Oh the times, they are a-changing

It has been brought to my attention that I haven't updated my blog in a while. Since June. Like I didn't know that . . .

Here's what happened. While I was waiting for strawberry jam to seal on the counter, I composed several new blog posts. If I remember correctly, I was having some trouble getting Blogger to load my pictures in the correct order. Blogger was not the only source of trouble that day. Only two of my 13 or so half pint jars of jam sealed. The jam was a mess - the recipe I'd been using said to stir the jam till it "sheeted" off the back of a wooden spoon. I cooked the heck out of those berries and sugar, and it never sheeted. Eventually I just poured it into hot jars, figuring enough was enough.

So much for giving out strawberry jam to friends and family members as Christmas gifts. The jam, I have learned, is excellent for making Giant's Thumbprint cookies - I think I have used up about 3 jars of jam on 5 or 6 batches of cookies since making the jam. But that is all it is good for. It is almost impossible to spread at all, even on something as hard as one of Krista's Kitchen's sturdy "Best Crackers Ever." I pawned a few jars off on my immediate family, and the rest is waiting to be made into cookies, possibly for Christmas.

This summer my dad and I grew a decent garden, although I did not freeze much food at all - just a few batches of chicken stock made with garden ingredients and stuff from the farmers' markets and lots and lots of zucchini bread, zucchini muffins, and zucchini cookies. I didn't make it to as many farmers' markets as I would have liked, either. We did have a steady source of produce from our CSA (we just ate a salad out of the last box) but this was not a great summer for eating real food.

I spent most of the summer applying and interviewing for jobs, and doing some traveling. Michael and I took Amtrak out to Reno, Nevada for a Scrabble Tournament. We had quite the adventure getting there and back again. Not as much of an adventure as old Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit, but almost. I had a job interview the second day of the train ride out West. By the time we go to Reno, the train was something like 18 hours delayed, which got us to Nevada mere hours before the tournament started, instead of a full day. On the way home we were another 10 or so hours late, so we had to spend the night in Chicago before catching a bus back to Madison. That was going to be a blog post, but it never materialized. In general it was fine with us that the train was delayed - we got to see some beautiful sights in daylight instead of missing them in the dark.

Here are some pictures in reverse order:

The Rocky mountains, from pretty far away.

I don't really remember where this was but it was before we got to the Rockies.
Foothills of the Rockies?
That is a CAFO. This was in Nebraska. It was the first thing we took pictures of on the trip. Once I saw the cows, I had to dig the camera out. Apparently (I later learned) it is illegal to take pictures of these places. We'll see what happens.
More CAFO. Some women sitting in front of us wondered what kind of ranch this was. I told them that if they've ever eaten a McDonald's hamburger, or bought ground beef at the grocery store, the animals probably spent some of their lives in a place like this. This picture cannot capture how vast this place was, or how many cows were there.

Michael came in second in his division at the tournament. I did not.

We arrived home to Madison in time for me to go to the Art Fair on the Square with my mom, which has been a tradition for several years now. Then it was back to the grind - searching for jobs to apply for, writing applications, hoping for interviews, going to interviews, and then waiting to hear about jobs.

We also went to three weddings this summer, which were fun. Congratulations Krista and Nate, Mark and Pondie, and Charlie and Tricia!

By mid-August I had been offered two jobs, and ended up taking a full time job teaching both English and History in Pardeeville, where I taught half-time last semester. So far I am enjoying teaching, but it has significantly impaired my ability to garden, cook, and can. (It has interfered with my ability to clean, too, but I'm not complaining about that.)

In spite of getting a job shortly before school started, my dad and I made two batches of Barbara Kingsolver's spaghetti sauce in late August, and my mom and I made three canner loads (plus some!) of applesauce in October.

On the first day of school, Michael and I met at the bank at 4:00 to get preapproval for a home loan. Working with a realtor who we have known for many years through Scrabble Club, we started looking at houses. We weren't sure how house-hunting was going to go, as Michael wanted a new house and I wanted an old house. I was partial to two-story houses, and we really wanted to stay in our current neighborhood, even though it is not in the best school district in Portage. Two weeks ago, we accepted a counter-offer on an 11 year old house about a mile from where we currently live. It is also two blocks away from the best elementary school in town.

