Beekeeping

I have been doing some extensive research on beekeeping. It was brought to my attention that honeybee's that first year are so concerned with building comb and honey reserves that the beekeeper does little with them. Maintenance but not much else, that as far as local "livestock" goes they are pretty easy to manage. So I looked up my local association to see if there we any classes on basic beekeeping offered, there are but they started the middle of January. YIKES. So I may have missed it. There is however a local farmstead that is offering the same info of the 1 hour a week for 8 weeks class into 4 hour one month compressed class. I have to email her and see if it is possible to get in on that. Then I would have to order my hive and gear. I do have to make this decision quickly however because most apiary's sell out of bees by the end of February. They don't ship them until spring though. Which gives me plenty of time to get everything set up for them. The Spokane County has certain codes around local hives. They have to have a screened off area, and be behind a privacy fence. I think that is so you don't get sued when someone really dumb decides to "poke the ant hill" if you get me.

I had thought about this last year but it was very late in the spring and everything was pretty much closed up for the year. With Jacob's surgery I didn't jump on the band wagon fast enough this time. But all things considered I still might be able to take the compressed class. Which would be totally helpful, considering I haven't the first clue about what I would be doing.

Hodgepodge

I am going to end up at the Recycle Center today and out of curiosity find out when they start selling there compost. I think it is late April or early March but still, that date is best added to the calendar. I did find some clipper blades for my lovely Bahco pruners, I think I might have gotten the last pair on earth! ( They were that hard to find ) I am excited to get them, we had lots of heavy snow this year and many broken branches need trimming up.

I did make another Farmhouse Cheddar loaf. I think this one will be more crumbly than the last batch. I let the milk, when setting get to, to high of a temperature. But that's ok it will still be super yummy, I just don't think it will be incredibly sliceable.

Not much other news is going on round here. Jacob is healing nicely post surgery. The chickens are mad because of the snow covered garden ( they think it's my idea.... I am pretty sure ). Kai, is really board because our nightly walks have stopped (surgery) and Me well I am catching up on my reading.

Laughter and Eggs

Chickens should be owned by everyone. They are seriously one of the easiest things to manage and they give so much in the way of humor and eggs. A great gem of an article by Jenna Woginrich all about back yard chickens makes some really good points about these yardbirds. How intrenched in our American nostalgia they are but no one seems to own them.

My chicks make me laugh every day, they see me coming with the cup of scratch and get all birdie excited. Bird brained to the last they topple over each other in an effort to get nowhere. They are giving us 3 eggs a day pretty consistently. What little givers they are. Eggs and humor for some feed, scratch and the occasional bowl of oatmeal. Life is good.

The Hummers of fruit

With Jacob going into surgery yesterday we made some exceptions about what we would normally eat. We decided about 8 months ago that we were only going to buy fruit from the USA or locally and freeze it. We have done amazingly well with this goal of ours but it does mean giving up some of our most favorite things. Pineapples and bananas have the farthest to travel. Most are not grown in the USA. So we gave them up. But for his first two weeks after surgery I wanted the health benefits that these two lovely things carry.

Seeing these exotic fruits on my counter is kinda like having some sexy visitor take up residence in my kitchen! I ate a banana yesterday the memory of it just doesn't compare to the perfectly ripe fruit. I can't wait to break into the pineapple later today. Most of the fruit is reserved for Jacob but I do get to sample the exotics!

Farmhouse Cheddar

Well the cheese press came, sat and waited. I needed a stock pot that could hold 2 Gallons of milk, sadly I didn't have one. But after all the searching I have one. Plus it works with my giant pressure canner as a double boiler. WOO HOO! Double boilers are expensive. I digress, yesterday cheese making commenced! I opted on Farm House Cheddar which according to the home cheese making book is a good easy first hard cheese.

All went according to plan, it is a long process of waiting. Add this, let it sit for 45 minutes now add that and let it sit for another 45 minutes. Not too time consuming but definitely have a good book on hand or do something else in the kitchen like.... make tortillas, a whole other post all together.

I only took two pictures of the entire process because I wasn't sure how this was going to turn out. So I have the cheese being pressed and then this morning after it pressed all night.

I promise you it is cheddar. I know it's not orange! They dye cheddar.... ummm cows milk is white. Yeah, I never thought I was ingesting dye either. I was kinda shocked to find that out. I guess as the story goes cows milk has carotene in it which will make it a slightly yellow color. But it mostly depends on how much butterfat is in the milk, so cheese makers of old found they could use inferior butterfat milk add dye to it and charge a higher price for the cheese! HA HA! Us consumer suckers have been duped! I found it highly funny. So my cheese is a creamy white, no dye in that beautiful baby!

