Open Floor: Homebrewing?

Posted on October 19, 2010 by Meagan

So I’ve been thinking. You know what’s missing from my life? Homebrewed alcohol! See this nice fancy stein above? It’s filled with flowers cause I have no delicious beer to put into it instead. What a shame. Well the flowers aren’t a shame at all, in fact that’s the bride’s bouquet caught by yours truly. But the no alcohol certainly is a shame.

My friend Jenna is talking about how her brew-your-own kit will be ready for bottling very soon, and I have fond if not smelly memories of when my parents brewed wine and beer back in Oldhome. This old house of mine has tons of space, we could certainly set up a brewing station downstairs. From what I can tell there’s plenty of quality used supplies available to save on the initial investment. All I have to do is start learning about it!

I’d like to hear about your experiences with home brewing, whether it’s brewing or drinking or even just wanting to do either. Would you appreciate a delicious alcoholic present?

Making Delicious Pierogi

Posted on September 19, 2010 by Meagan

Recently I liberated this KitchenAid mixer from Oldhome. I couldn’t help it – it was sitting all alone in the corner with its parts scattered around. I corralled it as well as some misc baking gear and are putting them to good use here in my kitchen. In fact just a few days ago I used a set of liberated mini silicon muffin liners which made a perfect two-bite tidbit of carrot muffin. I was so impressed that I brought them with me and finally sat down and talked with our closest neighbors the Racine family, who are absolutely lovely people. But that’s another story for another day.

I love pierogi, aka perogies, although technically speaking both the singular and plural of pierogi is pierogi – you never eat just one pierogi after all. As with many things in life nowadays I got to thinking, how can I make my own pierogi? So I googled it. And read. And now the mystery of the pierogi is unravelled and I am on my way to becoming a Pierogi Master! I’m sure I could make 151 types of pierogi, maybe even 451+.

Now, to share with you the secret of the pierogi.

There are two parts: dough and filling. The dough is a non fermenting dough so you can make it anytime; I actually found that using it the day after, cold from the fridge, was easier than using it fresh. The filling can consist of everything and anything. I used leftovers from my fridge as well as some random ingredients I had on hand. I recommend you try the same!

Here is what you need:

5 cups flour
5 tablespoons of melted butter
2 tablespoons of sour cream
2 whole eggs
1 egg yolk
1-1/2 teaspoons salt
1-1/2 cups lukewarm water

Mix the eggs together, mix the salt and water together. Mix together four cups of flour with everything else and gradually add the last cup of flour in as you knead it for a few minutes. Voila, a dough! A LOT of dough. I put half of it in the fridge and still had too much dough left out.

For your stuffings you can use pretty much anything you have on hand as long as you mix it up with potato – the goal of the stuffing is to be able to make it into little balls easily, and crumbly things fall apart, but not once you add some potato! Above I have potato with red peppers, onions, and mushroom, potato with cheese, and 100% meat. For my next batch I mixed the meat with potatoes and it was much easier to spoon out. Learn from my mistakes friends!

Now, let’s assemble the pierogi.

Divide up the dough before filling. I ended up using 13 grams of dough per pierogi, prior I used double that and got double sized pierogi, it’s your choice!

Roll the dough out long and flat.

Stretch it out a bit with your hands when it doesn’t comply. Which it will. Lay it out on one hand so that half of the dough goes over your fingertips.

Add a small spoonful of stuffing. The key here is to not let any touch the outer rim of dough: wet dough sticks to dough but it doesn’t stick with potato in the middle!

Wet the hand-half of the dough’s rim with a bit of water…

…then fold the dough flap over and pinch it shut! Try to get out the air as you go by smoothing the pierogi from the middle out, but not too hard lest the filling come out too. Yes it’s a challenge, but all good foods are challenges!

Now repeat 29 more times and voila, 30 pierogi!

Pierogi making does take a bit of time to do so I advise sitting down and spending an hour or two making tons of pierogi, flash freezing them by putting them on a baking sheet in the freezer for awhile then transferring into freezer bags for longterm storage, and continuing until you are out of dough or stuffing or become tired of making pierogi.

Now I have three bags of delicious pierogi ready and waiting for the day when I need a fast meal!

http://mises.org/daily/4575

The Most Amazing Tomato Sauce

Posted on September 4, 2010 by Meagan

I’m taking a page from Gordon Ramsay and calling what I’ve created The Most Amazing Tomato Sauce. And knowing that it’s me making it, it’s also the most easiest tomato sauce. It’s pretty much as close to “set it and forget it” as you can get while not using a Ron Popeil product.

