Recipe: pumpkin pie with gingersnap crust

We made a pumpkin pie yesterday.  We got the recipe from the box of Mi-Del gingersnap cookies that we bought recently in a moment of weakness at the co-op.  It has almost no sugar, and all natural ingredients.  The kids helped us make it, and it turned out great.

Gingersnap crust
1 1/2 c. crushed gingersnap cookies (the Mi-Dels are tiny and you need about 30)
5 T. butter, melted

First things first.  Crush your cookies:

Stir in the melted butter and press into a pie pan (preferably glass or ceramic):

Now bake for about 7 minutes at 350 degrees.  While it’s baking, mix up the pie filling:

Pumpkin Pie Filling
1/2 c. cream
1/2 c. maple syrup
2 eggs, beaten
1 15-oz can pumpkin puree (or 2 c. frozen pumpkin, pureed)
2 T. all-purpose flour
2 tsp. pumpkin pie spice or 1 tsp. cinnamon, 1/2 tsp. ginger, 1/2 tsp. nutmeg
1/2 tsp. salt

First, mix together the eggs, cream, and maple syrup:

In a separate bowl combine the pumpkin, flour, and spices:

Then mix the two together and pour into your prepared crust:

Bake at 350 degrees F, 45-55 minutes or until center is firm.

Beautiful, especially with real whipped cream.

Hennepin County Master Gardener program

I found out today that I’ve been accepted into the 2010 Hennepin County Master Gardener program!  YAY!  This is going to be a huge time commitment, but I really like how the program is structured.  I get to learn a lot about horticulture, but the education is practically free in exchange for volunteer time.  Perfect for my budget and my interests.  2010 is going to be a very interesting year.

 

My backyard canvas

Adam cleaned out the gutters this weekend, and as long as he was risking his life up on the roof anyway I asked him to take a few pictures of the yard. I sewed them together in Photoshop to create a visual map of our yard. It’s not perfect, but still interesting. Click to enlarge:

The area highlighted in yellow is the area I’d like to figure out this winter.  It is relatively sunny, but I’m not sure it’s sunny enough. Most of it is shaded by the house through the morning hours, then by the trees to the west in the late afternoon hours.  It gets solid, really hot sun from 1-3 p.m. at least.  I am going to need to do some careful measuring to determine what I can realistically plant here.

Also, from a landscaping point of view, we need to have access to the electric meter, the window wells, the A/C unit (currently non-functional), and the outside faucet.

My wish list for this area includes a dwarf fruit tree, such as a cherry.  Then some nice fruit bushes such as gooseberry and/or currant.  I also have quite a few perennial vegetables I’m interested in trying.  I have the whole winter to dream and scheme, and now here’s my canvas.

Recipe: Buffalo Sauerbraten

I’m sorta obsessed with German food lately, can you tell?  I don’t really know why.  I don’t even know what Sauerbraten means, but I can now tell you that it’s basically a roast.

We split 1/4 of a buffalo with Adam’s brother about a month ago, so we have a freezer full of bison meat.  Buffalo aren’t quite as domesticated as cows, so they can’t survive in a feedlot situation — they must be raised on grass, with some room to roam.  So if you buy buffalo meat you know the animal was at least allowed to live the life that it evolved to live.  I honestly can’t really tell the difference in flavor between buffalo and beef, but we eat grass-fed beef so that might be part of the reason.

Buffalo Sauerbraten (crockpot style)
Around 6-8 servings

1 buffalo (or beef) roast (round rump roast), 2-3 lbs.
1 1/2 c. red wine
1/2 c. red wine vinegar
1 tsp. dry mustard
A pinch of ground cloves or 3-4 whole cloves
1-3 cloves garlic, minced
5 carrots
1 onion
1 c. broth (beef or chicken)
About 1 c. canned or fresh tomato, chopped
1/4 c. raisins
1/3 c. gingersnaps, crushed

1. Combine the wine, red wine vinegar, mustard, cloves, garlic, and salt & pepper in a gallon-size plastic bag.  Place the roast in the bag and marinate for 24 hours in the ‘fridge, turning occasionally.

2. Chop the carrots and onion and place in your crockpot.  Sprinkle the raisins over top.

3. Remove your roast from the marinade bag (save the marinade juices), and brown each side of it for a minute or so in a hot oiled frying pan:

Note: if your roast had butcher strings around it, leave them on.  I took them off and my roast kinda fell apart.  Oh well.  Place the roast on top of the vegetables.

