We were tired. It had been a full day, and promises to be a long week. There were dished to do and laundry to fold and another bushel of green beans (and a half-bushel of cucumbers) out on the porch to be attended to. I should start stemming beans, I thought.

And then Lupine approached me, an apron in each hand. "Let's make zuh-urt, mama!" (Dessert is a rare treat in our house. Definately not an everyday affair.)

The aprons belonged to my mother's mother's mother. Great-Grandma Nellie. Lupine's Great-Great-Grandmother.

And so, zuh-urt? Yes. In the spirit of grandma Lee and Grandma Nellie, yes to zuh-urt. Sometimes it feels really good to surprise even yourself with a big and joy-filled yes.

Sage set to work whipping raw cream and homemade vanilla into peaks, and Lupine and I gathered almond butter, eggs, and honey to make almond-butter brownies. When they were cool we piled them with "frosting" and dug in.

What a sweet finish to a busy day.

~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~

The recipe for the brownies is adapted from The Specific Carbohydrate Diet and I've had it memorized for about 6 years, since my first journey into no-carb gut-healing foods. 1 C nut butter; 1/2 C (scant) honey; 1 egg; 1 tsp baking soda (optional). Combine well with a whisk and spread in a well buttered pan (or several small ones). Bake at 350 for 15-25 minutes, or until browned on the edges and not gooey in the middle. These will collapse some when cool, but you can just fill the divet with something yummy.

Thanks for the love yesterday. As always I find that unplugging from the computer and resting can work wonders. Today I feel like myself again (hooray!) and rested to boot.

This week has been one of the busiest – and messiest – weeks in my kitchen. Ever. The tomatoes have started coming in (and so have the other nightshades) so we're swimming in sauces, crushed tomatoes, and other canned and frozen goodness. The job of transforming huges baskets and boxes of ripe tomatoes into sauces for the winter is so satisfying.

Yes, the pantry is officially full. I've started stashing food in the basement too. There is something that so deeply satisfied about putting food by. And my kitchen? It's never been messier. Whoa.

But do you want to know something? Come February when we're opening those jars it'll be so worth it.

When I woke up this morning I had the faint memory of a marathon of sorts happening in my kitchen yesterday, though through my sleep-clouded eyes I couldn't remember any details. All I knew was that it was morning and time to get up yet I was still exhausted and had a strong feeling there was lots more to do.

I headed into the kitchen and stopped in my tracks. Dishes. Everywhere. A culinary disaster.

Yes, we cleaned up after dinner. Dishes washed, food put away. Then we took a quick bike ride to the coop (for spices for canning) before bed. After the kids were snuggled in I had work to do. (I was home alone with the kids last night while Pete went to do some "product testing" of our reformulated natural bug spray in the local spring creeks with his fly rod. Really. He was working. I swear.)

And so was I.

You may recall that Tuesday is my farm day. The kids and I had made our regular visit to some farmer friends yesterday and came home with gallons of milk and cream (for making butter, cheese, and yogurt) and pails and bags of fresh organic produce – green beans and wild blackberries in particular were begging to be put by at their peak. And let's not forget the garden harvest of zucchini that was taking over the kitchen from the day before. (There is something mildly manic about this time of year.)

Last night between the kids bedtime and my own I made two gallons of yogurt, a ruby-colored batch of blackberry jam, a half-dozen quarts of spicy zucchini-cumin pickles, a batch of chicken stock, and an enormous mess.

Today? Will be busy. We have homeschool group down by the creek, a playdate with friends, and then my weekly evening out – just me and my serger at a girlfriend's house. But somehow between here and there I have to manage putting by a 1/2 bushel of green beans, making a few more quarts of kraut, folding two loads of laundry, and washing a kitchen's worth of dirty dishes. Arrrrrggg!

Really. Why torture myself?

I can buy sauerkraut and blackberry jam any day of the year at the coop. Organic even. Heck, where I live there are two live, organic sauerkraut producers so I can even align with my ethics of supporting the local economy and foodshed. I would guess there is local jam too.

But then, I would miss the whole point of self-sufficiency. When winter comes and its dinner time I want to go – not to the coop or the grocery store – but to my basement or my pantry to choose what to serve with our dinner. There are still months left to put food by and already our options are: canned spicy zukes, garlic cucumbers, dilly beans (spicy or tame); live fermented sauerkraut, pickles, and dilly beans; and lots of jam – blueberry, strawberry, or blackberry so far. Plus the freezer is brimming with greens and fruits for anything we might want to make in the winter when all the veggies at the coop are from California.

