How Do You Eat 12 Pounds of Sauerkraut?

...One cookout at a time.  Earlier this year, I posted on our sauerkraut experiment.  I'm sure you were pulling your hair out, anticipating some resolution.  Rest assured, here is your update - success! There was some initial skepticism, but the kraut really mellowed out as it continued to ferment.   As mentioned in the first post, I don't fancy myself a sauerkraut eater.  However, I do see the health benefits in the fermented food.  And if we were really on our own, their would likely be a lot of fermented cabbage in our pantry as it keeps for a long time and it's easy to grow.  So, my pragmatic brain has evidently wooed my skeptical pallet.  Here's the recipe Allison referenced:

12 lbs. green cabbage
3 sour apples
2 medium onions
4ish bay leaves
1/4 tsp caraways seeds
a half dozen juniper berries
some sea salt

I'll pile it on a bratwurst (Goose the Market or Kincaids' if you will) and wash it down with a pale ale or lager.  I think it has a rather mild taste with just a little bite at the end due in part, I think, to the sour apples.  It's not really at all overpowering.  Oh, and did I mention we have twelve pounds of it?  So, you only have to make a passing mention about it the next time you see us and we'll send you home with a fermented cabbage.

Ferment Navidad

The ceramic prevents saturation

Christmas is the time for giving two types of gifts.  Option one is the boring, yet thoughtful, gift card.  We all give them and if the relationship calls for it, the gift card suffices.  The other gift is reserved for the persons in your life that consciously or unconsciously demand you give them an actual gift.  This gift can't be a specific item found on an Amazon wish list or explicitly circled in an newspaper advertisement.  These gifts don't always hit their intended mark.  So, when they do it really makes you smile.  I took a chance this Chistmas on a fermenting pot for my wife and it was a success.

This gift was an attempt to connect with my wife over cabbage.  The way I see it, a marriage built on cabbage is a marriage built on solid rock. It's an old wives tale that I am making up right now.  She's the only person I know to eat raw cabbage by the wedge.  Crazy, I know.  Nonetheless,  I thought this gift could help me see the light by way of sauerkraut.  I don't go crazy over the stuff, but I do occasionally enjoy it. 

The gift itself is a 4 gallon ceramic pot with 4 lbs. stone weights.  You put your mash in the pot, press it down with the stone and ensure it's all submerged in water.

The stone weights are placed on the mash

This particular pot also has a lip at the top of the pot to pour a little bit of water around the lid.  This creates a seal necessary to the fermenting process.





The benefits around consuming fermented foods are well documented (here, here, and here).  Improved digestion, increased vitamins, and an increased shelf life of fresh, raw food are all great reasons to include fermentation in our quest for healthier living.  It is becoming apparent to me that any family plan to maintain diverse, interesting, and healthy eating behavior should include some degree of fermented food.

The water reservoir that creates the seal

So, the holiday season ends but our fermenting adventures continue.  The Fords will thrive with good bacteria growing in our bellies.  And I am one step closer to throwing a wedge of raw cabbage into my lunch bag. Well, maybe not.  We'll keep you posted on our first batch of cabbage and if you're interested, we'd be happy to share the fruits of our labors as well as any tips.  cheers!

Summer Growing: A Post-Game Wrap-Up

It's finally cold enough that part of our garden can be dismantled.  It's hard to believe that we are still picking greens, kholrabri, and turnips (blech). Garden in the ground?  Oh it must be Thanksgiving, right?  That makes perfect sense.  With this late, warm fall finally coming to a close, I thought I would recap some of this season's green thumb farmer adventures.


Humility Through Hops
My mother-in-law's words haunt this experiment.  "I've got a hops vine in my yard and its impossible to kill", she said.  It was a bittersweet feeling proving her wrong.  As I alluded to in an earlier post this spring, I did not end up having much luck with the hops.  There were two significant logistical hurdles that could not be overcome including the unusually wet spring and my hops field location.    

The most significant challenge, by far, was the unusually long, wet spring.  The problem I discovered was that the above average rainfall created a large period of time for my rhizomes to sit in our cool, damp refrigerator.  Prolonged exposure to these conditions promotes rotting and that is exactly what I experienced.  That being said, well over 75% were unaffected.  Still, that starts chipping away at this project's success.

