Molasses Spice Crinkles

I made some cookies last night, so that Adrian could take some to work on what promised to be a cold winter day, and we could have something 'seasonal' for guests this evening.  There's something about cloves, ginger, and cinnamon that just makes me feel a little happier on a snowy day.

Molasses Spice Crinkles

1 1/2 cups butter, softened
2 cups sugar
2 eggs
1/2 cup molasses
4 cups flour
2 tsp baking soda
2 tsp cloves
2 tsp ground ginger
2 tsp ground cinnamon (most people like cinnamon, so I'm a bit more generous)

Sugar for dusting (about 3/4 cup - I throw the remainder in my tea the next morning.)

Preheat the oven to 375.  I'm lucky enough to have a stand mixer, so I throw the butter and sugar together and let them get acquainted while I gather the other ingredients.  I have made these by simply creaming the butter and sugar in a large bowl as well.  Either way, do not double this recipe - it will be too difficult to manage the dough. Just make two batches - the dishes are already dirty, and you're going to be monitoring the oven for a while.

Once the butter and sugar are fluffy, add the eggs and molasses.  Beat until smooth,

In a separate bowl, measure the dry ingredients and give them a stir.  This, I drop into the mixer by the rounded spoonful, but you can add it in several portions to the wet ingredients until the flour is blended in.

This is where the fun starts.  I have a 'tablespoon' cookie scoop to make measuring out the dough easier for me.  The original recipe suggests that this recipe will make 10 dozen, baked 5-7 minutes. My scoop gives me 3 1/2 dozen fairly chewy, moist cookies - baked for 9-10 minutes, and allowed to cool.  I scoop the dough, roll it in a bowl of dusting sugar (you can get fancy and play with food coloring and demerara sugar if you want things to be more colourful), and bake them 8 to a tray. If you intend to freeze some for baking later, skip the sugar dusting, and later thaw fully to ensure the sugar will stick to your dough before baking.

If you made 10 dozen, these cookies would be smaller and more brittle like a gingersnap.  I've tried to duplicate the giant cookies that some coffee shops sell - the danger is always that you will burn the bottom of the cookies without sufficiently cooking the middle.  You could try playing with the oven temperature. ** Remember** the crinkles don't show up in the oven - that occurs as the cookie cools on the tray out on the counter. 

Play with the size and level of chewiness that you like.  Finish the dough and do a test run - or 2 or 3, to determine what size of cookie you like, and what the ideal baking time is. 

The Kraut Craft Continues

Well, Adrian and I have decided that my newest attempt at making sauerkraut was a success - hitting the two week mark in the process was the key to taking the bitter edge off, and the flavour has continued to mellow.  We've enjoyed a bit on the side of most of our recent dinners, especially anything meat-heavy, as the kraut is supposed to aid digestion.  Yesterday I packed two more jars of kraut with a twist - one is flavoured with julienned apple and celery seed, and the other is a nod to kimchi with none of the pre-soaking normally involved in the kimchi-making process (and no fish sauce either).  Krautchi?  I've flavoured that jar with garlic and shallots from the garden, and red pepper flakes from the store. The water-filled jars on top are sitting on whole cabbage leaves, holding the vegetables under the cover of the brine, and both jars are draped with a clean dishcloth when I'm not taking pictures.  The casserole dish is there to catch any spills as the fermenting process takes over.  The original kraut is currently residing in the fridge, to slow fermentation.

 

The new krauts should be ready to try by the time we finish our purple cabbage kraut.

 

Krautchi on the left, and you can see the apple peel and flecks of celery seed in the jar on the right.

 

We'll experiment with additions and vegetable combinations, and find what works best and tastes best for us.  I have some mustard greens in the garden that I would like to add to a ferment - if they survive our current drop below zero under their floating row cover. Horseradish leaves would add some interesting heat as well, and I've already promised to use some daikon in the next batch. 

 

Fermentation is a traditional way of storing food where canning and refrigeration are not available. Traditionally, many cultures have fermented vegetables, dairy and meats in all kinds of interesting ways. Cheese, miso, coffee, tea, and chocolate are all products of fermentation.  Recent studies show that sauerkraut contains a greater number of anti-carcinogenic nutrients than cabbage (and other brassicas) which are eaten raw or cooked.  What's important to me, is that I know that it tastes good and I feel good about preparing and eating it.

