spiced beets canning recipe

from http://www.tasteofhome.com/Recipes/Spiced-Pickled-Beets
       
Ingredients

 •   3 pounds small fresh beets (or cylindrica)
 •   2 cups (organic cane) sugar
 •   2 cups water
 •   2 cups (apple) cider vinegar
 •   2 cinnamon sticks (3 inches)
 •   1 teaspoon whole cloves
 •   1 teaspoon whole allspice

Directions

    Scrub beets and trim tops to 1 in. Place in a Dutch oven and cover with water. Bring to a boil. Reduce heat; cover and simmer for 25-35 minutes or until tender. Remove from the water; cool. Peel beets and cut into fourths.
    Place beets in a Dutch oven. Add the sugar, water and vinegar. Place spices on a double thickness of cheesecloth; bring up corners of cloth and tie with string to form a bag. Add to the beet mixture. Bring to a boil. Reduce heat; cover and simmer for 10 minutes. Discard spice bag.
    Carefully pack beets into hot 1-pint jars to within 1/2 in. of the top. Carefully ladle hot liquid over beets, leaving 1/2-in. headspace. Remove air bubbles; wipe rims and adjust lids. Process for 35 minutes in a boiling-water canner. Yield: 4 pints.

Editor's Note: The processing time listed is for altitudes of 1,000 feet or less. For altitudes up to 3,000 feet, add 5 minutes; 6,000 feet, add 10 minutes; 8,000 feet, add 15 minutes; 10,000 feet, add 20 minutes.

Originally published as Spiced Pickled Beets in Taste of Home June/July 2010, p66

I did 1 1/2 times the recipe and had 6 and a bit pint jars of sliced beets. I did not have cinnamon sticks so used cinnamon powder in a loose leaf tea bag, which worked just as well. I cooked the beets first and then weighed them for this recipe. I used the cylindrica beets, which grow mostly above ground and as their name implies are not round but cylindrical in shape. That way you can cook the beets whole evenly and make similar sized round crinkle cuts while using the whole beet. Enjoy!

What's in my soaps?

My goat's milk soaps and specialty soaps are made with organic ingredients when affordable, locally sourced when possible and home grown when available!


The oils & fats I like to work with:

sweet almond oil; natural or organic
canola oil; organic and locally sourced through Regional Access or Greenstar
castor oil; natural
cocoa butter; organic
coconut oil; organic
lard; organic, local (Kingbird Farm at the Ithaca Farmers Market)
olive oil; natural (no chemical extraction methods used)
palm oil; organic - refined (white) or unrefined (retains the orange fruit color)
palm kernel oil; organic
shea butter; natural, imported from Africa
soybean oil; not available local for some reason tho grown all around
sunflower oil; organic and locally sourced through Regional Access
wheat germ oil; natural or organic

beeswax & raw honey; local (Waid's Apiary, Rowland's Farm or friends)
vegetables & fruit; home grown, Greenstar or organic from the Ithaca Farmers Market

My palm oil is farmed and is not part of rainforest deforestation.
I don't use hydrogenated oils (like shortening) because I don't want to lather myself with something I wouldn't want to eat :)

About Far Mountain Soap...

 

Far Mountain Soap specializes in fragrance and essential oil free all natural goat's milk and specialty soaps; made with organic when affordable, locally sourced when possible and home grown when available. We add subtle scents where needed using choice flowers, spices and/or herbs and do the same to create specific soap colors - all without adding any chemicals, of course.

Started in the early winter of 2011 - you know, winter, when for the homesteading artist there is not much else to do than our favorite pass of time: bookkeeping... with the help of my accomplished soapmaking sister, Far Mountain Soap was born. I make my soaps using the traditional cold process method, the bars are hand cut and given at least a month to cure. This creates a high quality long lasting bar that retains the naturally occurring properties of the great ingredients I use. The bars are also naturally high in glycerin, a humectant that leaves the skin feeling clean and fresh without stripping it of its natural oils.

