One bonus of having company: we do stuff we don’t take the time for, if it’s just us. Like…
… roast some pink banana squash.
Or use the Dutch oven…
… to make a pot roast.
Everything but the meat, we grew ourselves.
The squash is in the oven, and the pot roast is on coals right now.
Time to go and get some booze.
The Re-Farmer
I let the tomato sauce we made yesterday cool over night – with the current overnight temperatures we are getting right now, the kitchen gets really cold, so there were no concerns there!
This morning, I ladled it into some size medium Ziploc bags.
We did use some of it last night, while it was still hot. I still ended up with 6 bags for the freezer.
I left them on the baking sheet in the freezer, so they’d stay nice and flat while freezing.
Once this was done, I prepped more pans, then washed and sliced some Black Beauty tomatoes to dehydrate. Only 2 pans fit in the oven. I should look into getting extra oven racks. With enough oven racks, we could use all our 9×13 baking pans at the same time, and have room to spare for air circulation.
Something to keep in mind over the next while.
Anyhow, those went into the oven on the lowest “warm” setting, which on our new oven is 145F. I left the oven door propped open slightly with a wooden spoon to let the moisture out. It’ll still take a long time, though. Some of the slices ended up a bit on the thick side.
I also completely forgot to take any photos!
I’ll be sure to take some when it’s time to flip them.
The main thing is, these could stay in the oven to dry out, and I could go do other things. I was intending to get to the trellis bed again, but that didn’t happen. You’ll see why in my next post! I’m pretty excited about it. 😊
The Re-Farmer
It took a while, and I had to pause part way through to do other things, but it’s finally done!
Here are photos of the process. I didn’t really follow a recipe, but rather used a number of different recipes I found online to use as a guide.
After selecting the ripest Roma VF tomatoes, I gave them a wash and left them in the water while working on the onions and garlic. I wanted those on the bottom of the roasting pans to make sure they would get completely immersed in any liquid released by the tomatoes. I wanted them to cook until they were so soft, they’d disappear into the sauce.
When it came time to process the tomatoes, things went a lot faster than fighting with those little onions and garlic! I was going to leave the skins on, so I only needed to cut the stem ends off (and any damaged bits), then give them a squeeze. With the shape of the Roma, it was easy to do it sort of assembly line style, cutting the ends off and lining them up on the cutting board, cut side down, until the board was mostly full, then squeezing the seeds out into a bucket for the compost.
A handy tip to make things easier: place a cutting board inside a baking pan with low sides. I have a whole bunch of 9×13 baking pans that are perfect for this. They are large enough to fit a cutting board with room to spare to catch liquids or keep items handy, and the sides are low enough to not get in the way of my hand or the knife as I cut.
All the recipes I found had the amount of tomatoes by weight – usually 4 lbs. I had no idea how many pounds of tomatoes I had, so I just winged the quantities for the other ingredients, and split everything between the three pans.
After all the tomatoes were cut and seeded, I added more olive oil and carefully turned the tomatoes to coat them, while trying not to move the onions and garlic on the bottom too much.
The recipes I found had oven temperatures ranging from 300F to 425F, and while some had cooking times, most were “until the skins start to blister”.
I decided to go lower and slower. I put the three roasting pans into a 325F oven. I checked them at about 40 minutes, then added another half an hour.
While they were roasting, I went and got some fresh oregano and thyme. I didn’t get a lot of oregano, because the plant is mostly blooming right now, and the bees were loving the flowers. So I just found a few smaller stems. I picked about the same amount of the thyme sharing a pot with the oregano. We have German Winter Thyme in the old kitchen garden, but the seed pack for these ones didn’t include a variety name.
This gave me a chance to try out the herb chopper I picked up at a Dollarama not long ago. It came with a cutting board with a recess matching the curve of the blades. It did a pretty good job, though with the slightly larger oregano leaves, they sort of got caught between the blades while just rocking it, so it needed to be lifted and shifted with each cut. That was not as much of an issue with the thyme leaves.
I like it.
