Chicken Barley Chili

So on Sundays we've been trying to make bulk batches of food that is easily portioned for a week of packed lunches.   That way we both save money and eat a bit healthier since we're not eating out or resorting to heavily processed instant food.   This week is Chicken Barley Chili, made with left over black beans, chicken, and various stuff from the pantry:

 Simmering most of the ingredients while the chicken is cooked and then cut into pieces

  Finished pot of alternative chili.

Chickens enjoying the weather

With the weather fairly nice today, no snow or rain, they got to enjoy some time outside of their run.  They love scratching up the leaves to hunt for worms and bugs.

 Shelly and Dr. Teeth in the foreground, Sweetums and Rizzo in the back

1st batch of Homebrew is carbonated

The first batch of homebrew - an English IPA, is now carbonated after two weeks of bottle conditioning.  It still tastes a bit fresh, going to wait another week to crack open another.

Homemade Soup

15 Bean Soup-

Soaked a variety of dried beans overnight.  Then simmered with a ham hock for about 2 hours.  Then cut the meat off the bone and mixed in, along with red onions, tomatoes, green chillies, chilli powder, salt, pepper.  Simmered for another hour or so.  Then toasted up some of the homemade whey bread to eat along with it.

More birds in the yard

 Wren

 Black Capped Chickadee

 Sparrow

 Blue Jay

Titmouse

Snow Day!

YAY! First snow of 2012!

Hoosick LOVES the snow!

Snow Bird (aka Dark Eyed Junco)

Golden Finch

Another Snow Bird

Sparrow

Can you spot the three birds in the tree?

Weekend Update

Yesterday, J pulled out a container of frozen tomato sauce that I had put up over the summer. I decided to make ricotta and mozzarella cheeses and make baked ziti for dinner.

I had made mozzarella a few times before and it was good, but kind of plain. I decided to go to a local dairy and get some raw milk to use for the mozzarella and just used store bought milk for the ricotta.

Ricotta is pretty easy. Just add citric acid to the milk - it starts to curdle almost instantly.

Then heat and you have ricotta.

Drain off the whey

And - TA DA! You have ricotta. I drained out all the whey so I'm left with a very dry ricotta.

For the Mozzarella - Take your milk.

Add your citric acid.

Heat and add rennet (sorry for the blurry pic)

Cut the curd and heat again.

It should not be this gooey. I will need to adjust the recipe going forward with the raw milk.

But it still turned out a decent mozzarella. Definitely a LOT more flavor with the raw milk as opposed to store bought milk. (There is a picture missing of me stretching the curd)

Yummm. There is nothing like fresh tomato sauce in the middle of winter! Can't wait for summer to get here...

Baked ziti. The only things not homemade are the sausage and pasta noodles. J asked if the plan of eating fresh foods is going to include homemade pasta. After we clean out the pantry - it probably will!

Yard Work To-Dos for this Spring

1. Build three additional raised beds for veggies.

2. Build tee-pees for hops and gourds.

3. Build maypoles for beans.

4. Tie up raspberries and blackberries (bamboo doesn't work).

5. Build new chicken coop and run.

6. Build new compost bin.

7. Divide perennials - have a plant & seed swap.

8. Build bird netting over strawberry bed.

9. Build bird netting over veggie bed.

10. Buy and install (at least) one rain barrel.

Bottling Homebrew

Bottles are de-labeled and washed, ready for sanitation.

Bottle caps are sanitized


















Lid and airlock removed, final gravity was checked, the fermented beer is ready to be bottled

Priming sugar is dissolved in water to add to bottling bucket, for carbonating the bottles.

Siphoning line and bottle filler is sanitized

Siphoning the beer from the fermenting bucket into the bottling bucket.

Yeast cake left at the bottle of the fermenting bucket. Maybe next time I'll experiment with collecting and washing the yeast for re-use, but not this time.

Time to fill the bottles

And finally capping

Bottles should be carbonated and ready for drinking in a few weeks.

Cheese and Bread Making Day!

So, today was the first attempt at making a hard cheese. I've made mozzarella a few times and it's turned out pretty good. Great texture, but a little under salted each time I've made it.

Hard cheese, though, is a much more involved process and I've been wanting to do it for a while now. Finally went to the homebrew store yesterday and got the last few ingredients I needed. Decided to start with cheddar. I figure I'll choose a different cheese to make every weekend til I've used up the kit.

The farmers market was closed when we made it there yesterday, so I went with store bought milk.

This is what it looked like after all the cultures were added and it was heated. I was nervous that this was going to be screwed up from the start, because I allowed the milk to overheat by 10 degrees...

But the curds cut clean! YAY!

Had to let the curds heat up again, so that they shrink. Then I strained the curds out.

Here, the curds are hanging in cheese cloth to get more of the whey out.

After they hung, I added the cheese salt and broke up the curds a little.

By the way - the cheese is white. In order to get that ORANGE cheddar look, you need to add coloring. Jason doesn't like the look of orange cheese (thinks it looks cheap and fake) so we decided to stick with natural

coloring. Apparently, the type of milk you use will naturally change the color (a grass fed herd will produce a more creamy color than a grain fed herd). This is store bought milk, so it's pretty white.

Then, I packed the curds in the cheesecloth lined cheese mold.

So here is my homemade cheese press with just over 20 lbs of weight on top. It needs to sit like this for 24 hours, then air dry for a week, then cure for at least 8 weeks and as long as 7 months. The longer you age, the stronger the cheese.

There was SO much whey leftover. I tried to make ricotta from it, but I didn't catch much, I

don't think my cheesecloth was fine enough...

I feel bad wasting it all, so I made whey BREAD! YUMM!

4 Loaves! The big round one is a cheese loaf (not homemade cheese...), two of the loaves are garlic and the other is plain.

Needless to say, I'm pooped. 2 lbs of cheese and 4 loaves of bread, plus I got all the christmas decorations down and packed up. Nice to have a productive day!!