We will miss the river, the sandhill cranes who got into our engagement pictures and seem to return to the sandbar every spring (we saw them taking a goodbye-for-winter stroll along the edge of the sandbar tonight), and our wonderful neighbors. We will miss being a block and a half from the levy path that runs along the river. We will miss panoramic views of the changing seasons. We will not miss mowing the huge yard or only having one bathroom. I will not miss being a renter, although I am somewhat scared about the new responsibilities that will come with home ownership.

I'm planning a small garden at our new house (yay, even less yard to mow), and Michael has grand plans for the large unfinished basement, which will be his "man cave." (He has promised to let me set up a little corner of the basement for my 'reading nook' though.)

We'll be moving into the house during the month of December. It will be a happy, exciting, sad, fun time of change.

In the meantime, I'm keeping a day or two ahead of my US Studies students, trying to motivate my 6 Media Analysis students to participate, and feeling grateful that I have 18 students who, after about three weeks of school, finally learned to participate in American Literature.

It is the tail end of a 4.5-day weekend, three days of which I spent in Chicago spending too much money with my sisters. It was nice to kick back with my sisters, get pampered (mani-pedis on Friday), read (Snow Flower and the Secret Fan), eat, and shop. We stayed at the Inn of Chicago - the same place Michael and I spent the night after getting in to Chicago at 2 a.m., long after our bus had left.

Now it is time to get back to work, re-learning US Studies, creating an assignment sheet for Media Analysis, and reviewing The Crucible for American Literature. I like being a teacher. It is a lot of work, but it is work that I generally enjoy.

I don't promise to blog more frequently in the next few months, but here's hoping I have a garden next year, and that after my freezer is depleted this winter, I stock it back up next summer.

Getting Ready for Company

It's been awhile since I have blogged about food, hasn't it? The situation for Wisconsin educators is pretty grim. Teachers are retiring, which would ordinarily be good for someone like me who wants a permanent position, but school boards need to cut (LOTS OF) spending, so they won't be hiring new teachers to replace those who leave. Class sizes are almost definitely going to go up. While the school board in the district where I am subbing (but am not working under a contract or protected by a union) decided to extend the teachers' contracts for two years before our governor got rid of collective bargaining for teachers, the school board in the district where my husband is employed (with a contract) refused to extend their contracts, so he (and all of the other teachers in the district) now have their jobs at the whim of the school board, with no real union protection at all. We're looking at some big changes for next year.

One positive piece of political news is that the Wisconsin legislature may be thinking about making sales of raw milk legal (again). I hope that any such bill survives a veto this time.

In spite of not blogging much lately, I have been cooking up some yummy things in the kitchen. In an effort to streamline my life so that I can focus on teaching during the week, I've been making a huge batch of something on Saturday or Sunday, and living off of leftovers for the rest of the week.

Here are some pictures of the food we've been enjoying:

Spaghetti with grass-finished beef, homemade spaghetti sauce, and zucchini from last year's garden:

The pot roast (which came from Viroqua, not Argyle as I previously stated).


A casserole made with zucchini, onions, mushrooms, pasta, grass-finished ground beef, 3/4 of a jar of homemade tomato sauce, and a full quart of homemade spaghetti sauce, topped with local farmer's cheese. (It is not hard to get local cheese in WI, fortunately!) It was a little bit watery - I a going to keep that in mind for canning next year and really cook down the tomatoes before canning them. (I plan to can at least five batches of plain tomatoes plus two batches of the spaghetti sauce from Animal Vegetable Miracle.)
(Ideally, I would have sauteed the onions in a separate pan to make sure that they got fully softened. I didn't want to make extra dirty dishes, but at the same time, I wanted to really dry the zucchini out, because it tends to be pretty soggy after several months in the freezer. My solution was to brown the zucchini first, then add the onions later so that the liquid from the onions wouldn't keep the zucchini from getting a little bit crisp. I don't know if this worked or not since it all cooked down together in the casserole!)

I made creamy tomato soup from the remainder of the tomato puree. It was delicious.

I have also been experimenting with making bread from scratch.

Delicious. And pretty too, if I do say so myself.
While the bread dough was rising, I was simmering a gallon of chicken stock on the stove.
I was running low from the last batch, but I had a chicken carcass in the freezer from a few weeks earlier, and it seemed like a good day to cook AND bake. I thought about roasting my turkey giblets and neck from Thanksgiving and adding them to the stock, but decided they will make their own stock when I run out of the turkey stock that I made from the turkey carcass after Thanksgiving.

