84 lbs+ of apples and counting

A bushel of apples weighs somewhere between 42 and 48 pounds, depending on your data source. It's pretty impressive then that our family of three has already gone through two bushels of apples this season (I just bought our third today!). That is consuming about 12 pounds of apples a week, maybe somewhat more. Wow.

What have we been doing with all these apples?
-Apple syrup
-Freezing apple slices for pies
-Apple sauce
-Apple crisps and pies (some of these we've given away and entertained with...)
-Dried apples
-Apple-pumpkin soup
-Lots of apples for eating

Tucker eats fresh apples in the messiest way ever--nibbling off the peel and spitting the peel out wherever he is. He confessed to eating the apple this way at preschool even (I am now dutifully cutting and peeling the apples for him in that setting). Still, he loves apples, doesn't cough on them like last year, and easily eats at least two a day (more if there is opportunity). Ben likes Tucker to eat as many apples as possible because of the mess. Apples would be a horrible food disaster if Ben wasn't so diligent in cleaning up after the boy.

When I get a bushel, I usually fill a whole big drawer of our fridge with apples, put about an equivalent amount in two layers separated by brown grocery bags in a cooler that Austin takes into our basement for storage, and then use the rest in the moment for apple sauce or drying or some similar project.

This level of apple eating verges on the ridiculous, but when I can get a bushel of apples for $10 at our local orchard, why not???? I feel like I'm practically stealing the apples from them, but they seem to be glad to sell them and tell me they'll be manning the apple shed until Christmas. I imagine we'll all be a bit sick of apples by then.

Culinary Adventures

I tried my hand at canning some tomato sauce the other day and the result was good, though the process was messier and more time consuming than necessary. I learned some good lessons for next time. Even though I have a pressure canner, not a hot water bath canner, I opted to do the hot water bath canning to start with because it's been so long since I canned anything. It was a bit awkward and intimidating. I have a very healthy respect for hot jars and boiling liquid after seeing the burns a friend from master's swimming got (who had been canning for 40 years) that kept her out of the water for a month.

I learned for next time that:
1) I don't need to sterilize all the jars and lids before filling them if I'm going to be processing them in a pressure canner or for over 10 minutes in the hot water bath. This means no lifting jars out of boiling water and makes me very happy.
2) I used the jar tongs upside down. No wonder why I melted the plastic off the handles. Smart, Jackie.
3) I need to get a circular rack to put in my canner so that I can can two rows of half-pint jars at once. That will double my capacity or halve my time in one fell swoop.

In my spare time before baby comes, I'm going to experiment with pressure canning because it's faster, and not necessarily more scary than hot water bath canning (did I mention I don't like the boiling water?) given that I already have the equipment.

In other culinary adventures, I saw a gigantic pumpkin at the grocery store yesterday and couldn't resist buying it (at about 25 cents a pound it's the cheapest vegetable I've seen in a long time). Has anyone else noticed the utter dearth of canned pumpkin on grocery store shelves this past year? Apparently there was a problem with the pumpkin crop and canned pumpkin became very scarce.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure this was supposed to be a Halloween pumpkin, not a pie pumpkin because its skin was so thick I couldn't get a knife through it. Austin offered to bleach his hatchet and attack it outside the house, but I decided to just pop the whole 15 lb monster into the oven and roast it completely uncut. An hour and a half later, I still was barely able to cut through the skin (I've never met squash skin like this before--very odd) but the insides were perfect pumpkin mash. That is definitely the easiest way I've ever cooked a squash--from now on, just cook it, don't cut it.

I was going to try my hand at pressure canning the wonderful pumpkin pureee, but it turns out that mashed pumpkin is something that is not safe even to pressure can at home. Apparently the viscosity, the water content and the acidity vary so much from pumpkin to pumpkin that safe processing times can't be determined for home operations. Interesting.

(In lieu of canning, I opted to freeze the pumpkin in ice cube trays and pressed flat in quart ziplock bags so that little bits can be broken off and used at different times without having to defrost a hulking mass of pumpkin.)

Strawberry Picking

Tucker likes strawberry picking a lot. Even more than last year. And it was made even better this year because GoGo got to come along. Tucker is really at the perfect age for this kind of fun, (though maybe not the perfect age to actually accumulate a lot of berries!).