While we make basic soap batches, like the traditional Lye Soap with only local lard and well water, I enjoy developing and making unusual soaps. Like my Coffee Bar and Kitchen Hands soaps made with local Gimme! Coffee brew and grounds, my Apricot Wheat and Partly Sunny soaps made with the same beers from our local Ithaca Brewery and not to forget our signature milk soaps Milk & Honey and Winter Sunshine, made with milk from our own goats!

My soaps are free of preservatives, dyes & colorants, petroleum products, synthetic fragrance or essential oils - and of course: 100% biodegradable!

Please note - my soaps are hand made & hand cut, therefor every bar is unique; you may get a bar that does not *exactly* resemble the picture, but it will always be from the same recipe and it will always be just as pretty.

Handy Tip: handmade soap will last a long time if kept dry between uses. Please use a draining soap dish and keep the bar away from direct streams of water (and yes, we do sell reclaimed wood cedar soap dishes).

Soap Resources

Mountain Rose Herbs
Large selection of organic and non organic oils, butters, herbs etc.

Tropical Traditions
Has bulk regular and organic high quality coconut oil, keep an eye out for their free shipping and other sales.

Essential Wholesale
Has bulk regular and organic oils, nice materials but not that good customer service. Also sells cosmetic bases if you don't want to cook your own.

Brambleberry
Nice soap website with neat molds, melt and pour soap bases, fragrances and nice containers.

Lye Depot
Agway does not sell lye anymore, but I did find a great source for food grade lye on the internet.

Of course Regional Access for locally made and processed oils & honeys.

Milky Way Molds
Great selection of pvc soap molds; many, many to choose from.

Majestic Mountain Sage
Good recourse for materials, recipes and hosts the MMS Lye Calculator.

Miller's Homemade Soap Pages is full of technical know-how and recipes.

Soapnuts
A good resource for recipes, ideas and tips.

goslings

One of the five goslings hatched by my son's preschool last week. We donated 6 eggs from our breeding couple and offered to take any results back. All six hatched but one did not make it, and another was having a hard time (pictured). I brought that one home right in the morning to blow dry, keep warm and feed sugar water and by the afternoon she was fine. That afternoon I brought the remaining four home and the five of them are having a good time hanging out in a plastic half drum (no leaking) in our sunroom.

Baby geese are much sturdier than chicks and our five year old is enjoying handling and petting them (for now, until they grow up and "bite his bum", hihi).

The mother goose Emily is brooding her own nest with seven eggs last time I could count, which should hatch sometime the end of next week... we'll see who'll have the better hatching rate, the goose or the preschoolers!

I feel like gardening...

But it is only mid April! I did finally make a brick path in my flower & herb garden, which will make navigating it in summer much easier! Before the self seeding flowers loved to seed into the wood mulch path (they actually seeded more on the path than on the dirt...) and I felt bad about weeding out flower so left them and before you knew it the whole thing was impassible. So, with the left over bricks from the green house project (a lot of these have holes in them, are hollow bricks) a new path is made. If only I had started at the beginning and not at the end... I miss about 16 inches to reach the gate :)

incubating eggs

We started our incubator!
We have a selection of blue wyandotte, hamburg / wyandotte and I think brahma's that look like columbian wyandottes - thank you, friends for donating fertile eggs!

I've been watching the temperature like a hawk...

Simultaneously, school is hatching a dozen of Khaki Campbell duck eggs and a half dozen of American Buff goose eggs from our flock. Emily the goose mom started her own nest, with seven eggs last I could count, we'll see who'll has the best hatching rate - the goose or the preschoolers :)

 

For more info on incubating - it either goes completely fine, or completely wrong is my experience - check out the Hova-Bator manual at (if this link does not work, use a google search):

 

http://www.pdfdownload.org/pdf2html/view_online.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.gqfmfg.com%2Fpdf%2FThermal%2520Hova-Bator%2520%2520instructions.pdf

beeswax lip balm

My first foray into lip balm making... and my basement studio smelled absolutely wonderful of warm beeswax and honey! I hope the lip balm tastes like it smelled :)


Making the recipe was quicker than making a soap batch as there is no lye involved; just melting and mixing the wax and oil. The hard part was figuring out how to get it into the tiny tins - and I ended up using a large syringe (left over from toddler antibiotics) which worked perfectly. Bit of a bugger getting it clean again, wax cools down fast and becomes solid easily and hot water is not hot enough, but not as much as cleaning stuff from making charcoal soap!


