Leftovers

In case you're wondering what to do with all that leftover turkey, here's my suggestion:

stock.


Simmer the carcass (bones, whatever meat you couldn't get off the thing, skin, etc.) for as long as you can stand the smell in your house - I'd go for overnight.

Ladle off the broth and yummy meat bits into ziplock bags (seriously -it's the easiest storage option for the freezer. It won't burst on you and if you forget to get it out to thaw in the morning (which I always do), you'll be able to get the frozen stock out of the bag easily). Then stack them in the freezer and voila!

Now, when you're sick, you have something quick that doesn't come in a can.

Yum!

Hard Cider - the recipe

Materials

Fresh-pressed, sweet cider. check that there's no preservatives, because that stuff works, and you're trying to rot your cider, not keep it fresh.

The easy way:
A jug
cheesecloth
a rubberband (to hold the cheeseloth over the mouth of the jug)

The fancy way: (you can get it all from a home-brew place)
A brewing bucket/carboy
airlock
campden tablets
yeast nutrient
a gravity-measuring device (for knowing how strong yer drink is!)
wine yeast
siphon (if you're going really fancy)
bottles and associated accouterments


The easy way (taken from the one, the only, Sandor Ellix Katz who brought you the definitive Wild Fermentation*:

Put your cider in a jug/jar/whatever. Cover the mouth of the jug with cheesecloth so nothing but wild yeasties get in, and wait. taste from day to day. Sandor says that in one week you should have a good, alcoholic, bubbly hard cider. But be careful - if you wait too long you'll have no choice but to let it become vinegar because it'll be well on its way. When it's done to your liking (tastes alcoholic but not sour) put a lid on it and put it in the fridge! Share with friends, who will love you a little more after a few cup fulls.


The fancy way (supposedly this comes out better and harder - also, it's more easy to manipulate and keep clean. this is the method I'm using):

A note up-front - know your ingredients. If your campden tablets say one thing, and I'm saying something else, use the information on your tablets. If you're not sure, ask someone who knows. There's bound to be a home brewing store somewhere around you. Ask around and you'll find it. If not, ask a farm stand that has sweet cider. they might home brew their own hard cider and be able to give you pointers.

Measure your gravity. (do this be reading the instructions on your gravity-measuring device (I'm sure it has a name, but I've forgotten it)). Record it in your homebrew journal, or wherever you keep numbers you'll need to know in two weeks. basically, you're figuring out the sugar-to-water ratio in your cider which will tell you just how alcoholic your brew can get, since yeast converts sugar to alcohol. The more sugar, the more alcohol. Or, if you like bitch drinks, the sweeter and less alcoholic.

Prepare a yeast starter (like you would for bread, but with sugar and no flour). 1 cup warm water, 2 tablespoons sugar, the yeast, and my recipe (from the homebrew store in town) called for citric acid. I had no citric acid, so I used a squeeze of lemon, and it seems to be working fine. Also, I'm skeptical of how much this bit of acid is actually necessary (but don't exclude it just because of my speculations - let me know if you've heard something on this topic). Cover and set aside for 24 hours.

Empty your cider into your brew bucket/carboy. Wherever you're starting your brewing (probably the bucket). Now throw in some yeast nutrient (about 1 teaspoon per gallon of cider) and Campden tablets (crushed). 3 pills for 5 gallons were my instructions. Also, if you're going to add more sugar, now would be the time to do it. Cover and set aside for 24 hours.

...wait 24 hours (remember: a watched pot never boils)...

You're through waiting! Now stir the hell out of your cider until it's frothy on top to get any sulfites that might be hanging around out of it. once it's really stirred up, throw in your yeast nutrient (common-sense yeast etiquette: your liquid should be room-temp - yeast doesn't like the cold), cover your bucket, put on the airlock (don't forget to fill it with water like I did!), and put it somewhere safe and with steady temperatures.

If you don't have steady temperatures (like me), put your brew up on a stool (off the cold floor) and wrap it in a blanket. This will at least moderate the swings in temperatures.

...wait 2 weeks, or until the bubbles stop in your airlock...

Now either rack into bottles and fridge it, or siphon into a carboy for clarification and continuing fermentation. I haven't gotten to this part yet, so I can't tell you how to do it. I'll update you when I get there.