When the timer went off on the oven, the kitchen needed to be used for other cooking, so I just shut it off and left the pans in the oven. Then, before I started on the final cooking, I made sure to do all my outside stuff and other little things, so they were in the oven for probably 2 or 3 hours. They were still quite warm when I took them out!
When transferring them into my big stock pot, I was very happy to see how softened the onions and garlic were! Exactly what I was after. All three roasting pans really filled that pot!
At this point, I added the chopped herbs and salt. Sea salt, because we happen to have some at the moment. After stirring that in, I turned on the heat, then used the immersion blender on it. Not for long, but that things is very efficient, so there were just a few larger pieces that got missed.
After that, I kept it at a simmer for about another couple of hours, stirring frequently. I tasted it a few times and ended up adding more salt (twice), some pepper, some dried sage, a bay leaf and a splash of lemon juice.
Towards the end, I removed the bay leaf and took the immersion blender to it again. This time I kept it going for longer, so make sure there weren’t any big pieces of tomato skins anywhere.
I like that this pot has a measurement scale inside it. After the first blending, the sauce reached just under the 7L mark. When it was done, it was at the 6L mark. I could have cooked it down further, but I think it’ll be good enough.
For now, the sauce is cooling down. I plan to put it into freezer bags and freeze them, though we will probably use some of it with a meal, first.
I think the next processing I will do is to dehydrate slices of the Black Beauty and Indigo Blue tomatoes. Those can be left in a warm oven, unattended, while I get other work done.
A dehydrator would be a useful gadget, but we really don’t have the space for one. At least not where we also have access to an outlet.
For now, the oven will do just fine, and tomorrow, I hope to get some work done outside at the same time!
The Re-Farmer
Finally, I am home for the day and can start the tomato sauce. We have tomatoes all over the place, and I gathered all the ripest Roma VF, leaving the Black Beauty and Indigo Blue, for now.
It was enough to fill a kitchen sink.
After going over numerous recipes for roasted tomato sauce, I decided on how I would make these.
I have 3 roasting pans and can fit them all in the oven together.
To start, the bottoms got a generous splash of olive oil. I then took advantage of this and used the smaller onions and garlic. I finished off an entire small braid of onions, which gave me the equivalent of maybe 2 large onions. 😁 I also smashed and peeled cloves from about a dozen small garlic bulbs. That gave me the equivalent of about 2 large bulbs.
I wasn’t too concerned about the proportions in each roasting pan. They will all go into one pot, later. That’s when I will be adding fresh herbs and seasonings.
The down side of using the smallest bulbs is that it took a really long time standing at the counter, prepping them.
My back is killing me, and I took painkillers before I started.
So I am taking a break now.
Next step is to trim and deseed the tomatoes. That’s going to be another long time, standing at the counter!
I plan on leaving the skins, though, as I will be using the immersion blender as a final step.
As for the black tomatoes, once the sauce is done in the oven, I think I will slice the ripest ones and dehydrate them. As much as I can fit on baking pans, at least. There are more Romas ripening, so there will likely be more sauce or paste to make, later.
The Re-Farmer
Well, it took several hours longer than expected, but the tomato sauce got done!
I filled my large colander with the ripest of the Roma VF we have laying on a screen in the cat free zone, as well as the ripest Indigo Blue Chocolate and Black Beauties, filling the colander to almost overflowing.
After going through a number of recipes, I decided to not blanch them first. The Roma got topped, halved and seeded first, then went into my larger stock pot. I considered doing the other tomatoes separately, but didn’t want to mess with more pots and just mixed them all together.
When we processed tomatoes last year, we blanched and cooked them, before running them through a sieve, so any seeds were no longer viable by the time they went into the compost heap. This time, I seeded them first. I expect we’ll be having some volunteers in the compost pile, next year! 😄
For the seasoning, I kept things simple. I harvested some fresh yellow onions, picking ones the cats rolled on and broke the stems, since those were not going to be getting any bigger. They were a decent size, though, and I only used three of the bunch I picked. The rest got braided and are now hanging in the cat free zone (the living room) with the garlic to cure.