18 lbs of Grapefruit

I bought an 18 lb bag of grapefruit two weeks ago from the grocery store. It's one of those interesting sale buys that tantalize you with the price but have questionable practicality. I mean, it was a REALLY good deal--but who eats 18 lbs of grapefruit when you're not on the grapefruit diet? Anyway, it's only taken the two of us (Tucker is apparently not in a grapefruit mood) two weeks, and we are back to looking at an empty fruit drawer with only two grapefruit left.

I try to stay away from bragging on this blog, but I do think that rate of grapefruit consumption is pretty impressive, personally.

Collecting sap for our own maple syrup

We are making our own maple syrup this year. Really. I gave Austin 8 taps for Christmas, and he put them out today, attached to gallon jugs to start collecting the sap. By the end of the day we already had 4 gallons of sap.

Sugar maples don't grow well in our part of Virginia but apparently you can tap any variety of maple, and a couple other types of trees as well. What our property is lacking in sugar maple, it makes up with gigantic old silver maples, and so our maple syrup experiment is in business.

Apparently it takes about 10 gallons of sap to make a quart of syrup, which means we have to figure out how to store all these gallons of sap in a cold place before undertaking the monumental task of boiling it all down to make syrup. Austin bought a food grade 5 gallon bucket for the storage task, but we filled just about the whole thing up in one day. Hmmmm.

Also yet to be determined is exactly how to boil the sap down as there is a burn ban in effect in Virginia, and you really need to boil the sap outdoors so that all the moisture boiled off isn't released into the house. One solution would to build a cinder-block enclosure so that the fire can be technically argued to be enclosed, but that stills begs the question of what type of container to use. Anything from inside the kitchen would get fouled up with the creosote of the fire, and you also need something with a lot of surface area.

I'll let you know how all of this goes!

Gluten Free Bread

Gluten free bread is a bit tricky because gluten is really the key ingredient to making yeast bread so bread-y. It is what makes it stretchy and elastic rather than like a batter when you mix it together. I can make a mean wheat loaf, and I can make gluten-free cornbread, waffles and muffins without even knowing the difference... but when you make gluten-free sandwich bread, it is basically impossible to truly replicate real bread.

Thankfully I skipped lots of horrible loaves of nasty bread by googling "best gluten-free bread." The first entry on the google results is for a gluten-free millet-oatmeal bread that I have now tried twice, with good results both times. I picked it because it had the least esoteric combination of flours, or at least an esoteric combination of flours that I could handle (rice, oat and millet I already had on hand).
(http://glutenfreemommy.com/baking-gluten-free-bread-millet-oatmeal-bread/).

The process is definitely more time-intensive than making regular bread. I mean, what regular recipe calls for 16 ingredients? It only takes four ingredients to make a great loaf of yeast bread. I think a big reason for this is that it's pretty important to mix up a bunch of different flours to try to mimic wheat flour as closely as possible. Another complication: who has loads of millet flour or brown rice flour on hand? I'm sure you could find them at Whole Foods, but I have little interest in paying big money for boutique flours. Thankfully, Austin gave me a flour mill a couple years ago for my birthday and so I can just begin the bread making process by grinding millet and brown rice into flour. It is not hard, but does make the undertaking a little bit longer, messier and noisier.

Today I tripled the recipe and came out with 80+ slices of good sandwich bread. Not quite as fun as making real bread, but it was satisfying. If you do check out that recipe, I didn't quite do it as written. I cut the salt by a third, and I thought the bread was still too salty. I upped the xantham gum by 50% (this is the key gluten replacement) after my first attempt, and it definitely helped the texture of my second batch. And I have no idea what sweet rice flour is so I substituted buckwheat flour instead.

I also bought a couple loaves of gluten free bread at Trader Joe's a couple weeks ago for comparison purposes to see what is possible in a commercial kitchen(at $4 each they were a deal compared to $5+ for a loaf at Whole Foods). The loaves I tried were fine, but definitely not great. They suffered from the same problems as the bread I made: really dense. When you pick them up it is shocking how heavy they are, but thankfully the taste is pleasant and the texture isn't bad once you get over the fact that it is so dense.