I never posted about it, but I made a batch of crackers from scratch before the Superbowl. They were okay although in spite of baking them twice they never got quite crispy enough. I think that is because I did not roll the dough out thinly enough. Here's what was left after my dad and I took some to the Garden Expo in February:

As I posted previously, I am no longer eating meat from restaurants (unless I know where the meat came from and approve of the way it was raised) or buying it from the grocery store anymore. So yesterday I headed out to the farmers' market to pick up some meat to get me through the next few days with company.

My sister and my nieces are coming to town later this week. They eat "normal" things like Shredded Wheat, Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, and hotdogs.

I bought the cereal and the blue boxes of mac and cheese. But I just couldn't bring myself to buy hotdogs at the store. So yesterday at the farmers' market I picked up a package of brats (no nitrates)

and a package of hotdogs (with nitrates, but still a better choice than Oscar Meyer because the bison (shhhh) that the hotdogs came from led happy, pastured lives).

I also got a package of nitrite-free bacon for breakfast,
and my mom bought two chickens for next Sunday's big meal. (Not pictured. Yet.)

I'll be serving spaghetti with grass-fed ground beef and homemade spaghetti sauce (my last jars!) for dinner on Thursday night, and the two chickens with mashed potatoes and (frozen) garden peas and CSA corn on Sunday. I'm sure Adele will need to lick some jam off of a piece of homemade bread. And I'm planning to fold some frozen farm stand blueberries into the Rich Cream Scone recipe I haven't made in too long.

Back at the garden, my dad said he'd look into getting our huckleberry seeds and onion seeds started this week! I ordered about $75 worth of seeds from the Seed Savers Exchange, and have been drooling over them for a few weeks now.

Today I'm working on a pork roast that I will serve with wild rice and creamed asparagus (frozen last May). If I remember, I'll take pictures and post them later.

Self-Esteem

Sometimes I read blogs of women who work full time, have children, cook much more adventurous dishes than I could ever dream up, actually use research while writing posts about food, and know how to take amazing pictures on camera phones. And then I, a part-time housewife with no kids, who started this week with three days off (but only ended up having two) write a post whining about having too many vegetables in my fridge that I can't use. Those days I feel like a big underachiever.

Other times, I add an extra work day to my schedule, send two kids to in-school suspension, come home and make chicken stock. 100% local chicken stock, with organic pastured chicken from the farmers' market (8 lbs of backs and necks), carrots from my garden, local shallots and onions from the CSA and my grocery store, and celery from the CSA. (Okay, okay, so the salt and pepper were not local. Sorry!)
8 lbs of chicken backs and necks did not fit in my stock pot. So I used three of my biggest pots and tried to divvy up the ingredients accordingly.
Stock!
Leftover vegetables and chicken meat. (I actually went through this for an hour after the stock was chilling in the freezer and picked the meat off the bones so I can turn it into chicken noodle soup this weekend.)I made close to 20 cups of chicken stock, and froze it in a variety of sizes. I'd love to say I froze different amounts so I could easily use the stock in different recipes, but that would be a lie. These were the best freezer safe containers I could find in my cupboards.
I went to bed feeling pretty good about myself on Thursday night.

And sometimes I work a regular shift at the museum in which I end up screaming in terror three (!) times in one day due to run-ins with the local wildlife, then invite my mom up to make cranberry relish and applesauce. (I actually let her carry five pounds of produce into my kitchen. I must really love my mom. I did make her take a jar of pickles home with her, though - and the three pounds of cranberries we didn't use.) I went apple-picking with a dear friend on Monday, and came home with about $9.00 worth of 60-cent-a-pound windfall apples and something like 5 or 6 dollars worth of 90-cent-a-pound apples I had actually picked from the trees. (My friend opted to pick all of hers from the tree, not the ground, and ended up with over 30 lbs of apples and a headache - some trees were so full of ripe fruit that when she grabbed one apple, three or four came off the tree.) On Thursday my mom picked up 5 pounds of cranberries fresh from the bog in near her brother's house in northern WI. (The orange we added to the cranberry relish is fresh off a plane from Australia. Maybe not the freshest fruit in the house, but it smelled really good. I miss oranges.) Her cranberries, according to the farmer, were not store-quality, but we think they taste pretty darn good.
My mom portioned the apples out into four-pound groups and we had 16 lbs here on the island. The rest of the apples from Monday went to my uncle's house and became a pie.
Three green apples went into this cranberry relish.