4. Combine the leftover marinade juices with the broth and the tomatoes, and pour it over your meat and veggies:

5. Put the cover on and cook on high for 5-6 hours or low for 9-10 hours.

6. Remove the meat and veggies from the crockpot.  Now you will make a quick gravy with the juices.  I used whole cloves, so I strained the juices to get them out at this point:

7. Put the juices in a small frying pan or sauce pan, stir in the crushed gingersnaps, and bring to a boil over med. heat.  When it gets all thick and bubbly it’s done.  It took about 2-3 minutes:

For authentic German-style, serve it over spaetzle with a dollop of sauerrüben on the side:

Adam made the spaetzle while I was making the gravy.  Spaetzle is ridiculously easy, though a little messy.  If you’ve never made your own pasta, it’s a fun one to try.  Holler if you’d like me to post that recipe as well.

Does this look like a huge portion or what?  It’s not, I’m not that big of a glutton.  It’s a salad-size plate.  We eat most of our meals on them to try and control ourselves a little bit.

This was not a huge effort, but it was spread out here and there over 2 days.  So it takes a little planning.  Basically, it’s a roast, and tasted like a roast, but had more interesting flavors than roasts I’ve made before.

If you’re not up for making spaetzle, I think this would be good over mashed potatoes, or even just on its own with a piece of bread to mop up the extra gravy.

 

New Fall-ish header

I’ve redesigned the header again now that we’re half-way through a new season.  Left to right:

Anneke at the State Fair — not posed.  She picked up a piece of straw and put it in her mouth and started walking around like an old farmer.  It was hilarious.

Raspberry bushes with a brand new blanket of about 10 inches of maple leaves, generously dumped on our back yard over the last week or so.

Apple sauce!

Dried beans!  We’ve already eaten almost all of them.

Rowan eating homemade sushi.

Darning socks.

Well, it’s now come to darning socks.  I’ve been throwing every pair of socks that develops a hole onto a big pile in the basement.  Now I want to wear them, especially the wool ones.  Sandal season is over.  I need socks!

I have no idea if I did this right or not.  Needle, thread, and sewed up the hole nice and tight.  That’s it.  I wore a pair to work today and they were perfectly comfortable.  I feel kinda weird writing about it, but this is not something I ever would have done until money became so tight.

Only one thing to note: watching a foreign film and sewing simultaneously doesn’t really work.  Anyway, there you go Christina, finally something to tag with “sewing.”

Sauerkraut: new method a success

A couple weeks ago we bought a huge cabbage at the farmer’s market.  Usually we keep our ferments covered tightly, opening the jars about twice a day to let out accumulated pressure.  Because this was such large batch of ‘kraut, I decided to try the Sandor Katz method of fermentation: leaving the cover off and weighing the vegetables down with a heavy weight to hold them under the surface of their liquid.  It looked like this:

We let them ferment for a little over a week, and it was barely any effort at all.  I got one out and tasted it a couple times just to make sure it was getting sour.  We did get some foam on top, which we just scraped off when we added covers and transferred to the fridge.  No dreaded mold to report.

There was only one part of this that was a big mistake: I placed the jars in a metal 9×13 cake pan to catch any overflow and save my hutch from water damage.  Unfortunately, the acidity of the liquid that overflowed from these jars pretty much ruined my cake pan.  It is covered with rust now on the inside, and I can’t scrub it off.  Should have used a glass one.

If we don’t give these away as Christmas presents, this should be enough saurkraut to last us the entire winter.  Theoretically.

Fall happenings

Couple of random things going on today.  First:

Adam made a very local pie: he used raspberries and apples right from our yard (via the freezer for several weeks).  It is with great sadness that I report we have now eaten all of our frozen raspberries.  And it’s only Oct. 24.  It’s going to be a long time until July.  It was still a pretty great run though.   I’ve never eaten that many raspberries in my life.

Second:

My mother-in-law found a really great deal on pumpkins near their hometown in central Minnesota and picked us up two giant jack-o-lanterns and 5 really nice little pie pumpkins.  So I’m following the advice from the Root Cellaring book and storing them in a cool, dry place.  We have a spare bedroom that is just a storage area right now, so we don’t heat it in the winter.  It stays about 50-60 in there, so it should be perfect.  Not that those jack-o-lanterns need to last long, anyway.

Book review: Root Cellaring

Root Cellaring
The Simple No-Processing Way to Store Fruits and Vegetables
By Mike & Nancy Bubel

Note: the subtitle of the newer editions is Natural Cold Storage of Fruits and Vegetables.  I got the 1971 hardcover edition from the library, so my version had some awesome 70s lettering on the front.  (Same art, though.)

I was on the library website looking for something else when I saw this book.

