Early Home Grown Veggies

I still haven't sown those seeds I meant to sow three weeks ago, and I feel a bit guilty at losing some of the precious early planting days, especially since the weather's been very mild. However, I've made good headway and I think I'm finally done planning where I will be putting what. The indoor grow light is all set up and I plan to do successive planting and starting certain transplant friendly veggies indoors.

Meanwhile, in the last three weeks, my strawberry plants have been taking on a lot of new green growth. The areas of brown leaves have been replaced with large strawberry plants. Yesterday, I noticed some white amongst the plants and I thought some paper or debris had fallen in the plants. This morning when I looked outside, there were many more white spots. My strawberry plants were growing flowers!
When I went outside, I was pleased to see that the lettuce I put in the EarthBox three weeks ago were getting quite big and yummy looking. I plan on harvesting some of the outer leaves and tasting them over the next few days. They are a butter-head variety and they've still got a little ways to go before they become large compact heads.

read more . . .

Making Broth for GAPS

I made broth today. I make a large pot of broth every week in a 12 quart pot, using about half of it to make a week's worth of soup. This week I opted for chicken broth, after having gotten a fresh supply of chicken backs from Polyface.

Before GAPS, my husband and I were on the Nourishing Traditions/WAP diet, so broth has long been a ritual in our house. However, broth is even more emphasized on GAPS. Gelatin, found in the tendons and connective tissues of animals that is released when making broth, is a magical substance that helps heal and seal the gut, supporting the body's recovery from leaky gut and other issues associated with gut dysbiosis.

Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride's broth method differs a bit from the NT/WAP broth. The NT/WAP broth starts with mainly leftover bones from roasts and suggests a long simmer, up to a day or two to release all of the minerals. Dr. NCM recommends that you start with raw bones with meat, like a whole chicken, with a short simmer of about three hours. Why the huge difference? I think again here, the key is the gelatin.

Most experienced broth makers know that a well gelled broth, if left to cook too long, will lose the gelatin components. There's actually an ideal window of cooking time when the broth will gel strongly, and if it's cooked for too short a time, the connective tissues will not have had time to dissolve into the broth as gelatin; if it's cooked for too long a time, the gelatin is denatured and broken down by the heat.

Dr, NCM's broth methods it seems, optimizes the amount of gelatin that will be consumed. When I first started GAPS, it took a bit of trial and error before I arrived at the same conclusion as Dr. NCM on the ideal time frame for broth to get the largest amount of gelatin. And while beef bones will still have a lot of soft tissues connected to them, most of the chicken's tendons and gelatin components are removed with the chicken when it is deboned, accounting for why Dr. NCM recommends meat broth.

I like alternating between chicken, beef, and pork broth for a change of pace. The soup of the week is usually the same flavor as the broth of the week since I take the meat and connective tissues from making broth in making the soup. Here's my broth routine:

• Fill 12 quart stock pot 4/5 full of raw meaty chicken, pork, or beef bones. For chicken, I use either a whole chicken plus necks and feet, or chicken backs plus some whole legs and thighs and feet. For pork, I use neck bones or backbones plus two feet. For beef, I use beef marrow and other miscellaneous bones plus two meaty soup bones.
  