(My mom heats her jars in the oven instead of in a water bath. This is a particularly good idea with my water bath canner because my jar rack is really more a chunk of rust than a rack at this point. I'm not sure what I'm going to do about that next canning season. Or for the rest of this canning season, if there is any . . .)

We thought we could seal the cranberry relish my grandma's way - without a water bath, just by letting it sit on the counter after ladling it into the jars. But after maybe 30 or 45 minutes my mom got anxious that the jars would not seal and we'd have to put them all in the fridge. These jars are not made to go in the freezer. Earlier we had debated running out to K-Mart and buying freezer-safe canning jars in the event of this exact situation, but had decided against it. Still, we wanted to be able to relish the relish over a period of months, not days or weeks, so I decided to put it in the water bath before the applesauce went in. It worked. Two of the half pint jars fell out of the rack in the canner, but they did not seem to be harmed in the process. All 7 jars sealed.

Earlier, while the relish had been cooking down into a thick gel, we'd been getting the apples ready for applesauce.
Quartering, coring, and peeling apples sure goes faster with two sets of hands.
But twelve pounds of apples is a lot.At this point I was asking myself, "Are we really only going to get three or four quarts of applesauce out of all this?" (Yes - three quarts, one pint, and another 3/4 of a pint that didn't go into the canner.)Next time I will mash the apples instead of pureeing them with my immersion blender. The sauce tastes really good (a little too sweet) but it is literally the consistency of baby food.

Unfortunately, while it is the right consistency, I think the apple sauce is too sweet to feed to my youngest niece at Thanksgiving. But her big sister will probably like it. And the relish will go very well with my local, organic, pastured turkey.


Productive, fun days like these make me feel much better about myself. Thanks for your help and your cranberries, Mom!
Good thing too, because I still have a lot of work to do in my kitchen! (And right now I need to get some sleep.)

Ruff Day

This is Oliver at the end of his very long day. I took the picture about five minutes ago and he hasn't moved yet. He may be out for the night. He really did have a rough day, though.

We got up this morning and went for a walk, to enjoy the cool weather. As you may know, Oliver is not the best walker in the world. He loves to get his leash on, but once we're outside he really doesn't know what to do with his fluffy little self. He is scared of walking. But he still gives it a try whenever I get the leash out. And, of course, he expects treats when he gets home from this scary adventure. (Today his "treat" was his heartworm pill.)

After his walk, I made an egg for breakfast. He saw the neighbor hanging laundry outside and started barking at her. We've had Oliver in this house with the same neighbor for a year and a half. She and Oliver have never had a problem, although Oliver always barks his head off when he sees her. When I am over at her house for a visit, Oliver barks the whole time I'm gone - and the river seems to amplify the noise. Today, while my hands were full of eggs, I told Oliver to "hush" when he barked. (As I always do. It never works. We need to go to obedience training.) Today, Judy was having a rough morning of her own, and she yelled at him to be quiet! I washed the egg off of my hands and carried Oliver into the kitchen by me. He gets pretty distracted by good smells in the kitchen. And the eggs were just the start of things today.

After my breakfast, I headed out in the back yard with Oliver and 30 ears of corn. While I shucked the corn, Judy came over to apologize for yelling at Oliver. She'd hung a new blouse out on her clothes line and one of the trees in the yard dropped goop all over it and may have ruined the shirt - that she was planning to wear to a luncheon at the high school today. (I told her she is free to yell at Oliver whenever he bothers her; she must have felt so bad about the whole deal that she apologized to Michael when she saw him at the luncheon - even though he didn't even know what had happened!)

Oliver hung out for most of the corn shucking, then wanted to come back in the house. Soon I joined him with the last 8 ears of corn. I boiled water and set up an ice water bath in my cooler. I blanched the corn, cooled it, and cut it off the cobs. Oliver waited at my feet, hoping for a "jackpot." He got a few. I froze 10 bags (3/4 lb. each) of corn. In the past, I have made the bags one pound each, but they seem a little too full. Besides, this way the corn will last longer. Of all of the corn that I have frozen this summer, this was by far the best tasting. I reserved another two dozen ears (which meant 30 yesterday) to pick up on Sunday at our CSA.
The tomatoes in the background are extras from our CSA. I thought about throwing them in with the rest of the canning today, but ended up keeping them out - I was already feeling a little bad because I forgot to save out a few ears of corn for our dinner tonight!

