Dinner From the Good Earth.

[heavyhitterokra]

Dinner from the Good Earth

This is a thread created, to share recipes, and ideas about how to get more out of your homegrown food items.

I was feeling 'industrious' today, after having spent all day yesterday cutting brush and cleaning out old blackberry beds, pruning old grapevines, and pruning old peach trees. 

While digging out the roots of several small trees, I got the idea of making a shepherd's crook to aid in walking my Cotton Patch Geese.  I've got one old goose who when she gets it in her head to walk the other way, will defy any attempt to nudge her back into line using a regular walking stick.  If I attempt to block her, she'll just push right through or simply jump my walking stick. (I really need a stick with a crook formed on the end!)

While working on that project, I worked up quite an appetite, but because I had been outside working all day long, I had neglected to fix anything for dinner ...  So, it was cold bologna sandwiches for me last night.

Not so, tonight though!  Yesterday evening, I took the opportunity to fetch a 3 pound Butt Pork roast from the freezer and set it in a bucket of hot water, by the woodstove to thaw.  While it was thawing, I built a fire in the smoker.  By the time the fire was built, the meat was ready to begin marinating in soy sauce.

I don't use any charcoal in my smoker.  I just split seasoned oak using an ax, and build a fire from scratch each time, then as the coals begin to accumulate (about 20 minutes later) I add year old, dead pecan and a small amount of year old hickory.

When the fire has cooled to about 300 degrees, I put my meat on to smoke and basically just forget it.  At that point, the fire can only get cooler as the night passes, leaving my meat well flavored and heated through by morning.

By this morning, the meat had picked up a wonderful smoked flavor and was added straight to a crock pot full of tiny potatoes about the size of walnuts, some, maybe a little bigger.  There are about 20 or 30 of them in there.

To that, I added about half a gallon of water, one cup of soy sauce, a generous dash of fajita seasoning, and a few freshly dug cloves of garlic from all the uprooting I did yesterday to remove so many sprouts from the fencerow in my garden.  (In removing the sprouts, I inadvertently uprooted several cloves of garlic), so I thought I might as well use them.

While that was cooking, I rolled out some pie dough and diced up a few winter stored pears for a quick pie, then covered it with a second crust.

Later tonight, I'll probably bake a few cookies, but for now, I'm just boiling a kettle of hot water to cook tea from about 30 Roselle calyces to go with dinner.  i prefer sweetened Roselle tea, over pouring a glass wine that I do not enjoy the taste of nearly as much.

In doing all this, I realized most everything I had prepared to set on our table today, has come directly from our farm.  The pork was from one of the three hogs that George and I butchered last Autumn, the potatoes were from the garden (We dug about 250 pounds of them to put in storage, back in July).  They were Kennebecs and are still fresh and crisp, from being stored under a foot deep pile of oak leaves all Winter. The garlic was from my berry patch, the Roselle was some I had dried last Summer.  I dried enough to make 15 gallons of tea and now, (we are on our last gallon jar of dried calyces).  Even the water I had used to cook with was from our own water well.

For dessert, our pears came from the refrigerator where I had stored them all Winter in my Summer kitchen.  If I had room on my table for more, I'd bake a sweet potato pie from the sweet potatoes I have stored in a wooden basket in a cool dark corner of my kitchen, but I'll have to save that for another day, or else invite guests over to help me eat all this.

Days like today make me glad I have kids to help me take care of any leftovers.  I'll be eating pulled pork sandwiches for the rest of the week.   

Lots better than eating snowballs though.  All that hard work we did last Autumn is paying off in Spades right now! 

Thank you, God, for the wonderful bounty.  It's good to know no man has profited off my existence today, save for the guy who sells propane to run my oven and the guy who gens the electricity to run my crock pot for another day.

Five acre homesteading and a small holder's share of livestock certainly is possible for one or two people to manage; and (In a good year) is capable of providing food for many more than that.  I sold over 900 pounds of fresh cut okra last Summer, as well as over 1,000 pounds of garden ripe tomatoes, a couple hundred pounds of turnips, several bushel baskets of fresh Roselle, about a hundred pounds of pears, a few eggs, and still had enough left over to Winter my family in good standing until Spring greens and morel mushrooms start coming on.  I also put up 21 pints of elderberry elixir, for the cold and flu season last Summer, and stuffed a full size pillow with tufts of Rabbit Tobacco gathered from the plants I found growing along our country lane.   

A guy couldn't ask for any better feeling than that.

[macmex]

Ron, 
    If you hear a rumbling in the distance, that might be from all the folk who head to your place to mooch! Sounds so wonderful!

[heavyhitterokra]

 Send 'em on over.  I'll be here, ready and waiting with a pear pie in hand. 

[heavyhitterokra]

How to Feel Better,
by Setting Small Goals

This is an excerpt from the New York Times Cooking section. It's really good advice.

Good morning. The organizational psychologist Adam Grant wrote a fascinating piece for The Times this week about languishing, which he calls the forgotten middle child of mental health: a state of void that isn’t burnout, nor depression, but a kind of joyless aimlessness. He thinks it might be the dominant emotion of 2021.

Languishing is a tough condition to combat, Grant says. It leaves us indifferent to our indifference. But once we know it’s there, it is possible, he argues, to drive it away and to march ourselves back toward flourishing healthiness. How? Give yourself some uninterrupted time and focus on a small goal, he says, and take on “a challenge that stretches your skills and heightens your resolve.”

My personal thoughts on that subject:

  Home gardening can help a person do that very thing. If you don't already have a tomato patch planned and a few shovelfuls of earth turned over, there is no better time than the present to do exactly that. It's amazing what a few homegrown vegetables can do for your psyche and for your resolve.

