Birthday Loot

I really like having my birthday in June.  In childhood, it often meant final exams on my birthday, but even then I appreciated the fact that it was six months from Christmas - the other time of the year I got presents.  A six month spread seemed like a good thing then.  Now I just like that I can count on fairly nice weather for my birthday.

I got a pretty sweet lineup of gifts this year.  Garlic scapes and the first tiny zucchini of the year.  Last year the only gift I wanted was a full weekend of my husband's help on a project.  We got the rocket stove built over that weekend.  I liked the gift-project idea a lot, so the only thing I asked for this year was this project:

Why, yes.  How observant of you!  The mailbox does swivel.

This is our new hand tool depot at the entrance of our main garden bed.  Out of all the materials that went into this project, only the concrete and the paint were bought new.  The huge mailbox was a craigslist score, with a busted hinge that my husband repaired.  The post we pulled out of a dumpster a couple years back, and the hardware to make the whole mailbox swivel was lying around the work table in the garage.  All told, our costs came to about $25.  I think the mailbox-for-garden-hand-tools idea was first published in an old Rodale book a few decades back.  Just goes to show that good ideas stand the test of time.  I had fun with the colors, as you can see.  I'm not terribly creative or talented as far as visual arts go, but I do like color.  I guess painting the bee hives earlier this year got me on some sort of paint kick.  It seems with the mailbox I was thinking Mediterranean.  Or something.  I love seeing the bright colors in the garden; it makes me happy. Now I'd like to tear out the hideous wallpaper in both of our bathrooms and splash some riotous colors around those rooms.  Alas, calmer heads will probably prevail on that front.

Having storage for my tools right in the garden itself will not only clear up clutter in the shed, but it will shave several minutes off my gardening routine on a daily basis.  I am all about making the task of food production easier and less time-intensive.  Invariably I end up making several trips to and from the shed to retrieve and put away tools as I need them and finish with them.  I could use a few extra minutes every day, couldn't you?

Even though the hand tool depot was my only requested gift, I also got a breakfast of waffles topped with our own black raspberries, plus the large garden hod I've been coveting for the last few years.  Pretty sweet!  My husband definitely knows my tastes.  Thanks, honey!

On Meal Planning with a Garden

I've been thinking lately about the ways that producing our own food has changed our eating and cooking habits. Although fresh foods are somewhat scarce for us right now, in the depths of winter, in some ways I have more freedom to choose what I feel like cooking. When the garden has passed its peak output for the year, and much of what it produced has either been eaten or preserved, the pressure eases off. Oh, there are still things out there to harvest; parsnips and a few hardy plants in the cold frame. But all these things can hang out for a while. They don't present themselves with the same urgency as summer crops, which will rot, bolt, turn tough or bitter, get eaten by varmints, or simply overwhelm through sheer numbers if not harvested promptly.

What arrives in fall and stays through early spring is a measure of free choice in what I cook and what we eat. Sure, there are the harvested pumpkins, and squash, and potatoes to use up, but they too give me more latitude than summer's bounty. All summer long and into early fall I cook and preserve food in a race to keep up with what's coming in. That comes about from - and requires - a change in the way I think about cooking, and this was no small thing for me.

See, I trained as a chef. After mastering the fundamentals, we were taught to approach cooking as a creative challenge and as an expression of "personality." It was about sexing up a chicken breast to make it seem less trite, or assembling flavors in novel ways to tickle a jaded palate. We weren't taught to think about seasonality or regionality very much, unless it was something that could be translated into marketing text on a menu. And yes, we were very much taught to look at menus as marketing tools. Back then, the concept of local food was nowhere near the surface of national consciousness; it had only a small novelty value to a few menu-scrutinizing gourmands. Food miles never entered the discussion of my culinary training - not once.

That way of thinking took hold strongly in me. I've lived in areas where high quality ingredients were available to me at any time, irrespective of food miles or season. For years just about any exotic ingredient you could imagine was at my fingertips, ready tools at the service of my artistic vision in the kitchen. When thinking about meal preparation, it was routine for me to thumb idly through a cookbook, looking for a recipe that caught my fancy. Or I might simply sit back and ask myself what I felt like eating that night, and then proceed to acquire the necessary ingredients from the store. This was a deeply ingrained habit of thought, and it's one that runs counter to the realities of a food garden. This meant that when I gardened back then, I was a dabbler, and the food I produced myself was always adjunct and secondary to the "real" source of food - stores and farmers' markets. If I didn't feel like eating what was ripe in my own garden, I didn't. And I did no preserving in those days. I'm ashamed to say that (while some of it got eaten and some given away) too much of that homegrown food simply went to waste.

