Tomatoes Tomatoes Everywhere...

It's been a looooong time since I wrote anything on my blog.  Life gets busy and hectic and I just never seem to find the time.  I moved away from the city to lead a less complicated life and I think it has become the opposite.  I'm busier but with more important things like food preservation, gardening. livestock and learning new homesteading skills. Since I last posted in March of this year, a bunch of new things have happened and I want to share a few with you today and especially share some tomato surprises.

The summer garden production was over-the-top this year.  The tomatoes, peas and greens were spectacular but the beans and corn, not so much.  Even so, I filled up a chest freezer and my side by side fridge freezer and 4 under bed storage drawers with food and canned goods this year. I also learned to make cheese, use a cold smoker, make homemade medicinal salves, made homemade soap (dismal failure lol) and taught a couple of foraging classes. Somewhere in the midst of all that, I managed to complete my busiest cake season in a long time, lots of wedding cakes and birthday cakes and even a couple of baby shower cakes - one of those being for my first grandchild that's due Christmas day!!

Since my last post was about my new endeavor - Hugelkultur Gardening - I want to update you on how that went.  As you recall, I was trying a new method to be able to cut back and/or eliminate the need to water the garden at all in the summer and I think it was successful.  This last summer was relatively mild compared to what we normally have in Texas since we never reached 100 and had a couple of showers during our normally dry season, but even so, a traditional garden would have needed supplemental watering but not this one.  I watered every couple days after I planted to get the seedlings and transplants started but once they were established in mid May I didn't water at all until the rains started in September - that's 4 months that I didn't water a single time.  Imagine all that water I saved.  I deem this a success!!

This is the Hugelkultur garden at 6 weeks (a month of no watering):

These are some of my harvests:

 Lots of peas and good times with my mother, reminiscing of old times:

I bet I picked 100 lbs of tomatoes.  I had Rutger, Cherry and San Marzano tomatoes and they all produced like crazy.  I canned 12 jars of spaghetti sauce, 10 jars of tomato sauce, 4 pints of Chili Sauce, 3 pints of ketchup and 15 jars of stewed tomatoes not counting the 20 qts of tomatoes I put in the freezer.  I discovered a new way of doing tomatoes that I think is a favorite of mine - Smoked Tomatoes.  I bought an electric smoker and then I ordered an A-Maze-n Pellet Smoker and some JC's Wood Smoking Pellets, loaded up the smoker with 20 lbs of the San Marzano's and cold smoked them for 12 hours.  The result was amazing.  The tomatoes were soft and sweet and incredibly smoky and were almost like eating BBQ sauce all on their own.  I skinned them and pureed them using my wonderful Victorio Processor and canned 6 half pints of Smoked Tomato Sauce. I'll be doubling that recipe next year, it's that good. I used it in some chili I canned and it gives it a wonderful smoky flavor.  I bet it would be good in some enchilada sauce too!  Look at the difference in the Smoked (on the left) and Regular sauces:

Never one to be wasteful, I dehydrated all the tomato skins I had reserved (the chickens got some of them) and ground them up in a spice grinder and made 2 half pint jars of Tomato Powder.  A tablespoon of this can be used in lieu of tomato paste in dishes or even added to 8 oz of hot water for an instant cup of tomato soup. Very cool huh???

So...that's my Hugelkultur Experiment this year.  I think it's well worth trying if you live in an arid or semi-arid area and you don't get much rain in the summer, it'll save you mucho money and valuable time not to mention all the precious natural resources you'll be saving as well. Give it a try, the instructuons and a video are on my Hugelkultur post from March 2014 and I think you'll find it's worth the initial effort.
Merry Christmas Ya'll!

A Time For Planting...

I remember the warm spring and summer evenings before dusk and Mama behind the tiller, turning the soil and making rows for planting.  I remember the smell of the freshly turned earth and the damp coolness of it under my feet as I stepped in the fluffy mounds of dirt, even the feel and sound of the paper sack and the slickness of the dried seeds as I held them in my hand and dropped them from my fingers into the rows.  I can hear the freight train going past and can remember looking up to see Melvin Loyd flying his plane above us almost every time we were out there.  At the time, I didn't appreciate all of those things, but now I sure do. 