Gluten-free living

A month ago I was talking with a friend at a Bible study I go to. She was telling me about how she used to be just exhausted all the time, and never able to feel rested no matter how much sleep she got. When she started telling me about needing a long nap every afternoon, getting 9-10+ hours of sleep at night and still feeling tired, she was describing my exact situation. She got her thyroid tested, but no problem there. She tried other things. Nothing helped. Finally, this summer she went to a chiropractor who suggested going off gluten. A week later, she said she was a different woman.

Tiredness is one of those non-specific things that is hard to address. When you have spent much of the past several years pregnant and nursing and living with small children there's a sense that of course you should be tired. But I have known for awhile that my level of tiredness is just not normal. I even had a sleep study last year to tell me that I don't have a sleep disorder. But if not that, what?

I went off gluten a day after talking with my friend, and although I'm still waiting for any possible placebo effect to fade, I am beginning to think this is for real. I have not needed a nap one day in the past month. I have been sleeping an hour or more less at night. And I don't go around yawning, feeling miserable and exhausted. It is amazing.

In fact, the past month has been so amazing in this regard, that I have absolutely no desire for all things wheat. If I can feel this good without wheat, it is hands down worth it. It actually hasn't been very difficult at all because we make most of our own food from scratch, I can grind my own non-wheat flours, and we tend to do leftovers for lunch rather than sandwiches anyway.

I've learned during this experiment that gluten sensitivity is most common among people with European ancestry, especially the Irish and Basque (I'm half Basque). I have also known since grad school that eating too many wheat products gives me heartburn. But to think that something I eat could be making me TIRED? Fascinating... and potentially life changing.

Pumpkin Protein Iced Tea

Just in case you're wondering, it is not a good idea to put pumpkin, protein powder, wheat germ and flax seed into iced tea. It does not make a good post-workout shake. Austin learned this the hard way today.

FYI.

Cooking Tip: Peeling Squash

I have a love-hate relationship with winter squash: I love to eat it and hate to peel it. Eating Well magazine had a tip to microwave your winter squash for a minute before peeling it to make it easier to peel.

It worked! I highly recommend this as a new addition to your squash-peeling routine.

Milk!

Tucker passed his food challenge today with flying colors, and had his first glass of real cow's milk, his first taste of cheese, and lots of real yogurt. I don't think he realizes how exciting this is, but I certainly do.

Apparently the biggest reason that food challenges fail is that they can't get the kid to eat the food in question. So you have to bring them into the allergy clinic HUNGRY to make sure they'll eat whatever unfamiliar food you need them to try.

Tucker's appointment was at 8:30 am, so it was do-able to just bundle him off into the car and tell him he was going to eat breakfast with the doctor. It became harder when the doctor was running late and the challenge didn't start till 9:40 am, with one tiny cup (about a spoonful) of yogurt. Tucker wolfed down that spoonful and just broke into hysterics when he couldn't have more. The deal is you need to wait about 10-20 minutes to make sure there isn't a horrible reaction, before you can really challenge him with a serving or more of the food in question.

It is really sad to see your son begging for the milk and yogurt he sees in front of him, but not be able to give any. (I did end up pulling out cheerios to keep us sane, but still it was not a experience to repeat--next time I'm going to be looser about eating beforehand because he did not need to be that hungry.)

I thought Tucker might have an aversion to the taste of cow's milk after only having rice milk and soy milk his whole life. Not so. He hasn't remarked at all that suddenly his milk is different. And he definitely had no qualms about the yogurt whatsoever. He even liked the cheese I gave him at lunch.

Next up is an egg challenge in November. He'll like that one: real french toast (with syrup!). If all goes well we may have a relatively allergy-free holiday season (of course nuts and seeds are off limits to us, but that is easy to work around).

Helpful living hints

When you are about to put your son down for a nap, don't leave onions sauteeing in oil on the stove, even at the lowest possible heat setting. It may leave a permanent mark on the pan and your husband wondering why the house is filled with smoke.

FYI.

Birthday cake adventures

I decided to make Tucker a truck birthday cake.

