid is the same - sweet as pie one day, and on the road to auditioning for the role of Satan the next - maybe food dyes are something to consider? I'm glad we've got this figured out. I never want to live through another night like tonight. You can Google "Red Dye Behavior" for more stories and information about the chemical effects of Red Dye on the brain. I did. It's scary stuff.

Garden to Table Challenge - Week Three

I've started a new "diet" or sorts - just temporarily, to try to clear up a few health issues. Anyway, it's a diet that includes not eating any dairy, wheat or refined carbs, or sugar. It's not the most fun I've ever had on a diet, I promise.

But, it's forced me to be creative in trying to concoct meals I actually want to eat, while also using up goods from the garden and working in the last of the elk in the freezer.

My recipe this week includes leeks, carrots, parsley, and kale from the garden, as well as some homemade elk breakfast sausage. This is the first year I've grown leeks, and the first year I've ever cooked with them, so I'm adding them to just about everything I possibly can. Because I planted seventy of them, not really thinking about the fact that I didn't even know how to use them.

Sausage Barley Soup

1 lb bulk sausage (if you don't happen to have elk sausage on hand, any will do. I can see this being pretty tasty with some Italian sausage too.)
4 cups beef stock
2 medium-sized leeks, sliced thin, greens discarded
2/3 cup coarsely grated carrots
2 Tbsp. fresh parsley, chopped
1 cup chopped kale
1/2 cup rolled barley

Cook the sausage till brown throughout. Add leeks and carrots, cook 2-3 minutes till softened a bit. Add stock, parsley, and barley. Simmer 15 minutes, then add the chopped kale. Continue cooking another 10-15 minutes, until barley is soft.

Love soups that are super easy and fast like this. And it's really, really good reheated.

Be sure to check out Greenish Thumb for more links to great garden-to-table recipes!

Garden to Table Challenge - Week Two

It's been a weird summer. No one's tomatoes are ripening yet, and I've only had a few compared to what I'm normally harvesting by this time of year.

But my Early Girls are finally starting to ripen, and I used a couple of them today in the recipe for Raw Spaghetti Sauce I'm posting for this week's Garden to Table Challenge post, along with some garlic and basil from the garden and a few other simple ingredients.

My sister in law made this sauce last week, and I had the pleasure of sampling it while I was out at her house last weekend. Raw food "concoctions" scare me - usually because they involve some version of avocado, my Most Hated Food. If I'm going to eat something raw, I'll take it in it's original form, thanks. But this sauce is different. It doesn't taste like health food, it's just really yummy, and happens to be really good for you too. No one can deny the benefits of raw vegetables, and this sauce makes it easy to eat a lot of them.

The recipe is from How We All Went Raw, a raw foods cookbook that I've had the pleasure of flipping through. If you're interested in adding more raw foods to your diet, I highly recommend checking it out - it's full of recipes for cooking all kinds of "normal" things, using raw ingredients instead of cooked.

Anyway, on to the recipe -

Raw Spaghetti Sauce
2 cloves garlic
2 vine-ripened tomatoes
1/2 c. sun dried tomatoes
2 Tbsp olive oil
1/4 c fresh basil
1/4 c fresh oregano
1 tsp sea salt

Put all the ingredients in a blender, and blend until smooth.

Now, if you're looking for a simmered-all-day, chock full of Italian sausage and pepperoni, hearty sort of sauce, clearly this is not it. Tossed with some homemade pasta, it's great for a light, summer evening meal though, with tons of flavor and not all the heavy ingredients in most spaghetti sauces. It's also really fantastic as a dip for bread, or maybe grilled cheese sandwiches.

Two things in my kitchen come as accepted fact. 1)I am incapable of following a recipe and 2) I will never have all of the ingredients a recipe requires. Based on those two facts, I made a few changes to the recipe. I used a couple of tablespoons of organic tomato paste instead of the sun dried tomatoes, because I didn't have any. I used a couple of teaspoons of dried oregano, because I killed my oregano plant. I thought the two cloves of garlic that I peeled looked kind of puny, so I used four cloves instead. When I make this again, I'll also add a chunk of onion and maybe half a bell pepper and see how it turns out. While I won't promise it'll work, I can't think of any reason this sauce wouldn't freeze well, making it a great 'convenience food'.

Happy cooking.... or, well, blending.

Garden to Table Challenge - Week One

Wendy over at Greenish Thumb posted a challenge that sounds like fun, so I'm jumping in since the Kinder Gardens challenge is over. (Totally fell off the bandwagon with that one. Blogging in the summer is so hard!)

Anyway, the goal is to share seasonal recipes that make good use of homegrown or locally grown veggies. If I'm being honest, most of the meals in our house consist of stir-fried garden veggies and a starch, or stir-fried garden veggies and elk steaks. But once in awhile, I do like to have something a little different.

This week's recipe focuses on fresh sweet corn. If you're from around here, you know that Olathe farmers grow the best sweet corn in all the world. It's common to find trucks on the side of the road selling corn 4 for a dollar, or even 10 for a dollar if you're lucky. I don't grow my own corn - we just dont' have the space to justify it. But I do grow onions, leeks, garlic, turnips and basil, so this makes good use of some of our harvest.

