Category Archives: Food

It’s Juicy!

Food

My Mom makes the world’s best pies (don’t try to dispute it…) and she always makes us several varieties when we visit. Isaac has convinced her to bake a special pie whenever he comes. You see, he loves cherry flavoring but not the big old snot-like lumps (his words) of cherries in pie filling. Of course, in making the world’s best pie, one wouldn’t dream of buying canned pie filling. So, since my Mom makes her own, she is in a great position to filter out the cherries after making the syrup. That’s right, she makes cherry-juice pie for my son.

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I have to admit, I prefer cherry-juice pie to cherry-snot pie any day. All the flavor remains but you never get the surprise loogie. Now, my boy likes to eat and he is all about cleaning up the last drop of cherry juice. He gets that from his mother who has a similar feeling about ice cream and apple pie. It’s cool though because we don’t have to wash their plates after they do their tongue-cleaning.

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When we eat cherry-juice pie, we don’t talk.  It’s serious business, you see, eating the world’s best pie.  These pictures are taken over a 4 second period so the silence doesn’t last too long.  He devours pie!  So, have you ever had a juice pie or do you like the chunks (particularly in cherry pie)?

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She’s pickled and I’m sauced!

Food, Garden,

I tried and I tried but Emily got pickled the other night. Of course, the same night, I got pretty sauced so I guess we’re even. The garden hasn’t produced most things very well this year but we do have a lot of tomatoes and cucumbers.

(Ahhh…sauced!)

We’ve already made plenty of salsa with the tomatoes and peppers, onions, etc that we got. We figured tomato sauce can be used for about everything so we made a batch of that. It’s pretty easy really so it was ideal. We run the tomatoes through our Velox tomato press and then throw it all in a crockpot to cook down.  Some folks boil their tomato puree until it is half the volume.  We just throw it in the crockpot (uncovered) and forget about it for 24 hours.  By then, it is cooked down and we are oficially sauced.  I think we had about 2500 pounds of tomatoes and once it was all cooked down, we ended up with 5 pints of sauce.  We’ll run throuhg several more batches of sauce because it is so handy when we need to make something yummy over the winter!

(That’s the good stuff…I love the smell of vinegar and pickling spices)

Neither Emily nor I like cucumbers raw.  Emily doesn’t like them pickled either but she’s sauced, obviously.  Anyhow, I love pickles so we made a bunch with the cukes we harvested this year.  I grow dill too so we definitely made our pickles from some of the freshest ingredients around.  I suppose we could make vinegar, but I don’t think we’re ready for that yet.  Anyhow, I love making pickles because the smells of the ingredients take me back to when my Grandma canned pickles.  She canned tons of stuff and the smells and the warmth of the kitchen remind me of her<sniff, sniff>

(This is really a pressure canner but it’s deep enough to water bath can too…without the lid of course)

Ok, so it was a bunch of fun getting pickled too.  Don’t tell, but I figure we’re get pickled and sauced a bunch more times this summer!

My Shiitakes are fruiting!

Food, Nature,

I have always said that I never met a mushroom I didn’t like.  I guess I don’t like the ones that could kill me, but aside from that, I really dig mushrooms.  In some ways, I suppose I feel a certain kinship with mushrooms.  I am usually in the dark and they keep feeding me bull…well, you get the idea.

A friend of mine is a mushroom enthusiast and helped me inoculate several white oak logs with shiitake spores last summer.  Shiitakes have apparently only been grown outside of East Asia since 1982 so I am not too far behind the curve…I was at least alive in 1982!  Anyhow, the mushroom spores came mixed in a damp sawdust filled container.  We used a 1/2 inch spade bit to drill inch and a half deep holes all over the log and packed the spores into the holes.  I melted beeswax and covered the inoculated holes to seal in the mushroomy goodness.  I pitched the logs out behind my shed and waited.  Just this weekend, they started fruiting!