The process started yesterday when I made the cake (so it'd be cool enough to cut out and frost today). I decided I needed to double the recipe to make a 9x13 sheet cake (necessary for the design I was doing), while the recipe called for a bundt pan. I've never actually used a bundt pan, but I know they're in the shape of a doughnut. I had it in my mind that bundt pans are a) smaller than usual pans and b) cook faster because of their shape. It turns out both assumptions are wrong. How did I find this out? Well, it started because I doubled the recipe, so I'd have enough for my 9 x 13 pan. The doubled recipe seemed like a lot. It seemed like too much for the pan, possibly. I ignored my intuition and put the pan in the oven only to discover 4 minutes later that it had already risen enough it was about to overflow.

It was early enough in the process that I simply scooped out enough for a dozen cupcakes and put everything back in the oven. Surprisingly, this didn't seem to hurt the result too much. What DID hurt the result, however, was assuming that a sheet cake takes longer to bake than a bundt cake. It turns out this is not true. Thankfully, the cake I was making was naturally really moist so the extra 20+ minutes in the oven didn't really hurt things too much, unless you knew how good the cake should've been if done right.

Fast forward to today.

Tucker was napping and it was time to make his cake. All was going according to plan, until I made batch #2 of frosting. I am still puzzled about this, but somehow I managed to curdle my frosting. Keep in mind that I'm making vegan frosting due to Tucker's allergies... and keep in mind that batch #1 and #2 had identical ingredients. The big question: how is it possible to curdle frosting? It was just confectioner's sugar, vanilla, Tucker's "butter", rice milk and a little crisco (I know, gross, but the recipe said it would really help the frosting be decent).

Anyway, everything curdled. At first I pretended that it was just a little thing that maybe only I would notice, or that would go away if I smooshed it on the cake. Not so. The rice milk and food coloring basically remained liquid while everything else precipitated out. A quick trip to the store for more confectioner's sugar, and a helpful hint from my friend that marshmallow fluff might be a good thickener for vegan frosting, and the cake making process started seeming more hopeful again.

The only problem with learning these lessons is that there is NO way I'm going to remember these little details by the time I bake my next cake in 6 months or a year.

But, all in all, the cake turned out well and at least Tucker was impressed.

Baking soda subsitutions

Today I decided to make a big batch of waffles so we could have frozen waffles in our fridge all week, in addition to a great Sunday breakfast. The only problem was that we were running low on baking supplies, so I had to scramble a bit to substitute for whole wheat flour (ground up oats to make oat flour), and we were also completely out of baking powder. Having a vague recollection that baking soda isn't as strong as baking powder, I decided to wing the substitution and put in a heaping tablespoon of baking soda for every 3 teaspoons of baking powder the recipe called for. Problem solved.

Until I tried the first waffle and found that it was inedible, with that baking soda-salt taste. Yuck. Keep in mind I tripled the recipe and was not about to let all that go to waste (as well as our breakfast).

So what's a gal to do? Basically I just added more of everything, especially the things that could mask the taste (sugar, vanilla, cinnamon, pumpkin, banana)... and then added more of everything again, until the waffles were fine (though if you looked for it, you could notice the baking soda aftertaste).

If you start with a tripled recipe, and then add more of everything to make it edible, what do you get? A LOT of waffles. To be exact, we fed four people this morning and still have 21 waffles in our freezer.

P.S. Even the salty trial waffles got put to good use as frozen dog treats....

Sunday night dinner

Austin and I have settled into a fabulous routine for Sunday night dinner: we each pick our favorite throw-together meal that the other person hates.

Austin has salmon cakes made from that ridiculously gross canned salmon (you know, the kind that has the bones in it that are supposedly edible).

I have macaroni and cheese, though not the real stuff. Mine is a modified kind that involves mostly cottage cheese and egg and is highlighted by a little cheddar and parmesan. It also takes about five minutes to make, not counting the time to boil the pasta.

The smell of either of our dinners is enough to make the other person have to hold their nose just walking into the kitchen. It is quite a trial being married to someone who won't eat cheese or anything creamy, and I'm afraid Austin thinks the same thing about me and fish.