As I did all of this cutting and mixing and crushing, I had water boiling on the stove to prepare a new batch of kombucha.  We're on and off again with our morning consumption of a swig of this vinegary-tasting 'healthful' brew, but the kombucha mother keeps working, so I keep making it, and we keep trying to remember to drink it in the rush to get ready in the morning. 

I like the kraut better :)

A New Book to Add to the Library

One of the bloggers I have been following for a few years has self published, and I would love to add a copy of her book to my personal library.  She has an impressive array of informative links on her site to a range of homesteading and self sufficiency sites and references, and I've learned a lot from her thoughtful, honest, and sometimes self-effacing posts.  She and her husband have slowly been rebuilding their home and learning about the realities of trying to provide for themselves and their animals on their land in South Appalachia.  She actually has her rain catchment system connected and functioning, and a wood cook stove in her kitchen.  I can hope and dream!

Leigh was the first blogger that I've followed who actually published a comment on this blog, and I have to say that it gave me a bit of a thrill to hear from someone I've been following for so long.  She has a wonderful blog, 5 Acres and a Dream, and I've been learning about her efforts to re-mineralize her soil and grow food for her animals rather than being completely dependant on the feed store. 

By posting this entry, I've got a chance to win her book in a draw - but I intend to add it to my collection either way! I encourage you to go have a look at what they've accomplished. You might just be inspired.

The Latest Buzz

Last week I finally buckled down and dealt with the comb I had been gathering from the hive over the past season.  I knew the process would be messy, so it made sense to do this small amount of processing in one go.

In the height of summer, we accidentally broke some comb in the heat... then there were a couple of off-centre bars we mangled to protect the borrowed brood on a Langstroth hive... and then there were a few empty bars we removed as the weather grew colder in October, to consolidate the area the bees would have for overwintering.  These last bars showed a bit of mould - possibly because the humidity in the hive was increasing as the temperature dropped (I had put the bottom board on when we had our first frost), or because there weren't enough workers to keep everything tidy in the comb furthest from the busy brood chamber.

 

I set everything up on the kitchen counter, and proceeded to get sticky.

Honeycomb darkens over time as the bees use the cells for storage and for rearing the young.  There were pockets of capped (fully evaporated and finished) honey in both the light and dark areas of the comb.  The newer comb I crushed and strained for household use, and the darker comb (some not fully capped), I cut out, and put on a cookie sheet to feed back to the bees. 

The sieve didn't work as well as I had hoped, so I pulled out my jelly-making tripod and left the crushed honeycomb to drain through the fine material. Much better, and easier to use all around.  I did purchase a buckets with three nesting sieves for processing larger amounts of honeycomb, but this set up was fine for the amount I was dealing with.

I kept busy with school and chores, and checked back on the dripping jelly bag a while later. After I had allowed the honey to drain, I swished the remaining crushed, sticky comb in some water, and dumped it into some cheesecloth. There are bits of pollen and debris mixed in with the wax.

 

I managed to drain a half pint of honey out of various bits of comb - equivalent to about one full top bar.  I will use this very sparingly, and keep a few tablespoons back to add to any herbal sugar water I might need to brew up for the bees in the Spring.

 

I crushed and rinsed the remaining, empty comb, and added that to my cheesecloth sack (note to self - trim off excess cheesecloth!) which then went into my jury-rigged double boiler with several cups of water - enough to cover the cheesecloth. 

This small pot conveniently nested an inch off of the bottom of the larger one. The double boiler method is used to prevent direct contact of the wax with the heat source - wax is flammable.  It's also important to note that the small pot will now by used only for processing beeswax.  Apparently, it's impossible to completely clean the wax away. Personally, since I don't use any chemicals in the hive, I'm not worried about a bit of beeswax or comb debris on my kitchen mixing bowls, or on a wooden spoon - but I will mark the pot.

 

I brought the water up to a very gentle boil, and watched for about twenty minutes as the wax melted  and formed a floating layer. I made sure to turn the ball of cheesecloth over to get all of the wax heated and melted, and stopped when it seemed that the volume of the bag was no longer changing. (Very scientific).

I removed the cheesecloth, pressing it against the side of the pot with a wooden spoon, and placed it carefully aside to cool, then turned the stovetop heat off and left the wax to harden.

The girls have still been flying in the sunshine - even though the temperature is below 10 degrees most days.  I set the comb out by the hive entrance over three afternoons, and they cleaned all of the honey up for me.  One girl had gorged on honey and lost track of time - I found her, apparently too chilled as evening fell, when I went to bring the pan in for the night. I heated her with my breath before convincing her to walk off of my finger back into the hive.