When I became more serious about producing my own food and frugality in general, the harvests soon collided with my habits of thought around cooking. It was no longer about what I felt like cooking; wasting home grown food was no longer acceptable. The game had changed, and the challenges were now based in real life and not the creative life of a "culinary artist." It took a while, but I came to consider the garden and my pantry my primary sources of food. Purchased food, from any source, is now secondary. The differences are significant. I now understand the value in single-ingredient-themed cookbooks. When you're getting upwards of 25 eggs per week, or have just harvested 100 pounds of potatoes, cookbooks devoted entirely to egg or potato dishes seem like a really good idea. I used to find such cookbooks boring. Not any more.

Now meal preparation begins with an assessment of what needs using up, whatever the season. That's not to say my cooking is a constant state of triage in which I find ways to salvage food that's beginning to go off. No, I'm talking about staying ahead of the curve and eating or storing foods at their peak. I still have plenty of range for creative expression in my cooking. But now I start with the given of the foods we have, and I take pleasure in finding interesting things to do with these high-quality building blocks. I still use cookbooks, but I'm much more likely than previously to substitute ingredients based on what we have.

Even in winter, the food put up in canning jars, the freezer, or simply hanging out in cool storage needs to be tracked and eaten. Those foods have a shelf life like any other (natural) food. Even if they aren't about to go off, I need to know what I have on hand in order to plan the next year's garden crops and how they will be eaten or preserved. We got almost no tomatoes in 2009, so this year I'll try to put up two years' worth of sauce, just in case we get hit with blight again. On the other hand, we made enough jam to last us a couple of years. So we'll use up the fruit we produce in other ways.

Another difference is that for most of the year we eat fresher, more nutritionally dense food, and we eat in the seasonal sequence of produce gluts. During the winter, we eat food that was processed (by me, at home) at optimal nutrition and freshness. I'm working on making fresh foods more available in the cold months through season extension with cold frames too.

Here are a few ingredient-themed cookbooks I've found useful in helping me cook from both the garden and preserved or stored foods.

Simply in Season
The Compleat Squash
The Bean Bible
The Good Egg
One Potato, Two Potato


If you can recommend any other cookbooks that help use up garden gluts or commonly stored foods, please let me know in the comments.

Tinkering

I fear I may have spoken too soon in a recent post when I said I would try to find something other than food to write about. I spent last weekend dealing with late harvests from the garden, and with baking several loaves of bread. I went to the farmer's market and bought some local grass-fed beef, and I gleaned another 12 pounds or so of Bartlett pears from someone in my neighborhood who had a sign on the lawn for free pears. (Got a good pear recipe?) I also placed an order for 100 pounds of flour and 25 pounds of sugar at wholesale prices through a bakery I work for occasionally. I'm looking ahead to a lot of baking in the coming cold weather. And it doesn't hurt to feel like I'm hedging my bets, what with peak oil and our bleak economic outlook.

But I also found some time to tinker in the garage as the trailing edges of tropical storm Kyle dumped a few inches of rain on us. I have a couple of projects that I'm working on. After falling in love with apple wood smoked tomatoes, I'm more motivated than ever to hack together a proper smoker. We'd been talking about building one with a metal trash can and an old plug-in electric burner my husband has had since his dorm days. He's even used it in our Weber grill to smoke a few things. I finally went out and bought a few items to make a full-size trash can smoker a reality. Off to the hardware store I trudged with my discount coupon.

Right now I only need racks to hold tomatoes, peppers, or other lightweight things in the smoking chamber. So these very hacked together racks made from bent hangers will work fine. I just bent a bunch of hangers, bound them together with thin gauge bailing wire, trimmed the straightened out hooks, and then drilled holes in the side of the can where they needed to be. The racks can be removed and replaced as needed. Here I've got the smoker with two racks in place, and peppers on the lower rack. (Click for a better look.) Underneath is the burner with an aluminum tray full of apple wood chips on top. I'm also going to cut some dowels to fit across the top of the trash can so that we can hang meats or fish if we want to smoke these bigger and heavier items.



My total out of pocket budget for the smoker so far is just under $37, including the purchase of a special drill bit and mandrel which may or (let's be honest) may not ever come in handy again. Yes, I did ask around to see if friends or relatives already had one of these before I purchased. Finishing up the project with a few dowel hangers won't cost much at all. We already have wooden dowels. The only downside is that we're not getting much in the way of warm weather these days, so there's not much left to smoke at this point.

The other project I need to complete fairly soon is the marvelous $6 Chicken Plucker. This article was published a while ago, and I didn't have all the items on hand that the writer did. So our chicken plucker is going to come in around $19. That's still a pretty cheap solution. We'll be "retiring" our laying hens sometime in the next couple of months, probably just before we go away for Thanksgiving. The woman who I swapped chicken sitting services with eagerly volunteered to come and help us do this. I imagine she's looking forward to the time when she'll face the same solemn task. Our hens were actually due for "retirement" just before we got them this spring. We gave them a few happy months of life, and they gave us eggs. I don't really like euphemisms, especially not for death, so let's be honest here: we're going to slaughter them. That also means plucking them, and we'd rather not do that entirely by hand. This ingenious gadget is simple enough to make at home, and quick enough to easily handle the plucking of a small number of chickens.

