Drying Kale

Rinsed kale awaiting blanching.

So, I'm not really a huge kale fan, but I grew it this year to give it a shot and try to develop a taste for it. So far, that hasn't happened. Since I grew it, I might as well use it, and I've figured out a pretty good way to do it.

It turns out, you can dry kale and crumble it up and toss it into things like soups and casseroles for an added nutritional boost, so I'm going to try that.

I went and picked some kale this afternoon and brought it home and rinsed it. After that I started some water boiling and blanched it for about 3 minutes.

Kale blanching on the stove top.

After blanching, toss it into a colander and then submerge your colander into a bowl of ice water to stop the kale from cooking further. After that you'll want to shake off your kale and then pat it dry on a towel.

Kale drying on a towel.

After you've patted it dry go ahead and arrange it in the dehydrator and about 6 hours later, presto, dried kale! Once mine comes out of the dehydrator I'll snap some pictures and update this post.

Kale on the racks about to get started drying.

UPDATE:

Here's the finished kale, it only about 3 hours to get nice and crispy. I'm still not crazy about the taste but I think it'll work well in soups and things as an added boost.

The finished kale. I put a lid on it and stuck it in a dark part of the pantry.

Food Preservation Goals 2009

I've been setting up some goals for my preserving and here's what I've got so far:

Canning:
Diced Tomatoes 30 quarts
Corn 25 pints
Green Beans 25 pints
Pickles 5 quarts
Salsa 25 pints
Canned Fruits 30 pints
Carrots 10 half pints (for soups and stews)
Tomato Sauce 20 pints
Sweet Potato Cubes 5 quarts
Pumpkin Cubes 10 quarts


Freezing:
Peppers (strips and whole)
Squash/Zucchini

Drying:
Various fruits
Squash/Zucchini (for soups, sauces etc.)
Peppers
Kale (for soups)
Mint (for tea)


The non-canning things are a little vague because I'm not sure of a.) how much freezer room I will have and b.) how much of either I'll get. The dried vegetables are for tossing into soups and stews over the winter and the mint is for tea. The canned fruits will go into cobblers and pies and the dried fruits will be in trail mixes and oatmeal over the winter. The fruits are intentionally vague too because I don't grow any so I'm at the mercy of the farmers market and friends with large producing trees.

Well, that's all for now, I'm off to inventory my canning supplies.

Mint

I'm drying some mint today, I'll post some pictures when I get a chance!

Going to the Farmers Market

Now that it's summer the Farmers Market it going here in town. It's not the farmers market people nowadays usually think of, with picturesque stalls brimming with perfect produce in a plaza. It's in a parking lot sandwiched between two bridges and most people are selling off of a table in front of their trucks, or out of the trucks themselves. But you know what? The produce is amazing. Out of the about 10 farmers you can get a wide selection of veggies and many organic options.

Today the Kansas Insurance Commissioner was there handing out cloth bags and encouraging people to eat healthily. I was quite surprised, as this is a smaller town of about 10k people in a good year, most of which are on welfare and thus forgotten about. (The welfare rate is 35% in this town due to all of the factory closings, it's sad, but for another post.) She was a nice lady and we had a little chat, she's encouraging people to eat fresh veggies and has made it possible for people to use TANF (foodstamps) at the farmers markets which I think is just great. It helps the people who need good food and it helps the farmers to be able to sell to everyone, not just people with cash on hand. I didn't get much today, but here's a picture:

A bunch of carrots (2.50), one cucumber (.50), a dozen (free range, organic) eggs (1.50), two bars of goat soap (13.00- my indulgence, it smells and feels so good!) and one cabbage (2.00). Not a bad haul.

Also- today I canned two pints of green beans. The grocer sells green beans from a local farmer and I got a pound and canned the extra. Good times!

Making Bread Part One: The Basics

Here's how to make your basic white loaf. Actually, this recipe is for three, the more the merrier right? You can't ever really make just one loaf if you have friends or a freezer, this is the smallest most basic recipe I have.

First you gather your ingredients:

All purpose flour (in the cute mushroom canister!), bread flour, salt, sugar, instant yeast (in the Tupperware), oil and powdered milk (optional).

In your bowl, add:
4c. All Purpose flour
2.5 tbs. sugar
2 tbs. yeast

Mix these together and then add your powdered milk* and add:
2tbs. oil (vegetable and canola work best, but I've used grapeseed in a pinch and it tasted fine) and your 4c. of warm water.