Seasoning the Cast Iron Pans

I bought and was gifted two new cast iron pans. One a chicken fryer and the other a dutch oven! How cool is that?! Anyway I have to season them in order to get the "non stick" benefits of the cast iron. If you've never heard the benefits of cast iron here is a great article about it from the New York Times. When properly seasoned they are the original non stick and the heat transfer is unbeatable just to name a few! However they do need some care, not much but just to show you how easy it is I thought I would post about it.



First heat up the oven to between 300-350*. Next put the pan on the stove and heat it up with some high heat oils in it like Safflower or Canola. I actually use Spectrum Shortening, only a teaspoon +/ - a little. I don't measure I just stick my finger in and scoop out a glob. Make sure it coats the whole bottom and the sides, not dripping with oil just well coated. I use my silicone pastry brush and spread the oil around the bottom of the pan and sides. Keep the heat on low/medium, if it starts to smoke it's too hot take it off and wipe out the oil left over and start again. If it smokes you have reached the "volatile" stage for that oil and it won't do your pan any good. I keep the spreading coat up for about 10 minutes. Just long enough for the pan to get warm and the thin oil coat well spread and soaked into the pan. Essentially you are making the pan expand and fill with the oil, thus making it non stick. Ok so that parts done, take that pan off the heat and wipe out any extra oil with a paper towel, toilet paper or whatever. Then place it in the oven cooking side down.



Sorry about that last pic, my camera was having a hard time with the dark pans and dark interior of the oven. Cook it for an hour. Voila done! I have had to get a good season on several of my pans since I bought them used and rather abused. However it is really easy to fix... see above. I have purchased all my pans at a thrift store or an antique store.

Here is a good video for anyone who needs a visual. I am a vegetarian so I didn't use "meat fat" to season my pans. As long as the oil you use is for high heat.



I also don't wash my pans with soap. If they need a little I usually just dip the sponge in the soapy water. But mostly I just use really hot water and a light scrubby brush. The more you scrub and use soap the more you will have to season your pan. So I guess it's up to you how much effort you want to put into it.

Shopping In Bulk

I recently as in earlier this year, discovered the wows of the bulk foods section. I shop at a locally owned store called Huckleberries that gets mostly organic foods and local if it can. I got the idea of having my containers weighed from It's Easy Being Green by Crissy Trask. So I took my containers in with a bit of masking tape on top to have them weighed. To get an accurate measurement the containers must be clean and empty! Otherwise you will be paying for the weight of the container you bring in. I store my organic almonds in a glass sealed jar that is REALLY heavy. I of course don't want to pay each time for the weight of the container. Thus bringing it in empty. Now the first time I did this I had bowls and Tupperware's all on the counter at home, of dried fruits, oats, flour etc. that lined the bottom of the container. It does take some planing in order to have the empty container weighed. But it's worth it!

On the pictures that follow, the .63T is the tare or weight of the container. At the checkout the cashier weights the entire thing and then subtracts the tare from the total weight. In this picture is my containers for maple syrup, olive oil, oats, mung beans, rolled oats, almonds, walnuts, 2 kinds of Dr. Bronners, brown bag for mushrooms (used many many times). Containers not pictured: tofu, Braggs amino acids, raisins, blue berries, navy beans, black beans, flax seeds.... ok ok you get the idea.


















Now some shots of the Huckleberries bulk foods section itself.


The dried fruits, nuts, beans and cereal.


















Mom rocking the tea and bulk spices wall.


















And the anything and everything liquid.














I have found buying in bulk does save some money. Organic bulk is still expensive but I do feel better about not using so much waste just to grocery shop. I would always recycle the containers before. But now it is kinda fun to just reuse them over and over again. Recycling in many forms.

First attempt at Cheese making

I have been thinking about it for a while now. I really want to make my own cheese. I like the idea that I can make cheese from the organic cows that live about 10 miles from my house. The gal at The Country Market, sells 1/2 gallons of Raw Milk for $5. They are not certified organic but she follows a strict organic practice. They grow all the grain/feed for there chickens, cattle, cows, and pigs. I digress.

I purchased 2 kits, and an instructional DVD to try my hand at cheese making. One is the mozzarella/ricotta and the other is the hard cheese from CheeseMaking.com. I am following along with Ricki Carroll's book Home Cheese Making, which I've had for a while but not gotten around to purchasing the necessities.

The kits and DVD arrived, I watched and decided to give it a go! We made 2 cheeses, Mozzarella and Whey Ricotta. All from one gallon of milk. I won't go into the how too, because for that you really need the book plus I am still not sure what I am doing.

Anyhow, some videos of 2 of the steps.

Mom is stirring the cut curds while we bring them up to temp. Then we will scoop them out and start the stretching process.