I've never put food by on this scale before. It is still arguably a baby step towards self-reliance, but it's more than I've ever done. And there really aren't words for how happy those shelves make me. Sometimes when I walk down the stairs I open the cabinet doors just to gaze at the jars, smiling.

As I type this Sage is stacking last night's jars in the pantry and saying, " We're putting a lot of food by for winter! Even just putting them in the cabinet is satisfying."

My heart swells.

Note: You can find more canning and food preservation posts here, here, here, and here.

 

Most of you were right about our plans for yesterday's mystery field trip. We went berry picking! Each berry season is so fleeting. Abundance one day, out-and-out over the next. Since I refuse my children out-of-season berries (and many other fruits and veggies) during much of the year, we have to get while the gettin's good.

And yes, we have company coming tonight and we should have been home cleaning the house but we went picking instead. (Truth be told I am one to avoid the "shoulds" every chance I get. Because "should" rarely means "I really want to". And there's just too much should and too little joy in the world if you focus only on what has to be done. But back to the berries.)

As for the surprise or mystery element of the day, I hid the baskets from Sage (he's too sharp and would have figured me out before we pulled out of the driveway) but Lupine told him in the car that she "saw a clue" and together they figured out where we were going. We picked for a couple of hours and brought home pounds and pounds of berries for freezing, fresh eating, and jam. Sage worked out some math at home and determined that our $25 worth of berries turned into $75 worth of jam and frozen berries had we bought it at the coop. Even figuring in $5 for gas and $5 for other ingredients, we still came out way ahead – and that's without adding value for the fun factor.

So the pantry is stacked with 12 half-pints of blueberry and honey jam, two gallon bags are in the freezer awaiting winter smoothies and muffins, and everyone has blue teeth this morning from the last of the fresh eating. Not bad for a day's work.

(The beautiful Amish baskets were all a generous gift from some farmer friends whom we adore.)

 

Cheesemaking has fascinated me for years. It is much like soapmaking in that you take simple, basic ingredients and with a bit of chemistry transform them into something exponentially more wonderful than what you began with. My soapmaking fascination has led to my soap business, leaving my cheesemaking interests unfulfilled. And yet I check books out from the library and dream of the day I'll commit some time to learning about cheese.

And then there are the happy accidents. Like when you set out to make something else and find you've made cheese. Yup. I made cheese. Completely by accident.

(Worth noting: as a child I was fascinated by the serendipitous kitchen discoveries that our ancestors made. I heard a story of how bread dough, accidentally dropped into boiling water was the first noodle and I seriously thought of that with awe every time I ate pasta for years. Total bliss to have my own kitchen accident and "discover" something myself, new or otherwise.)

It started like this: Each week the children and I make a pound or two of butter from local grass-fed cream. (It is one of my favorite parts of our putting-food-by rhythm.) The nutrition this butter provides is far superior to that of non-pastured or winter butter and because of our family's history of tooth decay I view summer butter as something as important as others might view fluoride or medicine. 

A gallon of raw cream will yield about 1 1/2 pounds of fresh butter to freeze and leave me 2 1/2 quarts or so of sweet or tart buttermilk – depending on if I cultured the cream or not – to determine a use for. Because we don't eat grains, baking with it was out. And really, how much salad dressing can one family eat? So I resorted to giving it to a friend to feed to her pigs rather than dump it down the drain. I wasn't very inspired by buttermilk. And because I sometimes don't culture my cream before making butter (my kids prefer it that way) the buttermilk – rather than being thick and tart – it more like skim milk. Not inspiring for culinary creativity.

Last week I decided to culture the buttermilk post butter-making. (What can I say. It was an afterthought.) I began to gently warm the buttermilk on the stove with the intention of heating, cooling, and inoculating with yogurt culture to see what happened. But as the buttermilk heated, suddenly curds and whey separated and I was left with cheese. Whoa. Now what? Faced with the choice of dumping it or eating it, I was hoping it was palatable.

I hustled to the computer and googled "heat buttermilk make cheese" and sure enough, I had just stumbled upon one of the simplest incarnations of home cheesemaking. After straining out the whey through a cloth (the whey I then fed to my garden plants) I refrigerated the cheese and discovered to my joy that the kids could not get enough of it. It is creamy and crumbly, mild, and delicious. And ridiculously easy to make.

To enjoy your cheese, lightly salt and serve as you would any soft young cheese, or drizzle with a bit of honey and server with fruit.

Today we'll be making another pound or two of butter. And yes. More cheese!

Note: For GAPS friends, you would need to do a 24 hour culture of your cream to make this cheese GAPS legal. Just an FYI. We have decided to allow raw dairy or home-cooked raw dairy again because of our tooth decay history.

