The Joys of Cherry Season

July 2, 2013July 2, 2013 / handmadebyjo / Leave a comment

Cherries are my all time favorite fruit, hands down. When they to come in each year I eat them every day. Every. Day. I can’t get enough. I’ve canned them in the past and they are wonderful in the winter. I’ve made them into pies, crumbles, cobblers and clafouties. This years experiment is infused vodka. Of all the vodkas I’ve infused in the past this one is the most labor intensive. It requires you to pit and halve 4 to 5 pounds of cherries (and if you’re like me you eat a lot of them while you’re pitting). It takes awhile, but the fruit is beautiful.

I put the halved cherries into the container and added 2 liters of vodka. It’s sitting now in it’s dark little spot where I stir it daily. The plan is to have it ready for July 4th. Photos and a review will follow. I have to confess to having a bit of a taste this afternoon as I stirred the fruit around. This is going to be one fabulous vodka.

Chive Blossom Vinegar

June 18, 2013June 18, 2013 / handmadebyjo / 1 Comment

A couple of years ago I read about making chive blossom vinegar. This has to be the easiest infused vinegar to make and one of the prettiest.

The chives are in full bloom right now. When they are take a quart canning jar out to your garden and pick the blossoms until the jar is 1/3 to 1/2 filled. Fill the jar to the top with white vinegar, cover and set on the counter for about 2 weeks. Strain it through cheesecloth into a clean container. There you have it! No processing needed.

This is a beautiful, bright pink vinegar with a bright chive taste – perfect for salad dressings. My favorite thing to do is make a refrigerator pickle with sliced fresh cucumber, topped with this vinegar, salt and pepper. Let it sit for a couple of hours and you have a fresh, tasty pickle with a mild overtone of onion. Wonderful.

Food Rant Friday

May 17, 2013May 17, 2013 / handmadebyjo / 5 Comments

Okay, so there are a few friends and relatives that know how pissed off I get when yet another article crosses my path about Monsanto and their GMO’s. This week was the motherload in reading about various lawsuits that Monsanto has brought against everyone in the world from the small farmer to the state of VT. Apparently the money stream is so important to them they are willing to take on any state in the union that would try to label food as containing GMO products. Hmmmm, doesn’t it make you wonder what they are trying to hide? I believe in informed consent.

There are now apps available to help you boycott all kinds of products as you peruse the groceries in the store, just scan the barcodes and voila you know what subsidiary that food is coming from and can make your choices with a little more knowledge. I’m thinking that’s all well and good if what you are eating is processed but it’s really not going to help you in the produce section. I read today that one of the country’s leading suppliers of French fries is asking the federal government to approve genetically modified potatoes. This is to prevent those unsightly brown spots. Really?

You know that lawn that you hate mowing every week? Why not use part of it to put in a raised bed and plant some tomatoes ~~there she goes talking about those tomatoes again~~? Put a few potatoes in your little plot or grow a few carrots to eat right out of the garden. I promise you the seeds that you grow will surprise and delight you. You will have such a feeling of accomplishment and be astonished at the money you save over the summer on some of your favorite things. It’s also FUN.

I baked a batch of cookies the other day, shared them with sister Sue. They are a delicious soft molasses cookie encrusted with course grain sugar, crunchy on the outside, soft and chewy in the middle. Spicy and delicious they are the ultimate comfort food for me. Then I started to think about the ingredient list – what’s gmo and what’s not. Yeah, I know, but I’m always thinking about where my food comes from or what’s in it. That doesn’t mean I don’t eat what’s put in front of me but I’m always aware – so is my sister. After she ate those cookies with me and brought some home I texted her about all the potentially bad things that were in them. Today in the interest of science and my guilty conscience I decided to actually look up what went into them. I was pleased to find out that the things that were a little sketchy for me were all within my tolerance level for food weirdness. So I’d have to say that if you are going to eat cookies bake your own and source your ingredients. Now I can email Sue and tell her that those treats were really much more okay than I had led her to believe (and maybe she’ll stop sending me all that email about Monsanto).