I based the recipe on a batch published in Grit
www.grit.com/community/crafts/beeswax-lip-balm-recipe.aspx

a very locally themed lip balm; made with local organic sunflower oil, local beeswax and local raw honey - with a dash of vitamin E.

we've got storage!

 

I had the great idea this winter to add shelving to the right of the hallway cabinet (I added the top shelves when we bought the house). This time I made the shelves the height of pint jars only, I have plenty of quart jar shelves above and in the half bath / pantry, which freed up a lot of space everywhere. I was even able to do some sorting, and found some jars of things I did not even remember I had.Or like.
 
And then on a yard sale last fall I found this great metal four drawer map cabinet. It took me a while to figure out where to put it (it's big, and my basement is fully in use) and then how to get it down there! The things heavy! But I found a space, right under my matting table with one inch to spare, it cleaned up real nice and with added wax paper bottoms the drawers are perfect critter proof soap storage. I could even add a second layer of flowers... without bending the drawer out of shape! maybe I'm lucky and I'll find another one...

I love it when things have their own place, are out of the way and I can find them when I need them - it's the little things that make life happy :)

It's Spring! I think...

Our first kid of the year!
He was born Monday morning, and again Gazelle the mom choose a very, very cold day but now I was prepared and installed a goat safe heating lamp. It's a healthy little boy, tho quite large, but then, he's all by himself, enjoying free access to all the milk he can get!

Hopefully the snow will disappear soon - and stay away! - so mommy and kid can enjoy the outdoors, play on the goat playhouse and eat fresh grass (I'm sure there is some somewhere...).

 

Simon likes to visit after school and hang out with the little one, and he's becoming quite friendly. I hope the other kids, Thirteen could go any moment, show up soon so he'll have some friends to play with :)

A short video of our new baby goat kidding around!
p.s. Gazelle is part lamancha, so she has no ears (her nubs are called fairy ears, some lamancha have nothing at all). In case you'er wondering :)

http://youtu.be/3b2oqSNyePI

home made maple syrup

 We made maple syrup - from scratch! well, from the sap coming out of our tree :)
And I must say, apart from having to pay attention the last bit, it's much easier than cooking lard (which I did last time I used the outdoor propane burner)... and smells and tastes much, much better!

When the last batch of sap had cooked down to about a gallon (the point I would otherwise add a new batch of sap), I transferred the sap to a thick bottom indoor pan and finished on the kitchen stove. I used a candy thermometer and kept the sap at a slow boil, checking every 15 minutes or so, until it reached 104-105 degrees Celsius (it's a Canadian fact sheet). Then I poured the hot sap thru a milk filter in sterilized mason jars and closed with boiled lids. Hot syrup is thinner than cooled down syrup, so it still looked pretty runny but when cooled down it was definitely a syrup - and sticky as can be.

We had about 5 five gallon buckets of sap and ended up with 3 quart jars of syrup. But Simon the 5 year old did develop a craving for maple sap so we now have a pitcher of straight from the tree sap (sugar water basically) in the fridge as well. I'll keep tapping the trees to feed to the pregnant goats and the growing toddler - and maybe, if the sap really starts flowing again (it's snowing right now...) I might even do another run. It's fun!

The only thing I'm not sure about is if I was supposed to strain the sap or strain the syrup (for little stuff that gets blown in) - the syrup sure did not want to go down the milk filter!

rebatching soap

Sometimes when making soap something does not go quite as planned - not all the lye was diluted when the lye mixture was added, during gelling the soap overheated, the soap was mixed too long and seized, forgot to add an essential ingredient. But soap does not need to be thrown away, not even funky soap, as long as the basic recipe measurements (balance of lye to oil/fats) stay correct. 