Summer Corn Chowder (original recipe from Colorado Farmer's Market Cookbook. I altered it a little to fit us.)

1 stick butter
1 medium onion
2 leeks, thinly sliced
2 cloves garlic, minced
2 small potatoes, chopped
4 small turnips, chopped
6 ears sweet corn, kernels cut off, cobs milked
1 1/2 cups raw goat's milk
1 1/2 cups homemade chicken stock
1/4 cup fresh basil, cut into ribbons
salt and pepper to taste

Melt the butter over medium-low heat. Add the onion and leeks, cook until soft. Add the garlic and cook for another minute. Add the potatoes, turnips, corn and corn "milk", and basil. Cook for 10 minutes, stirring frequently. Add the milk and broth. Bring to a low boil, then reduce heat and simmer about 40 minutes, till potatoes and turnips are fork-tender.

*Disclaimer: I am NOT a great photographer, and especially not with food.

This soup tastes way better than it looks in my pathetic photo.

If anyone else wants to join in, I'm sure she'd love to have you! I look forward to getting some new recipes to try as the garden harvest starts pouring in.

A day off the bandwagon

I fell off the "wholesome" bandwagon in a big, big way today.

Between missing my husband and trying to accept the distinct reality of how much the newest schedule* sucks, dealing with general parenting frustrations, and some general burn out, I was depressed today. And so I attempted to cure my depression with some good ol' fashioned glutton.

We had the TV on all day. And when I say all day, I do mean exactly that. Movie after movie after movie. I laid on the bed with them, and we watched G-rated movies all day. We ate Cheetos for lunch, and then watched another movie. Around 4 o'clock, we went to Wal Mart for a few things. Since there happens to be a McDonald's inside Wal-Mart, we stopped in and grabbed chocolate milk shakes to sip on as we strolled through the aisles.

I bought things like root beer, Cocoa Puffs, and non-dairy coffee creamer. I bought Chloe a Skip-It knock-off made in China, and I bought Cora some Minnie Mouse panties. Then we had Taco Bell for dinner.

On a good day, we eat homemade granola with local raw milk for breakfast. We boycott cheap toys made in China and all things Disney and we shop for food at farmer's market. We play in the garden instead of watching TV, and we eat a dinner made of wild game and garden vegetables.

As you can plainly see, today was not a good day.

And I'm trying to feel guilty for it... but I don't. One day of typical American gluttony isn't going to kill us. At least, I'm pretty sure it won't.

*The newest work schedule: two weeks in North Dakota, one week off at home. This means more weeks off. It also means he lives away from home for two thirds of the year. There's a lot that goes on in two thirds of a year that he won't be around to share with us, and that depresses me. But I'll stop whining, and just be grateful he's got a job.

A Real Food Barbecue

My in-laws are health nuts. That is to say, if you think I'm health-conscious, you ain't see nothin'.

Having them over for a barbecue is the ultimate test of my ability to serve real, healthful food. Inviting them to dinner used to terrify me, but now I see it as inviting over willing participants in my attempt to create good, healthy food.

The menu:

elk burgers
corn on the cob
salad
German chocolate cake
Strawberry lemonade

Okay, so the cakes fails. It's whole wheat, organic evaporated cane juice, local eggs... but it's also store-bought coconut, chocolate, evaporated milk and all kinds of other junk that definitely does NOT qualify as healthy. But it's also my husband's birthday cake, and birthdays are a good reason to eat junk food. So we're going to overlook the cake.

We should probably also overlook the store-bought buns. I did buy the "healthy" version of hamburger buns, but I was just too overwhelmed with cleaning and preparing to think about making twenty homemade buns on top of everything else.

I made the ketchup, ranch dressing, and balsamic dressing from scratch. Having mason jars full of condiments on the table pleases me - much more attractive than Heinz and Hidden Valley plastic squeeze bottles. I'll set out some pickled asparagus and some homemade seasoned goat cheese with crackers for those who want to snack before dinner.

Burgers and salad both use lettuce. That was my primary reason for inviting 16 people to my house at one time - to see if they can start to make a dent in the lettuce that is threatening to take over our back yard. If they're willing, I'll also send my guests home with two or three bags - each. Lettuce makes a good party favor, right?

Thoughts on preserving

I'm mostly just "thinking" out loud here. Expect some rambling. Feel free to skip this one.

I put up five more little baggies of spinach tonight. Chopping spinach into 1/4" squares is tedious work that doesn't thrill me. Seeing five little bags of blanched spinach go into the freezer does, though.

1/2 cup portions seems sort of odd. I use spinach mainly in soups, pastas and sauces, and occasionally in dips or meatballs. 1/2 cup just seems to be the right amount to add. None of us love spinach, but it's good for us, and adds a bit of something extra, so I use it. I can pull a baggie straight from the freezer and dump it into a hot soup or sauce and it works great.