Step 1: Wash your tomatoes and arrange artistically for your own photo. Or just wash em.

Step 2: Cut them in half and arrange on a pan. But be smart and put down a layer of parchment paper first, or else you’ll be like me and spend hours scrubbing off burned crusty bits. Eh, it’s exercise!

Step 3: Season with salt and pepper. Don’t overdo it, but don’t skip this step.

Step 4: Cover them with some tasty ingredients. Here I’ve used some jalapeno peppers, my own homegrown spicy peppers, and onions. In other instances I’ve added sweet peppers. Put on what you like.

Step 5: Put them into a moderately warm oven and forget about them for a few hours. The slower you cook them, the more delicious they will be. Resist the impulse to cook them at 400 degrees as I did the first few times. Try 250F for two hours or so. Your house will smell delicious!

Step 6: Put everything into a pot and mash it up. Simmer the mixture to reduce it to your liking. If you bake the tomatoes a low heat you won’t have too much to simmer away. I leave the skins on, they don’t bother me too much. Same with the seeds. But add in a teaspoon or two of sugar – it takes away the sharp acid tones and really rounds out the sauce nicely.

Voila, you have a delicious homemade tomato sauce! Eat it, freeze it, or can it – either way your tomatoes have a purpose beyond being a decoration on your windowsill.

Some people ask me why I spend the time/effort making this sauce instead of just buying it from the store. Others are similarly puzzled by why I’d spend time/effort making wool when I could just buy it. Having the final goods available for purchase is nice as a backup, but I take a lot of pride in doing things myself. Doing new things means you always learn new things too. When was the last time you learned how to do something simply by buying the final product? For me, life is all about learning and experimenting and trying new things, and buying a final product from a store doesn’t provide me with a whole lot of value if I am capable of making the item myself. A cast iron pan? Sure I’ll buy that, I don’t have metalworking tools (yet) and that will last a long time. But tomato sauce? I know how to garden, I know how to grow tomatoes, and I know how to make my own sauce (thanks to Google). And now, so do you.

Crab Apple Jelly and Applesauce

Posted on August 27, 2010 by Meagan

As I’ve mentioned before, we have a crab apple tree. Best of all, there are practically no pests up here, so 99/100 crab apples grew completely unimpeded and with no worm etc.

What do you do with crab apples? I decided to make Crab Apple Jelly, and I stumbled on how to make crab apple sauce along the way.

Basically you simmer the whole, washed apples in just enough water to cover them. They fall apart really quickly and you can help them with a masher. Simmer for more time, I left them on for about an hour or so. Then strain the liquids from the solids.

We have a few sieves as well as cheesecloth so we decided to separate the mash as such: first, take some mash and let it drip drain, no squeezing it at all. Then transfer that mash into a second sieve but this time squeeze it very much. Finally transfer the exhausted mash into a collecting bowl.

The first drip drain resulted in a clearish ruby red liquid (the top left spoon). This is what we make the jelly from. The second squeeze drain resulted in applesauce (the bottom left spoon). The leftover mash (in the strainer on the right) will be fed to the animals, though we have a suspicion that it could be used for brewing too.

We canned the applesauce directly after extracting it – after heating it up again and spicing it up with some sugar and cinnamon.

The jelly needs more sugar added to it than the applesauce, and you have to reduce the volume by almost half, which means a lot of stirring and watching over the jelly else it could burn. You’ll know once you reach the proper stage – your stirring utensil and pot will start getting all jelly-y!

Crab apples are so high in pectin that you do not need to add any for the jelly to set.

My one tree gave us a bit over 11lbs of apples, from which we canned 1500ml of applesauce (3 x 500ml) and around 1500ml of jelly (6 x 240ml).

I quite enjoy the tart yet rich flavour of the jelly. If you need a kick in the pants to help wake up in the morning, I bet Crab Apple Jelly Toast would do the trick!

Muy Caliente Salsa

Posted on August 2, 2010 by Meagan

[Picture a delicious salsa here... I'm still trying to find the camera charger...]

The tomatoes were taking over the garden a bit too passionately. I mean, I love tomatoes, but I would like to have some of the OTHER things I planted in that bed, like peppers and eggplants. So some of the tomato offshoots had to go, even if they had already started forming little fruits.

Oh, and those saved green onions that we planted? Some of them were starting to get crowded too. They protested by turning to onion mush and giving off a ripe old smell. So I harvested a large bunch of green onions as well, half which had started forming a little onion at their root end.