• If using feet, I clean them before adding them to the stock pot. Chicken feet need to be peeled completely and have the calluses or other icky looking dark parts cut off. If the outer layer of yellowish skin is especially stuck on the chicken feet, I boil some water to scald it for half a minute or so before peeling. Pig's feet I always scald and rescrape since they usually don't come completely scraped clean. Any excess hair and skin is removed before I add it to the stock pot.
• Cover broth with spring water or filtered water, leaving about 2 to 3 inches at the top of the stock pot. Add 1 to 2 tbsps of salt to the water. Turn heat on medium and slowly bring to a boil. Since I often start off with semi-frozen bones, this can take up to an hour.
• When it starts to boil, turn heat down to maintain a very slow simmer. I've found that broths where I manage to avoid a hard boil turn out the best in flavor. Skim the scum off the top of the broth with a spoon. The scum is formed as a by product of cooking proteins which is why you often don't get any scum if you start off with only bones from roasted chicken.
• After skimming, I add my fresh or dry herbs. To chicken broth, I add a tbsp of black peppercorns. To beef broth, I add a couple of bay leaves and black peppercorns. To pork broth, I add a generous amount of peeled and sliced ginger.
• Simmer broth for about two hours. Take out any meaty bones and debone the meat, returning the bones to the broth. I like to dice up my chicken and beef but tend to keep my pork in large chunks for making soup.
• Add veggies like onions, celery, and/or carrots. We save trimmings from when we cut up onions and veggies for making other dishes in freezer bags and I usually dump a full ziplock bag size worth into the broth. Sometimes I'll add a fresh chopped carrot or stalk of celery.
• Return broth to a simmer. This takes about 1/2 to 1 hour. After the broth returns to a simmer, simmer for an additional hour before turning off the heat. For beef broth, I sometimes let it go for two hours.
• Let the broth cool for an hour or so. I then carefully pour the broth through the steamer basket of a second 12 quart stock pot. The steamer basket collects and strains all of the bones. Allow the broth to drip for about 1/2 hour.
• This is the fun part! This is where I sort through the bones to separate the soft tissues from the bones and meat. I reserve the soft tissues in a large pyrex bowl and also any marrow I find. Sometimes, I'll have to pound the bone against a cutting board to get the marrow out. I discard the bones and also any spent meat that I find at this stage. When I go to make soup, I blend the soft tissues and marrow in a food processor before adding it to the soup.
• I reserve about 10 to 15 cups of the broth for soup, straining the broth through a fine mesh strainer directly into an 8 quart stock pot. At this stage, the pot and any meat and tissues reserved for the soup can be placed into the fridge and saved until I'm ready to make the soup. Sometimes I store it up to two days in the fridge before getting to make the soup. The remaining broth is poured into 7 cup Pyrex containers, which I also strain through the fine mesh strainer in the process. I usually end up with 3 to 4 containers of broth after I set aside the broth for making soup. We drink soup or broth with every meal, so we normally consume roughly half of a Pyrex container of broth a day.

Broth making is a long process, but we have noticed a difference between our appetite and digestion when we miss broth or soup. We have successfully kept up with the broth and soups for the last few months. It's the one thing we will keep up with when other things fall apart during a spell of die off. Also after you've done it a few times, you learn to time it properly so you can maximize your time and do other things in between steps.

read more . . .

Spring Has Sprung! Time to Revive the Backyard Garden!

All the cherry blossoms have been reminding me that I am late in my seedstarting. Last spring, I planted three planter's worth of strawberries and they will be ready for harvest this June. I also had an herb box outside and planted some cucumbers, beets, and mustard greens. The mustard greens did well, but I planted the cucumbers and beets too late in the season for them to mature before the first frost.

I have always loved gardening. I'm not one for ornamental plants; however, I love growing my own food. It makes me feel connected to the earth and always revives appreciation for the food we eat. Large agriculture businesses, mono-cropping, and feed lots have artificially reduced the price of food to a point where people do not think twice about throwing out food. For example, enough food is wasted on an average cruise that I'm sure is enough to feed a small village for a month. Although we have not participated in the conventional food chain in quite some time, growing some of my own produce instills new appreciation in me for the local farmers that grow my food. Growing food properly by building soil fertility and without chemicals take some nurturing and love.

In past years, I used self-watering planters and pots to grow tomatoes and various greens. Planting the strawberries last year brought forth this yearning that has been brewing inside me for some time. No longer was I happy with a few planter's worth of produce. I longed for more. Our backyard is small and mostly paved, but there was a strip about a foot wide along the entire length of the left side of the yard that continues a bit to the back yard door, forming an L shape. The right side has a ten inch by three and a half foot strip. It's not much, but it was still dirt.

So last fall, we dug out all the established ornamental plants. Well actually, we didn't really dig out the back ourselves. At the time, we were six months into full GAPS, and were experiencing regular die off. So after putting off the digging for over a month and not feeling our stamina get any better, we hired our handyman's assistant to dig it out.

