harvesting stuff
Aug. 11th, 2014 12:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kareinaToday was about harvesting things and playing in the kitchen. I started this morning by making some paneer . This is all the fault of due to the inspiration of a friend of mine in Canada, who mentioned on FB that he "may eventually tire of home-made Saag Paneer on basmati rice. But not yet." In the resultant conversation one of his other friends wanted to know where he gets his paneer, and another wondered why he didn't make his own from scratch. My friend allowed that he isn't quite that hard-core. I, on the other hand, clearly am, since my reaction was to read several different recipes for it, and add "gammaldags mjolk" to last night's shopping list (since milk which hasn't been homogenized is much easier for cheese making.
I am pleased to report that panner is one of the easiest cheeses I have ever tried. The recipes I had seen said that the milk should actually be heated to boiling (and stirred to keep it from scorching on the bottom in the meantime), so I did that before adding lemon juice. I needed to use a bit more than 1/4 cup of juice before the curds separated from the whey, but once they did they really did, and straining them from the whey was really easy. Since I really love to use whey in cooking I strained the whey into another pot, and that pot full of whey was what I used for the weight to press the cheese. This worked really well, and prevented me having to find some other weight.
Then![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lord_kjar and I went down to pick some black currants. He picked about 3/4 of a bag, and I about a half a bag (because once I got to the side of the patch where the raspberries are growing I dedicated myself to eating the berries, since this isn't a good enough year for raspberries to be worth picking any for the freezer--they are small, there are not so many of them, and they are not very juicy, but they still taste nice) before he took the bags up to the house to start processing them and I went to harvest some nettles from where they are growing back in the path on the way to the berries (which he has mowed some weeks back). This time I yanked out the old stems by (glove covered!) hand, plucked the fresh, young leaves off, and tossed the old stems. With luck not so many will grow back in there.
Then I helped him clean and sort the berries and fill the Saftmaja (steam juicer) with them (that amount turned out to pretty much fill the juicer) and get that started. Then I got the nettles blanched and chopped and put into muffin cups to freeze for later use in cooking (I collected enough to fill six muffin cups).
While that was happening I took the left over bread dough from where it had been rising i the fridge and popped it into the oven, so that it was ready to eat about the same time I was done with the berries, and before I did the nettles. Yum! There may be things I like better than fresh bread, hot out of the oven, but I am not thinking of them just now.
Then I took a brief break (yay, reading!) while he kept an eye on the juice production. The berries yielded 4 liters of concentrated juice, which fills one of the shelves in the fridge. What a pity the earth cellar isn't done, or we would have plenty of room to store it, and we could make up lots more (there are still so many bushes full of berries down there).
When that project was off the stove I cooked up half of the panner with spinach, beet greens, and the little bit of nettles that didn't fit into the muffin cups. Then I took the 1.5 cups of extra juice that didn't fit into the bottles and 1 cup of the cooked berries and made a pie.lord_kjar tells me that when he was a kid they fed those berries to the pigs, but we don't have pigs, so I thought we should use a little of them for something interesting. The rest of the berries went into the compost bin, which sort of bothers me, but what else should I have done with them?
Yesterday, on the other hand, was an outside projects kind of day. We started the morning with more plowing of the field (he had done some of that on his own on Friday, but then discovered that there are far more rocks as one approaches the edges, so he saved the last bit to do with me). I follow along behind the plow and pick up the small and medium sized stones that get exposed and toss them to the field's edge, but if there is a large one I mark the place so that he can come use the forks on the tractor to dig it out.
We were partway through that project when I got a phone call from our friend Oskar who lives in Kalix (the one we visited on the way home from buying the forge), saying he was in town, and would we like him to drop by. We said "of course!", and he came over. This was his first visit to our place, so I gave him a tour of the property whilelord_kjar did a bit more plowing on his own (which means getting out of the tractor often to toss away the rocks himself), then we both helped toss rocks while lord_kjar drove tractor for the last little bit in that corner of the field.
Then we went in for fika, followed by doing some work on the earth cellar. Since we had Oskar to help we managed to do twice as much wall building as we would have other wise done--the boys worked on filling in the back of the other concrete ring with bricks while I worked on the wall next to the ring. This meant that Oskar had the easiest job--sit behind the brick wall in progress, and smooth out the cement on that side aslord_kjar keeps adding more bricks and cement and keeps checking to be certain the wall stays level as it grows.
We worked till we ran out of bags of concrete, and then we made home made pizza for dinner (and I put the left over bread dough into the fridge for later). This time I used the left over cooking water from the nettle harvest of the day before as the liquid in the bread, and added some thawed kale as well, so the pizza crust had flakes of green, and was very tasty.
After that Oskar went to meet up with some other friends and we did the last bit of plowing on the other side of the field. Note that the plow had, in fact, bent again, but this time, rather than taking it back to the forge for yet another repair he just folded that blade up out of the way (it is a two-blade plow, and only the one of the two blades keeps getting bent) and kept plowing with the good blade. Takes longer, but we were so close to done with that project that it made more sense to just continue, rather than loosing another day to repairs.
In other news I have been working on learning to play the song Hårgalåten (which our choir sings) on the dulcimer, and it is finally coming together. With luck I will actually be able to play it by the time choir starts up again this autumn. However, I have had to change the tuning of the instrument to accomplish this. My hammer dulcimer is not a chromatic instrument, but there are enough strings that most notes appear in more than one place on the instrument. Therefore some of the strings contain a sharp (or flat) variant of a note so that if one needs (for example) a normal B one can play one string, but if one needs the B-flat instead one hits another. However, at the high and low ends of the range there are not so many duplicate notes. The tuning the dulcimer arrived with had only a F#3 and not a F3, and it had only a B3 and not a B-flat3. Before I started learning this song none of the songs I have tried to play needs any of those notes. Hågalåten, on the other hand, needs the F3 and the B-flat3, and not the level3 notes that it came with. So I opted to re-tune those two strings so that I would be able to play this song. It will be interesting to see how long it takes before I wind up needing the notes I lost due to the change...
