Pot Cozy Cooking

While getting ready for our backpacking trip, I stumbled on this guy’s idea for easy, no-clean cooking while backpacking. His blog is Erik the Black’s Backpacking Blog and it is great if you want to experience the great outdoors on foot! I always love easy cooking while on vacation and this idea proved to be a winner!

It is so much easier to relax and enjoy scenery like this when you aren’t cooking and doing dishes three times a day!

First you buy a sunshade for your car and make a pot cozy for your backpacking cookpot. The directions on how to do it are HERE. It works so well and saves a lot of fuel you normally use for cooking. This year it was even more important as there is a statewide burn ban, so no campfires!

He also tells you how to cook using your new pot cozy. I chose the freezer bag method and it was amazing!

Just boil your water in the pot, pour your dried food into a freezer bag, dump in the boiling water, seal up the bag, place it back in the pot, put on the lid, stick it in your pot cozy and wait 15 to 20 minutes! Dinner is served…

A delicious supper with no nasty cooking pot to clean!

Sausage Basics

It’s our family tradition to get together with our dear friends every year on New Year’s Day. This year school starts on the 2nd, so we got together to celebrate a bit early. This year’s theme was sausage!

We picked up 80 pounds of pork butt and made our own 7 varieties of homemade sausages! Wow!

Here are some basic steps to remember in making sausage:

*Keep everything VERY cold! The meat, the grinder, everything! If you are doing large quantities, wrap ice packs on the grinder between batches of meat. Be sure to put the meat immediately on ice or in the fridge after grinding.

It is amazing how much fat is in a slab of pork butt yet how lean the sausage is! It also makes you wonder just how much fat they put in grocery store sausage??? Ugh!

*Find a recipe and prepare your seasonings. If it calls for larger spices, it’s nice to put them in a grinder or use a mortar & pestle. It brings out the flavor of the spices.

 Spicy Italian seasonings

*Mix the seasonings in with the meat and place immediately back on ice or in fridge!

 this mixer could mix up to 20 pounds but your KitchenAid mixer works well for smaller batches

*Cook up a bit to see if you like the finished product and tweak the recipe as you need. Add more spice or more meat to make it milder or more spicy.

*Now if you’re going to stuff your sausages, you will need casings and the stuffer attachment on your grinder.

Learn how to prep your casings here at The Sausage Maker.

Make an agreement on the sausage stuffing jokes. Either you can make all you want or make none at all. I just couldn’t not make one tiny little joke. ;o)

*Be sure to leave space at either end of your casings for room to twist your sausages. Twist them in reverse directions to they don’t unwind themselves.

 

making link sausages (no jokes please!) LOL

*It’s also way more fun and way less work to do with good friends!

NO! We didn’t eat all 80 pounds for dinner! Our fridge is full of over 40 pounds of sausage and smells like a German deli… ;o)

It was a very fun evening! Now we just have to decide what kinds to make next time???

Cleaning Bottles

Whether we like it or not the holidays mean cleaning… You have company over, you’re gonna clean.

I’ve been making my own cleaners for 4 1/2 years now and every single time I still have to look up the recipe in my little black binder. You’d think by now I’d have them memorized but my brain is getting a little full over the years and I think it’s running out of space.

If you’re curious about what those recipes are, you can find my recipes HERE.

I also realized that after 4 1/2 years my spray bottles were looking pretty sad. Some were cracked, some were broken and most were barely hanging on. So I splurged and bought all new for the holiday cleaning!

While I was labeling all the bottles and getting ready to fill them with all new cleaners (and looking up all the recipes again…), I had this ingenious idea! Why not write the recipes on the outside of the bottles???

So that’s precisely what I did!

Yup, I should have gotten that idea a LONG time ago!

Canning Cider

My boys have pressed cider with our friends every year for 6 years now! But this year they broke a record: 120 gallons!!!

The best part??? We didn’t have to buy any apples! It was a very good year for apples around here!

We brought home 22 gallons this year! I canned 10 gallons and froze the rest…

It turned out brilliantly! I love the way the jars of cider look in the sunshine! And it is so easy to do!