If you have a batch of soap that went really wrong and parts separated, make sure to save EVERYTHING including the yucky gobby stuff as it is all part of the original recipe.

Below is how I rebatch soap:

Noodle the soap (preferable not that old, like in a week or two after the initial batch) with an electric kitchen grater (like zucchini) and add noodles to a large non aluminum pan. Lightly pour milk (any milk) over top of noodles (I use about 1/2 to 1 cup; more for older, drier soap) but not so much it pools on bottom of pan.

Have the inner pan with noodles nestled into an outer pan with boiling water, the technique is called au bain marie. This way the soap can not scorch as the bottom of the inner pan never gets hotter than the temperature of boiling water. I use a lid to help with heat retention.

 

After a bit, half an hour to an hour, the noodles start melting. With a large spoon or ladle scoop from the bottom to the top, to stir the mostly melted with the hardly melted at all.

Keep an eye on it and stir every once in a while, like very half hour or hour or so. Also keep an eye on the outer pan water level and refill if needed. Make sure to evenly stir unmelted parts together, also the bits stuck to the sides, so it's mostly at the same melting stage when ready to pour.

When the batch is done, the melted soap kinda looks like lava, a bit thicker at the top and edges and pretty liquid in the hot middle.

Mix everything up one last time especially the edges and pour quickly into a block mold. I don't have much luck pouring rebatched soap in shape molds without bubbles so I stick to block molds and cut down to size later.

At first the poured soap will be quite dark, but over time it will lighten up. Rebatched soap will not have the same color as the original tho it will be close. This soap was more a pastel yellow but rebatched became bright yellow. Rebatched soap also tends to have a pearlessence to it, the folds and whirls of the thicker poured soap stay slightly visible in the body of the soap and looks very nice cut. I also found rebatched soap does not cure as hard as the original (or it just takes much longer) but don't know if that shortens it's shelf life or not. Certain soaps I prefer rebatched over straight, especially because of the pearlessence look, but probably also cause they really like to overheat :)

Why does soap sometimes overheat, in case you're wondering?

A biggie is forgetting it's still plugged in and wrapped up. I gel my block soap on a seed starter mat covered with a piece of insulation foam and wrapped in a moving blanket. I leave the seedstarter on for 15 minutes to an hour depending on ambient temperature (basically, is it summer or winter), unplug it and leave the mold wrapped for another hour or more, until it's mostly gelled (check out an earlier blog post). And sometimes I forget to check in time... darn the kid :)

Another one is a large amount of soap made with milk and added honey. Milk soap runs hotter than regular soap (no seedmat needed, wrapping enough). Add honey and you don't even want to cover it (which is why making milk & honey soap poured into bubblewrap such a skill, hihi). And if you make a batch of milk soap with honey (like my Bee Good) and pour the whole recipe into one block mold the mass of the soap generates so much heat it needs to be cooled down - I place it, uncovered, on my concrete basement floor. And yes, it's easier to make this soap in winter!

double yolker

One chicken egg, two yolks... you should have seen Simon's face :)
Most of the time I recognize the double yolkers, they do look like two egg butts stuck together with a small 'glue' ridge around the middle. And they always make me smile too.

We finally had a winter with chicken eggs thru-out, tho we do not have much fridge space left now either as we only sell/barter with a handful of neighbors and friends (and some of them escaped to Florida!) but I plan to start up the egg stand drive thru again this year - and add my soaps as well! A milk soap drive thru...

The geese and ducks also started laying and the first six goose eggs I donated to Simon's school. They'll incubate and raise the little ones for a while, and then I get them back - how useful! I'm also collecting the khaki campbell eggs for incubation in their primary class, I'd like a few more girls as I lost two of my three last year (foxes - and hence the saying "sitting ducks" I realized).

