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 :)

Free Seed Cabinets for our community.

One more gardening thing, and then it is time for lunch...

When planning your vegetable and flower gardens do not forget to check out the Free Seed Cabinets at Cooperative Extension this time of year! I am sure I blogged about this before, I love the program! This program is until supplies run out, in addition to the previously blogged Community Seed Swap coming weekend.

http://ccetompkins.org/garden/help-gardeners/free-seed-cabinets#sthash.to5Rgm2A.dpuf
the Free Seed Cabinets

Each year, staff in our Home Horticulture program write to various seed companies to request donations of seeds that are leftover from the previous year, but still viable.  CCE-Tompkins receives many generous seed donations in response to this appeal (including many organic seeds) from vendors that have included Ithaca Agway, Seed Savers Exchange, FEDCO, Burpee, Heirloom Seeds, Seed Saver Exchange, Select Seeds, Harris Seeds, and Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, for example.  There is a cabinet for flowers, and another cabinet for vegetables and herbs.

How It Works

Seed packets are organized in 2 cabinets, one for flowers, another for vegetables and herbs.  Everyone is welcome to come and take some seeds for free, but to keep the system fair, we've had to put these GUIDELINES into place which seed-takers must follow:  ONLY 1 VISIT PER MONTH and a LIMIT OF 10 SEED PACKETS PER VISIT.

So that we can track the success of the free seed program, we ask those taking seeds to write down their name, email and number of seeds they have taken.  Seeds generally are available starting in late January until the supply is gone.

We ALSO invite gardeners to contribute accurately identified and dated seed (date of seed collection) to the Seed Cabinet for others to share.  We have small envelopes here, or you may use your own, but be sure to put the year of seed collection on the envelope, as well as the name of the plant. NOTE: all donated seeds should be given to Pat Curran, our Horticulture Educator, for review before we make them available to the public.

The Seed Cabinets are located in our Agriculture/Environment office and may be visited weekdays from 8:30am-4:30pm.  Tompkins County Cornell Cooperative Extension is located at 615 Willow Avenue in Ithaca (Dey St. exit from Route 13).

some greenhouse thoughts...

My new gardening goal for this season is to try and really extend our season by start planting our greenhouse much earlier. I normally preseed tomatoes and bellpeppers sometime mid April for planting Memorial Day weekend, but since most of those now life indoors I will preseed them with my leeks and brassica in mid February. Yes, we might get a cold snap, but it is easy enough to run a small heater in the greenhouse at night and it warms up really fast during the day.

Plus, I prepared the bed ahead of time to seed some lettuce and other leafy greens real early. Last season I sowed bok choy early with not much success, but the greenhouse might still have been to chilly for them. This year I'll use more cold hardy seeds like mustard greens, and lettuce mix, which I noticed seeded itself in my cold frame and came up the next year with no issues at all!

 Instead of mulching with organics as I do in the rest of my gardens - the greenhouse does not get enough moisture for quick decomposition in winter - I remove the top couple inches of spent dirt and replace it with 2 year old composted horse manure I then dig in. Plus I do not like the tomatoes etc to seed themselves out each season and removal of the top layer also removes the seeds. I like having a couple wheelbarrows of soil to play with, either to dump & raise swamp hiking paths or to pot up suckers and seeders for a quick sale in spring! One can never have enough dirt...

Might I have mentioned I've got gardening on my mind today?!

Community Seed Swap

Community Seed Swap & Guidelines

Bring your home-saved seeds (or surplus purchased seeds) to share with others, pick up some seeds for spring planting, learn how to clean seeds, and get tips on starting plants from seed for next year's garden. Cost: $5.00 donation, or free if you bring seeds to share! See below for guidelines if you plan to bring seeds to share. Contact Chrys Gardener at cab69@cornell.edu if you have any other questions.

Seed Swapping Guidelines

- It's ideal if you can pre-package small seeds in individual envelopes. Sometimes with small seeds, people don't realize how much they are taking. By pre-packaging there will be more to go around.  Write the name of the variety and the year collected on the envelopes. Large seeds (corn, beans, etc) can be loose for people to package themselves.
-  People will have questions about the varieties you are swapping - how tall does it get, how many days till harvest, what's the flavor like, etc. Know your varieties, and if you want to save yourself from repeating the same information you can make an index card with information for each of the  varieties you are swapping.