 

My first wax harvest.  There is a bit of  dusty debris on the bottom of the wax disc, but most was easily brushed away.  

 

I'll be giving some to my neighbour, who makes herbal salves - she has been so accepting of all of our crazy backyard projects. I intend to treat myself to a small candle in one of my canning jars, and there will be enough left over for me to melt 'start your comb here' lines on the top bars for next year's hives. 

Thank you girls!

Somedays I Wonder About Technology

Prompted for the umpteenth time to upgrade the software on my iPad, I have it downloading and plugged in (per the prompt that I should plug it in while it takes 45 minutes to download). I decided that maybe I should update my 4S iPhone (the update that I was putting off, after hearing so many people complain about it) so that the two are still able to sync, and find that I cannot do the update without more memory available.  

 

Go do a search online - on my laptop computer that seems to have slowed down notably, even since yesterday - to find out how to do the update to my phone without wiping everything off of it.  It's suggested to do the update through iTunes as an easier alternative - but should save my pics etc. "just in case."  

 

Can't save my pics to iTunes, though I made 3 attempts, because, well... it just won't. That's all I get.

 

Fine.

 

I will update the phone and think good thoughts.

 

Except I can't, because there's an update for iTunes, and I need to update iTunes in order to be able to update my phone.

 

Seriously? Fine.

 

Meanwhile, I have Mozilla, Internet Explorer, and now Chrome open, to run my online class, my searches, and my email and calendar respectively.  I have defaulted to using 3 different browsers because the first two drop my connections at various times, and I'm not sure if that's because I have a 'cheap' computer, a bad Internet connection, or because Windows 8 is fickle and doesn't like me, my non touch-screen computer, or a combination of some mysterious factors I cannot fathom.  I often start things up in the morning, finding that 'my PC ran into a problem....' (grrrr) and has shut everything down. I have to go through ten minutes of resetting all of my standard search windows before I can start my day.  Luckily I am fairly consistent at saving all of my Excel and Word documents, and have become a bit more obsessive of late.

Now I will need to wait while everything loads, and then restart my computer to reset iTunes, so that I can update my iPhone, so that I can sync to my updated iPad, and.....wait, apparently I have purchased items on the Phone that I need to back up, but it should have synced automatically when I plugged the cable in. 

 

Idiot proof my eye. 

 

There's a lot of valuable information available with access to the Internet, and smartphones and tablets can be valuable tools, but some days I just have to shake my head at the amount of time we spend looking at screens.

Maybe I'll give Adrian a call.....

 

Island Trip 2

Adrian and I headed to the Island last weekend, to view several properties with a Real Estate agent, and we travelled throughout the Cowichan Valley.

 



 

We met at the Duncan Farmer's Market, which was nearing the end of the season, but still had a fairly decent turn-out of vendors.  We chatted with a lady selling pickles and preserves, and she gave me so much information about permits and requirements to sell at the market, that I purchased a jar of baby dills to bring home (for an astonishing $9).  There was a vendor selling Mason Bee houses, and I promised to contact him for more houses and cocoons if we wound up settling in the area.

 

Looking at other peoples' houses objectively can be hard.  There are always a few things in a house that make me tilt my head to the side and ask 'why?'  The trip to the Island last weekend made me do that more than a few times.....

This was the first house we saw on our trip, and had a goat dairy barn attached to the main building (which would have been very exciting, if the power and water were functional and the rest of the house wasn't oddly, partially renovated).  There had been a few starts and stops in terms of renovations - more stops than I was comfortable with for the asking price, and the extensive property was very overgrown.....

 

This house was adorable, if a bit small for our needs.  There were a lot of little finishing touches that showed how much the owner cared for her home...then I started to notice the little missing pieces, and I saw the rot around the upstairs skylight.  Also, we realized that the kitchen stove was being run off a propane tank smaller than what we use for our barbecue. Still, it was 12 acres of forest, pasture, garden and a large bog, with fruit trees, animal housing, 2 partially completed cabins (likely done without permits)....and plenty of water coming from a nearby spring.  Unfortunately, all of the water came from a license to a spring across the road - no well, no water treatment..... Too many questions, but a nice little place for someone with the time and money to do the repairs.

 

 

We stayed in Lake Cowichan for the night, at the realtor's basement suite she keeps for friends and family, and had a great dinner at Jake's On The Lake.  I watched the mist rise off the water the next morning, and the fish were jumping.

