Week 8 and here is the lineup this week:
Homemade beef jerky. I’ve been planning this one since I got the cow but finally managed to make it happen. I used a package labeled “bottom round” which I *think* is a pretty tough cut and it came out awesome! I partially thawed it then sliced it as thinly as possible against the grain and marinated it overnight in 1/2 cup soy sauce (US but non-local), a good shake of onion powder and a good shake of garlic powder. The next day I put it in the dehydrator for about 4 hours until it was done. It’s so nice not having to monitor the kid’s consumption, even though I won’t keep this on hand all the time since it is a pretty salty snack. But perfect for Pancake Man who I suspect is low in iron and won’t eat anything but guess what?
More beet whip for Chicken Little who doesn’t like beets but somehow is addicted to this juice of the week. Freshly juiced Nash’s Detroit Red beets with heavy cream poured off the top of the Dungeness Valley milk jug.
Sausage experiment #1 today. I used 1 pound of ground pork from Thundering Hooves that I’ve had in the freezer, mixed it with a small amount of chopped gala apples from Rockridge Orchard that I dried last summer, a pinch of ginger, cinnamon, 1 teaspoon salt and 2 teaspoons of sage. It was so yummy Chicken Little threw his arms around me and told me I was the best sausage maker ever. Wow!
I find it ironic in the scrambled egg pan the eggs are dark yellow and cheese is white. That is as it should be – dark eggs from pastured chickens and cheese without coloring agents. We rounded out the breakfast with toast from homemade bread and home canned apricot jam made from Rama apricots last summer. Ah apricots, so magical.
We have a fair bit of liver from our Cascade Range Beef cow in the freezer so I thought I would make chicken fried liver. It looked good. But before putting it on the table I did a taste test and oh my hooves and ass! Too barnyard. I love liverwurst and chicken livers but wow I could not do that to my family. So they got this instead which was supposed to be the side dishes:
Sorry family. I’m just glad I had bought some Willipa Hills Little Boy Blue to add to Nash’s beets and roasted brussel sprouts with bacon. The carmelized onions were supposed to go into cream sauce over the liver. And Pancake Man ate a pancake which he would have done anyway. I love having a big stash of those in the freezer for pancake emergencies!
My husband was fighting something all week after running himself into the ground on New Year’s Eve so I made a big pot of chicken noodle soup before heading out to the school board meeting to communicate to them my ardent desire that my two children attend the same elementary school. I used a jar of home-canned chicken broth made from carcasses of previous roast chicken meals, carrots from the garden and Nash’s chinese cabbage and kale.
Rose Brand Chinese noodles are made in the International District in Seattle. They are the perfect noodle for soups or those yummy Chinese peanut noodle dishes I stopped making since I can’t get local peanuts.
Freshly ground corn pancakes, Swedish pancakes and coconut pancakes. Because Pancake Man says so.
My desem start from Bluebird Grain hard red winter wheat.
You see how it is? Now that my year is up I’ve been to the store twice! And I was talked into these tortilla chips which I agreed to because they are made in Richmond, BC (less than 150 miles from me) from organic corn which is nixtamalized to unlock more of the nutrients. To celebrate a highly competitive checkers game I opened up a fresh jar of peach salsa made last summer from Rama peaches and our own jalapenos and onions. I whipped up my kitchen version of the little black dress – basic white sauce and added some grated Tillamook cheddar (outside the 150 mile range I know but it was 2 for 1 at the store – see how I’m becoming!) and some home canned green tomato chile sauce made last fall with the last green tomatoes as the bushes were succombing to blight.
From the depths of the freezer – smoky turkey, white bean and green chile glop. It’s amazing the number of meals we got out our Pastured Sensation turkey. This was made entirely from the bone broth and meat that would have been otherwise discarded. So frugal! So yummy! So fast from the freezer!
Our Sunday ritual – pizza made from 100% white whole wheat flour grown in Dufur, OR, home canned tomato sauce, still the contraband pepperoni bag from last week and mozzarella from Golden Glen creamery. I had to try their mozzarella since it’s local and Julie of River Ranch is no longer selling mozzarella at the market. I was surprised at the price tag ($10 for the blob) but embarassed to hand it back over so I swallowed my wallet and put the cheese in the bag.
After getting used to Julie’s mozzarella (where I learned to make it by taking her class which she IS still teaching) I was really disappointed to cut into the cheese and find out it was tough and rubbery, just like Tillamook’s. I guess I need to set aside some time to make another huge batch of fresh mozzarella to freeze again!
But here is my favorite part of the week:
I finally managed to locate the Kitchen Aid meat grinder attachment that I had gotten for my husband for Christmas and ground up an Akyla Farms picnic ham from the freezer along with some pork back fat that I had purchased from Skagit River Ranch. I just paid money for fat, yes I did. When that was ground up (can I say how cool that was to watch little worms of sausage come wriggling out of the plates?) I added some seasonings and some Chateau Ste. Michelle cab then mixed it all up and bagged it into roughly 1 pound bags. Some went on our pizza along with home canned cherry bomb peppers from Tonnamaker Farms.
I cannot believe how inexplicably cool that meat grinder is. Especially with all the hamburger recalls and knowing that the USDA’s response to the outbreaks has been to spray meat with ammonia. Did you know that? Oh yeah, they never really told you. All that meat is either irradiated or sprayed with ammonia. It’s sickening. Literally.
So if you eat meat please be sure you buy it from a local farmer and a local butcher, not one of those huge meat packing outfits somewhere behind a curtain, completely cut off from the people who buy their meat.
For those in the Seattle Area you can buy great quality ground pork or beef from Thundering Hooves. Their sausage is $7.99 per pound but the plain ground pork is $3.99 per pound. All you have to do for that $4 per pound is add some seasonings that you probably already have in your cupboard.
To my roughly 4 pounds of meat I added 1/2 cup wine, 4 minced garlic cloves (mine were roasted from the freezer), 1 T black pepper, 4 teaspoons sea salt, 1 T oregano and 1 T basil. If I had any fennel seed I would have added 1 T of that but what I thought was fennel turned out to be caraway. I wanted to add some chopped dried tomato to it as well but my husband nixed the idea so I’ll have to sneak some in next time when he’s not right there. There, doesn’t that sound like $4 per pound’s worth of seasonings to you? Pshaw!
Happy Dark Days!