Yes, it has been hot. Really wicked hot, hovering around 100 F. But that doesn't stop the veggies from coming in from the garden. When they're ready, they're ready.

Yesterday I spent a couple of hours canning up some garlic dill pickles (hot water bath canned). I am trying to put by all that I am able to this year to help feed us right through the winter. While I won't put by enough for all of our meals I like to think that everyday this winter the work I do now will help fill our table. It might be something as simple as our rhubarb ketchup or a crock of homemade ginger carrots, but it will be our own pantry food.

We are stocking our larder in four ways: 1) from our garden; 2) from our CSA share; 3) purchasing in bulk from local farmer friends; and 4) by foraging/hunting/fishing. My goal this season is to put food by in some capacity every week.

So far we have jam, yesterday's pickles, lots of various dried teas from forest and garden, and a freezer full of ketchup, greens, rhubarb, berries, assorted pestos, local trout, and summer butter (butter made from grass fed local milk).

Putting food by is a regular part of our routine. I make a weekly trip to a friend's farm to buy whatever she has in abundance that I can put by. No special requests. I just get what she has to get rid of. The price is right, and I like the connection of visiting with my friend and leaving with her produce. This week it was cucumbers. I'm expecting beets and broccoli next week.

You can supplement at your local farmer's market. Going late in the day will get you a bargain on what the farmers haven't sold and don't want to bring home. If you're new to food preservation look for a good book at the library or ask around. You might now someone more seasoned at this than you.

While I normally make live-fermented pickles, I wanted some that would still be firm and delicious come February. Asking around locally led me to a great recipe from a nearby mama and I got to work.

Along with the cucumbers I used garlic (from a friend), dill (volunteers that appeared behind my asparagus patch – fence jumpers from the neighbor's garden), wild grape leaves (foraged on my way home with the cucumbers to help keep the pickles crunch), sea salt, water, and vinegar. I canned 13 assorted pints and quarts and set them joyously in the pantry last night. (For the seasoned canner, the proportions were 2 3/4 C vinegar, 3 C water, 1/4 C salt.)

There is something about watching those shelves fill. It's magical. It is a feeling of wealth, abundance, and self-reliance. It's happiness in jar form.

Soon I will harvest many heads of cabbage, cucumbers for live-fermenting, and armloads of kale and chard from the garden. And they will be put by. I can't wait. I'm a bit of a geek, but food is my bliss these days.

Clearly the hottest week of the year is a beverage week around my blog. From kombucha I have moved directly on to tonic water. Because we all need more than just kombucha.

Tonic water is bitter and sweet and great with gin (of course). But a decent tonic can stand on its own as well. (Really. It can.) But store bought tonic water? Blech. Have you read the ingredients list on a bottle ever? Yeah. It's enough to make you stay away from the stuff. Like forever. Corn syrup and preservatives… not the health tonic you might wish it were.

A couple of summers ago Pete and I got a taste for tonic so I asked out local food coop to carry a natural (corn syrup- and preservative-free) brand. He said he would order some but it would probably take weeks to come in. In true Rachel form I decided to have a go at making my own. I found a great recipe on-line, ordered the one random ingredient  (a ground bark that smells a tiny bit like incense) and made a batch. Whoa. I finally understood why it was called a "tonic". So amazingly delicious in a whole ingredients sort of way – rather than that synthetic (anti)tonic that you buy at the grocery.

Take a look at what went into my cooking pot~

I have since modified the original recipe a bit to suit how we now eat. Here is my version.

Homemade Tonic Water Recipe    

Ingredients

4 C water

1 orange, zest and juice

1 lemon, zest and juice

1 lime, zest and juice

1 chopped lemongrass stalk

1 tsp allspice berries

1/4 c cinchona bark (natural quinine I guess?)

two pinches celtic sea salt (or what ever salt you prefer)

juice of 1 lemon, reserved

1 1/4 to 1 1/2 C raw local honey (or sweetener of your choice)

Process

1. Simmer everything (except the reserved lemon juice and the honey) for 20 minutes covered.
2. Remove from heat and allow to steep for 5 minutes.
3. Strain through a fine mesh strainer, a thin cloth, or your french press.
4. Add honey and stir to dissolve.
5. Add reserved lemon juice.
6. Cool.

This is a concentrated tonic syrup. All you need is fizzy water (and perhaps gin) and you'll be set. I used homemade Sodastream Penguin fizzy water for a completely homemade tonic water but of course you can use any purchased carbonated water – whatever type you like best.

When all is said and done you'll have close to 5 cups of tonic concentrate. That is a lot. And since it has no preservatives in it you'd have to have a serious G&T habit to charge through the bottle before it went bad. Freeze in ice cube trays, then bag for use throughout the summer. And label those cubes, okay? Otherwise you might mistake them for beef broth or something and make a regrettable stew.