With Spring just around the corner, I wanted to do a blog on gardening, pre-gardening to be exact. I don't know of any place you would consider having a garden that wouldn't require some preparation before you began.  Whether it was soil amendments, a fence or even deciding what to plant that would grow best in your area, there's always preparation.  Growing up, I never paid any attention to anything garden-related.  I was forced to help in the family garden when I was young and I hated it.  I couldn't figure out why my family was so old fashioned and they insisted on having a garden every year, why they didn't just go to the store and buy food like everybody else did.  When my mother would drag me out to the garden in the evenings and hand me a sack of seeds, I would dump handfuls in one spot just to get it over with.  I, in my ignorance, never imagined I would ever be found out because when the seeds came up in clumps they'd know what I did! Or, when it was time to shell  peas, instead of  really shelling them, I'd throw handfuls of the unshelled ones in the trash along with hulls, to get my pan emptied out faster and get finished.  I look back now and think of how I wasted those precious seeds and peas and I cringe.  My family wasn't rich and those things cost hard earned money and I was so selfish that I threw it away.  I also think back and wonder why they never got me for it.  I'm certain they had to know I did it!  Even so, with the constant drudgery of gardening as a youth, I grew up with a love for it that far outweighed the labor. 

Up until last year, I thought the soil of Gilmer was just special or it sure seemed so for my family.  I thought that powdery dirt was going to be the perfect media for my first garden since moving back here from Dallas....oh how wrong I was.  It was poor and drained far too quickly and got too hard and compact.  When I walked in the dirt it would rise up in wisps of fine, sandy smoke and curl around my ankles.  This was not the soil of my childhood at all....it was horrible.  I don't know what my family did to that soil to make it grow things, but grow them it did.  I assume it was from years of amendments like growing a crop and turning it under at the end of a season and using the cow and chicken manure we had to enrich it.  Not to mention there wasn't a drought back then like there is now.  That's what I've come up with after a hugely failed garden last year.  This year I'm doing something different.  Since you can't grow Pizza Rolls and Corn Dogs in the garden, and that's all my son will eat,  it's basically just me I'm feeding out of the garden.  I decided to have a smaller, raised bed garden and use a technique called Hugelkultur.  It involves digging holes where your bed frames are going to be and filling up the holes with a mixture of dead and green limbs and brush and covering that with dirt.  The general idea is the limbs rot under the soil and become spongy and then absorb the rainwater which they store for up to a year.  The crops are then planted in the soil that above the limbs and the water in the limbs is released into the soil and plants are kept watered as needed from below. According to what I've researched about this, only a single yearly rainfall is needed to provide enough water for plants with no additional hand watering or rainfall required for the entire growing season.  With the heat and drought in Texas, that will be a miracle.

Here are a couple of YouTube videos that will explain the Hugelkultur process:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sso4UWObxXg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lkx2JFO0Dhw

I had a friend of mine build me (4) 4x8 frames and (1) 6x12 frame and then in November, I hired a handyman to do the manual labor of digging the holes under the frames.  I had him dig them 2' deep and we filled the holes with about 20" of limbs and covered them with the local sandy soil that was left from digging.  Over the next month it rained pretty frequently and the soil settled into the spaces and around the limbs and we added more local soil as needed until the limbs were encased.  Once it was solid, I went to the local composted soil place and bought truckloads of a premixed raised bed mixture to top the beds off with.  Since I have chickens, turkeys, horses and donkeys, there's lots of poo at my place so in between the layers of the purchased soil I added layers of manure and some kitchen scraps and finished it off with more soil mixture.  Along with my chickens, rabbit and deer are a huge problem where I live so I also built a fence around the garden, allowing enough room to plant some fig, olive and fruit trees at the ends. 

Here's a picture of the Hugelkultur project in progress:

I planted some late winter crops of kale, spinach, lettuce, rutabagas and radishes a couple of weeks ago and they are coming along nicely!  Good gardening ya'll!