Gardens

May 16, 2013May 16, 2013 / handmadebyjo / 1 Comment

The first edible plant to arrive in my garden is rhubarb. We eagerly look forward to it thinking about pies all winter long. I have found no really effective way to preserve rhubarb that allows me to bake with it in the off season so we enjoy as much as we can while we can.

This particular rhubarb came from Bill’s grandfather’s property. After he died and we were cleaning out the house for sale I walked the yard to see if there was anything I could transplant. His back yard was very shaded and there was a very anemic patch of rhubarb in the back corner of the garage. I dug it up and brought it to Rowe. I planted it in front of a huge rock – it faces west. The plants are shaded until noon during the growing season and I’ve found that really works well, it keeps it from bolting early in the season. Last year I made a rhubarb pie in September and it was awesome. I always thought if you didn’t get it in the spring that was it.

Being able to go out and pick something edible this time of year is a blessing. Gives you hope for the rest of the season even if you haven’t planted anything yet. I have garlic that looks amazing this year but I know I didn’t plant enough. I will be tilling the garden this weekend barring any bad weather. I will set it up in anticipation of the ground warming to a temperature where I can plant most of my vegetables. We had three nights below freezing this past week so I make it a rule to never plant before Memorial Day.

I’ve had a vegetable garden for about 8 years now in varying sizes and layouts. I’m getting a grip on what grows and what will not and have had gardens through summers dry and hot, cool and rainy. I think everyone should have a garden where they can grow something of their own to eat. Our healthy choices are being taken away from us at a breathless pace. I don’t believe if you go into a grocery store right now that you can have any clue where your food comes from or what goes into it. You are being lied to on a daily basis about what’s organic or natural. I figure if it says that on a package than it’s probably not. Start using your farmers gardens. They are springing up everywhere this time of year. There may not be a lot of variety but soon there will be. You’ll know that your veggies and herbs haven’t spent days in a truck coming to you from parts unknown.

The other thing I would add is if you plan on ever growing any of your food now is the time to start. Gardens are slow motion works in progress, they can take years. What works one year may not the next but those experiences are what help you to be a better gardener. So many people I talk to think they can just put one in one year and it’ll be fine so they wait until they think they “really” need it. Don’t wait, do it now, even if it’s just pots of tomatoes and basil.

Bed and Chicken Dinners

May 14, 2013May 14, 2013 / handmadebyjo / 2 Comments

During the early 20th century Fort Pelham Farm was a bed and breakfast of sorts as well as serving home cooked meals. This is a brochure that Olive had in her scrapbook and I thought I’d share it.

The brochure itself is small, maybe 3″ x 5″ on a textured yellow stock and gives quite a bit of information on a small space.

As I was reading it this morning I was thinking how nice it would be to have a view of the hopper from the house. It is completely grown in now so the only view we now have is trees. Although I have noticed that part of the view just down the road (when the leaves are off of the trees) includes the windmills in Savoy which I can’t say that I’m a fan of. So maybe it’s better that we have the trees that way I’m not angry that someone has invaded my space albeit from afar.

The back of the brochure probably fascinates me the most. “Modern electric power plant”? Need a little more research into that. Running water, modern bathroom? Hmmmm . . . Then there is the way the entire upstairs is set up. You have to be pretty comfortable with strangers to all be staying in the rooms upstairs. There is no hallway between any rooms so you need to walk through other peoples bedrooms to get anywhere near the stairways. I’m making an assumption that what is now the upstairs bathroom was once a bedroom. I do remember my father talking about a water holding tank in the attic over the ell which they used for water pressure. Their water was spring fed and there was a huge cistern in the cellar as well.

Then there are those dinners. We donated a sign for chicken dinners to the Rowe Historical Society a number of years back. I have photographs of what is now the living room set up for dining. It’s difficult for me to imagine cooking for a crowd in the kind of kitchen they were using at the time. And what kind of flock of chickens did they have? Must have been substantial unless they bought dressed hens somewhere else which I’m kind of doubting. I also looked up the value of $3.00 in 1900 just to get a little perspective. It amounted to $79.10. They were making fairly good money with their little endeavor – almost $400 per person per week. You just have to consider that it was a seasonal retreat for people.

The photo above is of the dining room. The floors and layout are still the same and I have to tell you that I wouldn’t mind having the rocking chair in the foreground.