Now in order for the Mozzarella to get that smooth shinny, elastic look it must be stretched. But it has to be at 135 degrees or hotter in order to do that, hence the gloves. We used the "water bath" method to keep the cheese hot, you can also use the microwave. I didn't place the cheese in a bowl and use a spoon to add the salt, I will do that next time because our salt wasn't evenly distributed through out the cheese.





We are in the discussion process of the cheese press. It is quite a bit of money up front in order to have accurate documented results. We would like to make sure we can duplicate our cheese results (for gift giving purposes) and the wood block with several pans stacked on top of the cheese just doesn't seem very accurate. I am thinking we will just spend the money on it, and think of it as an organic cheese investment. Since most of the cheese we currently eat isn't organic. We did a cost evaluation of home cheese making, our home made organic cheese would cost slightly more than a Tillamook baby loaf. But the effort of course would be much more. The cost would be about $13 for a 2 lb. loaf where Tillamook is around $9 for a 2 lb. loaf. To purchase organic cheese is about $21 for a 2 lb. loaf. So we will be saving money in the long run but there will be a bit more cost up front. Of course these are "guestimates," we aren't sure how much of a yield we will get. The directions say 2 gallons = 2 lbs of cheese but that could be more/less.

A work in progress. It was a ton of fun to make the mozzarella and a very cool feeling to make something from a gallon of milk!

Green Christmas Part 3 The Tree

The dilemma of the Christmas tree is one we faced this year and have yet to really decide what to do. Artificial Christmas trees are one of the most toxic things you can bring into your home. They are coated in fire retardant which off gases something horrible! Most are made of PVC which is another terrible thing to bring in doors. A great article from Ecotality Life further discusses the pro's and con's of artificial vs real.

Listed in that article is a link to an Ontario Christmas tree farm that has some wonderful Treecycling Ideas.

So this year we attempted to sell our 4' Artificial tree but no luck. Maybe better planning for next year will work better. We ended up purchasing a real tree from our local feed store. And I intend to utilize that tree for many things. One the branches make great bedding in the chicken coop. Also the stump will work well as a hanging suet holder. There is some discussion between my parents and I about jointly purchasing a shredder/grinder. Something that can handle up to 2' branch sizes would work well for the both of us. Not only for the Christmas tree shredding but for other tree pruning as well.

I will do some research into a live tree that gets brought in doors for Christmas, but I don't want to shock the poor thing to death.

The jury is still out as to what we will do next year. If we get a grinder we will probably go with a real tree again. I don't feel bad in cutting it down if every last bit of it gets used. For mulch, bedding, or what ever. As long as people are not trashing the perfectly good tree, many places accept trees for free or for a small fee.

Green Christmas Part 2 The Wrap

In our homemade pledge we also wanted to have gifts given in recyclable ways. Using recycled paper or craft paper. I know it doesn't have the shiny appeal and I am working on that. I think I may have found the solution to that but more about that later. This year we wrapped all our gifts in craft paper brown "paper bag" like paper and then adorned it with stamps and colored pencils. For the ribbon we used recycled twine and sometimes shiny ribbon as well. All of the bows were recycled from last year and we intend to do that again until we use the whole bag up that I got 2 years ago.

Mary Jo, Jacob's mom gave me a wonderful idea about old Christmas cards. Cut up the picture and use it as a gift tag! How wonderfully simple but still a great form of recycling. I really struggle with the gift tag because I don't want to purchase the self sticking kind and I don't want to use (fresh paper) for the tags when really that is such a small part of the gift. Really it is the most important part since it lets you know who it is for! I went to Value Village for a completely different reason but happened by there Christmas stuff. They had a bundle of miss matched beaten up Christmas cards for .50 cents. I bought it, and intend to utilize most of it for gift tags next year along with the Christmas cards I was given.

So about earlier comment on wrapping paper. I really like the idea of furoshiki a Japanese way of wrapping with cloth. Here is a video that demos some of the way's of wrapping gifts.

Another way I have just discovered is from this ingenious lady named Joell A. Jacob, I just happened to stumble upon her blog today. She makes cloth gift wrap with ribbon attached. Beautiful design and very crafty. This is the video she posted about her reusable giftwrap in action.



Some very wonderful ideas for birthdays and next Christmas. I will most certainly be making/buying these for gift giving in the future.

Green Christmas

Our goal this year was to make Christmas green. In order to do that we had some major thinking to do about what to get for family or what to make for family. Much of what we did this year was made, or purchased locally. The only thing we had to outsource was the flax seed (more on that later) that had to come from Iowa.

We asked that all our gifts be made, purchased second hand, traded for or internet based. This is the run down of what we got from others.

Mary Jo and Windy gave us some wickedly fun stuff! Jacob and I each got a green to the core scarf hand made, an earth friendly message sweatshirt that was traded for, a fabulous crystal (made by the earth thank you very much!) And an Eckhart Tolle 2 cd The Realization of Being. MJ gave me some great gift tag ideas that I'll post about later!

