Finally, beloved September!

I just love September, always have. It's back to school time for Steve and the kids, even though they are way past the usual going to school age.Yesterday was the first day of lectures, so Steve did his nearly famous introductory class to Sustainability 1000, Phoebe picked up her keys for the office that Teaching Assistants use at King's College and Lucas headed back to his study carol to get back to work on his thesis. It was also Lucas' birthday, we had a nice birthday breakfast for him.

Here's the newest member of the family, Snow. He's Lucas' cat and does he add a lot of excitement to the place! Mostly nice. We don't have carpets, so he's finding the lack of traction difficult.

I am not back into the rhythm yet. Too many outstanding issues from the summer, but the gap is closing. Just by writing this blog entry, I am nearly back to my desired schedule. I have been working on my online embroidery course all August. Mostly it's about making samples that can be worked into my future textile pieces.  The one above is a machine made fake organza ribbon that I have embroidered and later added to a different piece. The ribbon is about 4 inches long.

This is my current favourite, even though it is a beginner effort. I like the peek-a-boo-ness of the textile coming up from behind. I have plans for this lesson.

I also liked the techniques I learned on this sample. There is cutwork (the big open hole) and stitching on mirrors and adding lace or textiles behind holes
.

I worked it up a bit more and ended up with this as my sample.

I confess that I am a little confused as to what to do with this blog these days. My initial intention was to write about urban sustainability issues and tag on a few bits of studio work when they were relevant. These days, the blog is more about the studio and less about urban issues.

We are still heavy practitioners of  attempting to live simply and sustainably. The folks I interact with on a daily basis give me good feed back on the studio work. There is a pounding silence on other matters. Since I don't really know who is reading and for what reasons, I wonder what I should continue to write about?

For the time being, I will chat a bit about our dehydrator. Last summer, we dried about everything we could put our hands on. Not everything was a success. I did not like the apples with the peelings still on, nor did I like the strawberries, but Steve did. The bananas were a dismal failure. Too bad because I really liked the idea of banana chips. The blueberries were the best so we repeated that just last week.

We watched a Blue Jays Game, luckily a slow one, while we stabbed about 8 cups of wild blueberries before putting them in the dehydrator. It gave us 5 x 1cup baggies of dried blueberries, to be used in scones, muffins, and trail mix.

Cleo Belle decided to help, by keeping Steve's legs super warm, while the dehydrator was heating up the kitchen when the temperature was nearly 80. We are going to do the apples and pears again this summer, but this time peel the apples. The dried pears were very nice in trail mix, which was sucked down every time it was tucked into lunches. It was especially popular when the lunches were made for a day of sailing.

This summer's drying experiment is going to be mushrooms. I'm not sure if there is a local producer of mushrooms, we'll scout around the market this Saturday. But even if we can only get Canadian mushrooms, and dry those, it will be better than those from Brazil or Australia this winter. Less oil.

Regrettably, the list of things to do left over from the summer includes some finances, cleaning the camping gear in the basement, sorting out the boxes in the garage and attic from Lucas' move home and finding storage for it all.  Too bad the list doesn't have things like pedicure and lemonaide with friends on it this week.

Local Diet - July's bounty

Peas, it usually starts with the peas. Four pounds yields about 4 to 5 x 1 cup servings. It's an easy task, just sit and talk and shell pea pods. Then scoop into snack sized freezer baggies and done.

We find that 10 baggies gets us through January to May nicely, since there are just the two of us and so much else in the freezer to tempt us.

Sometimes the strawberries happen before the peas, this year they were at the same time. Steve made up a triple batch this summer. Two for us, one for the kids to split. I think it made 13 jars. And despite that astonishing number of strawberries to clean and prepare, it took less than two hours.

We bought too many and decided to dry a few trays.

Steve likes the dried strawberries in scones, crumbles, and granola. I'm not a strawberry fan, but apparently, yum yum is the word.