Home-Saved Seed

- Be sure that you saved seeds from plants that were open-pollinated varieties, not hybrids, otherwise they will not come 'true-to-seed' for the next person that grows them. If you bought the plants from a garden center, the tag may say if it's a hybrid. If you started the plants from seed yourself the seed packet will say either open-pollinated or hybrid
- Some vegetables will cross-pollinate with other related plants, for example many types of winter and summer squash can cross producing sometimes inedible results in the next generation. Some plants are self-pollinated and are easy to save 'true' seed from without any isolation techniques - tomatoes, lettuce, peas, and beans are all generally considered 'fool-proof'. If you saved seeds from other types of vegetables without avoiding the possibility of cross pollination, just state that on the seed packets (eg. 'Possibly crossed with other squash').

Purchased Seed

- If you have extra quantities of purchased seed that you want to swap, you can bring both open-pollinated and hybrid varieties. Just make sure they are clearly labeled as such so that people who want to save seeds from them  know which is which.
- See more at: http://ccetompkins.org/calendar/13/11/06/community-seed-swap-guidelines#sthash.uIGajFUy.dpuf

I feel like gardening... it is sunny outside and it might be in the single digits and everything covered in snow, but from behind my computer it looks great! So I am thinking gardening thoughts instead... which brings me to the Cooperative Extension Community Seed Swap coming Sunday February 2nd from 10am to 3pm. I already sorted and bagged my seed surplus, and are ready to go, how about you?!

Community Seed Swap

Bring your home-saved seeds (or surplus purchased seeds) to share with others, pick up some seeds for spring planting, learn how to clean seeds, and get tips on starting plants from seed for next year's garden. Cost: $5.00 donation, or free if you bring seeds to share! See below for guidelines if you plan to bring seeds to share. Contact Chrys Gardener at cab69@cornell.edu if you have any other questions.

It's ideal if you can pre-package small seeds in individual envelopes. Sometimes with small seeds, people don't realize how much they are taking. By pre-packaging there will be more to go around.  Write the name of the variety and the year collected on the envelopes. Large seeds (corn, beans, etc) can be loose for people to package themselves.

See more at: http://ccetompkins.org/calendar/13/11/06/community-seed-swap-guidelines#sthash.uIGajFUy.dpuf

Celebrating New Year in style - dutch style that is!

And I do not mean the fireworks we picked up in Pennsylvania... no, I mean our famous Dutch Fried Dough we like to make around New Year's!

A little background on the Dutch Doughnut:
Oliebollen are said to have been first eaten by Germanic tribes in the Netherlands during the Yule, the period between December 26 and January 6. The Germanic goddess Perchta, together with evil spirits, would fly through the mid-winter sky. To appease these spirits, food was offered, much of which contained deep-fried dough. It was said Perchta would try to cut open the bellies of all she came across, but because of the fat in the oliebollen, her sword would slide off the bodies of whoever ate them...

For centuries the Dutch ate olykoek ("oil cake"), an old name for oliebol. The oliebollen visible in an Aelbert Cuyp painting from around 1652 are very similar to today's oliebol. During the nineteenth century the word "oliebol" started to be used more. These oil balls or early doughnuts were simply balls of dough fried in pork fat (Belgium) or rape oil (Dutch) until golden brown and liberally sprinkled with powdered sugar.  

Throughout the holidays most Dutch downtowns will have a temporary Oliebollen Kraam (Fried Dough Vendor). Since 1993 Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad has held an annual highly publicized oliebollentest at the end of each year, testing the skills and recipes of these traveling oliebollen salesmen! And customers do keep track of the results...

The Doughnut Shape
As Dutch immigrants began to settle in the United States, they continued to make their oliebollen, and influenced by other cultures it morphed into what we call doughnuts today. Because the inside of an oliebol does not cook as fast as the rest, problematic oliebollen (a.i. too large or undercooked) could have an uncooked center. One solution to this gooey center was to stuff it with fillings that did not require cooking but Hansen Gregory, an American ship captain, had another solution. In 1847 Gregory solved this problem by punching a hole in the center of the dough ball. The hole increased the surface area, exposure to the hot oil, and therefore eliminated the uncooked center (plus he could impale a doughnut on the ship’s steering wheel handles so that he could use both hands to steer!).

http://foodreference.about.com/od/history_myths/a/The-History-Of-Doughnuts.htm & http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliebol and a little by yours truly.

new bunnies; twice!