I look at these photographs and am amazed at how little the house has changed. When we do something to it we try to keep within the character of the house. It’s really too beautifully built to mess with. We have returned to eating in that room, dividing it into different living spaces. It’s a wonderful place to entertain friends and family. Now I just need to figure out how to charge $26.27 for a creamed chicken dinner.

The Frustration of Food

May 9, 2013May 9, 2013 / handmadebyjo / Leave a comment

Today’s level of farming ignorance is unprecedented in history—including all time and all cultures. Never have so many people in a civilization been able to be this far removed from their food umbilical.

Joel Salatin

An acquaintance of mine, Jenna Woginrich of Cold Antler Farm just received her order of 45 baby chicks today and posted part of an article written by Joel Salatin in response to those who would criticize the practice of sending chicks through the mail. Joel has the ability to explain in very simple terms why it is possible to have chicks comfortably make the trip from his farm to your house and remain perfectly healthy. He also wrote this article out of frustration and I’m sure that anyone that raises animals for food can appreciate that but I think everyone needs to read the article. The article is called Rebel With a Cause: Anthropomorphism Against Farms, take a few minutes to read it, maybe read it to your kids, you will all learn something.

I grew up when most of our meat was grown ourselves or my father shot in the woods. Sounds backwards and like I am some kind of hick doesn’t it? I think something is lost when you don’t make an effort to know where your food comes from. I believe you have to see their faces, understand what they are and what they give to you, sustenance. I believe you need to know the kinds of lives that these animals have led and what kind of deaths that they have had in order to make peace with the fact that you are an omnivore and flesh is part of your diet. Factory farming is farming at its worst, the only thing this is about is the almighty dollar, produce as much as you can as cheaply as possible. It’s all about volume.

The frightening part to me is now everything you can buy in a grocery store comes from some sort of high volume farming situation. If you want to know what is in your food you need to seek out the farmers of every single ingredient, visit their farms if possible and buy it directly from them. I am fortunate to live in an area where there are many farmers of various kinds. There is a small, family run dairy right down the street from my house in Enfield. Smyth’s Trinity Farm takes dairy farming to a new (old) level in my mind. I go there to pick up my dairy products and see all of the girls either in the pasture or in the stanchions in a very clean barn chewing their cuds and seeming very content. All of their products are processed right there. Once you start drinking and cooking with their milk, half and half and cream you will never go back to what passes as milk in the grocery store, you realize that you are being lied to about what they are selling you – it looks like milk but it doesn’t taste like milk.

Maybe that’s the problem, we’ve been lied to for so long that we now see what passes for food and something good and wholesome because it says so on the box. We’ve lost our way, we really don’t know what is good and what is crap. The gap seems to grow wider everyday. If you’re reading this you could maybe Google GMO corn, or Monsanto, or the difference between wheat 20 years ago and now. I can promise you it’s not pleasant reading, any of it, but it pays to educate yourself, you need to know what’s happening to us because of the profitability of big Ag.

Someone that reads my blog commented on what I really eat and if I was somewhat of a hypocrite. In a word, yes. I think we all are complicit in the problem with factory farming on every level. I cook at home a lot of the time from scratch but even those recipes handed down for generations use ingredients that are now questionable. It would require me to do a LOT of research to make some of my favorite meals from total scratch and I have not figured out how to replace American Cheese . . . sigh. So I may not always cook as fresh and local as I want to for every meal but you can be assured that I think about and calculate what is going into it. Then I make a decision about how bad I want that meal and at least know (and try to justify) what I’m ingesting. Sometimes that’s the best you can do.

Culinary Experiment Revisited

March 18, 2013 / handmadebyjo / 2 Comments

St. Patty’s day is a memory and so is my corned beef and cabbage. I finished corning that 6 pound brisket of Heath beef last Wednesday and wrapped it to wait until Sunday afternoon. I’d heard that a home made corned beef tastes so much better than something you buy already processed but honestly I wasn’t prepared for how truly wonderful this was. Maybe it was the beef we have been eating, you know grass and sunshine kind of beef. Maybe it was that very slight hint of cinnamon that came through from the brine. The texture was perfect, the taste divine. Makes you think about eating a nice corned beef more than once a year.