The Turkey Shoot

At the end of December a friend called to ask if I wanted some turkeys.  He had a friend that had 2 toms and 4 hens that needed new a new home.  I, thinking I am sooo capable, said "Sure, I'll take them!".  I got my handyman busy adding a turkey coop onto the chicken house so I'd have a place for them to live as well as fencing off a yard for them.  I was all prepared for when they arrived - until I saw them.  I thought my sisters turkeys were big but these birds were ENORMOUS.  Even the hens were huge.  The coop and yard I had built wasn't even remotely big enough for all 6 of them.  I inspected them and noticed one of the white hens had a bad leg and was spotted with blood so I put her in the brooder section of the coop. The blood was from the white tom trying to mount her and had given her some severe lacerations on her backside and she was just dripping blood everywhere.  I kept her there for 5 days and, although the mating injuries healed over, she never was able to bear weight on that leg.  Since her leg was so badly injured I decided to slaughter her. Now, I had seen my grandmother process chickens many times in my life and I figured it wasn't much different, just a bigger bird so I texted my oldest son and asked if he wanted to come watch and he did (thank goodness).  I made a butchering surface, had a water hose and all my knives sharpened and ready, took my big copper pot and some cinder blocks out to the back yard, grabbed my 22 rifle and set up shop.  While I was waiting on my son to bring his cooler and a blow torch, I built a fire under the pot and got the water hot. I was excited and nervous and also reluctant.  I was excited because it was a skill that I was perfecting for the future yet I was reluctant because I didn't want to take a life.  Still, I made myself a promise that I would only have livestock that contributed to my family and if they didn't contribute anymore, they would be used in other ways.  The hen was suffering and it was the most humane thing I could have done.  By the time he got there the water was hot and I was set to do it.  After we began plucking her I saw the mating injuries and was even more glad we had done it.  I kept remembering how my grandmother did it and in about an hour we had her plucked and dressed out.  She ended up making 18 lbs of meat for the freezer and canning.  Two weeks later, we slaughtered the white Tom and he contributed 31 lbs of meat to the freezer.

Since it was well after the holidays and she was 9 mos old when we butchered her, I decided to debone her and grind up the meat for burgers, tacos, chili and sausage, etc. I was going waste nothing at all of the hen.

Here's my process:

Deboned entire hen, separated dark from white meat

Ground dark meat and made Turkey Breakfast Sausage

Ground breast meat and vacuum sealed it

Added skin, giblets and bones to pressure cooker and cooked for 1 hour

Removed the cooked meat from the bones

Canned the cooked meat and broth

Used the skin and cartilage and various bits for dog food

Dried the cooked bones in the oven, ground them up and added them to the garden soil

Rendered the fat to use for cooking

 

 

The following Sunday morning we had a feast for breakfast. Everything but the fried potatoes was made by hand by me. There was Turkey Sausage, fried turkey eggs, homefried potatoes (fried in turkey fat) and Honey Wheat Bread with Beauty Berry Jelly.

 

It was delicious and made me so proud that I did it all.  I even made the Beauty Berry jelly over the summer and canned it so we'd have it for a special occasion like this.  It's a Jewish delicacy to use rendered chicken fat (aka Schmaltz) to fry potato latkes in so I figured I could do the same thing with turkey fat.

Even if you don't raise your own meat, you can make homemade sausage and use any kind of meat you want: pork, chicken, beef, turkey, etc.  This recipe will work with any kind of meat.  It's super easy and delicious, give it a try and you'll never buy it from the store again!

 

Turkey Breakfast Sausage with Fennel and Sage

1 lb ground turkey

1 clove minced garlic

1 T rubbed sage

1/2 t dried fennel seed, crushed

1 1/2 t coarse salt

1/2 t black pepper

1/4 t crushed red pepper flakes (or more, according to your preference)

1 egg white

2 t olive oil (I used bacon grease)

Mix all together well, refrigerate for 1 hour.  Shape into patties and use immediately or freeze in single layer then store in baggies.

 

Enjoy!

...Pressed Down, Shaken Together and Running Over...

Blessings can be found in the most unexpected of places. 