The only problem with our dinners is that Tucker can't eat either meal. (No fish until age three, and a milk/egg allergy). I'm hoping that he'll be declared milk/egg allergy free soon and will turn into my little mac and cheese buddy.

Ice cube trays

Ice cube trays are the solution to all my food storage dilemmas. We have a delightful chest freezer, but defrosting blocks of frozen tupperware is not a highpoint of my day. First, it takes forever (have I mentioned patience is not my strong suit?). Second, we don't microwave plastic because plastics leach into the food, so not only does it take forever, but I also have to figure out a way to pry the frozen stuff out. The end result? A big mess.

Well, ice cube trays are the way forward. Simply freeze whatever leftovers you have into the trays and then after they're frozen put them into labeled freezer bags. When you want some, you can conveniently select however much you need, AND it heats up super quickly in the microwave.

Also, there are some things we can never eat a whole package of before they go bad: pesto, pizza sauce, hummus, baked beans, coconut milk. It's pretty fun to have all of that perpetually at your fingertips without the responsibility for finishing off a whole container.

I just finished boiling two more (big) pumpkins from our garden, and freezing them into (lots) of ice cube trays. Actually, I ran out of ice cube trays so I resorted to putting dollops of pumpkin on cookie sheets to freeze in individual portions. I think I might've just taken care of all our pumpkin needs for the year. (Incidentally, pumpkin is really good in yogurt, and in chocolate cake....)

Peach syrup

We ran out of real maple syrup this week. Obviously, this is a catastrophic occurrence on any date, but even worse when we realize it the night before we're having a brunch featuring malted waffles.

What is a Vermonter stranded in the deep South to do? (Just kidding, central Virginia is a lot more Mid-Atlantic than anything else, despite the Southern drawl Austin is convinced he will one day have.)

What saved the day was Austin's work. On Friday he had come home from a site visit loaded down with two big bags of peaches and nectarines from an appreciative farmer. Because they make Austin's mouth itch when he eats them uncooked (this is actually a fascinating phenomenon called oral allergy syndrome that deserves its own post), that is A LOT of fruit to us to go through in the next few days.

So what's the solution? Peach syrup. I thought it was so fantastic that I'm thinking of canning a bunch for the rest of the year.

Here's the recipe:
5 c peaches (pureed)
2 c sugar
2 T lemon juice
Bring to a boil
Add 2 tsp vanilla [we were out of vanilla so I added maple extract, which was great]

Making soy yogurt

Helen and David gave us a yogurt maker for Christmas. I'm slowly getting the knack of making good, thick, Greek-style cow's milk yogurt in no time flat, but soy yogurt for Tucker is another story.

I've tried gelatin, I've tried pectin. I've tried thickening up the soy milk with additional soy powder (not soy protein powder... kind of like soy flour)... and that's just the beginning.

Basically, the soy yogurt turns out a) gross or b) gross.

I have one more idea, but then I'm abandoning soy yogurt for good. I figure, why do something that a) no one likes and b) that I don't need to do?

I came across some time management tips the other day:
1) Stop doing things no one needs to do
2) Stop doing things that someone else will do if you don't
3) Stop doing things that aren't the kind of thing only you can do

Making bad soy yogurt definitely fits into category 1.

Pemmican, the original energy bar

Austin has wanted to make pemmican, an old Native American food for the hunt, for ages. What IS pemmican? Well, it's dried meat that's been ground up, mixed with dried berries, with beef lard (suet) poured over it, moistening it and holding it together. Lots of calories for the hunt, and no sugar! Mmmmmmm....

On Valentine's day, we were going to go snowshoeing in West Virginia and I decided I'd make him some pemmican as a little Valentine's day present for the trip. Except it was about 70 degrees that week and all the snow in West Virginia melted. I conveniently forgot about it till the last minute as well, and unfortunately, a gal can't dry meat in an hour on a Saturday morning. It's the thought that counts, right? (Or is that what's incriminating in this little Valentine's day story?)

Anyway, I did finally get around to drying some venison jerky last week with the idea of making pemmican. We even got beef suet at our local Mennonite farm where we get all our meat.