The two angora bunnies from my friend Angelika grew up to be real friendly, but also became two boys... and they grew loads of hair... I had a hard time remembering they needed to be combed, again, and again, and again and felt pretty bad about that, especially when one got a little matted so I combed him out well but almost left him naked! I was a little too focused on removing the matts I forgot to check how much was coming off, and that in early spring... Angelika had room again so she took her two boys back. I do still have a couple containers of angora hair but found it did not even work real well for felting... so much for that idea.

I did learn I like to have bunnies, especially for the amount of weeds that go in and the piles of poopies that come back out, but are no good with high maintenance breeds. A friend of mine came across an older meat breed doe, a Giant Chin (chinchilla, as in similar color) and I ended up buying her. After a lot of looking and asking around and visiting the Buffalo County Fair and the Syracuse State Fair, I was unable to find her a buck, any meat type buck, anywhere! I happened to mentioned this unfruitful search to a tin can rally friend of ours, who laughed and said he had just started breeding his own meat bunnies a few years back and to come on over anytime. He lives like two blocks down our street...

 So that's how our Giant Chin Anabel had a very enthusiastic date with this black New Zealand buck, 30 days later resulting in these two precious little bundles of fur...

Anabel is not with us anymore, she developed some sort of cancer and died late fall, but her daughter Clarabel and son Albert are still with us. For a short while they lived side by side in the bunny bungalow until I realized - Clarabel was hopping around with a hay mustache - that that wire middle partition might not be as much of a procreation hurdle for bunnies as I assumed... so now Clarabel lives with her six kids in the sunroom and Albert is by himself, at least until the boys are old enough to be sexed...

nesting geese in January!

It's winter, so time for some blog house keeping! And geese are on my mind, as I found out yesterday the reason why my gander Kristopher has been so paranoid in the run recently... the darn things started a nest! In January! While the temps are below single digits and worse! I ended up removing six frozen and cracked eggs and hope they'll either stop laying, or keep on laying in the same spot so I can keep an eye on it. I like them making the nest in the side run, as we can lock that up at night, but worry repeated egg harvesting might scare them off somewhere else...

Let's see, last time I posted we had received five goslings from my son's incubating program at school. The brooding goose managed to hatch another eight (!) which is our record. If I remember correctly there were only one or two unhatched eggs left in the nest. From talking to other goose and duck enthusiasts we deduced that the hatching rate last Spring was high because the average humidity was high; we had a lot of rain and drizzle (and mud).
Goose eggs need moisture to develop correctly which is why a lot of waterfowl need access to a pond for successful hatching; the brooders swim occasionally and thus bring back moisture to the nest by their damp breast feathers. We do have a large rubbermaid container for them to poodle in but don't really see brooding mommy make all that much use of it, she hangs around closer to home. But she is not on the nest at all times, so next season I plan to mist the eggs occasionally and see if that makes a difference. The previous year we had three goslings from 7+ eggs. That was an above average dry spring, so it would be great if we can increase their hatching rate with just a little spritzing!

All five school goslings ended up being adopted by the larger brood and within a month or so the whole group was walking around together. We sold three of the school goslings; since I kept a close eye on them as they lived in the sunroom I was able to see sex differences and tagged them accordingly. We kept a boy / girl couple ourselves and sold the others as breeders.
Two of the eight brooded goslings quickly got separated at night and died from exposure (they squeezed thru the run/side run wire partition but did not have the thinking to walk around to the door and loop back - I put a strip of smaller diameter fencing around the side run to prevent this from happening again), the other six made it to adulthood fine. We butchered those, for our and our friends' freezers. Feedback was that it tasted the best when deep fried, but then, what doesn't!

It was nice having a large group of geese strolling the yard and garden. It looked so homely (and apparently scared the wacky neighbors, another plus!). Even tho we had a bumper crop of fruit and apples this year we had hardly any problem of rotting fruit on the ground! I had already put a wood snow fence around the chicken yard for our fox problem, which in early season kept the fox out and in later season the ever hungry geese. We'd kick the geese out in morning, feed the chickens, and then let the geese back in at night - otherwise there'd be no feed left! We ended up not feeding the geese commercial feed for about 4 months, stimulating them to graze and gather for themselves as they grew to a respectable weight of about 6-8 pounds dressed - and apple & leftover marinated :)