We've been rolling along here, slow and steady, figuring out how to get our sustanence from local sources...
I made yogurt last week, boy was that EASY! My sister said, 'As easy as putting a cup in the grocery cart?' LOL ALMOST! The recipe I used was for raw milk, since that is what I have. The only ingredients for plain yogurt were milk and yogurt culture (don't worry, that just means a couple tablespoons of already existing yogurt!) I used Stony Field Farms greek style plain yogurt, and my yogurt turned out, well, YOGURTY! I ended up straining some through cheesecloth (easy to find in the baking aisle of the grocery store!) to make it thicker for my kid, since I didn't use any type of thickener. Don't get me wrong, it is thick like regular yogurt, but had alot of whey (that clear-ish liquid that you will sometimes see on the top of yogurt) and he didn't find that appealing. Some recipes call for powdered milk, gelatin or pectin, but I want to use the raw milk I get at the farm, so I found a recipe that didn't use thickener, and honestly, it doesn't need it. After the yogurt was set, I mixed some strawberry jam (also from the farm) and a drop of vanilla extract into a cup of it and it was DIVINE! Now I have a coupla mason jars of it in the fridge, which should last a week or two.
My other kid had a friend sleep over last night, and his friend is a big milk drinker, so I made sure to inform his mom about our new milk sitch. She was fine with it, but I was a little nervous about him trying it, I guess I was afraid he would turn his snoot up at milk from a jar, but to my mild surprise he loved it! In fact, he drank us out of house and home last night and this morning, thank goodness I am getting more tomorrow! LOL!
My bread making is keeping me extremely busy, I won't lie! First of all, my family eats an entire loaf as soon as a batch comes out of the oven, so there goes half of all the bread I make! And secondly, I am trying to make bread for my sister also (she is also a paying member of the csa, so it is fine!) because she is a very busy lady with a full-time job and two little ones. So last week I think I made bread 4 times? or maybe it just felt like 4 times.... Anyway, I bought a huge stainless steel bowl for mixing the dough in, because even the biggest one I had was not doing the job very well! I am now going to go online and find a bread maker.... Yeah, it may be cheating, but last week my family ate 6 LOAVES of bread! Soooo....
Making butter is still fun, again, trying to keep enough of it on hand is the difficult part. Each time I get milk I skim off the fat on top, but I am not very efficient at it, so I don't get as much as some of the people I read about online. For instance, one lady said 2 gallons of milk (raw milk, which is what I am using and what I am drawing my comparisons to) should yield about a pound of butter, but it hasn't worked out that way for me. I would estimate I got about half a pound out of 2 gallons of milk. Again, my skimming isn't the most efficient, I am considering one of those sun tea jugs with a spout at the bottom, so I could just let out all the milk into a seperate container and have the cream part left inside as someone suggested. Unfortunately, all I have been able to find so far are plastic ones; I am looking for a glass one.
On the upside, the byproduct of butter making is BUTTERMILK! I had enough to make a triple batch of whole wheat buttermilk pancakes the other day! WoooHOOO!!!
Lunch meat has been a challenge. My hubby packs his 'lunch' 4-5 days a week, and when I say lunch, i mean at least 2 huge sandwiches, plus sides! So we used to use a pound or tow of store bought processed lunch meat a WEEK! The first week of the csa, I roasted an eye round, sliced it super thin, and it turned out great. The next week I tried a different roast that (hahaha silly me) LOOKED similar to the eye round, but wasn't. I roasted and sliced it the same way, but it just wasn't right for cold sandwiches. It had too much membrane running through, and he found it unpleasant cold between bread, hard to bite off, etc.
So this week I went back to eye round and so far so good. I am going to go check what that other roast was for clarity, one moment please....Thank you for holding! It was a bottom round. The meat itself was tasty, and would be fine hot with a fork on a plate, where you can see what you are biting into, and can cut off what you don't want.
I am looking forward to poultry season I admit!!!! LOL! I will never take another turkey sandwich for granted, I vow!
So local eating-wise, I do feel we have gotten over a few of what I percieved to be big hurdles. The subsequent issues that have come up make complete sense to me NOW, since they are obviously what humans have struggled with for all of their existence: spoilage, convenience, seasonality, etc.
But I am finding alot of zen in the process, I really am. I am feeling a connection with and appreciation for our food, for trying to provide and prepare it for my family. I am also enjoying NOT using factory farmed food, because I feel like by not ingesting the products of horrific cruelty, my body feels more in tune with the universe... (sorry, there I go again lol!). I admit it is an intangible benefit, and one that is hard to describe accurately, or without sounding like an idgit, but it is real I can assure you...
My garden is thriving, which is an unexpected thrill for me! And my kids and husband are pretty excited about it too! My younger son has been picking the few ripe strawberries each day, and eating them right there standing in the garden. I can't really explain it, but it just feels so good to see my child standing next to the plant growing in the soil and eating the fruit; it's like recognizing that he is a part of the earth, and the fruit is part of the earth, and as I nourished the strawberries (planting, weeding, watering) so they are nourishing my fruit (my kid). Does any of that make sense???? ANYWAY, the point is, SERIOUSLY, plant something edible!!!! It is incredibly rewarding!!!
So the difficulties this week are pretty much the same as the last couple weeks: still spending too much at the grocery store, still not much in the way of produce, from the farm or from my garden. So that is part of the seasonality of eating locally, and the weather and so on. Definitely there is produce available, at farmer's markets and such, but I don't like spending the extra money. Next year, I will have my canned and frozen stuff from this year to get us through the leaner times....
Ok, I wanted to cover my granola making, but it is soooo gorgeous out there today that the pool is beckoning....
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