Natasha and I made two batches of jelly yesterday. These are so sonically easy! On the left is Cider-Spice Jelly and on the right is Honey-Lemon Jelly. Natasha and I will share these with Phoebe. The honey-lemon jelly is more or less water, sugar, honey and lemon combined with pectin. It sounds like just the thing for flu season. The Cider-Spice just sounded right for winter nummies. It is even easier; cider, spices, water, sugar and pectin. We imagine it going on pork or warm bread, ice cream, scones, sauce over vegetables. Maybe I'm wishful thinking here. We'll see.

Blueberries are up now. We still have some frozen from last year, because we forgot the kids weren't around any longer and froze enough for gadzillions of pancakes and scones. Steve bought one box and made one batch of jam.
I used four cups of the blueberries and made Blueberry-Maple-Pecan Conserve. It sounds and looks so delicious. The magazine showed the conserve on a baked brie, which is decadent. I am imagining it for deserts and appetizers. I am hungry already.

Basic Vegetable Stock

Seasonally, in Nova Scotia, this is a mid-August kind of ingredients list. In spring you can substitute the onions for green onions, use winter carrots and don't worry if the potatoes are tired, they still have lots of good in them.

8 cups water
1-3 onions, peeled and quartered (some people like to gently fry these before using in the recipe, it can sweeten the onions. If you don't like a strong onion flavour, use less of them. If you don't know, cook up all the onions, add them to the broth until you like the flavour. Fry the remainder until crisp and freeze. They make a nice topping for a soup, or baked potato etc.)
1 large carrot, cleaned
2 cups potatoes, peeled and quartered
1 head garlic, unpeeled (or pickled garlic 4 cloves)
3 ribs celery with tops (or 2 ribs loveage - a herb)
4 sprigs parsley
2 tsp salt
1-2 bay leaves (depends on size)
sprigs of oregano, basil, rosemary, sage (not all of them.... go with which flavour you like best)

In stock pot, combine all ingredients. Bring to a boil then reduce heat. Simmer 2 hours. Allow stock to cool, then strain the veggies out, especially the bay leaf and put the broth into another container. Do not make the mistake of straining the liquid into the sink and saving the veggies. This is the reverse of your goals. It is a horrible shock to the system to watch your soup disappear down the drain....... yes, I've done it twice.

Use or freeze.

Options:
- the strained veggies are rather out of oomph. You can puree them and add them back to the stock for a thicker broth (not the bay leaf). You can use the pureed veggies to add to a potato croquet, or add into a meatloaf or meatballs as a recipe extender. Or give it up and toss them into the compost where they continue the circle of life.

ps. the butter or oil from cooking the onions, if you did that, might add a bit of a glisten to the broth. Just ignore it, it will disperse when the stock is used in other recipes.

Use: you have 7-10 days to use if stored in an airtight jar or container in the fridge.

Freeze: in freezer style zip lock baggies, ladle in two cups worth of broth, seal the baggie, lay it flat on a cookie sheet, make as many baggies as you can. (if you are really unsure about this, place the baggie in a large bowl, ladle in the broth and let the bowl support the baggie while you stagger around) Lay all the baggies flat on the cookie sheet, with a towel with nap between the layers. Put cookie sheet in freezer. Watch out, they become lethal sharp edged Frisbees when thefreezer door opens and they slide out and attempt to bean you in the forehead. The towel might save you. Once they are frozen, take off the cookie sheet and store in a safer manner. If a frozen baggie slips out of control and lands on the floor, the baggie might be burst or spring a hole. Put back in the freezer and when it comes time to defrost, use a large bowl to set it into so the liquid is caught from the hole. Good for 3-4 months. Labeling is a good idea if you don't like surprises.

If you have broth leftover, as in not enough to make 2 cup baggies with, the broth can be frozen in a ice cube tray and then transferred to a baggie. This never happens in my life. I forget and a veggie ice cube in a margarita is awful. Instead, I put the little bit of remainder in a smaller, tight lidded jar and use as a liquid for mixing up in salad dressing, meatloaf, flavouring rice or couscous, anywhere where a bit of liquid is asked for and veggie broth is an appropriate flavour.