We used white oak logs because their bark apparently is best at remaining tight on the logs for a longer time than other tree varieties.  Over the past year, as the log decayed, the spores began to run through the log and finally fruit as they have taken hold.  The logs I inoculated are 4-8 inches in diameter and 2-4 feet long.  I expect that they will fruit for 2-10 years depending on how things go.  We’ve had such a wet spring and summer that I suppose they will fruit a lot this summer!  We’ll eat a bunch fresh but I will probably dry some for use over the winter.  For this kind of payoff, I can handle being in the dark a little!

Anyone else grow mushrooms?

Blackberries!

Adventure, Food, WV, ,

We have a secret spot where we go to pick blackberries.  Of course, blackberries have thorns so our screams probably make our location a little less secret than it otherwise would have been.  Still, we go blackberry picking every 2-3 days while they are in season.  Last night was our first venture to the patch.

Emily and I are coming up on our 15th wedding anniversary and we’ve known each other almost 20 years.  I have known her parents about the same length of time.  Last night was the first time we have taken them along with us.  It was hard to decide whether I knew them well enough to trust them with my secret location.  Finally I broke down and we all went picking.

Last year we went so much that we were overrun with berries.  Don’t tell Emily but I am hoping for the exact same problem this year.  With the first batch, Emily made a blackberry pie last night.  I have breakfast lined up for the next few days for sure!

I plan to make some blackberry cobbler and some blackberry wine as well.  My dandelion wine is looking great so I am going to try my hand at blackberry too.  It’s funny to be making wine since neither of us drinks, but it’s the adventure that I enjoy!

Anyhow, blackberries are in season in WV and I have the stained and scratched up hands and arms to prove it!  Are you getting berries where you are?

5 to 10

Food

When we go to the beach, we have a pretty set routine…we get up around 8, grab a quick bite to eat and start applying sunscreen. Once properly lathered and slathered, we grab another bite to eat and head for the beach (with our coolers full of food). Beach tents have evolved and we have moved along with them. We carry our tent down and set it up (and maybe grab a bit of beef jerky or some peanuts) and head for the water. My immediate family body- surfs until noon at which time we grab a bite to eat and then back at it.

I sort of love the beach because we basically have no rules. For breakfast and lunch, Chips-Ahoy cookies are perfectly acceptable as the main course or as a side item. I drink pop by the two liter and am rarely caught without a handful of some sort of food that is ruining my bikini body. But it’s the beach you see so all rules are pretty much out the window.

So after a day full of eating at the house, we always go to some fancy (or at least expensive) seafood place where we eat far too much (and far too rich) fresh seafood. One place that is a ton of fun at Tybee Island is called the Crab Shack. The Crab Shack is certainly not a fancy place but it is expensive. It’s sort of hard to imagine why the prices are so high since all of the dining is either outside under the trees or inside a shack. By shack I don’t mean a quaint little restaurant building…I mean a shack. Cats crawl all over the place grabbing the bits of seafood that people drop and birds occasionally swoop in to snatch a piece of low country boil of a runaway shrimp.

In spite of its humble appearance, the food is really great. They specialize in “low country” food like low country boil, shrimp on grits, shrimp a-la-mode (channeling Bubba from Forest Gump here), etc. Everything is brought on a paper plate and the tables have holes cut in the middle where diners throw everything when finished. We eat everything with our fingers and garner the biggest smiles from the kids you can imagine!

Anyhow, an additional draw of the place is the alligator lagoon where a few dozen alligators reside. For $3, one can purchase 4 soft dogfood-like morsels to hang on the end of a bamboo pole to feed the gators. It is a blast although it appears that the gators eat well as they sometimes don’t want to play along with the “gator fishermen”. I suppose a cat might fall in here and there to satiate them, but generally, I think every patron must be feeding the gators ’til they are full. We were lucky to find a gator that put on a good show for the kids and ate everything we sent his way…must have been the runt of the group I guess.

Anyhow, we eat way too much every year and I generally gain 5-10 pounds in a week. It’s worth every calorie though as fresh seafood is hard to beat!

