Pickled Radishes...yum?

In less than a week, we've picked over 11.5 pounds of radishes. It'sa lot of damn radishes. They are totally yum...but really. Eleven pounds is a lot of radishes.

This happened mostly because Bill planted the radish seeds all at once, rather than in two week intervals as recommended on the seed packet. But what does a seed packet know anyway?

There aren't many recipes for preserving radishes. Perhaps because most people read the seed packet and spread out their planting. We did find one old timey canning recipe for pickled radishes. The garden forum where we found it said the recipe is from Colonial times.

2 dozen radishes
1 cup sugar
1 cup cider vinegar
1 tbls mustard seed
1/2 tsp celery seed
2 tsp dill weed

Stem radishes.

Mix all other ingredients in a saucepan. Heat until sugar is melted and mixture is clear. Add radishes to jars, fill with hot liquid mixture.

Keep in fridge, or can in a boiling water bath 20 minutes.

We haven't tried them yet, but the jars sure are pretty. 7 uncut pounds of radishes filled 6 and 1/2 pint jars. I quintupled the recipe above to have enough juice to fill up the jars.

We're going to let them pickle for a week or so and report back on how they taste!

Radishes!!

Tonight we harvested some radishes.

Nearly 5 pounds of radishes.

I had trouble carrying them all in from the garden.

We've got three types. French Breakfast are the oblong red and white ones. They are pretty mild, and apparently grow well even in the heat of summer. We've been eating them for the past few weeks and they are nearly done. The roundish red and white ones are Sparkler Radishes and they were the bulk of this evening's harvest. The typical cherry belles are just starting to be ready to pick.

We've been keeping a garden journal to note our plantings, harvests and plant milestones such as sprouting, flowering and fruit production.

Bill and I had different ideas of how to organize the journal, so we compromised. In the beginning is a chronological list of happenings (for Bill).

In the back is a page for each type of crop (for me). An alphabetical table of contents helps figure out which veggies are on which pages. We (...I) enter some info twice, but I think both organizational schemes have purpose. In future years we can easily see what activities should take place in any given week, and we have easily locatable, crop-specific milestones to refer to. We'll probably get 2-3 years per journal.

I feel like George Washington. It's pretty cool.

Food is growing!

The turkeys are nearly two weeks old and have quadrupled in size.

The new raspberry plants are waking up.

Two strawberries are turing red (we hope to eat them tomorrow!)

Radishes...rows and rows of radishes.

Cooking dairy

It's been a dairy-filled weekend. Not much of this is local, but we're practicing for when we have goats.

There's been a lot of milk cooked on our stove the past two days.

This is mozzarella in the making.

This is Bill being impatient while waiting for the curds to clump enough that the whey looks clear. Instructions said "5 minutes." It was more like "20."

Finally, we got to the part where the stretching and balling happens. The resulting cheese is pretty yum. Worth the waiting.

We gave the whey to the chickens. In return, they gave us eggs.

This, similar looking process, is actually the beginning of pineapple-orange ice cream.

It's now in the freezer along with some very rich chocolate ice cream and a batch of pineapple-coconut that we just finished.

It's been a dairy productive weekend.

...dairy.

Syrup fail.

A few weeks ago, we had maple syrup boiling day. There are a few sugar maples on our property and Bill really enjoys tapping them. While we don't eat a ton of pancakes or waffles with syrup, I was hoping to use the proceeds of maple day as a source of a local sweetener for jams and baking. Alas, this wonky winter had different plans. We collected about 50 gallons of sap, but wild temperature swings in February and March let the sap get too warm. It became cloudy and tasted a little off as sap. Boiling it down concentrated the weirdness and led to unusable syrup.

It was fun to sit around a fire all day, though!

Bill attempted to make bread in his new Lodge Something Dutch Oven with the coal-holding lid that might have been designed by Paul Revere.

He burned the first attempt (having not read the instructions).

The second try was much better.


We'll try again next year, with an earlier boil day. That will probably mean hot chocolate and snowman building instead of a cold beer and book reading, but that's ok!

Lazy Food

Nice article from BBC regarding our seemingly increasing distance from actual food preparation.

I am hopeless in the kitchen and resort to either eating ramen or laying pathetically on the couch, a slave to low blood sugar, whenever Bill isn't around to make food magically appear in front of me - so I completely get my hypocrisy in loving this article.

However, I will hedge my incompetence a little, because I think my lack of skills is largely a result of my not needing to know how to cook. I do help lots - I just need clear instructions. Shred this cheese! Chop this onion! I'm a kitchen follower, not a leader.

In general, it seems to me that the sort of distance from food described in the article is related to our distance from so many environmental processes and a general sleepwalking through life. We have such great distractions - tv, cheap stuff from China, career advancement, soccer/gymnastics/marching band - that we're spending less time living (and preparing the food we need for living) and more time doing.

Here's an added bonus hypocrisy - I know that my love of canning, for example, is one of those contemporary food luxuries that I get to *enjoy* because it is not necessary for my survival. I know that tv, cheap stuff from China, and career advancement have made my desire for a simpler life possible and...desirable.

There's got to be a middle ground, however, somewhere between a return to 1960s home economies (as described in this awesome article), and pre-peeled potatoes.

"...cooking is a bit of ritual, it's a process to start from the beginning with ingredients you prepare yourself. Preparation is an important part of cooking. You get a feel for what you are making. And food tastes better when it's made from scratch."

Popcorn dreams

This is me moments before a life-changing handful of popcorn.

We had gone to the Traders Point Farmers market early this fateful day primarily to acquire local, healthy pork for sausage-making. Turns out that wealthy hippies like their pork pre-sausaged, so we struck out. We did meet a popcorn man and spoke with him at length about real popcorn and the amazing number of people who only eat it out of a microwave. He gave us a tip on using coconut oil instead of canola for popping and we bought some of his popcorn.

What a find, we thought! Local, organic - easy to prepare - snack to feel good about. We decided to pop it that evening. On a whim, Bill pulled out our homegrown popcorn which had failed to pop at all earlier this winter. It was massive FAIL. It was tons of finger-blistering work removing the kernels from the ears and then we had to wait ages for it to dry. This was likely a project we wouldn't complete again.

But then! Then! Our homegrown popcorn popped like gangbusters! So we opted for a side-by-side taste test with the organic corn we bought earlier in the day. The popcorn man (who also teaches a beekeeping class) had given us a sample of his product at the market and it was deelish. If our popcorn was half as good, we would feel victorious.

We grabbed a handful of our very pretty yellow and red popcorn. Anticipation grew as we popped a few kernels in our mouths. All the work...would it be worth it??

O.M.G. Our little baby homegrown popcorn was ahmazing. Light, airy, crunchy. And, was that a hit of nuttyness? Could our lovely farm and soil have added a touch of terrior in our humble snack?

Yeah. It was good enough to describe it in terms usually reserved for wine. As Bill and I fought over the remaining kernels, the farmer's market popcorn - organically and lovingly grown - wimpered a little from its bowl. I don't think I'll ever be able to eat other popcorn again.

So much for the easy to prepare snack.