Feeling blue

This morning Jeremy took off work again so we could do a second round of u-pick at Bauer Berry Farm. Blueberries are in season now – actually, it’s just the very beginning of the season so the pickings were a bit light. But we did manage to get about 10 pounds.





I have to say that, though I don’t really like blueberries, I think I prefer picking and freezing them over strawberries. They are so much easier! (In this next picture, you can see our food dehydrator which has been chugging away on some currants we picked in a neighbor's yard - and you can see our jar of dried cherries way in the back!)



I froze most of them, but we also saved out some for eating. What else is a girl to do with so many blueberries? Why, make blueberry muffins of course! Since some of you may ask, here is the recipe for these lovelies, found in a Penzey’s Spice catalog some years ago.



Blueberry Muffins

1 ¾ cups flour (I use whole wheat pastry flour, but you can use white)
1 tablespoon baking powder
2 tablespoons sugar
Pinch of salt
3 eggs, slightly beaten
¼ cup milk
5 tablespoons butter, melted
2 cups blueberries

Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Combine flour, baking powder, sugar, and salt, set aside. In another bowl, mix the eggs, milk, and melted butter until well blended. Add the liquid to the dry ingredients and mix until just moistened. Fold in blueberries. Using a 12 cup muffin tin, fill the cups to the top with batter. Bake on the middle shelf for 20-25 minutes. Cool on a wire rack.

Notes: I used honey instead (mixed in with the wet ingredients). I use more than 2 cups of blueberries, like 2 ½ at least. Jeremy likes just enough batter to hold the berries together…sort of. The recipe also calls for sprinkling the tops of the muffins with a little “vanilla sugar” which I skip, but you could do that if you like them sweeter. They don’t really need it though.

I've got that lovin' feeling

I was just returning from the garage (freezing trays of u-pick blueberries) and stopped to admire the garden. It really is an incredible thing, growing your own garden. It's hard to describe the delight and satisfaction it brings.

The various kinds of beans are coming along nicely. Several of the vines have reached the roof of the garage and I'm not sure what they're going to do if they want to grow taller. I think some of the first (gazillion) cherry tomatoes are showing signs of color. There is finally a (huge) blossom on the squash. The parsley, chard, and kale are coming back nicely after we harvested most of them.

The rest of the backyard is full of life too: the next door neighbor's black cat skulking and meowing through the yard; squirrels leaping and chasing through the tree tops; a new crop of baby birds chirping in their garage-roof nest; and the parakeet (either escapee or let loose) joyously squawking away in the trees.

It also helps that it's only 83 (not 90+) degrees. All together, it is a lovely afternoon for admiring one's garden, and life in general.


(pictures on this and more as soon as I figure out what is wrong with my laptop - where all the pictures are!)

A word from our sponsors...

Okay, so no one is actually sponsoring us - but I thought I'd take a moment to talk up a product Jeremy discovered recently: cellulose bags.

Cellulose bags are natural and nontoxic (made out of the cell walls of plants) and they can be composted. They apparently biodegrade completely in 30 to 90 days in soil. (Plastic bags are petroleum based.)

We first ordered a bunch of sandwich bag sized bags. We reuse bags a lot and haven't gone through all of them yet in 4 1/2 months! We take them to the store with us and use them in the bulk section instead of the plastic bags there.

Last week we discovered a great store here in Minneapolis: Linden Hills Natural Home. They sell the bags so we picked up the bigger size. We'll definitely be back to that store, they have a lot of great stuff and it's nice to bike (or even drive) over instead of having the bags shipped from some other state.

If you're interested and can't find the bags at a local store, here are a few sites selling the bags:

Environmentally Sound Products
Green Home
BYOgreen

Our work is never done

The last several days have been absolutely packed! We had a friend in town from Wednesday to Saturday. I was very excited to have our very first guest who stayed the night in our library / guest room. Jeremy also took the opportunity to take us both on a little tour of Minneapolis. We were biking on the days when it was 90 degrees plus and super humid. Ugh. But it was still a lot of fun.

Our friend, Ashley, brought us 20 pounds of Washington cherries. We had to call around a lot of places to find them and secured the box just days before Ashley's departure. As soon as we got home from the airport we set to work removing pits and freezing some of the cherries. After a really long walk and a stop for drinks and dessert, we came home and made a batch of cherry jam.

That worked out nicely so we made another batch the next day. We had hoped to make two but realized we were out of pectin and the store had closed at 9:00. That's right - we were making jam after 9:00 pm.

Lest you all get the idea that preserving and canning is fun and games, well... Actually, it is kind of fun, but it is also a lot of work. And, as Jeremy has been known to say: the vegetables/fruit don't wait. You have to take care of them in a certain amount of time - or they end up in the compost bin.

The truth is - we're obsessed with food. I feel like we spend 75% or more of our time in the kitchen.