Dandelion Wine

Food, Nature, Tinkering, ,

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I was making homemade hooch but I didn’t say what type I was making.  It’s sort of a funny thing…Emily hates dandelions with a passion.  I don’t understand her issues with them but she goes around the yard picking the heads off of them all the time.  Occasionally she’ll dig the roots, but mostly she just wants the flowers out of sight.  Always one to see an opportunity, I asked her to save the dandelion heads she picked for a project I had in mind!

Wine can be made from all sorts of things including various flowers.  Most people have heard of dandelion wine, but wine can also be made from clover, roses, pansies, coltsfoot, and golden rod among others.  Anyhow, the real key to dandelion wine, is to use the flower petals and not anything green.  I picked a ton of dandelion heads and cut the petals off of them until I had 2 pints of dandelion petals.  That doesn’t sound like a lot, but when you consider the sticky factor, you’ll understand the effort that went in to this project.  My fingers were very yellow and sticky and I left yellow fingerprints all over the place!

Anyhow, I kept remembering how tasty the last batch of dandelion wine was many years ago so I pressed on through the allergies and rainbow of colors on my fingers.  I wrapped the petals in cheesecloth so they would be manageable and started my brew!

In a big open pitcher, I added the petals, 6 pints of water, 3 Campden tablets, 3 lbs of white sugar (as an approximation…remember 2 cups a pound, the whole world round…2 cups of about anything weighs a pound),  1/3 oz of citric acid (taste some of that straight up sometime!), and yeast nutrients.  I let this mixture sit for 2 days in the container loosely covered to keep dust out.  After 2 days, I added champagne yeast and let it sit another day.  Finally, as it started to bubble, I moved everything but the pouch of petals to a fermentation vessel.  The bubbler on top allows the carbon dioxide to escape.  Of course, carbon dioxide is a by product of the yeast converting the sugar to alcohol.

Funny story time…I know someone who was creative and decided to forego the typical bubblers used for fermentation.  Really, the whole point is to allow a bit of CO2 to build up and then force its way out without allowing other contaminants back in.  Some folks take care of that issue by stretching a balloon across the mouth of the fermentation jar.  Well, being extra creative, this person stretched a balloon-like male birth control item over the jar lid.  Of course, this method would work just fine to allow the CO2 to escape.  I am not sure how I would feel about the CO2 building up and…uh…inflating the “balloon” though.  Anyhow, without thinking about it, this winemaker bought the variety with spermicide too.  Some folks say that too much drinking may lead to pregnancy, but I think this may be a solution!

Anyhow, now I have to wait a few months until all of the sugar is converted to alcohol or the alcohol content rises enough to kill the yeast.  Either way, the bubbling will stop and the wine will be ready to settle/age/bottle.  I’ll post more on that when the time comes.


(Here is a windows media version if the above doesn’t work)

In the meantime, I will certainly enjoy watching the bubbles rise through the murky yellow concoction.  It bubbles and fizzes like crazy, very similar to a bottle of pop when first opened!

Homemade hooch

Food

About 15 years ago, my Dad and I decided to make wine with a bumper crop of raspberries that we had harvested.  We had never tried making wine but we figured if Hank Jr said a country boy could do it, we needed to make sure we were up to snuff.  So we headed to the recycling place to snap up a few gallon jugs in which to ferment our hooch.  We made homemade “bubblers” to vent carbon dioxide from the fermentation and started along our way.  The internet was, of course, young, so online stores hadn’t cropped up.  Finding wine or champagne yeast was not a simple process so we started our fermentation with regular bread yeast.

In case you didn’t know, wine is made by adding fruit/flowers/sweat socks to a mixture of sugar and yeast.  If all goes well, the yeast feeds on the sugars and produces alcohol and carbon dioxide.  To prevent a mess, the carbon dioxide is vented off (without allowing new air or contaminates to enter the mixture) leaving the alcohol.  At some point (usually no more than 15% alcohol), the alcohol kills the yeast and fermentation stops.  Of course, if the yeast runs out of nutrients (i.e. sugar) before that point, fermentation also stops.  Our first batches of wine made from regular bread yeast were not as high in alcohol (and we sweeter than usual wine) since the yeast was not meant to tolerate full wine-level alcohol content.  They also didn’t taste quite as good as regularly fermented wine tasted, I suppose.  Still, they were dang drinkable and well worth our effort.  We eventually branched out and, quite successfully, made apple and grape and dandelion and all sorts of other types of wines as well.

