Winter Solstice 2013 {Seasonal Snaps}

On the first day of winter 2013, central Ohio was subject to flood watches. Our property developed two temporary ponds and two whole acres of mud as several inches of rain melted four inches of snow. One of the ponded areas is where we plowed about a quarter acre of lawn for planting next year. The plan is to till it and fill in low spots with additional soil when the land dries but does not freeze. We may be waiting until spring for that chore.

But the sun shone and heated the air to nearly 60 degrees during the afternoon. The sky was BLUE and the air felt like April. I was happily barefoot most of the day with windows open to air out the house. Thanks to the thawed earth, I was able to pull five pounds of sweet, anise-y parsnips to serve for Christmas Eve dinner. What a precious reprieve from the typical winter ick!

Alas, because of the long very cold spell in early December, the hoop house is nearly empty. A few plantings of greens are hanging on but not growing much. There are peas in the center I hoped to harvest; even though they aren't producing food, I'm leaving them as a green mulch.

I started the Seasonal Snaps project one year ago for Winter Solstice 2012. Our homestead isn't nearly grown to where I envision it but you can see some of the major changes. Our small orchard is planted, we have a hoop house for growing, the mudroom is built and insulated, and we're working on a bigger better vegetable plot.

Rain, snow, and sunshine all contribute to the food forest we tend. We are again thankful for the turning of the seasons that hearkens us to look back at where we've come and set our intentions for the future.

It's Squash Season - Grab a Grapefruit Spoon! {One Great Tool}

Today I'm introducing a new series, One Great Tool. In each post, I'll highlight one hand tool that is indispensable to our daily cooking and gardening activities. We hope that by sharing our favorites with you, we can encourage more efficient and fun homesteading.

The first step to cooking any winter squash or making a jack-o-lantern is to remove the seeds and stringy flesh from the inside. Pulling them out by hand is one way, but it always reminds me of the 'cold bowl of spaghetti masquerading as pig guts' trick. It feels icky and rarely removes all of the seed material.

Instead, we go right for a grapefruit spoon. The row of metal teeth is meant to perfectly separate sour grapefruit segments from thin, bitter membrane. More frequently in our house, the teeth scrape the insides of harvest orange winter squash.

With a few simple scrapes using the spoon, all the gooey bits of the squash separate from the flesh which can then be roasted whole, roasted in chunks for soup or boiled. We save the seeds for roasting or replanting.

We reach our hands, clutching a grapefruit spoon, into the middle of jack-o-lantern pumpkins too. The spoons cleanly remove the bits of membrane that might otherwise catch on fire when you light the candle. I've even used it to remove the seedy middle from halved zucchini and summer squash.

We don't eat grapefruit very often because it isn't grown in Ohio and some people experience a negative interaction with a medicine Alex takes. But we do use our grapefruit spoons for squash frequently, especially in the fall.

Our Worst Canning Accident Yet

My students at canning classes frequently express concern about botulism. I ease their fears about that rare occurrence by assuring them they should worry about burns instead. Hanging around boiling water, hot jars, and simmering sauces is a recipe for a brush with hot stuff, one I experienced today.

My friend Kate of Kate On The Way and I were canning sauced tomatoes in quarts. During the water bath phase, one of the lids loosened and tomato sauce seeped into the boil. No problem, we kept the other jars in there to finish processing.

Kate removed a jar after the finished time. As she went to tighten the ring a bit (a necessary step for Tattler lids), the lid flew off, creating an explosion of tomato. We both were covered in the spray of boiling sugary puree.

We ran for cool water and eventually made our way outside to harvest, chew, and apply plantain poultice. Our left arms have a series of first and second degree* burns with Kate suffering more than me.

Alex was kind enough to pull the remaining jars from the canner after they cooled a little. By then, three of the remaining jars had also lost their lids, the contents mingling with the water bath.

Learning From A Canning Accident

Since neither of us were hurt badly, we moved pretty quickly into the "how did this happen?" phase. Kate and I have each canned hundreds of jars of food before, if not thousands.

We referenced a canning book and filled the jars to the right head space. We heated the canning bath to a simmer so the jars weren't rattling in a raging boil. We used a proper canner with a  rack on the bottom. We have done all of these things many times.

We concluded that the lids must have been the issue. Although they were tightened according to directions, and Kate and I both have used them before, the Tattler process failed this time. Will we ever use Tattlers again? Kate says yes, I'm less sure.

Additionally, I experienced why it isn't a good idea to hover when someone else is pulling jars out of the water bath. I can't remember exactly why I was near - I might have been getting ready to grab something out of the fridge - but I shouldn't have been so close. While the Tattlers might be responsible in this case, glass failures and drops can also occur when jars are moved from the water bath to the cooling place. Someone standing nearby can be in the line of fire.

Finally, we were reminded that even experienced canners must remain vigilant to the risks at hand. We feel fortunate that the liquid exploded onto our bodies and not our faces, and that no pets or children were caught in the splatter. We lost some home-grown goodness and in a little bit of pain, but ultimately realize this could have been much worse.