  

To can cider all you have to do is heat it to 190 degrees for 10 minutes, pour into hot sterilized jars with 1/4” headspace, top with prepped lids and process in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes for quarts and 15 for 1/2 gallons. Super easy!

Making cider however is a whole different ball game. I’ve had people ask how we do it, so here it goes… (these are pics from last year. It was raining too hard and they were too busy to take pictures this year!)

First you need LOTS of apples!

This year’s apples weren’t nearly so pretty!

Then you wash them.

  

Then they go into the grinder part of the press to get made into mush! This part is messy and lots of work!

Then all the pulp gets moved over to the press to get squeezed… (they are doing both jobs simultaneously in the above pictures)

 You can see the cider pouring into the black pot from the press

After the pot is full of cider, you pour it through cheesecloth to strain out any remaining pulp.

Then pour into clean containers, leaving plenty of head space if freezing. Do not use old milk jugs! You can not clean them out well enough!

The hardest part??? Clean up! Do this job outside because you want to clean up with a hose! Everything is a sticky mess! But it smells fantastic!!!

What do you do with all the left over pressed pulp??? And there will be LOTS of it! Spread it over your garden. It makes wonderful mulch!

Then take your cider home and chill it… It will need to be frozen and/or canned as soon as possible! It turns to vinegar before you know it!

Goat’s Milk Soap

Yesterday I had friends over and we made almost 70 more bars of soap! I don’t know if I will need to make soap again for a while now and it kind of makes me sad… :o(  We even had fresh goat’s milk to try a milk soap recipe! It turned out so nice that I am really excited to try it with canned coconut milk next! But I think it will need to wait for at least a little while.

I have to confess that for a long time I was afraid our little batch of milk soap was going to be a complete and utter disaster! You should have seen it… but it pulled through and turned out just lovely! It even has a bit of a swirled or marbled look to it.

The recipe is from Soap Making Essentials but I did a bit of modifications and substitutions and my method is a bit different, too. If you want to stick with the original, go HERE.

I wouldn’t recommend this if you are a novice. You need to be familiar with the steps and how your finished product should look before tackling this one. I wish I had taken pictures of all the stages, but I honestly didn’t think it was going to work.

But here is my version:

*The recipe is easier to measure if you use grams. So this recipe is in grams, except for the lye. Sorry to make it so confusing, but it really is easier this way. But watch out! Grams are really tiny!!! ;o)

270 grams coconut oil

315 grams olive oil

45 grams castor oil

180 grams palm oil or lard

90 grams shea or cocoa butter

215 grams distilled water

100 grams fresh goat milk

4.5 ounces lye

Follow my basic crock pot directions with pictures HERE.

First melt all of your oils in your crock pot on high heat.

Stir your lye into the distilled water until dissolved.

Carefully pour into the hot oils in crock pot.

Mix with stick blender (keep in touching the bottom to prevent splattering) until it reaches a light trace. It will just barely hold a line behind the blender.

Slowly mix in the goat milk.

This is where it may get kind of funky.

It will go through all kinds of stages that may not seem normal. Ours was VERY separated and thin almost the entire time. Just keep it covered while cooking and be sure to check it and stir it every so often. Don’t worry, it will get done eventually. Ours cooked about an hour before it was done!

When it starts to look thick and dry (not oily), take out a small amount and place it on a plate to cool. If it becomes hard and soapy as it cools (much like wax does), it is ready for the tongue test.

Place the small piece of soap lightly on the side of your tongue. If it zings (like licking a 9-volt), it is not ready. If you don’t feel any zing, pour it into your parchment-lined mold.

Let cool and cut into bars. Cure in the air for at least two weeks before using. The longer it cures the longer it lasts!

Crock Pot Soap

I totally ran out of soap! Thankfully, I didn’t have to buy any thanks to my friend April. I exchanged some lye for some of her lovely bars of soap. Now my record of not having to buy soap for almost 4 years still stands!

I especially love the espresso owl soap!

Today, April came over and helped me make some more. About 75 bars more!

I always use the same 3 recipes and just modify them, by adding things or using various liquids. My two favorite recipes are HERE.