There was a property we couldn't get in to see because there was no lockbox, and a forested acreage that was a bit too much for us to commit to.  The last house had a new heat pump and lots of space, but plenty of standing water on a smaller acreage, and some questionable building decisions.

A lot of our needs and wants are being clarified with this research, and I would be happy to shop at the local Farmer's Market - maybe even be a vendor after a couple of years have gone by and we have excess to sell. 

We'll keep researching and looking.

A Quick Look

It's hard to believe it's almost Friday evening as I sit at the computer.  Work has been grinding by this week, and I've been under the weather for a lot of it.  Right now I'm full of Vitamin C, Sinutab, Ginger Gravol tablets, and my forehead is slathered with Tiger Balm.  Feelin' awesome.

We're heading to Vancouver Island tomorrow, for a 2-day romp 'round the Cowichan Valley, looking at properties that might fit the bill for our future.  In all likelihood, these properties won't wait for us to get our ducks in line, but the time spent learning about the area's communities, services, roads, possibilities and drawbacks will help us make some decisions.  Looking at real properties and asking questions about heating oil (?!?), woodstoves, water quality, recycling and garbage services and the like will help to focus our search and refine our list of needs and wants.  We'll be visiting the Farmer's Market in Duncan to see what the locals produce and sell - the list of vendors is impressive.  They have fudge.

I've been trying to make this happen for a while, so I'm going no matter what.  Pray for Adrian's sake that I get a restorative night's sleep.

Last weekend was a 3-day affair because of Remembrance Day, and while some people spent time with family or got in some extra rest and relaxation, Adrian took a vacation day from work, and we made things happen. We also kicked back and played a video game, and played with bunnies. Have I mentioned how lucky I am to have him as a partner?

 

We spent Friday completing most of this year's jam, with a little extra work on Saturday morning.  We now have about 95 half-pints of homemade preserves with only 3 failed seals (refrigerator jam!).  From left to right: Black Currant Jam and Strawberry Jam - both crops grown here in our yard, Cherry Jam, from BC cherries (I don't want to talk about our 3 trees in the back yard which provided not a single edible cherry this year), Huckleberry Jam from berries picked locally (if I say 'wildcrafted' I sound like a hipster), and Blueberry Jam, from the lovely bushes that came with the property (Adrian would like to dig them up and take them with us when we move....)

We got all of the jam made and canned, and left it to cool on the dining table (where it still sits, waiting to be labelled and boxed for the pantry - shhh!)

The time had come to butcher some of our crossbred rabbits at just over 12 weeks old, so we spent time over the rest of the weekend processing, freezing, and cooking meat, chopping vegetables, and making Rabbit Pot Pie for the freezer.  Then, since while taking all of the berries out of the freezer to thaw, I managed to turn off the power bar and hence both of our chest freezers (doh!), we made a huge batch of what I'm calling Chicken and Sausage Cacciatore.  It was coincidentally well-timed, in that I was able to use the last of my tomatillo harvest while it was still at it's best. Delicious.
 

Tomatillos from saved seed - we've been growing these for several years now, and I used to say they are more dependable than tomatoes for production.  This year, they bloomed early and failed to set fruit, just like the tomatoes - but they soldiered on as the temperature dropped, and I got a decent harvest long after the tomato plants were cleared away.  No tomatillo salsa this year, but we did have small harvests through the season that went into our casseroles and soups.  They also dehydrate wonderfully.

Good news is that the freezers are now very organized and clear of ice - Bad news is that we lost some prepared food.  Good news is that some of that food had been in there a little too long anyway. How does it happen that you never actually remember what you have in a chest freezer (despite your best intentions), and who is supposed to be able to physically reach the bottom?

A couple of weeks ago on a Costco run, Adrian tried sauerkraut and declared it good.  I glared at him and reminded he had eschewed my home made sauerkraut previously, and decided it was time to give it another try.

 

This is about 4 pounds of cabbage, with 3 generous tablespoons of salt mixed in, pounded together to release 'juice,' and left to sit on the counter.  I like that the red cabbage makes for a pretty colour.  I wasn't about to make a huge batch until we had decided if we would work it into our routine, and local cabbage is generally available through a large part of the winter.

Sauerkraut can be left to mature for between 1 and 4 weeks. I have a large intact leaf weighed down at the top of the jar to keep everything submerged under the brine.  At 1 week, it tasted like salty, crunchy cabbage, so we left it to do its thing for a little longer. Time will tell.