Once this is mixed you'll have a nice goop going. Let this rest for 5-7 minutes to allow your yeast some time to get started.

After the yeasty goodness has started, add 2 tbs. salt to the goop and then add 6 cups of bread flour, one cup at a time. I generally use my mixer to get everything incorporated and then knead by hand, but in my pre-mixer days I'd just use a large wooden spoon to get it all going and then turn it out and knead it.

I used to flour the counter and knead it, but thanks to my good friend Merry I've learned that it's much easier to oil the counter and knead, so toss down a handful of oil and rub that onto your kneading surface and knead your bread for about 7 minutes and then let it rest for about 15 minutes. This step is called an autolyse and it's used to get your gluten forming. By now your bread will look like this:
It's still kind of lumpy and awkward, but it's working towards that good dough feel. Let it relax for about 15 minutes and then go to town with the kneading**. If you're using a mixer then you need only knead for about 7-8 minutes, you want it to clear the sides of the bowl, but not to over mix it and stress out your gluten. I prefer to hand knead because I find it relaxing, YMMV. It's impossible to over knead when you're hand mixing so you don't have to worry about that, but you do need to work at it for about 15 minutes. Sometimes 15 minutes can seem like forever, and sometimes it passes in no time. You'll feel your dough change from a kinda tacky, awkward lump to a more smooth elastic lump and that's when you know you've kneaded enough.

Once your dough is kneaded, let it rise until double, about 60-90 minutes. This part isn't an exact science, you can just kinda eyeball it. I like to use my 10q. bowl because it fills up a little less than 1/2 at first, so it's pretty much double when it's at the top.

After it rises, pinch off 3 equal size pieces of dough and form them into cigars. I forgot to take a picture of this, but I think I'm going to do a segment on the many shapes of bread, so stay tuned! In the mean time, you can find directions here. This is basically how I do it except I just pat it down with my hands as opposed to using a rolling pin.

Once it's shaped, toss it in a greased bread pan and let it rise again for about an hour. It should just about double up in size again. Going into the pans mine looked like this:


This is enough dough to make 3 loaves, but I needed some rolls, so I used one section of the dough to make these:



Usually I can get more rolls out of a section but I needed these to be pretty large as they're going to be housing some hamburger patties.

Go ahead and preheat your oven to 350* and after 35 minutes start your rolls cooking. They take about 20 minutes to bake. You'll know they're done when the tops are golden brown. Pull those out of the oven and brush the tops with butter and then toss in your bread. Bake it at 350* for 30-35 minutes and then voila! Fresh baked bread! After you pull it out of the oven let it cool on a towel so the sides don't get gummy from condensation in the pan.



Happy Baking!

*Powdered milk is optional. It's something I have on hand for just in case as well as for baking. You can use water or regular milk in it's place. I've found that using milk makes bread a bit softer, and powdered milk is cheaper, ergo I use powdered milk in my recipe. YMMV.

**I recommend hand mixing at least your first couple of times so you can get a feel for the dough.

Photos from the Garden

Tomato Plant! This variety is growing the fruit in clusters of six which will make canning super easy because they'll all ripen within days of each other.

Squash Plant! This is one of four. There will be a lot of squash, I'm not sure how excited about that I am.

Lily! This is just pretty.

Mint! Soon to be picked and dried for tea.

Food and other such nonsense...

So you'll notice in my pantry pics that there was a noticeable dearth of vegetables, quite sad. Well, that's been remedied as of today. I was previously down to a measly 3 cans of green beans due to not paying attention (it was *very* disorganized before) but now that it's all straight I can start building my supplies. I'm try to get an extra months worth of food, which I'm pretty sure I have, then 3 months, then 6, and so on, up to a year or so. My goal is to can as much as possible from the garden so I won't have to buy vegetables throughout the winter.

Home canned vegetables taste so much better than commercial ones and are generally more nutritional. The only bad part about this attempt is that I didn't try to grow any corn this year (no room!) so I'm going to have to buy it from the farmers market to can. Last year it was hideously cheap (4 ears for a dollar), and generally the more you bought the less you paid per ear, so that's what I'm hoping for again this year. My green beans never came up either, so I plan on buying extra at the farmers market to can as well.

Speaking of farmers market, tonight for dinner we had pork chops, mashed red potatoes, steamed cabbage, corn on the cob and biscuits and it was divine! The cabbage came from this awesome new organic farmer and it was so good! Really tender and tasty, I'm definitely going to be stopping by her stall again!