Not that we won't be incubating ourselves, except we'll be trading our eggs for fertile eggs with friends. They have blue laced wyandottes, absolutely gorgeous birds, but not laying thru winter as they don't have a coop light. I am partial to wyandottes anyway, pretty and a good dial purpose breed, but have only had silver and gold laced versions. I look forward to new subjects to photograph this coming year!

photographing for web postings

An easy way to photograph products, for sale or for fun, while using natural light and no flash. I used three pieces of white board (even cardboard with white paper taped or glued to it would work), two square and one rectangular with a taped hinge between. I use regular white paper as a surface.

I position the reflector, because that is what it becomes, on a table right next to a big window with indirect light (no direct sunlight) but not too dark.Then I photograph from straight above, for my sister's tea samples, or from whatever makes the best composition without blocking the light. I position the side flaps to bounce the most light to the sides of the objects as well.

Then I use photoshop to edit the images. First I use the white balance and select the whitest part of the paper background as pure white. The camera's light meter automatically underexposes white as it interprets medium grey. Then I use the selection tool to select the white background from the edges of the tea, reverse selection to only crop out the tea (feather if necessary, to avoid sharp selection edges), open new image, copy paste the tea into it, click away the standard white background layer, save as a gif to allow transparancy and voila, a tea picture with a transparent background - suitable for all websites :)

Fenn Fresh - a original tea melange by Atelier Cherubijn.

maple sugaring for dummies

 With help from the Ontario Extension Notes handout on Backyard Maple Syrup Production my son and I drilled some holed, hung some buckets and had some old fashioned fun! With power tools!

He was very much intrigued by the drip, drip, drip of the sap into the buckets. We now have a pitcher of maple sap in the fridge and yes, it does taste better than plain water :)

The taps come from Agway and the foodgrade buckets are either icing buckets from Wegmans or oil buckets from my soap business. I used a door handle drill (makes about a 2 inch hollow hole) to drill a hole in the lids, to help prevent stuff from blowing into the buckets (and squirrels and snowflakes). And I used rubber bungee ties to wrap around and secure the buckets to the tree. I did that because it's quite windy at our place, but last time I when gently unhooked the bungees one full bucket fell right off the tree, taking the plug straight with it!  I had been wondering if that could happen...

Over the past two weeks we collected about 5 buckets of sap which kept well as they pretty much froze solid overnight. I moved the buckets indoors to thaw, have one pan on the woodstove to preheat and whenever the main pan is getting low I add that. It seems a pretty efficient system. Surprisingly, the indoor woodstove does not get stoked hot enough this time of the year to evaporate much from that large a quantity of liquid. I'm using my turkey fryer propane burner which works well, yesterday outdoors but today in the sunroom with all windows open as it is raining (works better, less draft).

Will keep you updated!

snow!

Is Greni trying to catch snowflakes?!

No... he learned to "smile" for a cookie :)

bird seed cookies

based on an oatmeal chocolate chip cookie recipe from Moosewood.

1 cup cane sugar
1/2 cup butter (microwaved for 1 minute)
1/4 cup veggie oil
2 eggs
(1 teaspoon vanilla extract, I never do tho)
1 cup all purpose or half & half flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
2 1/2 cups rolled oats or five grain mix
1 cup chocolate chips
1/2 cup raisins and/or dried cranberries
1/2 cup walnuts, chopped
1/2 cup dried dates, small pieces
1/2 cup flax seeds
1/2 cup sunflower seeds and/or pinenut seeds

combine all ingredients.
with a tablespoon drop batter on baking sheet
push batter flat to about 1/2 inch thick
bake at 375 degrees for 14 minutes or edge of cookie is crisp
cool for about 10 minutes or until cookies firm up in middle

I would have added a picture except we already ate the latest batch!

These are good emergency cookies as well. Healthy enough as a breakfast and / or lunch replacement when on the road! At least I think so...

Coffee & Cream

Meet our two new does, Coffee and Cream (or maybe Cappuccino and Espresso?!). They are a Nubian Saanen cross and most likely pregnant. They're a little younger than I would normally breed (it was an oops) but it is the industry's standard so we'll just go with it this time as older, experienced milking goats are quite valuable - if you can even find one!