I grabbed a garlic bulb that turned out to have two huge cloves, as well as a bunch of fresh thyme from the pot in the living room. Along with that, I added some freshly ground salt; my husband picked up new salt and pepper grinders to replace our old and breaking ones, and got a container of Himalayan pink salt chunks for the salt grinder, too. I also added a bit of sugar and lemon juice.
Once the tomatoes had stewed long enough that the skins could be easily removed, I sautéed the onions and whole garlic cloves in some ghee until the onions were translucent. I was going to strain the tomatoes through a fine colander I have, but I couldn’t find it, so it went through a large sieve, instead. This sieve has a quite fine mesh on it. I don’t know how much difference it would have made if I’d used the colander, since there really wasn’t a lot of pulp in there, but the end result was more like tomato juice than tomato sauce!
Which is why it ended up taking much longer than expected to cook it down to a more sauce like consistency.
All those tomatoes had filled my larger stock pot. By the time I strained out the skins, it barely filled half of my smaller stock pot. I cooked it down until it seemed thick enough, then poured the sauce into sterilized 750ml canning jars. I was able to fill two, plus maybe a third of the last jar. That one got a twist off lid. In the photo, the whitish chunks are the broken up pieces of garlic cloves. Mmmmm….
They are now sitting out to cool over night, and then they’re going into the fridge. There isn’t enough there to bother actually canning the sauce.
I think with the next batch, though, I might take the time to make tomato paste again – this time on the hot plate on the dining table, to free up the kitchen, like we did last year. I don’t expect to be making as much as we did last year, and we only got a dozen 125ml jars of paste at the time. They went over so very well, though, they didn’t last long. That’s why my original intention had been to grow so many paste tomatoes this year, and it just didn’t happen. Hopefully, we’ll be more prepared, next year!
Altogether, this took about 5 or 6 hours to finish. If we’d been working with more tomatoes, I would have broken out our giant stock pot – the one that’s big enough to brine a turkey, with room to spare – to cook down the tomatoes. That’s what I used to make the paste last year.
We still have plenty of tomatoes resting on the screen in the living room and, of course, lots more on the vines, so we will be doing this again, probably a couple more times.
I did get a bit of a nap in before I started, but I am still so very tired. I’ll expect I’ll be sleeping on the couch again tonight, too. The family did keep checking on my room, and my husband even had Snarly Marlee in the living room to give her a break from the kittens for a while, and there were no new messes. Hopefully, things will stay that way, but my mattress is still damp from the previous ones.
I so look forward to getting cats and kittens adopted out!
Speaking of which, still no sign of The Phantom. The Cat Lady and I have been discussing alternatives if she doesn’t show up, and tomorrow she plans to drop off a trap for us.
Still no interest in the kittens she shared photos of.
Since they are friendlier and easier to catch, she’s going to see about booking us to get a bunch of males fixed, next.
As much as I’d like to get the outside cats fixed and adopted out, we really need to adopt out more inside cats. Some of them are inside only because they were going to get taken and adopted out, and it just didn’t end up happening.
Ah, well. We’ll figure it out.
The Re-Farmer
One of the odd things about our garden plans not panning out this year is that, while we are harvesting more of some things faster than we can conveniently eat, it’s not enough to make it worth canning or freezing.
Today, I decided to take most of what’s been slowly building up to make a large soup. We roasted a couple of chickens yesterday, so that was my main protein.
Since I was using whatever was on hand, I measured nothing. I just chopped everything so that they would finish cooking at about the same time.
So here’s my not-a-recipe.
First, a couple of shallots and a small onion that got accidentally harvested while weeding, were sautéed in butter along with some Uzbek golden carrots and a few Gold Ball turnips, and the one tiny Honeyboat Delicata squash that got accidentally harvested when the stem broke off while in was checking on it. All of those needed the longest time to cook. A small handful of Spoon tomatoes went in, then green and yellow beans, and finally some green and yellow patty pan squash. A whole bulb of garlic went in, too – all 2 cloves that were so big, I was able to dice them. After those sautéed for a while, I took the pan juices from the chicken roasting pan and ran them through a sieve into the pot, along with just enough water to barely cover all the vegetables, bringing it to a boil, adding a big spoon full of chicken stock powder as well. I didn’t need to add any other seasoning. Last of all went some Irish Cobbler potatoes. These were the small ones I’d brought in, leaving the larger ones to continue curing, that had gotten a thorough scrubbing last night. I picked out the smallest ones, most of which didn’t need any chopping at all. More water was added until it seemed like enough, and it was brought to a boil.