Some of the hot peppers needed to be trimmed off, bugs were making their way too close. And as always I took a handful of parsley and cilantro because both of those plants grow relentlessly.

So here I am with all these ingredients in my hands. What do I make? Turns out tonight was Nacho Night, so I decided to take a stab at making a salsa verde. From what I read, green unripe tomatoes are somewhat similar to tomatillos, which are used to make that “green salsa”. So into the food processor went three hot (but still green/unripe) chilis, my herbs, and some of the green onion stalks. Then in went the green tomatoes, quartered, and a splash of lemon juice. All this was blended together then put into a working bowl. I coarsely chopped some ripe red tomato and blended it for a second or two just till it was more diced up, then this was added to the working bowl, along with a cup of cooked corn (saved from my preserving batch a few days ago) and some salt and pepper.

Then I took a taste.

Holy cow. That was a spicy salsa. Like, oh my gosh, my mouth is on fire spicy!!

Those chilis are HOT. Rather, their seeds are. I’m sure the flesh will similarly spice up as they become ripe, but boy do they pack a punch now.

I diluted the salsa down with two spoonfuls of a commercial salsa I had in the fridge. This added a bit more tomatoeyness to the salsa, which was appreciated. It helped take the burn off a bit but the burn was still there. It was that slow burn that you don’t realize is going on until a second after you eat it, and by then it’s too late to do anything about it except hope it doesn’t last forever. Thankfully it doesn’t, it goes away once you eat another nacho or two.

All in all, I am pretty pleased with my first homegrown salsa (minus the corn, but hey mine’s just growing a bit late!). More so, I was very happy to have found a use for all the spare tomatoes I will have once I trim the garden even more. Note to self, for next year tomatoes must be planted with LOTS of space between the rows! And start them two weeks in advance indoors – even though mine are up to speed with their growing, I would have loved to be doing this a week ago, and I figure that should be possible starting the guys off indoors a bit earlier.

Making Cream Style Corn

Posted on July 28, 2010 by Meagan

One week ago I did not know how to make my own cream-style corn, or even how to take it off the cob beyond using my teeth. Yesterday I figured it out, and so can you! It’s surprisingly easy to do, and now I have 8 cups of frozen cream-style corn to greet me in the wintertime, at a cost of less than a dollar a cup. What a nice taste of summer that will be!

Step 1: Buy and shuck your corn. Now and during the next weeks is the time to do so! I got two dozen corn for $8 from a local producer and I bet I could get a better deal yet. Also, four of the ears were our dinner so all in all I used 20 ears.

Step 2: Boil the corn for just a little bit. Most preserved fruits and veggies are blanched, or boiled quickly, before being saved. This converts some starch into sugar and will make the item taste better once used later on. I boiled each pot of 5 for about 4-5 minutes.

Step 3: Cool off the corn quickly. If I had ice, I’d put it in this bowl. Because I don’t, I used cold water and changed it when it got warm.

Step 4: Cut the corn off. This is the fun part, and by fun I mean a bit tiring. If you want cream-style corn, you cut only the tops off the kernels, if you wanted kernel-style corn you’d cut pretty much all of the kernel off.

Step 5: Pop the kernels and milk out using the back of your knife. Some kernels will go everywhere. You can see them all over my chair. Oh well. Continue cutting and popping until all of your ears are completely empty.

Step 6: Heat the corn back up for a bit. I didn’t want my cream-style corn to be too creamy so I heated it up for a few minutes and let some evaporation occur.

Step 7: Bag it up! These small Ziploc freezer bags hold 2 cups perfectly. Into the chest freezer they went and that’s where they’ll stay until the winter and spring.

Even though I did not use my own produced corn for this food saving adventure, I still learned something new and now have a delicious surprise waiting for me later on. And delicious is the key word. That is one thing I am learning about growing your own food – the tastes absolutely rival those you can find in the store. I almost died of happiness biting into my first fresh tomato, I know I’ll die of happiness eating my preserved raspberries, and I can only imagine what my salsas will taste like. Even if you will never live on a farm and produce your own food like me, you can take advantage of this blog and learn how to preserve the food that other local farmers produce. That way you can enjoy it far later on past its prime season, and also take pride in knowing that you were the one who processed it, not some robot in a factory.

The Life and Times of Meagan Hanes

Documenting the adventures of a free spirit in this wonderful world!

Category Archives: Cooking