I am pleased to report that panner is one of the easiest cheeses I have ever tried. The recipes I had seen said that the milk should actually be heated to boiling (and stirred to keep it from scorching on the bottom in the meantime), so I did that before adding lemon juice. I needed to use a bit more than 1/4 cup of juice before the curds separated from the whey, but once they did they really did, and straining them from the whey was really easy. Since I really love to use whey in cooking I strained the whey into another pot, and that pot full of whey was what I used for the weight to press the cheese. This worked really well, and prevented me having to find some other weight.
Then
lord_kjar and I went down to pick some black currants. He picked about 3/4 of a bag, and I about a half a bag (because once I got to the side of the patch where the raspberries are growing I dedicated myself to eating the berries, since this isn't a good enough year for raspberries to be worth picking any for the freezer--they are small, there are not so many of them, and they are not very juicy, but they still taste nice) before he took the bags up to the house to start processing them and I went to harvest some nettles from where they are growing back in the path on the way to the berries (which he has mowed some weeks back). This time I yanked out the old stems by (glove covered!) hand, plucked the fresh, young leaves off, and tossed the old stems. With luck not so many will grow back in there.Then I helped him clean and sort the berries and fill the Saftmaja (steam juicer) with them (that amount turned out to pretty much fill the juicer) and get that started. Then I got the nettles blanched and chopped and put into muffin cups to freeze for later use in cooking (I collected enough to fill six muffin cups).
While that was happening I took the left over bread dough from where it had been rising i the fridge and popped it into the oven, so that it was ready to eat about the same time I was done with the berries, and before I did the nettles. Yum! There may be things I like better than fresh bread, hot out of the oven, but I am not thinking of them just now.
Then I took a brief break (yay, reading!) while he kept an eye on the juice production. The berries yielded 4 liters of concentrated juice, which fills one of the shelves in the fridge. What a pity the earth cellar isn't done, or we would have plenty of room to store it, and we could make up lots more (there are still so many bushes full of berries down there).
When that project was off the stove I cooked up half of the panner with spinach, beet greens, and the little bit of nettles that didn't fit into the muffin cups. Then I took the 1.5 cups of extra juice that didn't fit into the bottles and 1 cup of the cooked berries and made a pie.
lord_kjar tells me that when he was a kid they fed those berries to the pigs, but we don't have pigs, so I thought we should use a little of them for something interesting. The rest of the berries went into the compost bin, which sort of bothers me, but what else should I have done with them?Yesterday, on the other hand, was an outside projects kind of day. We started the morning with more plowing of the field (he had done some of that on his own on Friday, but then discovered that there are far more rocks as one approaches the edges, so he saved the last bit to do with me). I follow along behind the plow and pick up the small and medium sized stones that get exposed and toss them to the field's edge, but if there is a large one I mark the place so that he can come use the forks on the tractor to dig it out.
We were partway through that project when I got a phone call from our friend Oskar who lives in Kalix (the one we visited on the way home from buying the forge), saying he was in town, and would we like him to drop by. We said "of course!", and he came over. This was his first visit to our place, so I gave him a tour of the property while
lord_kjar did a bit more plowing on his own (which means getting out of the tractor often to toss away the rocks himself), then we both helped toss rocks while lord_kjar drove tractor for the last little bit in that corner of the field.Then we went in for fika, followed by doing some work on the earth cellar. Since we had Oskar to help we managed to do twice as much wall building as we would have other wise done--the boys worked on filling in the back of the other concrete ring with bricks while I worked on the wall next to the ring. This meant that Oskar had the easiest job--sit behind the brick wall in progress, and smooth out the cement on that side as
lord_kjar keeps adding more bricks and cement and keeps checking to be certain the wall stays level as it grows.We worked till we ran out of bags of concrete, and then we made home made pizza for dinner (and I put the left over bread dough into the fridge for later). This time I used the left over cooking water from the nettle harvest of the day before as the liquid in the bread, and added some thawed kale as well, so the pizza crust had flakes of green, and was very tasty.
After that Oskar went to meet up with some other friends and we did the last bit of plowing on the other side of the field. Note that the plow had, in fact, bent again, but this time, rather than taking it back to the forge for yet another repair he just folded that blade up out of the way (it is a two-blade plow, and only the one of the two blades keeps getting bent) and kept plowing with the good blade. Takes longer, but we were so close to done with that project that it made more sense to just continue, rather than loosing another day to repairs.
In other news I have been working on learning to play the song Hårgalåten (which our choir sings) on the dulcimer, and it is finally coming together. With luck I will actually be able to play it by the time choir starts up again this autumn. However, I have had to change the tuning of the instrument to accomplish this. My hammer dulcimer is not a chromatic instrument, but there are enough strings that most notes appear in more than one place on the instrument. Therefore some of the strings contain a sharp (or flat) variant of a note so that if one needs (for example) a normal B one can play one string, but if one needs the B-flat instead one hits another. However, at the high and low ends of the range there are not so many duplicate notes. The tuning the dulcimer arrived with had only a F#3 and not a F3, and it had only a B3 and not a B-flat3. Before I started learning this song none of the songs I have tried to play needs any of those notes. Hågalåten, on the other hand, needs the F3 and the B-flat3, and not the level3 notes that it came with. So I opted to re-tune those two strings so that I would be able to play this song. It will be interesting to see how long it takes before I wind up needing the notes I lost due to the change...