My goal when I moved from the city was, initially at least, to live a simpler life.  I wanted a small house, sparse furnishings, a few chickens and a vegetable garden.  My sweet brother in law and a dear friend worked weekends to get my chicken house built so I could have those chickens by the time I moved in.  I had tilled my garden and planted the heirloom seeds and watched as they sprouted up.  I watched as my house took shape and all the little things I dreamed of were completed in that house.  I had a huge estate sale and liquidated 90% of my possessions in the big house and moved them all into storage to wait for the new house to be ready. Finally, on the first day of May, I moved in.  As soon as the moving truck arrived I realized the remaining 10% of my possessions were never going to fit in this house.  I ended up getting rid of half of the 10% to who ever would take it and I still had too much.  I felt like I was on a picnic on the shores of Galilee and no matter how much I gave away, more kept appearing.  How in the world did I ever get all this stuff???  Luckily I had a barn and I could stash it in until I figured out what I wanted to do with it (and, it's still there).

A week before I moved in my sister and her husband bought 2 little turkeys and 9 chicks to have in some family photos and I was so ready to get my own chickens. A week after I settled in, I went to the feed store and bought my chicks.  I had built them a brooder so they could live in that for a while until they were big enough to be in the coop.   I bought 15 female sex links because I didn't want a rooster (keep that in the back of your mind, we'll get to that later), just hens for eggs and they were so cute. I talked to them and cared for them and held them, feeling their warm little bodies in my hands, and watched as they grew.  Soon they were too big for the brooder and I moved them to the coop.  I built them miniature roosts so they would know to roost at night.  Talk about cute!!

Time ticked by and soon I had 2 rescue puppies, 2 free kittens, a rescue horse, then another horse.  I vaguely remember something about a simpler life way back there but I didn't know what had happened to that. I was in the middle of a busy, wonderful life and loving every bit of it.

My sisters chickens were disappearing one at a time every night until she only had 2 left. I talked her into giving them to me and for a day I had 17 chickens until one of the puppies ate one.  I still have those same 15 hens...and 1 rooster.  The people who sort those chicks by sex need a brush up course because that little boy slipped right past them.  It was a good thing though, I'm glad it happened.  I'm looking forward to babies this spring and more eggs and chicken for the freezer later.

Recently a friend of a friend had 6 turkeys she needed to relocate so I took them.  I warned them I would be slaughtering some of them and not to give them to me if that was going to be an issue.  Those turkeys arrived and they were the biggest things I'd ever seen. 

That brings me to my post title and my opening line. 
    Give and it shall be given unto you, good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and
    running over, shall men give into your bosom.  For with the same measure that ye mete withal
    it shall be measured to you again. Luke 6:38

Indeed I have been blessed.

No recipes this week but next week I have a great turkey sausage recipe to share! Ha ha ha!

Texas Simplicity

It's been 8 months since I moved from the city.  In the first few months I missed the conveniences of the city and the food....oh how I missed the food.  I think I missed being able to drive 5 minutes for Dairy Queen or 30 minutes into Dallas and have world class dining and here, it's 30 minutes to DQ and 2 hours to fine dining.  I knew if I wanted fancy food I better get busy cooking it because all I was getting out here was burgers, chicken fried steak, BBQ and hot links.  Now, all those things are delicious - if prepared properly - which, often, they were not.  It was easier for me to make my own everything than drive 15 miles to get it and it not be the way I liked it then fork over good money for a less than great meal, so I did. 

I made Chicken Fried Steak...

 

 

I made Pear Tatin with Caramel Sauce...

 

 

 

I even made Beef Bourguignon and homemade Hawaiian rolls...that was so good...

 

 

 

And some Pasta Carbonara...

 

 

 

I learned that I didn't need to drive 15 miles and spend $30 to get the foods I craved, I could make them at home and save my gas and cash for other things.  As time went on I didn't crave those things as much and I was happy to just have simple food and that's where I am now. Just satisfied with the delicious simplicity of an egg or a bowl of soup.  I have acclimated at last.  I think my favorite thing I made when I first settled in here was the Beef Bourguinon.  It was simplicity at its best and made me feel anchored to my new present. I bought ingredients from my tiny neighborhood grocery store and the wine was from a local vineyard.  I was supporting my community and giving myself the gift of extravagant, fancy food for a pittance of what I would have paid at a restaurant.  I have Julia Childs' famous recipe but, wow, it takes forever to make so I trimmed the steps back and made my own version.  I like it just as much and hope you will too.