My hops sources told me that the rhizomes really had to be in the ground, at the latest, by mid May.  My mail order rhizomes were available for pick-up in late March. I thought maybe they ought to be placed in some soil to preserve them while they sat in my refrigerator, but that is ill advised.  Everything I was told or read said that the soil would trigger the growth and rooting in the rhizomes.  While in this fragile state, the chance of survival would be negatively impacted when transplanted to the ground.  So, they sat and sat in the refrigerator.  I threw caution to the wind and finally planted them as they were just going to rot in the refrigerator if I'd waited till early June, when it was finally dry and appropriate for planting.  As expected, the soil was too wet and dense and therefore not conducive for growing anything, let alone a resilient hops plant.

My other logistical issue was geography.  I'm only an hour and ten minutes, door to door, to my parent's farm and location of my hops experiment.  That is assuming no rush hour traffic, accidents, but at an appropriate speed limit.  If you've spent any time on I-69 north of Indianapolis, this is not always a safe assumption.  It's not far, until I need to be there consecutive days during the week.  Early on, I really needed to be there for multiple days a week to water and weed.  I also needed to be tending to the  during those few days when the vines needed training.  These needs won't always manifest on a weekend, the only available time I really have to warrant a trip to the farm.  If this was my backyard, growing hops would be easier.  But you've seen my back yard in earlier posts. It's not large and it's currently occupied - and not by that social movement!

Will I give the hops another chance this next spring? The poles are in the ground and there will be turned soil at my disposal.  So in that regard, there'd be less work.  I could also likely assume that next spring would experience average precipitation.  However, I still have this geographic problem with my field.  One could also look back and say, "what the hell were you doing?"  with your second baby due in May and a Masters thesis you weren't interested in touching.  Let's leave that alone, shall we?  I still have that thesis to complete.  So, I'll be generous and consider my hops experiment a game time decision next spring.

Backyard Chickens

Remember this extreme nester?

Here we have another project conducted right around the time we had our second baby.  Regardless, our chickens are a success.  For a couple of months now, we've had a steady stream of eggs.  Comparing the hops experiment to the backyard chickens, it becomes clear that you really have to be within close proximity to these sorts of experiments.  Everything that needs tending is conveniently tucked away in the corner of the yard.  I'm going to need to be close to this project in the winter, what with battling freezing drinking water and potentially heat in the shithouse coop.  I use the term shithouse in that it's a kids toy outhouse re-purposed as a chicken coop and not a reference to its craftsmanship.  Anyway, the chickens are a home run.




The Garden
Finishing at around the .320 mark was this year's garden.   It could be characterized as a handful of wins and losses.  This year, The biggest winners were the leafy greens.  The spring planting was really fantastic.  For weeks, we had great tasting spinach, greens, and different varieties of lettuce.  We even got a second, albeit less bountiful, late season crop.   Our kohlrabi was good.  Our bell peppers were a hit. The tomatoes and beans were not very successful.  That's too bad as I really like tomatoes.

We had a variety of  bell pepper colors

Lot's of lettuce!

What's next?
With two of three agricultural projects success, I consider this growing season a win.  I'm already thinking about next year.  I'm considering backyard bees tucked away somewhere in our 'spacious' yard.  We'll probably spend some time figuring out how we could organically maximize tomato yields.  Also likely is an annex to la casa de polio.  I've also been interested in cold frames.  Or perhaps even some grander scheming I've been mulling around in my head.  There's so much experimentation and technique refining that I wish I could quit my job in order to free up more time.   The future is bright!

Enough Salsa Already: Homemade Hot Sauce pt.1

Year to year, it seems we have a rotating cast of vegetables that flourish. That is, except our peppers. Even I can't kill a pepper plant. These things produce so many peppers that, after our fourth batch of salsa, we often compost the rest as we just can't use them all. I don't know why we end up planting such a variety of hot pepper plants. I suppose we have the room, they're inexpensive, and as mentioned above, they're pretty hearty. This year, I came across a recipe to make homemade hot sauce. I'm getting old and have a waning thirst for spicey food, but I'm in if it means less salsa in my life.

I picked a combination of cayenne, habanero, and jalapeno peppers from the garden. The recipe article I was using mentioned that greener peppers might dampen the hotness. These green peppers are fresh jalapenos, so I'm expecting a decent punch.


I cut the stems off of the peppers and left the seeds inside before putting them into the food processor. These peppers above produced a cup of processed mash. I poured the contents into a glass container, added a teaspoon and a half of salt.


I mixed my ingredients and pressed them into the bottom of the container. The idea is that this would bring water to the top of the mixture. I need this stuff to ferment, so this layer of water acts as a seal to promote this fermentation. I did end up having to add some additional water to create this liquid layer. So now, I sit it and forget it for about a month. Stay tuned for part 2.