As is typical, I recently got a wild hair and decided that it was time to once again get back into the wine making business.  It is legal for individuals to make homemade wine (thanks to the 21st Amendment).  In fact, one can make several hundred gallons of wine before there begins to be any problem (look it up on your own and with regard to your own local laws).  No one is allowed to sell homemade wine, however, without proper licenses, taxes, etc.  I don’t intend to make much wine, and certainly not hundreds of gallons so this operation will be well within legal limits.  

Anyhow, I ordered some real champagne yeast, nice bubblers and some other additives to make my own wine.  I still recycled my fermentation vessel like I did before as that worked perfectly well.  Later on this week I will tell you the specific sort of wine I am making (it ain’t boring old grape) and show you how I put it all together.  I suppose the wine we are making is one that is in line with what Hank had in mind for a country boy!

Yeah, I eat salad…what of it?

Food

So, anyone that knows me pretty much knows that I am a meat and potatoes and sugar kind of guy.  But lately, we have been trying to eat healthier.  Yeah, I lost a bet, and since my head was already shaved, there was only one good bet left.  So here I am trying to eat better.  So a few weeks ago, I talked about 7 layer salad. Some may argue that it is not super healthy…but it has lettuce and spinach in it so get off my back already…it’s salad!

We discovered another salad that I sort of dig too.  Well, really, lettuce is only the dressing-delivery-vehicle, but I’d rather have a corvette than a chevette as vehicles go.  Wait, I am talking about lettuce here.  Ok, so I do not like ice berg lettuce.  I like the funky expensive spring and summer mix greens if you are buying bagged salad.  Of course, if you grow your own, so much the better.  Anyhow, I throw a bunch of greens in a bowl and add unreasonably sized handfuls of walnuts, craisins, and gorgonzola cheese (feta or bleu cheese work also).  Sometimes I add sunflower seeds and if I’ve had too much to drink, raisins.

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These guys ate my salad…

So all that stuff looks pretty and may be enough to trick most guys into eating a bowl of salad.  Of course, I am not most guys.  My Dad always told me I was special…and that one day, if I worked very hard, I could be useful as a clamp or maybe I could be the guy who holds the tape measure on the dumb end.  Anyhow, it takes a bit more than some pretty craisins or a few seeds to get me to eat salad.  No, no, I need dressing.  A friend shared this secret recipe with us and, so long as you promise not to tell anyone, I will share it with you.  Ok, ready?  Here is the dressing:

2/3 cup olive oil
1/3 cup balsamic vinegar
1-2 Tbsp sweet hot mustard
1-2 Tbsp honey mustard
2-3 Tbsp honey
1-3 Tbsp sugar (to taste)

We mix all this in a pint jar and store in the refrigerator.  Let it warm before serving of course…it looks very dark because of the vinegar but I love this stuff…probably because of the vinegar!

Bonbon Jovi

Food, Fun,

It all started with a banana.  A banana very much like this one.  Emily usually gets bananas to eat on her cheerios.  She is very particular though and will only eat them if they are green or perfectly yellow.  I am quite the opposite.  I prefer mine yellow to 50% brown.  Anyhow, the bananas had crossed the line and I could not eat half a dozen bananas in a single day so Emily decided to make banana pudding…you know, the old standby banana pudding that can raise the dead and heal the lame.  

 

So she pulls out the ingredients and starts to work…vanilla wafers, sugar, vanilla sweetened condensed milk, etc…except the can of sweetened condensed milk was actually evaporated milk.  Rats…first we are trying to do something with the bananas so we don’t waste them, and now we introduce something else we don’t need into the mix.  I couldn’t see wasting the evaporated milk while trying not to waste bananas.