Conclusion:
Painless, no? And you thought home brewing was hard!



*I truly believe that this book will become a must-have classic. Get your limited first editions now! In neon green and hot pink, this ugly little book will be a sure-fire crowd pleaser in twenty or thirty years when they're in multiple editions and have chosen a more attractive cover. the coveted, ugly first edition will be a marvel to behold. That and it's a damn good book - what's stopping you?

Finding the Reasons

I hope you, my faithful readers, whether you are in New York City or on a farm somewhere, don't fool yourself thinking it's easy or romantic to get home after 8 hours of mind-numbing (but reasonably purposeful) work only to load up firewood into a cold, black, sooty furnace that makes the house smell of slightly rotten baked beans, with a pile of dishes accumulated after 2 days of home-cooked, from-scratch meals, in a kitchen stacked high with vegetables calling me to freeze, brine, or bury them in sawdust. All I want to do when i get home is load up the wood into the stove and sit next to it on the floor with the cat in my lap, in the little halo of its sunspot, drifting in and out of thoughts as the cat and I wait for the warmth to seep in. Sometimes, in the rare moment when I let myself sit like this by the stove - when the thoughts of long to-do lists don't drive me into the kitchen or the shed (after dark), and when loneliness doesn't rouse me to show up unannounced at a friend's door - It all does seem very wonderful and peaceful.

On days when I come home happy and motivated, doing the tasks I love to do, alone, with the hum of the radio in the background, is the simple joy of my life. It is my bread and butter. It doesn't matter that the sun is down and that I've spent 8 hours on someone else's dream.

But on nights like last night, I come home exhausted, incapable of comprehending how, after 8 hours of work, anyone can do anything other than sit with a friend, talk, sigh, and otherwise escape the incessant barrage of thoughts. On these nights the little things I love doing become huge tasks. I don't think we were meant to be solitary creatures. I know i wasn't. I love the time to myself when my thoughts are happy and calm - the decadence of calm and joy when my thoughts haven't been run to exhaustion by the endless project of daily tedium. As much as I love those nights, there are countless nights on which i would happily give it all up for a large-screen TV and enough money to consume my thoughts into submission.

But this project of mine - it's about something inherently different than consumption that drowns out the constant buzzing of my thoughts, the endless self-exploration of my life. As I listen to the steady hum of NPR, I find myself almost believing that the goal of the recession is to get back to the riches and gluttony from which we fumbled into this recession to begin with. Even as environmental groups say that the decrease of consumption is better to our precariously balanced world than rampant wealth. But we're not happy in this recession - even if less is the answer. Less of everything - less wealth, less money, less shopping, less opportunity to still our constantly-fretting minds. We've learned to still our minds with means outside of ourselves - with things we can purchase. Of course we need to still our minds. 8, 10, 15 hours a day of working on someone else's riches can't teach us to enjoy our own company. it's too exhausting, to daunting a task to come home from work, cook, clean, and then put up with our fretting about tomorrow, or next year, or heaven forbid, the tragedy that our lovely world is in. After a day like that - with all of the world to worry about, how do we just sit by the fire and enjoy the calm? We don't know how to anymore. It is too quiets. our thoughts feast on the demons of solitude and silence.

This project of mine, the small, self-contained and self-sustained life of homesteading - as unromantic as it is to admit - is basically a project of finding joy and peace in something other than financial wealth and consumption. To be completely blunt - it is a project of joyful, successful poverty. because what I love so much is doing the small things - and though it's not popular to admit it, I don't love homesteading tasks because they're green, or because they're philosophically fulfilling, but simply because they're what I love doing. Just as people make a career of what they love, I want to find a way to make my life focus around what I love. The only way to do all the things I love doing is to work less - and since the kind of things I do replace work, by providing directly for my needs in lieu of money, that's do-able - if I'm willing to admit to myself the very real trade-off: since I'm no trust-fund baby, working less means being paid less and consuming less. it means spending more time with people and with my thoughts and less time with new things, tv, fashion, magazines, tomatoes in winter, traveling, and stores. The project in this is to find the joy in it. The possibility of success in investing in my own idea of what it means to be happy. And to find a way, somehow, to be at peace in the tedium of daily tasks and work - to be at peace in my own thoughts in the silence of these tasks which occupy hands and hearts, but leave the brain to its humming.