And I think we lucked out all around, I found two healthy milking prospects and they did not go to the weekend meat auction! I happened to email just at the right time...

ducks everywhere!

It's been fun having all those duckies around, but man, do they make a mess! I already evicted their water bucket to the outdoors and just wish they would do their multitude of poopies there too...

But, they are fun to watch, tromping down the snowy pasture all in a row, scooting like a penguin under the stall doors to check out the barn isle (and scooting back fast when they see me...), coming to the fence real curious to look at the tiny human, who in turn loves to watch the funny looking and chirping mass of ducks!

They're about 8 weeks old now and some of the boys are already larger than their mom...

quick stew option

Add frozen meat and frozen tomato liquid to stew pot, with a little jar rinsings to help thaw out without sticking to the bottom of the pan.

As I mentioned in the Squashed Deer Stew recipe:
When I can tomatoes, like everyone, to make paste I cut the tomatoes, boil them up but then I remove the liquid with a ladle before the tomato flesh completely disintegrates. That way I don't have to boil the tomatoes forever to remove excess liquid, plus I either can or freeze the liquid to use for other things (stew, soup, etc).

Couple hours later: perfect stew!

Monica, may she rest in peace

I'm real sad to say that our trusty milker Monica died this week...
She was ailing for a while, had milkfever after kidding last spring, had real trouble putting on and keeping on weight over summer and then had a miscarriage followed by milkfever this winter... I tried high nutrient food, extra vitamins, splitting up at feeding just to make sure everyone got what they needed, and just when I thought she was getting over the last set down she died. Poor, poor girl.

In collaboration with Cornell Ambulatory I donated her body to the vet school Anatomy lab. Hopefully an autopsy will reveal what went wrong so I can learn and prevent my other girls from having to go thru a similar ordeal like her. And maybe her remains can help teach the student farm vets...

We're going national!

 

Far Mountain Soap officially opened shop on Etsy.com today :)

visit us at www.etsy.com/shop/FarMountainSoap
to check out the first listing of our best seller milk and honey bars...

which reminds me, we're on Facebook now too!
visit us at www.facebook.com/FarMountainSoap and "like" us.

Squashed Deer Stew

The following is a recipe that evolved from my kid's insistence on not eating anything lumpy & mixed... so I blended it before serving. I also used a short cut to make stew with meat from the freezer without thawing it first, very useful for the busy (and forgetful) mom!

When I can tomatoes, like everyone, to make paste I cut the tomatoes, boil them up but then remove the liquid with a ladle before the tomato flesh completely disintegrates. That way I don't have to boil the tomatoes forever to remove excess liquid, plus I either can or freeze the juice to use for other things (stew, soup, etc).

1 leg of frozen meat, I use goat or deer
1 quart of saved tomato liquid, frozen or canned

Add to cast iron pot (start with a little bit of extra water if liquid is frozen, like rinse out of the bag or jar, to help start thawing the rest) and simmer until meat easily comes of the bones.


Remove all meat and bone from liquid, let cool down on cutting board, when meat is cool, remove from bone, remove squishy parts and cut up in small pieces.

1 butternut squash or medium pumpkin, skinned & cubed.
same amount of sunchokes (jeruzalem artichokes), cubed.

Add cubed squash and sunchokes to liquid and simmer until tender.
When cubes are soft, a fork sticks right thru, blend with stick blender.
When blended add meat back in and heat until all is warm.

We like this with spagetti but it works well with all kinds of pasta. The neat thing is that the paste sticks to the pasta (courtesy of the sunchokes) so the kid has to eat the veggie even if he tries to pick around the sauce :)

Why I call it Squashed Deer Stew?
Cause the deer had a vehicular encounter before ending up as stew...

my sister the soap maker

I just had to share these wonderful little soaps with you! They are the creations of my sister, the first soapmaker in our family and the one who taught me all! Left you see "Pommander", then from top to bottom you see "Mystic Musk", "Berrier Reef" and "Koala Treat".

