Caitlyn and I walked from school to the Westlake Link station yesterday afternoon. We found cherry trees starting to bloom (one totally covered in buds so that it looked pink from a block away) and daffodils pushing their greens up. Caitlyn nearly burst with joy when we found a camillia in bloom; she’s been waiting to pick up faded camillia flowers for a full year now. And while I don’t mind not being frozen whenever I step outside, I worry that this past record-breaking warm January will have unpleasant side effects later: a cold snap just as the fruit trees …
Category: homesteading
Caitlyn and I ate our last honeycrisp apple yesterday. I’d bought 18 pounds of them from Jim and Carmela at the end of our local farmers’ market season. The apples stayed in the refrigerator, in their box on the bottom shelf (crowding the beer, which somehow Wednesday seems to have forgiven me for) since purchase in mid October. I think we ate most of them as-is, not using them for pies or crisps, just slicing and enjoying them. Our last apples were starting to get a little wrinkly. I’m not sure if that’s the result of four months in the …
While in the kitchen this afternoon to make dinner rolls and a batch of muffins, I discovered that the carrots were no longer happy with their storage method. Lacking a root cellar, I had scrubbed the carrots, popped them into bags and put them in the drawer in the bottom of the refrigerator. The previous batch of carrots hadn’t objected to this treatment, beyond sprouting little roots and trying desperately to grow new tops. This new batch was rotting. My guess is that I had not closed the bag tightly the first time, allowing the carrots to “breathe”; these newer …
We opened up the first cheese last night. A gouda. Not quite two months old. It tastes like cheese, and although it’s not quite like gouda, it’s surprisingly yummy. It’s soft and creamy still in the center, which makes it hard to plane for sandwiches. If I’d left it to age for another month or so, perhaps that would be different. But, it’s HOMEMADE CHEESE! Save
When I got started on it this morning, the vision for dinner was potato soup. When the garden produces 48 pounds of potatoes, that’s a lot of potatoes to discover/invent ways to eat. Some of them are starting to show their age (perhaps the pantry is slightly warmer than the perfect potato storage temperature), but they still soup nicely. But there was half a sweet potato in the fridge that I threw into the pot with the sautéd onions and the dried bell peppers. I added one of the jars of whey from cheesemaking last month and the whey that …
Reality Intervened, after I had promised Caitlyn project time after school today, and she was all set for some no-sew fabric crafting. Instead, we made dinner. I’d been reading about Solar Oven Chef’s frittata and Hip Chick’s kale tortilla, so: She chose the potatoes from the pantry, then scrubbed them clean. I peeled and chopped. She put the water in the pot and carried the full pot to the stove, were we turned on the burner together. She watched the pot to be sure it didn’t boil over. I sautéd onions. She added the broccoli. I drained the potatoes, and …