Most of all, I have to learn to be comfortable with not having to apologize for choosing a lifestyle that is either difficult to understand or comes across as moralizing. I don't want my lifestyle to be moralizing. Or make people uncomfortable. I just want it to be how I live. And I hope that someone else enjoys it too, learns from it, and maybe takes part in making this world a bit saner, a bit greener, and more joyful.

(apple cider recipe will be the next blog post - I left it at home by mistake)

Apple Cider

Sunday was a beautifully warm day (in the 50's), sunny and still. it was a perfect day for the task at hand - pressing cider! My landlords have a beautiful apple press complete with a big ol' grinder. If you've never pressed cider, I really recommend it. We pressed 2 bushels, which gave us 3 1/2 gallons of cider.

I bought a bushel and a half of apple seconds (less-than perfect apples) from my favorite farmstand, and my friends brought over another half bushel. I paid $12 for my apples - a good price in exchange for complete devotion for the past 4 seasons. They're pretty far from me now, but I'm devoted to my farmstand, because they're good to me, because I've come to know them, and because they have wonderful fruit and are lovely people.

The press is in the icehouse (above my sleeping winter vegetables), out of the wind. The three of us women stayed in, quartering the apples, while our one male fellow-presser went out to clean the cider press. There's very little I love more than women gathering over a traditional task. It's easy to talk, hands are occupied, the sun streams in, and it's hard to imagine something more peaceful than performing the basic tasks of sustenance with friends.

When we were done we loaded the apples (in trash bags) into a wheel barrow, brought it to the icehouse, and ran them through the grinder, then moved the bucket over and pressed the juice out of the milled apples. We got the hang of it the second time around. 4 people was the perfect number - one to monitor the flow and keep things steady, one to turn the mechanism, then two to turn once it gets hard (with a much larger stick for leverage) and one person to keep the press steady, since it's not bolted down. With switching and plenty of tasting and standing around it was wonderful. Remember towels (it's messy and wet and hands will get cold!) and gloves for the workers (to ward off blisters, or for heat - make sure they're work gloves. they'll get dirty).

When we were done and the dry apples were in the compost I said goodbye to my friends and took apart the press and washed it in the stream, since I don't know where the hose is, and it was a readily available source of water. It's very easy to wash wood in the deep, dammed up stream, since the water is still and the wood floats, so it's just a matter of dunking and running a rag over everything. The water was terribly cold, but with the sun starting to set (at 4!!) over the catskills and a good day of work and friends to think over, it was a lovely way to put to rest the first part of my day.

I strained the cider through cheesecloth and hung the pulp to drip over the cider so as not to waste anything. The I poured 2 1/2 gallons into a home brewing bucket for hard cider, and reserved a gallon of sweet cider to bring to the family for thanksgiving.

Hard Cider Recipe on the way.

Winter, Again

The veggies are packed in their boxes, moist, cold, and ready to go into the cellar. they've been ready for two days now. I found out that the other agway nearby is open until 6, so that solved my problem (in case you're wondering - some small woodlots might carry wood shavings, but most sell them now, which is why I buy the stuff rather than sourcing it for free). The veggies going into the cellar tonight with the help of a friend who doesn't know he's going to help me with this task. It's not that I can't carry the boxes. It's that I can't get the cellar door open myself. it's too heavy for me - though I clearly remember opening it once before myself. For future reference - it's actually a bad idea to leave veggies out in the mild temperatures without high humidity for this long - but I had no choice, so I hope they'll be forgiving. In my experience, so long as you don't really mess up, it'll be fine.

When storing veggies, you should expect a 5 - 10% loss of veggies over the course of the winter due to rot or other problems. Check the vegetable regular and cull out bad ones because mold spreads! As for the balance of eating the stuff that's spoiling or eating the fresh stuff - it depends on the mood of the day. sometimes I get sick of eating only the worst veggies, so I let a few go bad and eat the nice ones. Sometimes I'm more sensible and eat the molding ones..


*******
Winter, Again - and poetry:


Excluding me, there's only one other person I can think of off the top of my head whose favorite season is winter. I can understand what's not to like - it's cold, dark, and (most would say, and I would argue it's not so) you're stuck indoors. Driving is difficult.