 

Texas Beef Bourguinon





4 slices bacon
1 T additional bacon fat or olive oil
1 carrot, sliced
1 onion, halved and sliced
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 t fresh thyme or 1/2 t dried thyme
1 bay leaf
1 t salt
1 t black pepper
2 lbs lean beef roast or steaks, cubed
2 T flour
1 bottle nice, red wine (I used a local wine from Los Pinos)
3 cups beef stock, low sodium if possible
1 T tomato paste
1 pkg frozen pearl onions, cooked in butter till slightly softened
1 lb mushrooms , sliced, cook with the pearl onions till soft
1/2 C frozen english peas


Preheat oven to 325.  In a dutch oven, cook bacon, remove and set aside. Add fat or olive oil to the fat from the bacon you just fried and add next 7 ingredients.  Cook on medium high until the onion and carrots just start to caramelize.  Add the cubed beef and cook till browned. Sprinkle the flour over the sautéed mixture and cook for 2 minutes.  Pour the wine and stock over the beef and vegetable mixture and stir in the tomato paste till dissolved.  Bring to boil, remove from heat to preheated oven and cook at 325 for 1 hour.  Heat up the onions and mushrooms right before the hour is up and when ready, remove the pot from the oven and stir in the onions and mushrooms. Return to oven and cook another 2 hours,  Remove from oven and stir in peas.  Let sit 10 minutes before serving.  Taste and adjust salt if needed.

From Excess to Economy

Since I last posted, MANY things have changed.  I moved away from the Dallas, Texas area and back to east Texas, where I am originally from and am homesteading now.  I still love fine dining and travel and home cooking, but I'm changing a few things in my life as a result of our changing times. With the cost of food and the questionable safety of commercially produced foods, I have embarked on a journey to return to a way of life where I have an active role in feeding myself and my immediate family with food I have raised and cared for and, at times, have processed as well.  There's no guarantee that there will be electricity, running water or food at our command so I needed to create a simpler, less needful life.

I felt wasteful and privileged and spoiled, accustomed to eating out often, living in a huge house and totally dependent on large corporation provided power.  We were 2 people living in a 4000 sq ft house and paying huge utility bills every month for 13 years. I woke up one day and realized I had to change my life and teach my son that wasn't how life should be.  I sold that monster of a house and bought land in the country and built a new house.  My goal in building this house was to be frugal and resourceful in the materials I chose and to buy American whenever possible.  If I needed something for the house and I couldn't find an American made source, I bought it used or made it myself.  I used local labor, bought from local vendors and tried to support my local economy (let me tell you, they do appreciate it!).  It took 4 months to build and aside from some builder and structural issues I'm having to deal with, the house is working out great. 

This is the new house (still under construction here).  It's 860 sq ft...yes, 860 sq ft.  I did the math, that's less than 1/4th of the other house. Everything about this house is cheaper.  Here's an example:

Expense                         Then                        Now
Insurance                       $2600/yr                 $900/yr
Electricity (summer)         600/mo x 4             60/mo x 4
Gas (winter)                      350/mo* x 4           80/mo* x 4
Water                                 150/mo                   60/mo
Taxes                               5200/yr                  2200/yr
TOTAL                           $13400.00/yr         $4380.00 yr

* Before, I had only gas heat and water heater, now I have that, and a gas range too.

I'm saving an average of $9,020.00 a year on these items alone. I saved the most money on utilities by positioning my house using permaculture guidelines, having concrete floors (keeps the house about 10 degrees cooler in the summer), a 23 SEER A/C and I have double foam insulation - it's like living in an Igloo cooler, the cool stays cool and the warm stays warm.  I still have Internet and satellite TV and those charges are about the same and my auto insurance stayed the same as well, dang it. I have some livestock that provide meat and eggs to my food supply and a garden is coming this spring.  I'll be solar one day, but for now, my electricity is from a local co-op, not ideal, but at least it's not  ONCOR.

I'm just more satisfied and secure, both financially and realistically, living this way.  As I learn and grow, I'll be blogging along the way about my journey from excess to economy and hopefully help others to do the same.   I believe it's time for a change in our lives. Stay tuned!!