At that point, my daughter too over for me so I could make a quick run to get more kibble. With the running around I have to do over the next while, I wanted to get more while I had the time.
My daughter simmered the soup until the potatoes were soft, then added some diced roasted chicken. For the final creamy touch, she also added an 8oz block of cream cheese and took the immersion blender to the whole thing!
It definitely went over well. By the time I got home, there was just over a bowl of soup left for me to try!
It was delicious.
Even the parsley I sprinkled on top was dehydrated from our own parsley we grew a few years ago. We dehydrated so much, we still have some!
I had it with a couple of slices of bread. The girls have been making at least a loaf every day, then sometimes starting another one during the night. I’m really glad we picked up that bread machine!
Meanwhile, on a less cheerful note…
I got an email from my sister letting me know she wasn’t going to be able to visit my mother tomorrow as planned, asking me to go over instead, as her car is in the shop. Turns out that knocking noise in the back was a loose wheel! TTT is getting her staples out tomorrow, but not until 3, so I would be able to go, but earlier than I normally do. I called my mother and the first thing I asked was if she’d talked to the pharmacist about the T3s she’s refusing to take. She said no; my sister was coming over tomorrow, and she was going to get her to drive her to the pharmacy so she could talk to the pharmacist in person. Not just any pharmacist, though, but the new store manager. I told her about my sister’s email about her car, and said I could come in to drive her around, but since I had an appointment, it had to be earlier. I suggested 11. In reality, 10 would have been better, but I didn’t think my mother would accept that. Well, she didn’t like 11, either, and asked if we could make it 12. I said no, I wouldn’t have time for that. Oh, so I’m always in a hurry…
???
Long story short…
I’m always in a rush and never spend time with her. My sister’s car troubles were just an excuse she made up, and now my mother’s entire day’s plans have to change (as if ours didn’t change as well!) Also, my brother is dropping the responsibility of taking care of her on me and my sister. None of us call her or spend enough time with her, we’re all terrible people who don’t go to church and don’t know right from wrong, my brother should practically be her slave because she “gave” the farm to him, and she paid for “everything”, so we should all be doing whatever she wants us to do, no matter how badly she treats us, because she needs our help. Oh, and I don’t allow her on the farm anymore, but when I do, I don’t serve her tea.
When I finally said, if I’m so bad, maybe I should stop coming over to help her completely. Did she still want me to come over tomorrow? Of course, she twisted that around and said that, if I didn’t want to come over, she would just find a way to walk over.
To the bank, the pharmacy and the grocery store?
I called her on the manipulation and guilt tripping, then simply told her I’d be there for 11, while she kept insisting she would walk. Her knees are so bad, she is starting to have trouble navigating her tiny apartment, never mind the half block to the grocery store. The pharmacy is something like 6 blocks away.
Of course, she’d have an easier time of it if she would take the T3s, but she sure as heck wouldn’t want that!
Do I sound a bit frustrated?
Yes. I’m frustrated.
I’m especially ticked off over how she is about my brother. No one has bent over backwards for her more than he has. Now he has the burden of this property on his shoulders – we are helping him by being here, but the place has problems well beyond either of our abilities or finances to fix, plus he still has the headache of dealing with property taxes and insurance for a place companies don’t even want to insure! She has no understanding that she didn’t do him a massive favour in signing the property over to home now, rather than in her will, but saddled him with a white elephant. Then she turned around and stabbed him in the back, and still can’t understand how badly she hurt him. He has pulled her butt out of the fire so many times over the decades, with zero gratitude or appreciation, it’s mind boggling he hasn’t cut her off completely.
He’s a much better man than I am, that’s for sure!