I had to buy all the materials for this plucker except the drill itself. I've got the plucker started. When it's finished, I'll get some pictures up.

Then, just for fun, I spray painted some poppy heads and some garlic seed heads that I had saved from this year's garden with silver and copper metallic paints. Holiday wreath-making is a family activity on the day after Thanksgiving. I thought some of of the seed heads might look nice in an evergreen wreath. I haven't quite decided whether they will or not. I may have to wait and see them in a wreath before I decide if they're tacky or not.

I like tinkering with things. I don't really know what I'm doing with woodworking or mechanical stuff, but I like having tools and materials to mess around with. And I like building things fairly cheaply that will serve us well as tools. Making these sorts of things is far less intuitive to me than cooking or baking. But the results tend to last longer than the food does.

What useful things have you made in the DIY category? What clever hacks have you used or even invented? Please share your stories in the comments.

Salvaged Food = Chocolate Cake

I took two short trips away from home this month. When I got home from the second one on Monday, I found that the better part of half a gallon of milk was right on the edge of drinkability. It was starting to go sour. It's important to remember that just because old milk tastes off, it's not dangerous - so long as we're talking about pasteurized milk. My milk was pasteurized, and it had been in the fridge for a few weeks. There's nothing in pasteurized milk that has soured which can make you sick. It's a great ingredient to cook with.

Aside from the milk, I've had the last two oversized zucchini from the garden sitting in my kitchen for about a month now. They're sufficiently large that they stabilized enough to behave like winter squash, meaning that they won't rot anytime too soon. But they're also tender enough that there's no reason the flesh couldn't be used for baking. I think you see where this is going, right?

I'd heard about chocolate zucchini cake before, and I recently stumbled upon a recipe for chocolate buttermilk cake. Being the foolhardy baker that I am, I saw no reason not to combine and substitute as my supplies indicated. So I whipped up two chocolate cakes in tube pans on Tuesday night. And boy did they turn out well. Here's what I did.

Chocolate-Zucchini-Sour Milk Cake

Ingredients

2 cups all purpose flour
1 cup unsweetened cocoa, plus extra for dusting
1 1/2 tsp. baking soda
3/4 tsp. salt
1 1/2 cups sour milk (or buttermilk)
2 tsp. vanilla extract
1 3/4 cups sugar
6 oz. (1 1/2 sticks, or 3/4 cup) butter or shortening, at room temperature.
3 eggs
2-3 cups shredded zucchini

Method

Grease two 9" cake pans or one tube pan and dust with unsweetened cocoa. Arrange a rack in the middle of your oven and preheat it to 350 degrees F.

Combine the flour, cocoa, baking soda and salt in a medium bowl. Whisk together the sour milk and the vanilla extract in a small bowl. In yet another large bowl, cream together the sugar and butter, then beat the mixture for 3 minutes at high speed until it is light and fluffy. Beat in the eggs one at a time, scraping down the sides of the bowl after each addition. Add the two other mixtures into the butter mixture alternately and in stages, beginning and ending with the dry ingredients and blending well between each addition. Mix in the shredded zucchini by hand.

Pour the batter into the cake pans or tube pan and bake for 45 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the cake comes out mostly clean, with a few moist crumbs clinging to it. The tube pan will require at least 55 minutes of baking. Cool the cake or cakes for ten minutes in their pans. Remove them from the pans and cool on racks for at least one hour for cakes or two hours for the tube cake. Dust with powdered sugar or frost as desired. The cakes can be wrapped with plastic wrap when thoroughly cooled and frozen for up to three months.




I like this recipe because it feels like I made something yummy and even mildly healthy out of materials that might otherwise have been thrown away. The sourness of the milk vanished into the moist luxury of this cake. If anything it just contributed a slight tang to the overall flavor. I'm not partial to frosting, so I just enjoyed the cake as is. It did suggest to me that it would really go nicely with a scoop of vanilla ice cream though. I put in only two cups of zucchini in my recipe, and I couldn't even detect the zucchini in the cake. I will definitely increase it to 3 cups per batch next time. This is a sneaky way of using up this notoriously prolific vegetable, and also of getting finicky eaters to consume a little vegetable. My guess is they'd never even notice if you didn't say anything.

I still have some more sour milk that needs to be used up. I'm reminded of the blini that I enjoyed in people's homes in Russia. Over there they deliberately let the milk go sour so that they can use it in the blini recipe. Then they eat them with berries and honey or smetana, a heavy product similar to creme fraiche. I'm going to find a blini recipe soon and then see how well they freeze!

Related post:
Sour Milk Potato Biscuit-Muffins

Creative Frugality at Its Finest

Why am I not surprised that this happened in San Francisco? We need more of this sort of thing. This guy got a free haircut while providing interactive entertainment and engaging his community.



I'm not brave enough to do this myself, as I don't favor a very short haircut. But this is strangely heartwarming to my frugal self this morning. Kudos to Bilal Ghalib for thinking out of the box!