This is the other one I used today:

37 ounces olive oil

7 ounces coconut oil

12 ounces distilled water

6 ounces lye

The directions on how to make soap in your crock pot are HERE.

We made some with espresso, some with tea and some with chai tea. Just water works fine, too. But remember to ALWAYS use distilled water! 

For texture, throw in poppy seeds, coffee grounds, or whatever else you like. Essential oils work well for scents.

Espresso with coffee grounds

 

chai tea

lemon poppyseed

tea tree oil

April also let me use her beautiful new mold her husband made her. While my plastic molds are fine, I may just need to get me one of those… ;o)

Egg Day 2012

We didn’t get many pictures of this year’s Egg Day. But then how many pictures of Jello eggs and egg bakes do we need??? LOL

Thankfully, Will did take some pictures of our Easter eggs though…

  They look so different so close up.

I also made an egg bake (recipe HERE) for church tomorrow morning and 4 batches of Jello eggs (recipe HERE) for Easter dinner.

Drinking Vinegar

I can’t believe I’m saying this… but I have drank a cup of organic apple cider vinegar every day for about two weeks. This just proves that I will do just about anything if I think it will keep me from getting sick! ;o)

Before you get the idea that I am just taking a few swigs out of the bottle I should tell you that I do doctor it up a bit before sipping. And I didn’t come up with this idea myself. I have several friends who do it and I finally decided to give it a shot. (Reading posts from numerous friends about nasty coughs, sore throats and barfing didn’t help.)

Apple cider vinegar is good for lots of things that ail ya from colds, to cancer, diabetes, cholesterol, blood pressure, weight loss, digestion, arthritis, fungus, yeast…

This isn’t for whimps! I can’t convince anyone else in my house to do it at all. (Babies!) But there are a few tips that I have learned over the past two weeks that I believe has made it a bit easier to swallow…

Pour 1 Tablespoon of organic apple cider vinegar (unfiltered & unpasteurized) in a large mug. Don’t use anything smaller than 8 oz. Diluting it helps.

Add 1 heaping teaspoon of raw local honey. (also good for allergies)

Fill mug with hot (not boiling, I think that makes it taste worse) water. Stir to dissolve honey.

Drink up! Repeat once daily (if you can…)  ;o)

Something Smells Fishy Around Here

This is a flashback post from October 2008. This was the very first time we were gifted live crab. We’ve done this a whole lot of ‘em since then but we still do it just like this…

Well maybe not fishy, but definitely , crabby. Last night, a couple in our church gave us a gift of 5 live, large dungeness crab. It was quite a treat and we were all excited, but had no idea of how to go about cooking live crabs.


So, what do you do when you don't know what to do? You call your parents. My parents go crabbing and I knew they would know exactly what I needed to do.

Warning! The remainder of this post is not for the squeamish or faint of heart.

They did know exactly what I needed to do and I wasn't all that excited about doing it. But you can't let $50 worth of crab meat go to waste, so...

Crab tastes better if you kill it before you cook it. And then you don't have to hear it "scream" when you drop it into boiling water, either. Therefore, the first thing we had to do was the killing.

Andy helped me by wielding the rubber mallet while I held the knife. You cut the crab in half while it is on its back.

Then we pulled off the shell and cleaned out all the undesirable parts and put the legs in the bucket of cold water. This made for an interesting lesson on crab anatomy during school today. We learned that we were right, it was the heart.

After everything is cleaned and removed, into the boiling salt water they go for 15 minutes.

Followed by an ice-water bath.

Then the picking begins. With four of us working, it went pretty quickly. Much thanks to Andy for his ingenious idea of using our fondue forks for removing the meat. It worked great!

In order to freeze the crab, it gets frozen into another saltwater bath.

You can also freeze the legs whole after they are cooked and cooled. Then you just boil or stem them to reheat.

It was a lot of work, but the crab cocktails at supper were well worth the effort.

But we now know why my parents do all of their crab cooking out of doors. It's really difficult to get rid of that "down by the docks" smell! It was like being at the beach, but not in a good

way. :o)

 

Now we do the whole messy ordeal out on our deck. It is usually dark and cold but being able to hose the whole thing down and not deal with the smell is worth it!