Well, we’ll see how it goes. She may act as if nothing happened at all. Or she may decide to be vindictive. Either way, she’s going to be ticked off that I will have to leave early enough to drive back home, pick up TTT and take her to the vet in time for her appointment to get her staples removed. I certainly didn’t tell my mother is was an appointment for a cat. She would have completely lost it, if I did. She’s always hated having pets in the house (my father loved them), and cats in particular. Dogs were accepted only because they helped with the cattle. They never took a dog to a vet. Not even when one of them got kicked in the heat by a horse and lost its eye. That dog lived to a grand old age, with a very messy, untreated eye. As a child, I had no understanding that this was not a good thing. Heck, I didn’t even understand that there was such a thing as a vet when it happened. So you can probably imagine that she would not be happy that we took a cat to a vet at all, even if it meant the cat living outdoors with a dangling broken leg. For us to be taking a cat to a vet on a day when she wanted me to devote my time entirely and slavishly to her would be just that much worse.
*sigh*
We’ll see how it turns out.
I’ll go back to thinking about how good that soup turned out!
Well. Try, to, anyhow.
The Re-Farmer
Okay, so I made this video a while ago, but had all sorts of problems exporting the finished video into a file format that I could upload to YouTube that worked. After trying for days and having it fail, suddenly it worked. Nothing had changed on my computer, and there was no software update. Just, one day no-worky, another day, yes-worky.
Frustrating!
No matter!
Normally, I would have done a long, photo heavy post on making this, but I don’t have the media storage space, so I’m trying to make more videos. I’d found a video on how to make a Tuscan beef stew that looked really good, but I didn’t have the exact ingredients.
So I made it with what I had on hand.
Here is not-quite Tuscan style beef stew, made with mead.
Let me know what you think, and if you have any suggestions to improve things!
The Re-Farmer
Last night, I finally got around to making some butter, using whipping cream. It’s been ages since I’ve made butter! I decided to try it again when I was picking up butter at the local grocery store, and the cheap, house brand butter had gone up in price so much, it was actually more expensive than whipping cream.
Making butter is easy and relatively fast when using an electric mixer. It can also be made by putting the cream in a well sealed jar and shaking it. Hopefully, with someone that can take turns shaking it with you!
To make butter with an electric mixer, a fairly large bowl is needed, since it will be in the fluffy, whipped cream stage for quite a while. It feels like it’s taking so long, whipping and scraping the sides and whipping and scraping and whipping and scraping some more, when then suddenly it “breaks” and you’ve got butter!
Also, even with a deep bowl, you’ll get cream splattering all over! You are forewarned! 😄
One thing about using a mixer is that the churned butter’s initial texture is very different. You don’t get a lump of butter. Instead, you get this.
The beaters keep the butter from forming larger pieces, so you get lots of very little pieces, instead. This photo was taken after the butter had been drained of buttermilk, then rinsed with cold running water. The smaller pieces made it easier to gently turn it while it drained, being very careful not to push the butter through the sieve.
Once drained through the sieve, there’s still water in the butter than needs to be removed as much as possible. That’s actually the part I find most difficult. It might be easier if we had one of those old style butter presses, but I just had my flat wooden spatula to squeeze and mash the butter in a bowl. I’d press it, drain the liquid, press it again, drain the liquid, and when I thought I was done, I’d press it a bit more and get even more liquid out! Finally, I got to the point where I could mix in a bit of salt to taste. Then, I pressed the butter into a small bowl with a lid, and put it in the fridge to sit until we use it today.
In the end, I estimate I got about 1 3/4 cups of butter, and about the same volume of buttermilk. A pound of butter is 2 cups, so there’s less butter from 1L of whipping cream, but we also got two products out of it. That buttermilk will be very nice in baking!
Whether or not it’s worth making butter with whipping cream is debateable. At least if price is your measurement. Whether it’s the cream or the butter that’s more expensive seems to change rather quickly. About a year ago, I remember whipping cream selling for over $8 for 1L, while butter was still under $4 a pound. The next time I went shopping, the price of whipping cream had gone down again, though still higher than butter was at the time. If you consider being able to control the amount of salt, the flavour, and getting buttermilk as well, the benefits do add up.