I love being in charge of her website - yes, I'm Middle Earth Studio as well -  as that gives me a first and often a behind the scenes look of her products. And a change to pretty much try them all as I get samples for the site's product images :)

To see more of her work you can visit her website at www.AtelierCherubijn.nl

home made bread

I bake about two loaves each week for my family and seem to have perfected the recipe enough that the resulting loaves are consistent in shape and taste. My hubbie and kid prefer this bread over the sweetened supermarket bread and it's easy enough to make not to be a weekly hassle for me. So if you'd like to try some, my tweaked recipe follows below:


6 1/2 cups of all purpose or half and half bread flour (whole wheat is too dense to rise well)
1 cup of broken grain cereal (secret ingredient, see pic below)
3 cups warm water (or whey, or potato water, or bean soaking water etc)
1 egg
1 1/2 tablespoon salt
1 full tablespoon yeast
1 tablespoon of some sort of sugar, to proof yeast

Measure 1 cup of warm water, put in separate small bowl. Add yeast and sugar and whisk well. Wait about 5 minutes, or until a layer of foam appears on water surface.

Add flour, grains & salt to mixing bowl. Then add yeast mixture to flour and start mixing.
Immediately add the egg.

Let mixer turn until all the dough is stuck like a ball to the dough hook (because of the egg the bottom will stay stuck to the bowl, don't worry about it).

Remove dough hook and put a hot wet dishcloth over bowl.
Put somewhere warm but not hot for a couple of hours.

When the dough has nicely risen, as in looks like a big mushroom, scrape off from inside bowl, divide in two and put either one in a metal loaf pan (with or without some antistick oil). Push gently in all corners and then LEAVE IT ALONE for another 10 minutes or so (set timer). After 10 minutes it will have recovered handling and started to rise again so stick them into the COLD oven and turn on the heat to about 350 - 375 degrees, for about half an hour to 45 minutes. When the loaf slides around in the pan, is loose, it's done.

The tricks seem to be proofing the yeast, even tho technically it should not need it, adding the egg for more volume, letting the dough recover after putting it in the pan and sticking it in a cold oven so the dough keeps rising while the oven warms up...

But I did just hear about another trick, adding moisture the first third of baking to get a larger fluffier loaf, so that'll be next week's experiment!

a New Year's Treat!

Oliebollen or Dutch Fried Dough, the perfect way to celebrate New Year's - and a perfect treat on such cold days :)

The recipe is from a traditional Dutch cook book (it will tell you how to boil potatoes for instance) and all the recipes are from scratch. They are also in metric, as in grams and liters, but for ease of American cooking I translated the measurements to cups & spoons. Happy Eating!

Put one cup of raisins, black and / or golden, in a container with spiced rum the day before making the dough.

Measure 4 1/2 cups of white or all purpose flour into a mixing bowl.
Add 1 tablespoon of salt.
Measure two cups of milk (or beer!) and warm 1 minute in microwave.
Add 2 tablespoons of yeast to warm milk/beer and mix well (with small whisk).
Add yeast mixture to flour and mix well with dough paddle.
Immediately add 1 egg.
And add the soaked raisins (but not the rum, use that to make more rum raisins).

When all is incorporated well, remove paddle and cover with hot wet towel. Put somewhere warm, like heating vent or wood stove (or closed oven with light on) and leave to rise for at least an hour.

Heat a deep fryer to about 170 degrees Celcius (middle setting, fries setting is too hot).

With two spoons scoop about a clementine's worth of dough, pat semi round and softly lower into frying oil. Do not put in too many at once, they need their space to turn. When the bottom is done, ca 3 minutes, they'll easily flip over, if there is enough room they'll even do it themselves. Enjoy!

The American Doughnut is based on this traditional dutch Fried Dough recipe, as with larger balls and hotter frying oil the center tends to stay sticky & uncooked so the solution was to remove that all together - the hole in the middle - and voila, the doughnut was born :)