[heavyhitterokra]

I've had the "Blahs" all week. But today has been better. I've been keeping myself busy picking tomatoes, peeling potatoes, snapping green beans, chopping sweet peppers, and cooking up a big pot of homemade vegetable soup. Somehow, that always makes me feel better. Maybe, because it conjures such wonderful memories of my late mom and my grandma doing the same thing. I've been so fortunate to have enjoyed so many pots of homemade soup over the years!


 Thank you, God, for another boutiful summer from our home garden.

[chrysanthemum]

Bon, any chance you could add a few photos directly to the post above, please? The link isn’t allowing me in, and I’d love to see what you’re enjoying.

[macmex]

Thanks Bon! That sounds so good! I just read about your greasy rabbit when I sat down to eat my supper of... rabbit! Mine was oven baked though.

[chrysanthemum]

Wow, Bon. Those cabbage rolls and that rabbit looks so good. Thanks for posting the photos.

I fry and deep fry, but I had never heard of slow frying.

About a year ago we found a sale on an eight quart electric skillet. I have loved using that for frying okra and fish and chicken. I still need to do multiple batches if I’m doubling a recipe for leftovers or storage, but it is a help to be able to do larger quantities at one time for our family of six. It’s also nice because it has a thermostat built right in to the heating element. I had a candy thermometer that I used to use for deep frying, but it got oil inside it recently, and I didn’t feel comfortable using it again. I did like knowing the temperature of oil, though.

[heavyhitterokra]

Bon,

Thanks, for posting those photos of the fried rabbit. That was beautiful! Looks to me like you never needed a thermometer. You got that oil just right without one!  (Can you be my Mom?)

I'm the world's worst about putting any old kind of grease I have into a deep fryer skillet, then trying to guess at how hot is is getting by watching the smoking point, then backing it off some.

I found a pretty handy chart of temperature smoking points for various oils.  They are not all the same, so you have to kind of know your stuff when judging temperature by smoke points. The one that surprized me most was vegetable shortening.  The smoke point of that is almost as low as butter.
(Pardon my editing skills they are not the best).

Type of Fat                     Smoke Point                     Neutral Flavor?*

Safflower Oil                   510°F/265°C                    Yes


Rice Bran Oil                   490°F/260°C                    Yes


Light/Refined Olive Oil      465°F/240°C                    Yes


Soybean Oil                     450°F/230°C                    Yes


Peanut Oil                        450°F/230°C                    Yes

 
Clarified Butter                 450°F/230°C                    No


Corn Oil                           450°F/230°C                    Yes


Sunflower Oil                    440°F/225°C                    Yes


Vegetable Oil                    400-450°F/205-230°C       Yes


Beef Tallow                       400°F/205°C                     No


Canola Oil                         400°F/205°C                    Yes


Grapeseed Oil                   390°F/195°C                     Yes


Lard                                 370°F/185°C                      No


Avocado Oil (Virgin)           375-400°F/190-205°C         No


Chicken Fat (Schmaltz)       375°F/190°C                      No


Duck Fat                             375°F/190°C                     No


Vegetable Shortening           360°F/180°C                     Yes


Sesame Oil                          350-410°F/175-210°C        No


Butter                                 350°F/175°C                      No


Coconut Oil                          350°F/175°C                      No


Extra-Virgin Olive Oil            325-375°F/165-190°C         No

[heavyhitterokra]

Deep frying can be a dangerous task. When my daughter was a teenager, she set a skillet full of grease on fire at her brother's apartment once. He had a faulty electric stove with no temperature shut-off on one of the burners. Everyone in his household knew about it, but she was just visiting and no one there told her. They were all gone somewhere and she decided to deep fry something. I suppose she never heard of throwing a cup full of salt and baking soda in a grease fire to put it out because she tried to carry the pan outside instead and didn't make it across the house.
(Thank goodness they had a concrete floor!)

She ended up melting a skillet-sized hole in the linoleum but didn't catch the house on fire.

Never throw flour in a grease fire. (Flour dust, agitated by the swirling heat of a grease fire will ignite, making matters much worse).



Back when I worked in prison, we had three commercial-size Frialators that burst into flames inside the institution's huge kitchen one night after hours. Each Frialator held 50 pounds of frying oil. They were all sitting side by side, so when one Frilator caught fire, the heat of it spread fire to the other two.  By the time it was over, there was about 150 pounds of burning frying oil involved.

One of the Frialators got left on at the end of the shift and had a faulty thermostat. When it didn't shut off at 400 degrees, it just kept getting hotter, and hotter, catching the grease on fire.  When this happened, the fire suppression system on the commercial hood did not work.

The person whose job it was to inspect the fire system had not tightened the coupling on the compressed Nitrogen bottle that is used to drive the fire suppressing powder inside the hood. Because of that, all of the compressed gas had leaked out. When the fire got hot enough to melt the actuator pins, there was no compressed gas left in the system to drive the powder dump to extinguish the fire.

Since the fire hood was not functioning, someone called the Haskell volunteer Fire Department to come help fight the fire. They showed up with nothing but a grass-fire rig to fight fire and ended up hosing the frialators with water. Naturally, the grease exploded into a giant fireball!  They must have looked like the Keystone Cops on fire patrol that night!  everything went wrong! 

Then, someone got on the P.A. and called for anyone on any unit, having a fire extinguisher to hurry and bring it to the kitchen A.S.A.P.! (There were over twenty fire extinguishers emptied that night... By the time they called me and I drove all the way back to work to see what had happened, there was not much left of the kitchen.

It was a concrete building with a steel roof, so it didn't hurt the structure, but the grease, the water, and the powdered fire extinguishers made the equipment unusable for the next few days.  It was cold bologna sandwiches for everyone the next few meals.  I stayed on duty that night and the next morning until it was cleaned up.  It was a long, long, shift!