If the price of butter keeps going up, while the price of whipping cream remains more stable, it may well become the most cost effective way to get butter!
The Re-Farmer
While putting the jars of rendered lard into boxes, I remembered to take a picture of jars from each batch, together.
The batches are in order, with the first batch on the left, and the third batch on the right. My younger daughter ended up doing most of the work for the third batch, as I was not feeling well enough. I just got to jar it up the next day.
The third batch turned out smaller than I expected, with only 5 full jars – and I filled them only to the top of the “shoulders” of the regular mouth jars – and a 6th that was not quite fill. The fat was so thoroughly rendered that when I did the cracklings, there was only an extra couple of tablespoons out of them, so that didn’t even make it into a jar.
Also, I much, much prefer the wide mouth jars.
You can see the second batch is noticeably lighter than the other two. The second batch had less time in the slow cooker, and also got the most fat rendered off the cracklings.
Altogether, we got 22 500ml jars of lard, including the crackling lard and partial jars, out of 3 batches.
That should last us a good, long while!
The Re-Farmer
I was going to start the third and (hopefully!) last batch tonight, but it’s coming up on 5pm, and I just finished jarring up the second batch a little while ago. It can wait until tomorrow!
At times like this, I really appreciate the uninsulated old kitchen. This time of year, it’s basically a walk in freezer or refrigerator, depending on how cold things are outside. The remaining leaf lard is the thickest chunk we got and was still really frozen when I worked on the rest, yesterday, but as it sits in the old kitchen, it will soften more, yet still be frozen. That makes is a lot easier to chop, but also gives me a bit of flexibility in time for getting it processed. Yesterday evening, I had to get the girls to take over some stuff because my hips suddenly decided to go crunchy on me (they were fine by morning!), while my shoulders have started to really hurt from all the chopping. I’m doing it while sitting at the dining table, since there’s no way I can stand at a counter long enough to do it all, but the height while sitting isn’t very good, resulting in a lot of pain and stiffness right in the muscles where the neck and shoulder join. Which still hurts now, so I’m going to take an evening off from chopping.
I didn’t render the second batch in the slow cooker quite as long as the first batch; I’m curious to see if there is a noticeable difference in the colour of the lard. I might have had a touch less chopped fat in the second batch, but since I only have the depth in the slow cooker to go by, I can’t say for sure. Taking the solids out earlier did mean less liquid fat to jar up, and more volume to turn into cracklings later.
After removing the cracklings, I was able to fill six 500ml jars, with such a small amount left in the slow cooker, I just dumped the rest into the pan with the solids. After taking a break so the girls could use the kitchen, I started rendering the last of the fat out of the cracklings. While that was slowly heating up, I decided to take some leftover mashed potatoes and make them into potato patties. I just kneaded flour to the mashed potatoes until I got an dough somewhat thicker than bread dough, but not as dense as pasta dough. After breaking of sections and making them into rolls, I cut them into rounds, then pan fried them in some of the first batch cracklings lard. Enough to cover the bottom of the pan by about half an inch.
Lard has a high smoke point, so I could do these at almost deep fryer temperature. The higher the temperature, the less fat gets absorbed by the food. After cooking, they got laid out on a paper towel lined dish. They came out nice and crispy on the outside, with a smooth texture on the inside, and not at all greasy.
The lines that you see are because I set the cut rounds on a cooling rack until the pan was ready. If I’d laid them out on a plate, I would have had to flour the outsides to keep them from sticking, and I didn’t want to have burnt flour in the hot oil.
Here is the second batch of lard.
The first 6 jars were almost solid by the time the cracklings lard was done! I got another 1 1/2 pint size (500ml) jars out of the cracklings, making for a total of about 7 1/2 jars. The first batch was just under 8 jars total, so it came out very close.
The cracklings are once again laid out between paper towels, sandwiched between 9×13 baking trays and weighted down, so that cats can’t get at it!
One thing about handling all this fat for the past several days; even with constantly having to wash my hands with lots of soap, they haven’t been this soft in years!
The Re-Farmer
The Re-Farmer 