Garlic/Onion Powder

I decided to make my own garlic and onion powder, my store bought stuff had run out and I needed more. Turns out it's really easy.

Step one. Dry your garlic or onion. This is my garlic after it's been dried. Slice thin and place in a food dehydrator or if you have an air dryer and time use it. An air dryer is basically shelves covered in a fine mesh that keeps bugs out. Pretty cool, but I don't have one. I used my electric dehydrator instead. I chopped up several garlic bulbs. Enough to fill 3.5 trays of my dehydrator. Plug in and wait. The garlic or onion should snap it's so dry. Crunchy, crispy, brittle or any other such words for completely dry. The onion took less time to dry than the garlic but it was at least 6+ hours. I put it in the spare bedroom with the window cracked and the door shut. But it smelled of garlic and onion that's for sure!

Step two: Once it's dry you need to pulverize it. Blend, smash, food process, mill grinder whatever it takes. Until it becomes a fine powder. I used my food processor and after a few minutes stopped and ran it through a sieve. Keep doing that until all you have is powder. Or If you ran out of room like me (because I made too much) I kept some of the garlic as small ground up pieces. Dried garlic bits to add to soups or whatever. The garlic was staticy and clung to the side of the rotor blade in my food processor. Kinda pretty huh?

A word on homemade garlic/onion powder, it's MUCH stronger than store bought so make sure to account for that when you're cooking.

Eco-wrapping/Furoshiki

I have been working on my version of Furoshiki or cloth wrapping for gifts. Using some left over squares of fabric from other crafts, I fold the corners down and sew the edges, voila homemade furoshiki! It's not beautiful because I can't get the soft edges I could if I had a serger sewing machine. But it still works and all the folding techniques are the same. Here's a beautiful wrap at etsy. And videos of how to wrap gifts on youtube. Most gifts this year will be given in cloth wrapping. Otherwise it will be reused bags, wrapping and ribbon. I save everything I can from gifts I get from others, this way any "disposable" items get used more than once.

Pinwheel Cookie Recipe

So I made a mistake yesterday, the cookie recipe is from Better Homes and Gardens 1953 cookbook, not Betty Crocker. Sorry about that. Here is an image of the actual recipe in the book, you can click it to make it BIG and easily readable. But first I must explain about the chocolate the recipe states 1 square of chocolate. If you don't have chocolate squares you may substitute 3 Tbl. cocoa powder and 1 Tbl. oil for every 1 1oz. square of chocolate. Here we go.

Mix butter and sugar until well mixed. Add vanilla, eggs, and 1 TBL. Milk. Then add flour, baking powder and salt. Mix until the dough pulls clean from the sides of the mixing bowl. (sometimes you need a tsp-Tbl. more milk depends on the humidity I think?)

Separate the dough into 2 balls, one only slightly bigger. The smaller will be the chocolate since the extra oil allow it to roll out easier, without tearing.

Place smaller dough back into mixer. Add cocoa, oil ( or melted square chocolate if you're doing that). Mix well. It too should pull away from the side of the bowl when it's mixed correctly.

Chocolate and Vanilla.

Between 2 sheets of wax paper roll out the dough ( we doubled the recipe so the dough rolls out much bigger ) for a regular recipe 10x12.

Like so...

Now add 1 Tbl. hot (not boiling) milk to the top of the chocolate dough. Place the vanilla dough to make a milk sandwich, which helps the two dough's stick to each other.

This is my mom rolling the dough, she's a professional.

Refrigerate overnight or at least 4 hours cut into 1/2 thick or even thinner. Bake 375* for 8-10 minutes. Enjoy.

Pinwheel Cookies

Mom made some beautiful pinwheel cookies today. I would link you to a recipe but since it isn't online I can't. It is a Betty Crocker recipe but it's from a 1960's cookbook. The recipe is long and I will have to copy it from the book in order to show you. Maybe later, for now some mouthwatering pinwheels....

Thrift Store Score

This year will be the first year I've cooked a turkey. In order to do that I needed a roasting pan and platter. Check this out! I found it at our local thrifty store. I love second hand stuff! I snagged it by 3 seconds, another woman was eyeing it too! Super score!

Leaves

We have no trees in our neighborhood, at least none that bare tons of leaves for garden mulch. They must be hunted and gathered and stuffed into a Prius.

On Meat Birds

We've been a lot in discussion about raising our own meat birds. The ideal situation would be to have a breeding flock but since we are in the city now and don't have a rooster that won't happen. But we can order or pick up chicks from our feed store and raise them. What we're trying to accomplish is food with little gas thrown in. Birds raised with room to run, eat bugs dust bath and feel the sun shine. When there time is up it be respectful, quick, clean and thankful. Jake and I watched some videos online about harvesting birds and it really isn't that bad. The hardest part is the death, taking the life you helped raise from baby to table. This idea right now is in it's infancy. We won't be able to order chicks to start until next spring. Harvesting is done in the fall when all the wasps have gone and gives the birds time to get to size. So we are looking at a year away. Which is good because it gives us the opportunity to decided whether we are going to raise chickens and a turkey or two? Just chickens? Housing? Space considerations? All of these things are up in the air right now, and we have all winter to decide and plan. I really love that about winter. ************ In other news, the garden has been put to bed. I have done the last of the weeding, clipping dead flower stalks, and mixing the mulched leaves with chicken muck from the coop. I should have great compost by mid spring! I do need to find some more leaves and mulch them to mix with the chicken muck I pull out all winter. Maybe I'll do that today!