Jason, Jacob's brother gave us an Amazon gift card that is delivered electronically, no waste! Perfect!

My parents got me a tortilla kit for making home made tortillas! I have wanted to do this for a while now since I make my own bread I thought this would be a good venture to step into. Jacob got several jigsaw puzzles which help distract him during his upcoming surgery and recovery.

For each other we went with 1 want and the rest was home made or needed like gifts. For example Jacob's "want" gift was Tomb Raider Anniversary for Mac. I was a horrible to buy for girl because I couldn't come up with a want gift. I really didn't need or want anything. But I did get a new blanket that I now that I think about desperately needed. I was using 2 skinny wimpy blankets and my robe for a cover at night. Plus 2 new spatulas since mine had wimped out on me. Jacob made me a necklace holder and I made him a photo collage with updated pictures that he could take to work.

A pretty simple Christmas for us.

*Gift Spoilers ahead.... if you haven't gotten your gifts yet*

We made therapy bean bags, pieced together from multiple websites. Our chosen "bean" of bean bag is actually flax seed. Apparently flax keeps it's heat for longer there for less microwaving. We referenced these sites:Sew mama sew and, And sew it is.

Other gifts included the bees wax candles from Tahuya River Apiaries plus votives made by Mary Jo at Raven Rocks Studio. We also gave out our home made suet, see earlier post about how to make that. We also sent out dried fruit (that we dried this summer), cookies, breads and russian tea.

I know there is a ton of links in there, but I wanted to document where we got the ideas from. Thanks to everyone for a wonderful Christmas. Thanks for making it green and homemade with and for us.

Teddy bear toss 2008

Considering it has been forever since I posted something I figured I should get my act in gear. I've been really busy lately making our christmas gifts. My goal was to not purchase anything, I failed however because I couldn't come up with anything to make Jacob so I settled for something that would take his mind of the up coming surgery. Much crafty has been going on in the Oxrieder household, plus wrapping, boxing and shipping gifts has been a project, and of course I can't post any of it here because the family will see what they are getting. Do you see my dilemma? Still no excuse not to post something heh?

Last night we went out and had Thai food (first time for the parents). They did splendidly, according to dad's friend Ron, dad "grew tits and pussied out".... ( he had sweet and sour chicken ). He was told to have Thai Peanut noodle by Ron's wife..... ah he was ribbed for that one. Anyway, after our Thai food adventures we went to a hockey game. My parents being season ticket holders they let us know when the "teddy bear toss" was. Everyone brings teddy's/ stuffed animals of some sort, when the Chiefs score a goal everyone throws the "teddy's" onto the ice. They toys are then collected by toys for tots and given to kids and hospitals etc... I forgot my camera but some lovely person remembered there's and I am going to use there video to show you what it looks like. It really is very cool, and inspiring that so many people donate toys.

Bird Suet

Mom and I decided to make our own bird suet to experiment and see what we get. Also we are thinking of "homemade" gifts too. We are going to get crafty later today (if mom's sewing machine will work)... I digress. Bird Suet!

Ingredients:
1 1/2 C. Peanut Butter (cheep kind because it has more fat)
1 1/2 C. Lard or Suet ( I haven't found a source for true raw suet yet... still looking)
1 C. Flour ( I used buckwheat as I had WAY to much of it)
1 C. Cornmeal
1 C. Rolled Oats
We used 3 types of bird seed to add to this mixture, Thistle, Porch mix (bigger seeds like sunflower etc...) , and a Millet "finch" mix.
1 C. of each type of Seed mix

Then somehow a second cup of oats got added to the mixture somewhere, so our suet is a little crumbly. So above is the recipe we intended to make.

Ingredients not pictured are flour and cornmeal.



1. Melt lard and peanut butter together on LOW! Once they are fully melted and mixed you add flour, cornmeal, and oats. Mix well and take off the stove.


2. Add the seed mixes to the hot goup, Stir well, the flour has a tendency to clump.

3. Pour into a Baking Pan. We bought a disposable 12x8 because we weren't sure what this was going to do to our pans. I let mine sit out on the counter for about 15 minutes to let it cool before I stuck it into the refrigerator.



4. Let cool for a few hours. I forgot about mine until late in the evening, when I pulled it out of the fridge it had set up really nice and firm. I sliced it into 4" cubes that should fit into a standard suet feeder. If not we'll improvise. (or feed it to the chickens..)



So thats it. It wasn't difficult at all. I think it could be a money saver from the purchased suet cakes that are store purchased. If I could find a source for raw beef suet. If I do find that, it has to be processed so I'll have a post about that too.