Hot Lava

Did you also have a bumper crop of peaches last year, ran out of space in the freezer and ended up canning a hole bunch on syrup? Then have I got a recipe for you... and preschooler approved!

 It originated from my husband's college time, where they liked to challenge each other to cook in single color. The name comes from the blub, blub, blub the sauce does when cooking slowly, it really does look like lava! Since I use home canned ingredients, there also is not a whole lot of cooking involved, it's mostly a matter of waiting for the rice to cook and the ingredients to warm up.

What you'll need (~5 people):
2 quart jars of thick milled tomato sauce (no seeds)
1 jar of peaches on heavy or medium syrup
1/3 cup corn starch (not needed if using condensed tomato sauce)
chicken breast or tofu
and 2 cups brown rice
(spices to taste, tho I normally do not add anything else)

Boil water for rice, add rice and slowly cook until tender.

If using chicken breast pan sear until done, then add tomato sauce.
Dump the two jars of tomato sauce in a thick bottomed pan (we use a cast iron wok, or more properly called a wadjang). Add the syrup from the peaches but NOT the peaches. If using tofu cut in half inch cubes and add. Slowly simmer until the rice is ready.

When rice is ready, add peaches. Mix corn starch with a little cold water. Add liquid starch slowly to sauce and stir well, bringing back to boil to set for just a bit.

For a kick, start with frying a big spoon of sambal oelek (hot pepper garlic sauce) or sambal badjang (sweet pepper garlic sauce), when seared add either chicken, or the tomato sauce.

Do not add peaches until the end, as they get burning hot (quote from preschooler) and will burn your mouth! It isn't called Hot Lava for nothing :)

starting seedlings

Busy sowing seeds, we did two flats yesterday, one with tomatoes and peppers and one with brocolli, cabbage and some brussels sprouts. The tomatoes and peppers are for the greenhouse, next month we'll seed more for the veggie yard. We used cut down yoghurt containers as markers, they're easy to write on and don't mind the wet.

first kids of the year!

We have kids!

Maybe delivered two healthy little kids Tuesday morning at 11am; a boy and a girl, 7.5 and 8 pounds each. And a perfect day for it too, sunny and in the fifties! Much better than today, around freezing with a winter snow storm going on! The kids are a saanen boer mix and look almost identical to their mommy, the girl with pointy saanen ears and the boy with floppy boer ears. Maybe comes from a show farm so was not allowed to nurse her own kids, and at first did not like them looking, but settled in quite quickly when realizing they sure take the pressure off. 


We liked the boer buck we used last fall, and these two are some nice kids, so we hope to buy one of our own for the coming season. Makes it easier if we have a buck right on property, I won't have to chauffeur the girls to their date :)

Snow White also gave birth to a nice buckling during the night, but as far as we can back track the little buck asphyxiated on a piece of inhaled caul and was found dead at the morning feed... I'm going to try to keep her in milk, but she's not having any of that, and sits down, right on the bucket!

first venture into sausage making

 With another frozen leg of venison to process I finally decided to go ahead and treat myself to the KitchenAid meat grinder attachment - and I am loving it! Over the past couple years even tho our freezers are full of our homegrown meat we still buy at the store; tho almost always either ground or sausage... I think I noticed a need here! This first time I made about 6 pounds of sausage using two recipes, one from the book Home Sausage Making and one from the internet using maple syrup.

A few tips I learned while using the grinder, from the book and from google:
- Only process COLD meat and fat, stuff it in the freezer for 30-60 minutes before grinding, including in between grinds. This prevents the meat from turning grey (never happened to me, only read about it).
- Try and remove as much of the muscle sheaths as possible, those white fibrous membranes, as they will get stuck in and behind the grinder disk. If the meat "worms" stop coming out evenly, stop the grinder and clean the disk.
- With this grinder, grind meat and fat separately, then mix together. I grind everything once with the coarse disk straight into the mixing bowl, add the herbs and spices, and then use the flat paddle under the mixer to mix it all together which it did real nicely. Then I put everything thru the grinder's small disk (see pic) and it looks just like the hamburger meat from the store!

 Unfortunately, even tho I love the grinder attachment I do not like the sausage stuffer part of it. I googled my experience and found that screw grinders are not really meant to stuff, the rotating action of the screw takes way longer to get the meat thru and I found it comes out pretty much as pate. I personally like coarse texture sausage better than fine (bratwurst compared to hot dogs) so I do not think I will use that again. I did find mention, from a commercial chef who has used this same KitchenAid and grinder combination as I now have with pleasure for years, to use a cake decorating bag instead. Next time I'll mcgyver one with the sausage stuffer funnel at the end (you need some length for the all rolled up entrails) and see if that works any better!

My husband and son loved the sausages, we tried the regular ones first, tho both my hubbie and I would like a coarser texture. I also found recipes for poultry and already look forward to make some goose sausage!

Soapy experiment

I've been wanting to make a purple marble soap for a while, so when I ended up with half a jar of burgundy lees from my blueberry mead making I decided to use that. Lees is the sediment, all the minerals and larger organic particles, from the honey, fruit and yeast used in the mead making process. Sometimes wine is aged on the lees, sur lie I think it's called, but most times the liquid is racked off (funneled with a hose) into a new container without disturbing the lees. Then the lees gets tossed...