This is a very simple book, and a quick read.  It has three main parts:

1) Overview of vegetables that store well in a root cellar, and what their ideal conditions are

2) Descriptions of many, many different kinds of root cellars and other related cold-storage options

3) Recipes

The authors were so jazzed about root cellars that they traveled around the U.S. taking pictures and drawing diagrams of interesting set-ups they found.  They only touch on the greater philosophy behind root cellaring once or twice:

“Home canning has been common practice for something over 100 years, freezing perhaps 40 years at most.  We consider these technologies to be conveniences, and of course they are.  Now, we have no wish to turn back the clock.  We’re very glad to be living here and now.  But haven’t we been missing out on a truly basic convenience –  the practice of root cellaring — in our preoccupation with jars and lids and blanching kettles and freezer bags?  It’s as though we’ve forgotten briefly, almost momentarily, considering the long sweep of human history, how to make use of natural rhythms, how to sensibly meet and participate in each season of the year, how to put natural cold storage to work for us.  Now we need root cellars again.  Perhaps, in a way, more than ever.”

I think I pulled one of the only philosophical paragraphs in the entire book.  The rest is given over to discussions of how real people are doing this.  Here’s one example that really struck me:

In this example, some city-dwellers built a little box into one of their basement windows.  The box is big enough to hold two refrigerator-crisper drawers of vegetables.  They open the window on fall nights to let in cold air, but during the winter the temp stays just right.

I love simple solutions like these.  The Bubels also provide photos and plans of root cellars they’ve come across, which comprise: drawers built into stairs, improvised crawlspaces, an old buried milk truck, a really beautiful HUGE buried stone cellar, a combination root cellar and smokehouse, and many others.

Basically, an optimal root cellar needs a cold air intake, a source of humidity, and a stale air outlet.  But because different vegetables thrive in different conditions (and they have a detailed list in the book), you can tweak your cellar to your circumstances.  For example, perhaps you only want to store pumpkins and winter squash?  You’re in luck.  Those are best kept at 50-60 degrees F and moderately dry, 60-70% relative humidity.  You could easily achieve this in a cool basement room and call it your root cellar.

The recipe section has some gems, too.  Some great ideas on CSA box cooking can be found here — simple recipes that call for things like celeriac and salsify, turnips and rutabagas.  There’s also a section on fermenting and pickling.  They have a really nice way of explaining the benefits of lactic acid (which fermented foods are rich in):

“Lactic acid, like yogurt, buttermilk, and acid fruits, helps to dissolve the iron in iron-rich foods so that it can enter the bloodstream.”

This makes sense at so many levels, because since I started fermenting I’ve noticed that the most iron-rich foods are the ones that taste the best in combination with some type of fermentation.  Examples?  Pancakes made from wheat flour soaked in buttermilk.  Steak with fermented banana peppers on top.  Sausages and sauerkraut.

Naturally, this book has inspired me to think about whether we could have a small root cellar.  We don’t produce a ton of stuff, but even having some extra kraut storage-space during the winter would be nice.  I already have a spot in mind: there’s a closet under the basement steps that always stays pretty cold in the winter anyway, and right now it is literally filled with old junk.  I am going to investigate it this winter to see how cold it really gets, to gauge how much work it would be to change it into a real cellar.  Add that to the list of to-do’s for 2010 I guess…  Damn that list is long already.

Different fermentation method

We’re making a new batch of sauerkraut right now, and it’s our biggest batch ever: 5.5 quarts.  My normal method, while the kraut is fermenting, is to keep the jar tightly sealed, and open it about twice a day and let out the built-up gas and push down on the cabbage a bit.  If you don’t do this, the lids can literally blow right off, from the pent-up gas.  It’s happened to me.

No problem when you’re making one quart, but with five it starts to be a burden to open each one twice a day.  So I’m fermenting these the old-fashioned way:

I have a plastic jug filled with water holding the cabbage under the surface of the liquid in each jar.  Air bubbles can easily escape, and I pretty much do absolutely nothing except wait for it to get sour enough.  I have the jars sitting in a cake pan in case they froth over a little bit.  (Can you see the froth on the right-hand one?)

We’ll see how this goes… it’s been going for 2 days only so the smell is not a factor yet.  It might get bad though.  I have it in a very cool spot in the dining room so this is going to be a long, slow ferment.  I’m also keeping a flour sack towel over all of them to keep out dust, dog hair, etc.

We’ll see if I get mold, a common complaint when people ferment with this method.  It’s nothing more than a nuisance; you just scrape it off and throw it away when you’re transferring your kraut to cold storage.

Update, 10/29/2009: It turned out great!