I pulled out my old friend the glorious world wide web (thanks Al Gore!) and searched for a recipe for something sweet and gooey that uses evaporated milk….and I came upon Bonbon Jovis!

Bonbon Jovis

Prep Time: 15 minutes  Cook Time: 10 minutes

Ingredients:

  • 2 cups sugar
  • 6 Tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder
  • 1/2 cup evaporated low-fat (2 percent) milk
  • 1/2 cup margarine (be sure it’s non-hydrogenated)
  • 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
  • 3 cups quick-cooking rolled oats
  • 1 cup sweetened shredded coconut

Preparation:

In a medium saucepan, combine sugar, cocoa , evaporated milk , and margarine. Cook and stir over medium heat until mixture comes to a boil. Boil for 1 minute, stirring constantly.

Remove from heat. Stir in vanilla . Add rolled oats , and coconut and mix well. Drop by tablespoons onto a cookie sheet lined with waxed paper. Refrigerate until firm, about 30 minutes to 1 hour. Store in an airtight container in the refrigerator or at room temperature.

To me, these looked a lot like no-bake cookies (no bake fudgies we call them).  They are pretty close in taste to no bake cookies but are excellent at using up extra evaporated milk if you find yourself in such a predicament.  I give them a thumbs up with an additional half-thumb if you get to lick the pan and spoon!

Maple sugar time!

Food, History, Nature, ,


We were in PA this weekend at my childhood home to visit my parents and celebrate my grandpa’s 95th birthday.  We got into all sorts of things with cousins and aunts and uncles, but one of my favorite things we did was help my dad make maple syrup.  Sometime a long time ago, when my brother and I were kids, we decided to make homemade maple syrup.  We lived in the woods and had ample maple trees all around and Dad had made syrup as a kid with his dad so we were set to start tapping our trees.

Sap begins to really flow in the late winter when the days are above freezing but the nights are still cold.  We usually tap trees in early to mid February and pull the taps when the trees begin to bloom (about now this year in PA).  Of course, sap will flow after that but one risks taking too much from the trees I suppose.  Maybe we just got too tired to go on at that point.  Anyhow,  to tap our trees, we would blunt the end of 1/2 inch pvc pipe, drill a hole slightly upward 1.5 or so inches into the tree and pound the tap (aka the pipe) into the hole in the tree.  It sounds pretty ugly I guess, pounding a pipe into a tree, but I promise it isn’t that bad or hard on the tree.

Sap will begin to drip from the pipe almost instantly.  Now when my brother and I were collecting the sap, we had 25 gallon barrels strapped to the side of the tree to collect it.  Well, maybe they weren’t that big but I truly believe some were 5 gallon pails.  I guess it makes sense when one has child labor to do the work.  My brother and I finally unionized.  It got pretty ugly there for awhile…you may have heard of the maple wars of 1983…yeah, that was us.  But we won and now my dad uses 1 gallon milk jugs that he ties to the trees.

We used to save the sap (it was always cool there…like a giant refrigerator) until the weekends.  Every Saturday, we would build an enormous and very hot fire and start the sap cooking.  Dad had a 55 gallon drum that we set on its side.  The lengthwise edge was cut off so we had a large trough in which to boil the sap.  I don’t remember how much we had in a typical week but we always had the barrel very nearly full and we added more as the sap cooked down.  If I recall correctly, 50-60 gallons of sap will cook down into about 1 gallon of syrup.  Wood cooked syrup has a definite maple, but somewhat smokey taste that is pretty awesome.  We saved it in mason jars and it typically lasted all year.

My Dad still taps a few trees each year though, now that the child labor is gone, they are closer to the house and far fewer in number.  He also cooks his sap in a turkey frier over a propane flame.  They used to heat the house with wood too…my brother and I chopped a powerful lot of wood growing up…funny how that changed too.  Anyhow, propane fired syrup has a much more mellow taste and the maple flavor is very pleasant (and wholly unlike the artificial stuff you buy in the stores).


It was such a thrill to once again go maple sugaring and this time, to take the kids along with me.  We tasted the sap, we ate some syrup, and we loved walking in the woods.