Which I just could not do, not even for chicken scraps, it's all the good stuff and then concentrated! I decided to use it to marble in a soap recipe even tho I could not find any mention on google anywhere of soap makers having done that before... Of course, I make soap with whatever I can stuff in so that does not deter me too much but it's always nice to know ahead of time what to watch out for...

First odd thing that happened was that when I added the bright burgundy to the early trace soap the color immediately changed to bright green. The stuff is acid and I added it to a base! My goodness, chemistry at work :) Only too bad that bright kelp green did not last either, it again changed and now to a deep golden yellow. During gelling the color deepened, as gelling tends to do, from gold to chestnut and made quite a nice marble pattern.

Second odd thing was that the brick did not want to gel properly. I did not use heat, only my new foam insulators, but kept it covered for too long apparently as the oils in the soap partially separated. But only in the parts of the soap with the lees, not the standard soap mixture... weird. It did firm up nicely, and cut easily, but the colored marble has coconut oil beads all around the edges which does not look too good (it is a build in moisturizer tho). And then it hit me - lees is alcolic! And highly alcoholic, at least as high as wine! The soap seized from the alcohol, and that prevented proper gel...

So for my new Apple Jack soap, made with apple cider mead lees, I slowly boiled the lees to evaporate the alcohol, as I normally do when making beer or wine soaps. I hoped to make two recipes of this for my sales inventory and are really glad I found out before loosing another batch! Oh well, we live and learn - and now have a stack of beautiful marbled moisturizing soaps for gifts :)

Soap heat box

With this long and cold winter my basement workroom is colder as it has ever been before... it does not make much sense in heating it for me, I'm mostly waiting when making soap, except I did not realize how much it was influencing my soap process as well! The first batches I made this year would not gel at all even though milk soap normally creates enough internal heat to gel without external heat or even wrapping - so I added external heat... and overheated the heck out of it!

Normally the soap brick gels from the center, creating an oval of dark semi transparent soap which creeps to the outsides, and just before it does that (and then overheats) I stop the process by cooling down, either by unwrapping or placing on concrete floor. Gelled soap creates a better quality soap so I think it's worth the trouble. Except because of the extreme low temps the center would overheat before the edges of the soap brick would gel...

A bit of thinking made me realize it was the cold air of the basement keeping the outside from gelling, so I devised this foam edge to cut on draft and keep the heat in. I first used heavy blankets but that did not work anymore (as it did in previous years). Rescued pieces of heavy insulation foam (from a construction site, also used to insulate my chicken coop west wall and two top bar hive lids) were used for the bottom, top and sides. It's very easy to cut to size with a band saw (our new tool) and with a piece of butcher paper on top to protect moisture beading from leaking chemicals it makes for a perfect heat box. Tho I am sure a styrofoam cooler would work just as well :)

deer tallow

I laid my hands on some deer fat and rendered about a gallon of the stuff on the wood stove... it took about a day and rendered and smells similar to beef tallow with a bit more spice. Now, what to use it for? Anti scent hunter soap? Guess it's time for google!

bunny bungalow

Based on the design of my good friend Anglika's bunny cages I finished my second bunny bungalow. I hoped to move the mommy bunny with her six kids last week but we're back in another bout of winter so it's still too cold... Good thing bunnies like to snuggle because they're rapidly outgrowing the indoor hutch!

 This is the first one I made, with a frame of hemlock and siding of old oak floor boards. For the run I recycled wire panels of my old ferret apartment, made by stacking three bunny cages on top of each other, connected by wire stairs. These were large, good quality cages which I have not been able to find locally.

I found the hard way that making a bunny bungalow out of one piece made for a heavy and difficult to maneuver piece of woodwork, so I did some thinking and split the unit up in three pieces; two hutches and one run. The hutches are made with hemlock framing and painted pine tongue and groove boards, the run is made with scrapwood pine lumber which can be easily replaced as needed. I bought the largest rabbit cage at Tractor Supply to use as paneling for the run, but am not pleased with the measurements and quality of the metal wire. Next time I will buy rolls of wire and make one from scratch to my own dimensions (a 1x2 cm roll for the bottom and a 1x2 inch roll for the sides and top).

Inside of the bungalow living area. The floor is wire with holes small enough to accommodate bunny feet but large enough for the pellets to fall through. I will add a sliding door on the outside of the hutch door to partition off for ease of catching; similar to my first hutch, which proved very useful. I prefer the two hutch design as I found the bunnies tend to use one hutch as living quarters and one as a bathroom, which really cuts down on cleaning! A few times a year I give everything a good scrape, and remove the poop heap below for composting into our gardens. Bunny poop is neutral and can be used immediately, without lengthy composting.

The finished project. The lids are roofed with left over sheet metal (used to protect ordered sheet metal in shipment, from our carport project) and hinged upwards for easy access to the living quarters. This run has a door at the front, the first one a door at the top - either works. I will put another piece of sheet metal on top of the run to protect from snow and rain (the bunnies seem to be out more with roof on run).

One more hutch to go, and we'll have a bunny villa park :)