For example, take today. In the morning I harvested our crop of swiss chard, curly scotch kale, and dinosaur kale. I cut off the stems and stuck them all in the fridge for later. I also put some black eyed peas on to soak. I had dinner ready for Jeremy when he came home just after six. He brought a bunch of raspberries home hoping I could make some muffins. After dinner we put the water on to boil so we could process the chard and kale for freezing. I cut up an onion and some more chard and kale so Jeremy could make some green soup. Jeremy put the peas on to cook and I started making muffins - stopping every couple minutes to help with the freezing of the greens.

Right now, at 8:30, the greens are frozen, the peas and green soup are cooked and ready for lunch tomorrow, and an incredible batch of raspberry muffins has just come out of the oven. Whew!

It's incredible that we are running three or four burners at a time and the oven when it's 85 degrees out and humid as anything. That's what a lot of our preserving season has been like so far - hot and sweaty and hot. And hot - did I say that?

Oh boy - Jeremy just picked a quart of pole beans from the garden. We've got to figure out what to do with those!

Nettles on the menu

A couple weeks ago Jeremy showed up with a rather large bundle on the back of his bike.





It was full of stinging nettles he'd picked at a park near where he works.

So... we got to work picking off all the leaves and trying to avoid stinging ourselves.



Then we boiled them in batches for just a minute or so each (which takes out the sting) and packaged them up for the freezer.



Why stinging nettles!? you ask? Well, stinging nettle leaves are actually quite high in nutrients (such as vitamins A, C, D, iron, potassium, manganese, and calcium) and can be used in place of spinach or other greens in many recipes. We made a nettle quiche a few weeks ago that was fabulous.
You can also soak the leaves in water for 24 hours then use the water as an organic pesticide.

And it's just growing out there - everywhere - free for you to pick! Just don't forget your rubber gloves...

Yogurt

I've been a fan of yogurt for several years now. I enjoy a small bowl almost every morning with a healthy scoop of homemade-granola. I switched to plain yogurt a couple years ago because the sweet stuff got too overwhelming on a daily basis.

When we moved here Meg gave us her recipe for homemade-yogurt and we've been making it ever since. It's great stuff and Jeremy and I have fun making some every few weeks.

We use a half gallon of whole milk which we get in returnable glass jars from Cedar Summit Farm or Castle Rock Farm. Pour the milk in a pot on the stove and turn on the heat. I think it's best to heat it slowly, but we've done it on high heat before and survived.



While I'm stirring the milk, Jeremy pulls out the jars we need and our little cooler. He boils some water and fills up several of the jars which will sit in the cooler till we're ready for them.





Meanwhile, I'm stirring away and watching the heat. We want to milk to get to 185 degrees.



At some point when it's warming up, we add a half cup of powdered milk and whisk vigorously to get it integrated. The first time we made yogurt we just stirred in the powdered milk and at the end found a lot of it clumped at the bottom, so now we whisk. The powdered milk adds some thickness.



As soon as it reaches 185, we turn off the heat and move the pan to a sink full of cold water and ice packs. Now we want it to cool down.



Jeremy has already pulled out the jars we need for yogurt (that had been keeping hot). Into each of these he has put about two tablespoons of starter yogurt. This is store bought yogurt that we froze in little containers. You need the cultures from this yogurt to get the new yogurt going. Somehow the freezing doesn't hurt the cultures.



When the yogurt gets down to 115, Jeremy scoops out a bit into each jar and swishes it around. By then the yogurt has reached the target temperature of 111 and we pour it into the jars.



Then we arrange them in the cooler along with two jars still full of hot water, put the lid on, and walk away. The yogurt sits in the warmth for 6 to 8 hours (or is it 4 to 6? we can never remember). After that we stick it in the fridge.



I know there is another method of keeping the yogurt in your oven at a low temp so it stays at that heated temp for all those hours. The cooler method is much less energy intensive. I also like not being 'chained' to an oven for four hours or more - making sure it's maintaining temperature, etc.

In addition to eating yogurt at breakfast, you can blend it with some heavy cream and strawberries (if you happen to have some around), and make an incredible smoothie.



So - now you all know how to make yogurt!

Another garden update

It's been about two weeks since the last garden update and things are going crazy here. I had to have a shot of me in the garden so you could see how big it is getting. The tall stuff in the front is fennel and dill, the tomatoes are very tall too. The lettuce is even getting quite high since we let it go to seed. (We bought a packet of "mixed greens" which turned out to be mostly radish greens with sharp prickly points all over the leaves!)



We have bush beans - baby bush beans!



Remember our first baby tomato? It has become a real bruiser:



And we have a ton of cherry tomatoes. A ton, ton, ton!









Our scarlet runner beans and rattlesnake beans are getting quite tall too - and the rattlesnake beans now have lots of flowers!



Our snap peas have been doing well too. We've harvested a couple small handfuls to add to salads.

I wonder what the next two weeks will bring?