We'll continue to put up food using water bath and pressure canning, with these lessons learned:

• Use caution if you use Tattler lids with liquidy sauces
• Stand back when removing hot jars from the hot water bath
• Keep children and pets at a distance when canning
• Have a plan in place for treating burns
• *Identify some plantain in your yard. By all accounts, we should have blistered burns but thanks to plantain we don't. Kate details a little more about using plantain to heal.

What's your worst canning disaster? What did you learn from it?

Acmella oleracea aka Toothache Plant aka Our Party Trick {Wordless Wednesday}

A friend wrote recently, "Seeing you always leaves a tingly feeling in my mouth." He's talking about toothache plant, Acmella oleracea, our party trick flower. Innocent in appearance and vigorously growing in our apothecary garden, we encourage guests to taste the small dense flowers. They give off the oddest sensation, described by some as sour, acidic, numbing, and 'like liking a 9V battery'. The effect dissipates after about five minutes.

Beyond the silly sensation, flowers and leaves of the toothache plant is useful for numbing the mouth, discovered by Brazilians as an herbal remedy for cold sores and dental problems. Some people, including Lil, munch on the flowers, also called eyeball plant, as a sour candy alternative. Or she may just like spitting out the flower on the ground.

We will collect seeds and have plenty to share if you want to grow your own next year.

What's the strangest edible you've grown?

Homemade Low-Cost, High-Character Cold Smoker Contraption

Today I will reveal the second craziest homemade cold smoker ever created. It was born from a desire to cold smoke a molasses cured, home butchered ham without breaking the bank and inspired by the craziest homemade meat cooking devise, my father's Hillbilly Ham House.

Behold Alex's Cold Smoking Contraption.

To build this beauty, Alex started with a gifted excess mini Weber grill and removed the top vent. He arranged a length of round furnace pipe acquired for $3 at the Habitat ReStore into the hole, followed by a $5 length of flexible dryer vent. Connections were reinforced with aluminum duct tape, $5 a roll.

The dryer vent ran into the modified lower vent of our existing large charcoal grill. Alex used the angle grinder and many curse words to extend the hole enough for the pipe to fit in properly. The grill remains usable to cook off meat with charcoal.

Useage is simple: Build a small wood fire in the mini Weber. Put the meat on the big grill and monitor temperature. After 18 hours, you have ham!

The dryer vent was incapable of handling the smoke heat for the duration and melted through once. Alex cut off the effected part, reattached with tape, and went about the smoking. A more permanent solution would be durable flexible hosing or connecting pieces of furnace pipe.

Cold smoking is the act of surrounding a piece of food with smoke but little to no residual heat. The ideal cold smoking temperature for a ham is 60 degrees F. Given that the air temperature in summer is generally higher than 60, adjustments can be made. We kept a pan of ice in the base of the meat chamber to help keep cool and were able to average about 75 degrees F.

Alas, our basement is still a little too warm for dry curing, the next step in the ham Alex wished to make. We ended air drying early before mold set in and packaged the ham in slices and chunks for the future. Someday we'll learn that hams are not meant to be made in July.

What do you think of Alex's creation? DIY genius or a bunch of junk?

PS. For classier Weber modifications, head over to our friend Dave's site Webercam.com.

Our Dysfunctional Kitchen {Friday Five}

Live in Columbus and want to see the new place? Come to our open house next Saturday, July 13 from 3-5 pm. More details on the Facebook invite. There's one place in our house that I haven't dared to write about yet - the dysfunctional kitchen. It's an ugly space we use often. The back door to the house, the entrance we use most often, walks right into this room. Each time we host a dinner party or undertake a large preserving project, the 'heart of the home' reveals more design flaws. I could go on for days about what's wrong with our kitchen but I won't bore you with all the details. Instead, in the spirit of Friday Five, here are the basics of what we dislike most:

1) Where's the other half? Our kitchen is spacious but only has counters and cabinets on two of the four walls, which leaves us lacking in storage and working space. We temporarily corrected the issue with a large stainless steel table from a restaurant supply store. But why, when there is a perfectly good dining room just through the doorway, did someone not install cabinets on all four walls?

2) The ugly, ill-installed, tile floor - Tile is an abomination in a working kitchen. The hardness breaks every glass and dish that is dropped. It feels cold and bounces sound. Cold + hard = achy legs when processing a mountain of fruit, stock, or vegetables. Ours happens to have been installed by someone either inexperienced or lazy enough to not fully clean off the grout, so we have swipes of now-hardened grout on top of the tiles that collect mud and look dirty at the drop of a hat. On the upside, despite the five (!) layers of flooring, they all seem to be degraded enough that tearing them out won't be much of a problem.

3) The glass-top electric range - I could write a book about how much I despise electric, glass-topped ranges. Instead, how about if I list the things I could easily cook six months ago but now are either underdone or burnt or both every time I make them: popcorn, quesadillas, pancakes, eggs, bacon, grilled cheese. In what I think is an oft-repeated design flaw, this range has the controls on the back of the unit, requiring the cook to reach across steaming pots of water to turn down the heat.