To use dilute 1 part tonic concentrate with 2 to 3 parts fizzy water. You can also add 1 part gin if that's your style. Your drink will be amber colored, unusual for "modern" tonic but really pretty natural when you think about it. So fill your cup, go outside, and take dorky pictures of yourselves.

Oh, and the straws. The straws!

You love them, don't you? So do we. These lovely bits of kitchen wonder are our glass drinking straws from Glass Dharma. Straw fun without straw waste. Rad. The kids love them so much Pete and I rarely manage to grab them for ourselves.

I can not say enough good things about these. Really and truly. They are guaranteed for life against breakage (and we've dropped them an embarrassing number of times) so if you do figure out how to break one they'll repair or replace it. That works in my world.

I suggest you buy a set for your whole family. That way you won't need to swipe them from your kids when you take your dorky pictures of yourselves with your tonic.

Stay cool you all.

Love,
Rachel

edited: I just got an email from Glass Dharma that they'd like to host a glass straw giveaway on my blog. Are you interested? I hope to put it up in the next couple of days.

Kombucha. Have you tried it? Do you buy it, bottle by bottle at the coop or grocery store? Kombucha it turns out is easy and satisfying to make.

I hadn't heard of kombucha until a few years ago when I discovered it at the coop. Not normally a purchased/bottled drink person I was inexplicably drawn to it. I did a bit of research becuase I was curious about what it was and why I wanted to try it so much.

Turns out kombucha is an ancient live fermented beverage with a long list of health benefits. The more I read the more I realized that it is as easy to make at home as, say, yogurt. Maybe easier. All you need is to find a friend who already makes their own who can share their "SCOBY" with you (symbiotic community of bacteria and yeast) – the mother that turns black tea and sugar into a health tonic. (The SCOBY is the big rubbery disc in the photos below.) I happen to live in the sort of community where loads of people make their own everything, so I had several offers in the first day I asked around. If you are the odd-duck in your community you can find them via Craigslist or Freecycle or you could even purchase one on-line.

We started making our own and have only purchased a few bottles at the store since. We love our homemade kombucha. It is extremely affordable and make a naturally carbonated, mildly acidic drink. Here is how we make ours:

Supplies

4 TB loose leaf organic black tea

1 C organic sugar

4 quarts water

A large stainless steel (or other non-reactive, non-plastic) bowl or pot large enough to hold water above

Masking tape

Cheesecloth or a clean dishtowel large enough to drape over bowl

Process

1. Fill tea kettle with fresh water and bring to a boil.

2. Measure out organic black tea and sugar into cooking pot.

3. Pour boiling water over tea and sugar. Stir to dissolve sugar and steep until cool.

4. Strain into your large steel bowl or pot. Compost tea leaves.

5. Add enough fresh, cool water to make a total 4 quarts (including your sugar/tea mixture).

6. Add your SCOBY and the kombucha it is soaking in to your sugar/tea/water mixture.

7. Make an x over the top of the pot with tape and drape cloth over the pot to keep out critters.

8. Check your kombucha every day. Stir with a wooden spoon underneath the floating SCOBY and taste. After about a week the sweetness will have faded and a mildly vinegar-edged flavor will begin to come through. When you taste this, your kombucha is ready to bottle. (Note: if you let it go too long and you taste strong vinegar you've gone too far. But you just made vinegar, which is good too. Use as you would apple cider vinegar and start over on your drinking kombucha.)

9. Remove your SCOBY. It will be the size of the opening of your bowl and two layers thick. You can now peel the two layers apart and share one with a friend. Every batch of kombucha results in the growth of a second "mother". If you don't have any takers then thank it for its work and add to your compost. Put the SCOBY you are keeping for your next batch into a jar and cover with your fresh kombucha. Cap and refrigerate.

10. Bottle your kombucha. You can use any lidded glass bottles or jars. We use to keep store bought kombucha bottles around to reuse for this purpose, but now I prefer to bottle into a few narrow mouth canning jars instead. You can bottle just the kombucha or top off with juice (our preference). I add approximately 5/6 kombucha and 1/6 fresh or bottled unsweetened juice.

11. Cap and refrigerate. Leave for a few days and the kombucha will carbonate itself using the sweetness from the juice as its "fuel".

12. Enjoy! Server kombucha cold. If the flavor is too strong for you, dilute with 1/2 water or carbonated water, or dilute with 1/4 juice, 1/4 water and 1/2 kombucha. When you open your last bottle it's time to make a fresh batch.

I am drinking the glass above right now. And it's really, truly, amazingly good.