Now there is that problem with only having 2 briskets per side of beef. Hmmmm, I may have to trade some steaks with Russell for another brisket. It was that good – ribeyes for brisket, yes.

I highly recommend anyone trying this. It probably could be categorized as slow food. You have to plan at least a week ahead but it is incredibly easy to do, in fact I will never buy a corned beef again. I posted the recipe I used previously and will freely admit that instead of making my own concoction of pickling spice I used the jar I had in the cupboard I normally use for bread and butter pickles. I can’t imagine that creating my own spice concoction would have made a huge difference but you never know. Next time I will try that.

Now onto pastrami!

Another Culinary Experiment

March 8, 2013 / handmadebyjo / 1 Comment

Please excuse the lousy photograph – but if you could smell it all would be forgiven.

I prepared a brine to make corned beef last night and this is what it looked like this morning. This is my first attempt at making it but by all of the accounts that I’ve read it is ridiculously easy to do and gives spectacular results. We shall see. The brine smells so wonderful with its assortment of spices – allspice, peppercorns, red pepper, mace, mustard seed, bay, mace, ginger, cloves, cinnamon and garlic. It’s mixed with a gallon of water, 2 cups of salt, a little pink salt and sugar. I simmered it last night and refrigerated it until this morning.

I have a large brisket of Heath beef that I submerged into the brine this morning. I put a plate on top of it to make sure the meat stayed under the brine and put it back into the refrigerator. I’ll check it every so often until next Wednesday morning when I will take it out and wrap it up in anticipation of St. Patty’s day on Sunday. Looking forward to something that should look like this.

Yummmm.

The recipe can be found here.

What you can do with a little flour and fresh eggs

January 15, 2013 / handmadebyjo / 4 Comments

My sister has quite the flock of chickens that are just beginning to lay eggs (note the rooster in the back over seeing his girls). Last week she brought up some eggs and since then I’ve been thinking a lot about what to do with the motherload of eggs like she will be seeing in the coming weeks. You see, she has 26 very healthy hens. That’s a lot of eggs. Once they are all laying it could be up to 2 dozen a DAY. Hmmmm, what to do with that wonderful fresh egg bounty?

Make omelets, quiche, pudding, angelfood cake? Fry them, scramble them, poach them – aahh, Eggs Benedict. Eat them at every meal, sell them, give them away. The list goes on but how about something a little different?

Saturday I decided to try something new. I’d been thinking about it for a long time. Pasta, specifically ravioli, I was determined to make my own. I scoured the internet and watched way too much Diners, Driveins and Dives in preparation for this new gastronomic adventure. I bought a pasta machine and ravioli mold (all very on sale) as well as a bag of Perfect Pasta Flour from King Arthur. Then she brought up those eggs and I was ready.

After all of that prep I ended up using the recipe on the bag of flour (how can you go wrong with a recipe from King Arthur Flour?). Three cups of flour, four large eggs, very little water. Sue’s eggs are small so I used 5 eggs. Put it all into the mixer with the dough hook and let it mix. Well, for a couple minutes anyway. The dough is so dense that it really requires hand kneading, so I divided it in half and did so. Let it rest for 30 minutes then shape into anything you want.

Now I have to tell you that this didn’t really look like it was going to make much pasta – I had 4 dozen meatballs just waiting to be turned into filling. Sister Sue wanted to be part of this adventure and entered the kitchen in time to help – good thing because this is a 2 man job (they don’t tell you that anywhere). I started rolling out the dough a little at a time and was AMAZED at how pliable a dough this is. Stretches like crazy, does not fall apart. After the first dozen raviolis were made we decided to cut the meatballs in half since the first batch looked more like Chinese dumplings instead of the intended Italian pasta. Perfection!

We made 3 dozen raviolis. I also have a pasta cutter attachment with the pasta machine so we made linguini and then spaghetti. I had no where to dry it so we made piles to freeze. We had a delicious meal with a homemade sauce and put everything else in the freezer. It takes only 4 minutes to cook fresh linguine, the ravioli took 5 minutes and was amazingly good.

The question remains, what are we going to do with all of those eggs because this is what we made with only 5!

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