community garden plot

Yay yay yay yay! We got a community garden plot!!

apple sauce

A friend of ours has a winter fruit CSA with Grant Family Farms. Since it is winter and all, that means he gets a lot of apples. He recently shared some of his bounty with us. (thanks! we owe you!) What do you do when you have a lot of apples? Make apple sauce, of course. Next up, apple pie!

plum jam and sourdough pancakes

sourdough starter

I recently purchase sourdough starter in a silent auction. You can start sourdough on your own just by letting flour and water sit out to absorb whatever wild yeast spores are in the air. We've done that before but we gave up because the flavor wasn't all that impressive. The sourdough starter that I purchased in the silent auction, however, has a delicious smell. It must be pretty resilient too because it is said to be 150 years old!

Today I used it to make a sourdough rye bread. Yum yum yum yummm... Excuse me while I get back to eating the entire loaf.

curing olives

I picked a quart of olives when I was in Tempe this past weekend. I'm trying a water-curing cycle which will be followed by brine-curing (instructions). The options made me think--brine-curing food just makes so much sense if you live near a body of salt water.

crystallized ginger

I'm a ginger fiend. I like my chai and ginger snaps to be overpowering with ginger. So, I made crystallized ginger the other day, using Alton Brown's recipe. It was surprisingly easy. Watch close, because the moment the liquid sugar recrystallizes happens in the blink of an eye. I made some delicious ginger snaps using this homemade crystallized ginger.

Boiling it:

raw taco salad

Yet another attempt at raw food here. I soaked pistachios and walnuts for a day. Then I ground them up with red onion, carrot, and taco seasoning and made a salad of local greenhouse arugula and non-local red peppers.

I definitely enjoyed this meal. Nuts + taco seasoning = success. Though crunchy tortilla chips would have made it even better...

hot diggity dog

We picked up a new canine friend from the Humane Society last weekend! He is a 1.5 year old black lab mix. His name? Francois! Il est un bon chien!

pierogies

I love making a mess in the kitchen! I really should take more pictures of that portion of cooking... This mess is the result of making pierogies. If you're unfamiliar with pierogies, just think of them as raviolis except in an Eastern European way. The outer shell is a simple flour, egg, water, and salt dough. The fillings that I chose were cheese & potato, mushroom & onion, and sauerkraut though there are many other options. To cook the pierogies, I boiled them for 3 minutes. Then I topped them with melted butter and sour cream. Then I devoured them.

Did I ever mention that I am supposed to work on a Vegetarian Eastern European recipe zine with some friends? I am. And then I don't. Hold me to it people!

bottled the ginger brown

We bottled our ginger brown ale that we started back in November. The recipe is on hopville, a nice calculator tool and way to keep track of recipes.

We now have a big enough collection of flip-top bottles to fit a 5-gallon batch of beer, without needing to use wine bottles (too big) or crown-top bottles (requires borrowing the capping tool). Conveniently, all of the bottles fit (just barely) in our dishwasher for sanitizing.

For a little experiment, we used three different priming sugar recipes (priming sugar is added just before bottling to create carbonation). One gallon was primed with blackstrap molasses, one gallon was primed with cane sugar boiled with 1 oz. ginger root for extra ginger flavor, and the remaining three gallons got half molasses half cane sugar for priming.