Beekeeping Class

We signed up for our beekeeping classes tonight! The first 3 Saturday's in March we will be occupied learning about the bees we'll soon be getting! March is a long way off, but it'll be here before I know it! I am really excited to see those glorious boxes of bees. How awesome will our honey 'bee' I tell you! Now that it's looking like an actual reality I need to purchase those beekeeping books. I have only a small list of them but I'd like to have them read before we undertake the class. That way I can get the most out of the classes. There is so much in the way of language to beekeeping. Things like supers, frames, brood, excluders and more. Should be fun!

Farm City

I started reading Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer today. So far a very good look at what we are trying to do. She starts with garden, bee's and egg chickens. Moving onto raising her own meat birds. I am not through with it yet, it is a fairly quick read I should be done with it in a few days. I really like the respect she shows to her animals with consideration to harvesting them. Harvesting an animal requires more work than harvesting plants but is essentially the same. Planning, growing, caring for and eventual harvest. We are considering raising our own meat birds. Novella Carpenters blog can be found at Ghost Town Farm. Jake and I have spent some years as vegetarians and knowing most tofu or soy products are grown in Brazil where rainforest's are cut down to make way for soy bean fields doesn't seem environmentally friendly. I've done some research on soybean's phytoestrogen's and frankly basing my diet around that is some what frightening. Our big push to eat locally grown, organic, humanely raised, meat seems our obvious choice. We ate our first local chicken a few days ago. The whole bird, because local doesn't mean just breast meat, it means you want chicken well here's the whole bird. Our's came from Rocky Ridge Ranch a farm about 25 miles from our house. They also sell grass finished beef and pork. Amazing people! We are treading lightly with meat eating preferring to eat mostly veggie and legume diet. But veggies are in short supply in the winter months. I don't wish to eat any fruit ripened with ethylene gas (yummy! it's also used for welding). Our food supply is truly frightening the more I look into it. Which is another big push to get as much as we can, including our meat from this back yard farm. Some links about Soy and ripening agents for produce.

Pine needle carpet

Yesterday Mom and I went in search of pine needles. About half of the garden has been covered in mulched pine needles as a walkway/weed barrier. But as we're moving into winter and our heavy rain season all that bare dirt is going to get really, really muddy. So the pine needles also serve as mud protection for the boots! I think it looks pretty good. It sure makes the cover crop green stand out! Another benefit of using needle's is there own wind gust protection. Pine needles interlock with each other when they get onto the ground, thus making them really hard to blow around in the wind. We had thought about using straw in the walk way, but I did an experiment last spring using straw as a mulch. Our heavy winds just blew it way. I'd like to find a mulch for the front yard butterfly/bee garden but I think I'll stick with the pine needs. The problem is finding them in mass quantity. See I don't want to go to a park and rake for hours just to get a small pile of them. Mom and I just drove around the back country roads until we found a strip of pine needles that looked really thick from the tree's hanging over the road. Then we collected the needles. We got 6 full tarps, and stuffed 2 at a time into the back of the Prius. I really need to remember to take pictures of that kinda thing. Then laid it out onto the bare garden dirt. The chickens had fun, scratching though it. Or playing keep away with this new cool pine needle. They really are silly! We're supposed to get winds 25 mph sustained to 45 mph gusts today. Ugh!

Food Inc.

Jacob and I watched Food Inc. last night. A truly amazing movie, there are some very hard parts to watch, not because they are gory or anything. Truthful is more like it. I have a hard time watching the chickens in a cage that grow so big so fast they can't walk. Comparing them to my girls outside made me cry. I urge everyone to watch this movie, if only for the knowledge. To understand where your food comes from is an empowering act. To make informed decisions you really should see this film. I really want to say TONS about this movie, but it will impact you more if you just see it. Have a party, invite someone who may not be aware of the food issues. In other words, don't just preach to the choir. Share your knowledge. If not for your own self, for the future or your children's, children. Please.

Potato Harvest

Well I must say I am disappointed at the harvest numbers this first year. But I think I know why, it took us until about late July to truly figure out our watering system. The potatoes grew a ton at the top and a ton at the bottom but not anything in the middle. So all in all we got roughly 60 pounds of German Butter ball and 35 pounds of the fingerling Rose Finn Apple. We may do something a little different next year using tires instead of all this dirt. It really is a lot of earthmoving just to uncover some spuds.

But we did have some major help, this is why Curious the chicken has her name.

Dual Flush Toilet Retrofit

In our efforts to save water we decided to install a dual flush toilet. But we didn't want to replace our newer toilet because that seemed the the farthest thing from environmental! So after some research we found a dual flush toilet retrofit kit! Say that 5 times fast!

Heres the facts: our toilets are "low flow" meaning they only use 1.6 gallons per flush.
With the dual flush kit:
1.) rinse mode or #1 flush - .8 - 1 gallons per flush
2.) full flush or #2 flush - 1.3- 1.6 gallons per flush

Now I am all for the "if it's yellow let mellow" but after a few of those a rinse flush needs to happen. We did have some quirks with the install and getting it just right. But now that we've figured it out and the dual flush works really well!

We got the kit from Dual Flush Kit. It's reasonably priced at $30, compared with some retrofit kits I've seen. However this one has the advantage of being entirely made in the USA, Michigan in fact which they proudly display all over the box. We have 3 toilets in this house, but we only bought 2 to test out. I should have just gotten that third one but oh well, this spring we'll make that 3rd one happen. Jacob my handy man was only able to install one before his shoulder surgery so the second toilet will get done some time in January.

I also haven't started the cloth TP campaign yet. We ended up with too many late fall chores I needed help with before Jacob's surgery so that got pushed to the wayside for a while. But I intend to move to cloth, at least for #1 I'll keep you posted!