The problem is that as a former vegetarian, even the idea of pemmican is revolting to me. The process of creating it was an act of love and revulsion at the same time. I ended up having to put the dried venison piece by piece in the coffee grinder to get it to a fine powder, mixing it with currants and prunes and then heating enough beef suet in the microwave so I could pour just enough over the mixture to moisten it (before just about dying from the smell...). Then the berry-meat-lard mixture hardened in the fridge.

I think I'm relatively open-minded towards food, as gals go... I never tried any of the squirrels Austin hunted, but I allowed them in our kitchen and in our freezer. I allowed Austin and Josh to butcher three deer this season in our side yard, and even let them hang the deer from a tree, for all the neighborhood to see. Pemmican is in the same category--it's allowed in the fridge, but I most certainly am not going to try it.

I did let Austin give some to Tucker this afternoon, though. It's kinda tricky thinking of fun snacks for Tucker because we don't really have much snack type foods around (nor want that sort of thing in the house). Austin ended up breaking off pieces of pemmican for Tucker, who devoured them like they were chocolate. Like father, like son....

Food glorious food

I just mentioned in the last entry that Tucker can really eat when he wants to. Last night we went to our favorite hole-in-the-wall diner in town for dinner. They don't have a kids' menu, so we ordered Tucker an adult hamburger and fries.

When he saw the food he just about flipped out, he was so excited. He ate almost 2/3 of that hamburger and half of the french fries. It was really impressive. (Keep in mind he weighs like 25 lbs--that's a LOT of food for a little boy.)

Then he put the take-home container on his head. What could be more fun?

Actually, there were lots of highlights of our dinner. One was when he realized he could see the street from our booth and he pointed out to us all the trucks and buses that went by. THAT was exciting.

He also really enjoyed eating cheerios from the hoods of his matchbox cars while we waited for our food. He even had a little matchbox ambulance that he was able to squeeze a cheerio into.

He saw his favorite clerk from our grocery store, eating with his wife. This guy looks like kind of a gruff older man, but every time he sees Tucker he melts into a smile and says "That's a fine fellow there."

Ah, good times....

Food Reviews (1)

The highlights of this weekend's food included popcorn this afternoon, of course, and managing to avoid having to eat Austin's infamous salmon cakes. Salmon cakes COULD be a good idea if they weren't made out of the gross kind of canned salmon that has the bones still in it. Austin claims you can't really taste the bones (they're these weird crunchy circular things), but what he really means is "you can't taste the bones if you don't have taste buds." (Hi, sweetie, so glad you're reading this!)

More seriously, though, I made up a recipe for protein bars for Tucker as a snack, because we're sick of giving him crackers and stuff like that for snacks. Obviously the no milk-no egg-no nut allergy thing makes baking for Tucker a bit creative, so this recipe may look a little odd, but it was surprisingly good. (I do have to admit that at church today one of the girls sitting across from Tucker said "that looks AWFUL!"

Anyway, on that promising note, the recipe is: 1 c ground flax, 1 c wheat flour, 1 c oat flour, some coconut milk (can you tell I don't measure very often?), some olive oil, 1/2 cup rice protein powder, a couple teaspoons baking soda and baking powder, and a can of crushed pineapple with the juice.

Obviously the pineapple is pretty sweet, but Austin couldn't tell the bars didn't have sugar in them without me telling him. We've eaten 2/3 of the pan between the three of this in two days, so maybe I'll need to make more for Tucker this week.

We also tried our first overnight crockpot hot breakfast cereal. We put in buckwheat groats, wheat berries, and some oats, with water and some apple juice and raisins in the crockpot overnight. The raisins were a little funny--all of the sweetness had drained out of them so they became these nondescript blobs that didn't taste very good. Overall, I think we both like the idea, but the grains need some more flavor. Next time I would add chopped up apples and dates and skip the raisings. Also, if anyone is tempted to make this recipe with small children, I suggest NOT giving anyone with an immature digestive tract these grains... let's just say Tucker had some interesting digestion issues this weekend!!

What else? Austin also made some great crockpot ribs. (Liz, the secret is cinnamon. Don't discount the crockpot, or ribs, until you try a cinnamon rub first....)

Better stop writing before this post makes me hungry!