Last year was very experimental as far as how much stuff I put by from our harvest. Well, this year is experimental too, but I have some idea now of how much I actually need. I'm taking serious notes - I'm weighing and counting everything we harvest and marking it on a sheet in a notebook I keep in the kitchen. I'm keeping a chart of everything going into the freezer, with space to mark the dates we run out so I know how long it lasted, how much will be needed next year. I have tentative goals for some items, especially the ones I can.

Grocery stores are under the impression that food preservation doesn't begin until fall. No one has lids or pickling salt in stock yet. I'm glad I stocked up last fall! I'm still in the early stages of preserving, as little bits come out of the garden and come into season in the stores, but so far I've pickled 6 pints of asparagus, frozen 8 meals' worth of asparagus soup starter, a triple batch of strawberry jam (with plans to do another triple batch tomorrow) and eight little pouches of spinach. Not much, by any means, but we'll be eating primarily fresh all summer, and hey, at least it's a little bit. I'd like to buy another fifteen or twenty quarts of strawberries before the price goes back up, and just freeze them whole. We like strawberries in our smoothies, and I have a great recipe for strawberry bread that I haven't made in awhile.

Standing at the sink tonight, chopping pile after pile of spinach leaves reminded me of just how much work it is to do this, and we aren't anywhere close to self sufficient. Between everything that I make from scratch, everything I'm trying to put by for later, and meals for us to eat each day plus clean up for everything, I spend an easy three to four hours in the kitchen most days - sometimes a lot more. My back hurts, my hands are painfully dry, and I'm glad I'm sitting down now... but I love the satisfaction of it, too.

My "to do list" right now includes canning jam, making pasta, making crackers, freezing (more) spinach, making a big batch of black beans, freezing strawberries... there's more. I know there's more because the list is stuck on my fridge, intimidating me every time I walk into the kitchen. I just can't remember what else is on there at this moment.

Is anyone else out there preserving already? Is there anything I'm forgetting that I should be doing?

Canning Season Begins

I've been procrastinating. It's been strawberry season for a couple weeks now, and until today, I hadn't canned the jam our family would happily subsist on.

See, the thing is, I know once I start canning, I won't be stopping until sometime in October. It's not that I don't like it - actually, I love it - but it can be a LOT of work.



By the end of harvest season, I'll have canned strawberry jam, peach or apricot jam, tomatoes, tomato sauce, salsa, bread and butter pickles, pickled asparagus, tomato soup, peach salsa, peach butter, apple butter, applesauce, apple pie filling, apples, and peaches. And anything else that sounds appealing as the summer progresses and we see what the garden brings. And strawberry jam is always the first, the start of that enormous amount of satisfying but exhausting work.

But when I found a great sale on organic strawberries this week, I knew I had to give in. Besides, my husband actually pouted when he discovered we ran out of strawberry jam a few weeks ago.

The good news is that now that I've got a few years' experience under my belt, canning isn't quite the enormous project it used to be. In fact, we had a triple batch of jam finished by 10:00 this morning.

I say we, because this is now a family project. Even the Littlest One can help mash berries.

I just realized she looks homeless. We didn't bother dressing
her or fixing her hair before starting.

And the seven year old is actually helpful now - not just smooshing, but also stirring as the jam cooks on the stove. (With supervision, but she's gotten lots of stirring practice from our bi-monthly cheese making.)

If you're not sure about canning, jam is a great place to start. Berries, pectin, and sugar, a bit of patience and a big pot of boiling water are all you need. It's pretty straightforward. I use organic raw cane sugar and organic berries, just to make it slightly healthier. (Can jam actually be healthy? Probably not...)



A triple batch should be enough to keep our family's sweet tooth satisfied until this time next year - it works out to about 12 pints. Of course, a few of those will be gifted to good friends and family.

Carrot-kraut

"Honey, what's the orange stuff on the counter?"



"It's carrots," I say, as if it wasn't obvious.

"Why are there carrots in a jar on the counter?"

"Umm, they're fermenting."

"I see. And why are you making rotten carrots?" he asks.

"Fermenting! Not rotten!" I reply, indignant.

"Fermenting is synonymous with rotten."

"Point taken. They're supposed to be good for you. And I needed to use up some whey. Will you eat them when they're done rotting? I mean, fermenting?"

"Have I ever not eaten anything you've made?"

He's such a good sport.

The rotten fermented carrots, which he dubbed "carrot-kraut" were finished fermenting today. I have a weak stomach. I made him and the kids taste them first. I'll tell you that the texture was sort of like limp grated carrots saturated in snot - sort of a mucous-y, stringy sort of substance. Probably the result of, well, rotting.

Chloe's response was something along the lines of, "Wow! Those gave my brain a zap! I like them!" Another bite..."Mmm. Well, I maybe kind of like them, but not very much." Another bite... "Those are really yucky, Mom."

Hubby dutifully ate them. He's amazing. Cora and I opted out.

We're throwing the rest of them away.

I know this whole fermented foods thing is supposed to be really healthy, but there are some things I just can't force my family to do, and eating rotten vegetables is one of them.