A week ago, I ordered some seeds from Seeds of Change. I chose mostly heirloom varieties, also concentrating on varieties that may be cold hardy, slow to bolt, and quick to mature. We joined a CSA again this year, so I concentrated on vegetables we normally consume a lot of. My order consisted of: Oxheart Carrot, Celebration Celery, Oregon Giant Snow Pea, Tendergreen Bush Bean, Komatsuna Asian greens, Val D'Orge lettuce, and Red Deer Tongue lettuce.

Today, I went grocery shopping at Whole Foods and found that the store is already stocking herb plants and little seedlings. I couldn't resist, so I picked up a small pot each of thyme and mint, and a mini-pallet of six lettuce seedlings. Since it was fairly warm out, I went ahead and stuck the lettuce seedlings outside in my Earth Box that had housed the beets the year before. While I was at it, I also cleaned out the dead leaves from my strawberry plants, which are already beginning to show much new green growth. And so debuts my backyard garden this year. :-)

read more . . .

Woodland Creatures Like Grassfed Trash

I took out the trash this morning. Even though we cook all our meals and snacks, we never have that much trash since we recycle conscientiously and keep two compost bins in our backyard where we toss all our green waste. However, the day after broth day, taking out the trash is a must. If left in the trash too long, the spent bones from making broth tend to ripen and the smell permeates the entire house pretty quickly.

It appears the local animals like the day after broth day as well. An hour after I set out the trash, I stepped outside my door to leave for work, and the bag had a couple of good sized holes in it and the chicken broth bones were strewn all over the grass. I rebagged the trash and cleaned up what I could and hoped the garbage truck would come before animals came for more pastured chicken bones.

This isn't the first time this has happened. Throwing out trash for us is always tricky. After animals ransacked our trash a few times, I started to take out the trash the morning it is collected rather than the night before. But it appears the neighborhood animals have caught on. They are quick to hone into what is good to eat. The record was the time I left for work ten minutes after I set out the trash and I caught a large crow pecking at bones already strewn about the bag. It appears that we have very high valued trash. I look up and down the street and my neighbors never seem to have this problem. After all, the animals know grassfed and pastured trash from conventional trash. ;-)

read more . . .

Salted Duck Eggs

I tested the salted duck eggs today. I started them on 2/25 and normally they go for a month, but since February was a short month, and the eggs were especially large, I let them go for a few days longer.

Salted duck eggs are traditional Chinese fare, entirely versatile. It can be eaten by itself as an accompaniment to congee, or you can use it boiled and cut up in soups, or mixed raw with ground pork to make Chinese steamed pork pattie. A popular Filipino salad features hard boiled salted duck eggs mixed with ripe tomatoes and red onions. The yolk, which turns hard, is usually dark orange and deliciously oily, and is often used in pastries like moon cakes or put into zongzi, a Chinese dumpling like food made of glutinous/sticky rice stuffed with either a salty or sweet filling.

Making salted duck eggs is easy. You can see my recipe for salted duck eggs in my recipes collection. Basically you take fresh duck eggs and keep them submerged in brine water for a month. Voila. Then you cook them up whichever way the recipe calls for them.

Sourcing duck eggs isn't so easy. Some farmer's market vendors carry them, but since vendors that carry duck eggs are so few and far between and they are so highly prized amongst gourmet chefs, they are often out of stock. Whole Foods carries duck eggs along with other exotic eggs in the produce area, but I found them not so fresh; about half of them went rotten on me when I tried making salted duck eggs. They were well within the use by date, but they seemed old, even older than the batch of eggs that I ordered once that got lost in the mail for three weeks.

This time, I found a farmer in Virginia carrying pastured duck eggs that will ship to me. I try to eat as local as possible, but I was craving salted duck eggs and my steamed pork pattie, so I ordered two dozen. I spent almost two hours looking for a farm close by that had it in stock, and felt better at least knowing that it was being shipped within Virginia.

Once salted, the duck eggs can keep in the fridge for a few months. I usually just keep them in the brine and use them up after two months, although they get really really salty. The saltiness isn't harsh though if you use natural sea salt, and it lends great flavor especially if you're using it in cooking other dishes.

This batch of duck eggs turned out really good. Of course, I used them in the Chinese pork pattie recipe. The yolks are our favorite and the small bites embedded at the top of the pork pattie left us longing for more. I think next time, I will use two yolks instead.

read more . . .