But to me winter is when the air is the clearest. Winter is bright stars and a clear view of the mountains. It's a dramatically beautiful and changing landscape. Winter is walking through the forest in bright orange without being stopped by underbrush. It is stews, cuddling under heavy blankets, and long nights talking with friends. Winter is incredibly cozy. It's the season to read, bake, and dream. Everyone told me I'd get over winter once I started driving. That kind of sensibility has yet to kick in. Or, rather, that it seems silly to me to hate a season for such an arbitrary and small reason. Plus, getting stuck is an adventure. it's something new.

For me, winter is the season of writing. (Please realize how hard it is for me to just put the poem down without disclaimers - but no disclaimers (except this one)! They don't help!)


Winter, Again
11/20/09

It is winter
again.
The trees have given way to
mountainsides - soft waves -
hips, shoulder blades - pale
beneath the naked trees.

It is impossible not
to lose myself in last
winter. Ice in floes
on the lake, the same smell
of the stove.

When you loved
winter too.
The way you spoke
of you -
subtle silences of breath hanging
in the air.

It is impossible now
to remember what spring was -
how her flowers dried in the
strange heat, when the mountains

dressed themselves, hid
their secret stones beneath young
leaves uncurling, forgetting
that we both loved

winter -
subtle silence
the waves in the hills.

Winter Color

As fall gives way to winter and the gray gets grayer and the dark gets darker, I start craving color in my life. Short of buying fresh bouquets every week, there is a very easy way to forage up some winter color, and it's a great, covert way to store food.

Foraged winter bouquets:

1 - sumac and goldenrod

My favorite bouquet by far is the one I made of sumac and goldenrod. Find yourself some Staghorn Sumac, which you will find on tree-like shrubs pretty much anywhere on the edge of a forest and a field, including roadsides. You'll know it by the burgundy cluster of tiny, tightly-packed, fuzzy fruit forming an upright point (we call them 'red points' sometimes). Get some pruning sheers and cut the stems with the fruit at the end as long as you can get them (they'll be about 3 feet tall). Then go get some goldenrod which should be taking over an old field or the space right at the edge of a cultivated area. Goldenrod is yellow in late summer, and this time of year it's puffy smoke-color. Cut it to the same length as the sumac.

Bring it inside and arrange! I stood up my bouquet of about 5 branches of sumac (some Y-shaped, some not) and 7-8 goldenrod stems in the corner of my dining nook (it's not really a room) in an extra stand for fireplace tools I had lying around. Don't add water - this is a dry bouquet. Now you have dark red in your life!

Sumac makes a delicious lemonade-like drink if squeezed in water and mixed with sugar. You can also steep it as a tea. I intend to mix some sumac juice into my cranberry sauce this Thanksgiving. And now I have some conveniently lying around, though the bouquet is so pretty I think I'm not going to use that sumac, but harvest some more instead.


2 - rosehips

this one is really easy. Go out into the woods and find a wild rose (aka multiflora). They're EVERYWHERE. cut off some stems with the fattest, redest rosehips (be careful of the thorns). If you want, cut off the thorns for easier handling, and then put as many as you can get in a vase and you're done! Again, no water.

Rosehips are an excellent source of vitamin C. I crack them open into my tea. You can also make a painstakingly annoying jam or jelly out of it, if you're so inclined.


Both bouquets should stand fine through the winter. You can also add color with bright red chili peppers braided in the kitchen, wreaths, and dried flowers.


pictures and the continuation of the root cellar saga soon.

Sawdust

In case you're wondering where you can buy sawdust to store your veggies in (the kind of sawdust you would find in a hamster cage), the answer is - nowhere that's open after 5. Agway definitely carries it, but they close at 5. Both stores.

I tried the hardware store 30 minutes south that's actually open until 7 - no luck. I tried the large grocery store that has a whole aisle of pet products - ditto. So no vegetable storing tonight. With temperatures going into the upper 20's, I can't figure what to do with the box of parsnips and carrots in my shed. Wrapped in blankets, they were okay last night. Parsnips and carrots both do fine in the garden through the winter, but would they be fine in a box? Having never discovered an accidental frozen carrot, I really have no idea. And I don't even know how to begin googling the question (and none of my books have the information).

So it's cleaning for me. And maybe, just maybe, after all that driving I'll actually get to making pickles. It'll probably just be a short night of knitting though.