NOTES: This makes a good group recipe. Just double or triple or whatever the ingredients. Use a bigger pot of course. The recipe can be used alone as a soup; very good when you have the flu or it an be used as a base for other soups. The red onions might add colour to the broth...pink soup!

Harvesting through dehydration

Sometime in August Steve researched and purchased a dehydrator. We had been talking about this as a way to preserve some foods that weren't so easy to can or took up lots of freezer space.

cabelas.com
is the link to the company we purchased from. Look under dehydrators, the links are complicated to duplicate here.

What was really motivating us was blueberries.
While we had been in Lunenburg in May, the salads all had these lovely dried blueberries in them, making an otherwise dull salad inspiring. We shopped around at our local stores and the best we could find was a 250g bag for nearly $8.00. This seemed painful. Over the summer we recalled that we had bought dried apples and pears a few times from the market at $3.00 a baggie but the vendors seemed to have stopped coming.

Blueberry season arrived and it was too good a chance to miss this experiment. The unit and shipping cost us slightly over $100. We bought the 750 watt unit, because the consumer reports suggested that there wasn't much difference in energy consumption but a large difference in out put of dried food.

The last week in August, we followed instructions and boiled our blueberries for a quick minute or two, and then dried them. It was mush. Do not boil your blueberries. The waxy outer coating needs to be pierced in some manner to allow the insides to dry more thoroughly. We refrigerated that experiment and added them to pancakes. The following weekend, we bought two pints of blueberries and with a darning needle in one hand and a seemingly endless supply of blueberries in the other, we gave each blueberry two pierces and then laid them on the trays to dry.

We also peeled and cored a quart of pears. There are different drying times for each kind of fruit or vegetable but it is possible to put the longer drying foods on the bottom trays and the quicker ones on top. We did a bunch of bananas because store purchased dried bananas have palm oil in the processing and that is bad for us. We are very conflicted about bananas. There are some instructions around this, but essentially as one tray dries, its end product can be taken off and put into storage.


Today we tackled a large bunch of green onions and a celery plant. Each vegetable was washed and toweled off. I chopped the green onions coarsely (they dry up really small and might fall through the tray's holes) and did the same with the celery leaves. The celery stalks are sliced lengthwise and put into small baggies in the freezer. We have found that one good sized celery plant will keep us going for most of a year. We make two batches of turkey or chicken stock, several chilies and spaghetti sauces and use the remainder randomly in different dishes over the year, rissotto, paella, chicken pot pie and so forth. Using fresh local celery, even frozen, is very tasty. It keeps its strong flavour and half as much is needed to get the taste while winter celery requires double the amount.

We have dried 10 baggies of pears and they are sweet and tender from that one quart. They will be wonderful on their own, chopped and added to trail mix or baking or over ice cream. We fantasized about peaches but we never seem to have our act together when peaches arrive. Too much else is going on. That will be a major project next summer, jam, preserves and dried peaches.

One of the more obvious foods to dry would be tomatoes. There is certainly good reasons to do this, the dried tomatoes can be turned into tomato paste, ketchup, sauces and used as ingredients for other dishes. A few years back we discovered that if we wash tomatoes and put 3-4 in a snack size freezer bag, when they come out of the freezer the skins wash off very easily and we have one to four tomatoes to cook with. They still have their summer flavour and are yummy. We currently have enough freezer space to do this and it is a habit so we didn't dry any. I can see doing some next summer so that it would be easy to make our own tomato paste or ketchup.

Here is my version of the economics. Taking our initial discovery of blueberries selling 250g at $8.00, we made 10 baggies that would have cost us $80.00 over the winter. The cost of the blueberries was $9.00 for two pints and the electricity and labour could be costed at $10.00.

The way I figure it $100 +$9.00+$10.00-$80.00=$39.00 currently the cost of the dehydrator.

Continuing in this line of economic rationalizing
onions, celery and pears $11.50+$10.00 labour and electricity = $21.50 + $39.00 (dehydrator) = $60.50 15 baggies of dried goods at $3.00 each = $45.00

$60.50-$45.00 = $15.50

This is all the dehydrator has cost us. Maybe I will buy some tomatoes just to get this equation to zero or even a profit.