The corn was finished around 12:30, and I thought about eating lunch, but did the dishes instead, because I'd made plans to pick up 30 pounds of Roma tomatoes at the farmers' market at 2:00. I did some other cleaning in the kitchen, then headed to the grocery store to buy more jars and lemon juice. I looked at the jars for about 7 minutes, trying to decide whether to make between 6 and 8 quarts, or 12-14 pints. I didn't want to buy two cases of pint size jars, so I finally decided on the quarts. I'm quite certain that Oliver barked the entire time I was at the grocery store.

I picked up my tomatoes at the farmers market on my way home from the grocery store, and started canning at about 2:08. I washed the tomatoes, and Oliver waited expectantly at my feet for a tomato to fall.

The big box of tomatoes, partially emptied
On the left are tomatoes ready to be blanched. In the middle is the box. In the sink are (obviously) tomatoes being washed. This was a LOT of small tomatoes!
I think I could have filled my sink three times with all of the tomatoes in that box.

I blanched the tomatoes. Oliver waited expectantly at my feet for a tomato to fall.
(I blanched four trays full of tomatoes - but I had to bring out non-snowman trays in order to pull that off.)

I skinned and cored the tomatoes. Oliver waited expectantly at my feet for a tomato to fall.
Two tomatoes did fall while I was doing this, but Oliver didn't get either one.

In addition to making sure that no fallen tomatoes went uneaten, Oliver was also very busy barking at our landlord, who was using his Bobcat in the back yard, trying to figure out the grade of the terrace, and why the grass seeds aren't growing. Our landlord brought his dog, who whined the whole afternoon. Oliver heard the whining and barked. I told him to be quiet. He barked. The other dog whined. Oliver barked. The other dog whined. I wanted to pull my hair out. I called Michael to see when he'd be home from work. His phone was off. I locked Oliver in the bedroom. He barked, and also peed on the carpet.

It wasn't my favorite afternoon.

But Michael came home, and after he decompressed from back-to-school meetings he helped me with the tomatoes, which made the afternoon go much faster. (Also, our landlord left and took the dog with him, so Oliver didn't have anything to bark at. He just waited for tomatoes to fall.)

The tomatoes I bought were glorious - I only had to throw out two from the entire box. But while the Romas I got from my CSA were bright red and meaty, with thick red pulp around the seeds, these Romas were pale and watery. The puree they made coming out of the chinois was pretty thin - and the seeds slipped through the holes in the sieve part. (Not all of the seeds, just a few.)


I followed the Ball Blue Book recipe for tomato sauce in part, because I wasn't sure how long to cook the puree before putting it in the water bath. That recipe said to cook the tomato pulp down until it was half the original volume.

I couldn't wait that long. I didn't get my tomatoes until 2:00, remember? And I did the blanching and skinning mostly on my own, which takes a lot longer than doing it with another set of hands. Plus these Romas were very little, and I had to put a lot more effort into coring them than I would have with larger canning tomatoes. So I was still putting them through the chinois at 7:15 when our pizza was delivered. (Yes, it was ironic that we got pizza tonight while I was making tomato puree that might become pizza sauce sometime this winter. But Michael suggested pizza from a locally owned place, and I'm always up for food that someone else cooks.) So I boiled them down in three separate pots (because I didn't have a 3-gallon pot) until all of the tomato pulp fit into my 8 quart pot.
On the left is some of the juice that drained off of the tomatoes while they were waiting to be smashed in the chinois. On the right is the first large pot of puree.

And then I continued to boil it down while the water in the canner was bringing itself up to a simmer, and then a boil.
All of the puree in my eight-quart stock pot.

My sauce is pretty thin, but I think it will taste good. (I know it tastes good because I tried some, actually.) Five of the six jars that went into the water bath sealed so far (I took them out of the water bath 35 minutes ago), and the half quart that didn't go into the canner sealed too, but we'll eat that this week.
The leftover jar.

Resting in the water bath after 40 minutes boiling away.
I put vinegar in my water to keep the lime away, but apparently didn't use enough. However, this time the residue was only on the outside of the jars, not the inside. (I know because I looked, and also because I went ahead and put vinegar in the water while the jars were being sterilized today.)

From my human perspective, it was a good day. Oliver did his best to be in the way, but only got one drop of tomato on his head for all of his trouble. (Well, that plus the four tablespoons of corn that went flying when I lost my grip on the ear I was holding this morning.)
(My last jar just popped. So I can go to bed now, and my grandma can get back to whatever she was doing with her angel friends.)