4) Recirculating exhaust fan - Recirculating exhaust fans, the kind that most kitchens have attached to a microwave or just above the range, are worthless. They do nothing to remove heat or steam or smoke from the area. We'll have to move the range to the other wall to install an outside-venting fan but this is the only way that baking and canning in the summer is bearable to me.

5) The too-shallow sink - Our kitchen has a standard two basin ten-inch deep sink. Our needs, apparently, aren't standard because many of our pots didn't fit under the faucet until we replaced it with this number chosen for height. Our biggest cookie sheet doesn't fit width wise. There are always clean dishes spilling out of the drying basin. Large cuts of meat are nearly impossible to rinse and yes, we're still cure-deep in charcuterie. A deeper sink like my beloved old numerar doesn't take up much more space and is imminently more useful.

I feel a little guilty whining about a kitchen that many people around the world would love to cook in. Truly, we could live with this design and these appliances for many years if we needed to. But my aching legs tell me that if we're going to happily preserve the (hopefully) hundreds of pounds of food that we're growing, we could use an upgrade.

Fortunately we're starting to plan a DIY kitchen renovation. Did you know this blog started out documenting the renovation of our last kitchen? We've actually taken kitchens apart and put them back together in our two previous houses, so we're well aware of the effort the project will require. We'll document the process along the way and ask for your opinions too. Because while we're quick to solve the functional issues, we could use help with the finishes and designer-y options.

What bugs you about your kitchen?

Early Spring Inside The Hoop House {Friday Five}

What's going on inside the hoop house we built? 1) Garden beds of Price Farm Organics soil from City Folks Farm Shop and peat moss over cardboard broken by walking paths of landscape cloth covered by mulch. Alas any gaps between the cardboard and cloth are already growing weeds... 2) Seedlings hardening off on the hardware-cloth shelves. 3) Strawberry plants under the shelves where water drains down from seedlings. 4) Cold-tolerant food like kales, lettuces, and beets. 5) Friends and family hanging out. The hoop house is always warmer than the outside; on the days reaching 70 deg F recently, the hoop house sauna was positively steamy!

Fermenting Wisdom from Sandor Katz

Wild Fermentation and Art of Fermentation author Sandor Katz visited Columbus briefly last week. He taught two classes to the ever-growing population of people who keep jars of ferments brewing in their homes.

Our family ferments sauerkraut, sour cream, kefir, beer, charcuterie and more on a regular basis. I don't write about it here often because we never make the same thing twice, preferring to ferment what we have in abundance at any given time. Fermentation is a fun and useful pursuit that I want to encourage. Below are ideas from Sandor Katz to start your sour juices flowing:

"There's No Food You Can't Ferment"

People ferment for:

• preservation - krauts, kimchis, and cheeses historically allowed populations to survive between growing seasons
• production of alcohol - to sanitize water, provide entertainment and elightenment, and preserve grains in a useable form
• digestion - see below
• flavor - almost all gourmet foods like cheeses, cured meats, olives, chocolate, coffee, and vinegars are fermented

Vegetables are a good place to start because they are intrinsically safe, require no special equipment, ferment quickly and are delicious. The process can be as simple as cutting up vegetables, pressing them until juices run, adding a little salt, and submerging under juices or water for a few days until they sour.

Salt is good for the process because it discourages unwanted molds, enhances taste, and maintains texture but you can use very little. Through osmosis, salt pulls out water and creates a desirable selective environment for the fermenting bacteria that can tolerate salt.

Fermentation changes foods by:

• pre-digesting nutrients that humans cannot digest normally, as is the case in dried soybeans fermented into tofu
• enhancing nutritients - fermented foods have more B vitamins than fresh versions and some nutrients like natokinase are only available after fermentation
• de-toxification - cassava, the African staple crop, for example, is a root vegetable that contains cyanide and is inedible until fermented.
• live bacterial cultures - pro-biotics aid digestion by supplementing the biota in our guts. Eating naturally fermented foods with diverse macrobiotics offer more benefits than monoculture probiotic additives or pills.

"Where Is The Line Between Fermented And Rotten?"

No form of life has lived without bacteria, yet Americans for the past 100 years have been indoctrinated in the idea that bacteria is dangerous. Humans need bacteria to digest and absorb nutrients, reproduce, and support immune function.

The origins of fermented foods predate recorded history because as soon as humans chose an agrarian lifestyle, they had to use fermentation to preserve crops. Agriculture would not make sense if fermentation did not exist.

Food exists on a spectrum from fresh to rotten. Cultural standards often define what is too rotten to eat. Scandinavians notoriously eat fermented fish that both smells and looks rotten to most Americans. Runny, molded cheeses are not common here either but are considered delicacies in parts of Europe. Expanding your palate by eating more fermented foods may open your mind to new flavors.

"Be Bold In Your Experimentation But Not In Your Quantities"

Once in awhile, everyone who attempts fermented foods will create something that isn't tasty at the best or afflicted by black mold at the worst. It's ok - we all make mistakes. To minimize waste, make many small batches until you learn what works in your environment and with your particular tastes.

For health, preservation and flavor, ferment!

Special thanks to City Folk's Farm Shop, Swainway Urban Farm, and Clintonville Community Market for sponsoring this event and Janine Harris Degitz for organizing.