Pass the salt please...

OK, to set the record straight I grew up in a house where salt was a bad thing. I was still in grade school when my Dad was diagnosed with an enlarged heart and so Mom thought it a good idea to switch us to (shudder) light salt. If you have never tasted this stuff be glad it has the worst after taste you can imagine. But because of Daddy's heart issues as well as both of the adults in the house had high blood pressure we made the switch. We were told that salt was a bad thing and should be avoided as much as possible. So I continued the practice as an adult (with real salt mind you). It was not until a couple of years ago that I found that there is are several good reasons for salt in our diet.

Salt will actually help keep your body in balance. It helps with your pH balance, thyroid, insulin in addition to keeping your hormones in balance. It works as a natural antihistamine and keeps your adrenaline from spiking allowing you better quality sleep. The proper amount of salt can also help with your metabolism and weight control. Contrary to popular belief salt can also be beneficial in keeping away the water retention. OK so these are some reasons for your health to pick up the salt shaker, but for cooking it is an amazing tool in drawing out flavors. It took me a long time to get past my old fears but a cooking show helped me understand it better. Salt will draw out the sweet flavors in baked items. It will draw out the flavors in your meat and vegetables as well.

In doing a little research I found that the type of salt is important. As with most foods you want to take the one that is processed the least. The less it is processed the more or its natural minerals will be in tact. So don't fear the salt shaker, but at the same time this does not give us a green light to eat a whole bag of frito's either. As with most things it is about balance. Cooking from scratch allows us to have the salt we need in our diet, and the control over what type is used and how much.

Let me just clarify something... Wine

OK so it has been a couple of weeks ago now that we moved into the third stage with our wine.We have been dealing with a sick little girl and she had priority over anything else. And as predicted it was as the rest of it has been pretty easy to do. The first order of business was to dissolve packages of metabisulphite and sorbate in half a cup of cool water. These two ingredients act as a stabilizer for the wine. After it dissolved I just poured it into the carboy and after putting the bung back in place shook it for two minutes. The purpose of the shaking is to make sure that everything is mixed thoroughly and to drive off the CO2. The instructions want to make sure that everything is mixed hard enough to bring up the yeast sediment that is sitting at the bottom and to agitate the gas out of the wine.

The next item of business was to shake the last packet, a isinglass clarifier and pour it into the carboy. Again we are back to shaking the wine for two minutes to degas the wine again. The idea behind this step is that if it is not properly degassed it will not allow the wine to clarify properly.

The first couple of days the mixture was pretty cloudy, but after a couple of days sitting it started to clear nicely.

Here is what it looks like after sitting for 15 days. Because of our family schedule we won't be able to put it in the bottles for another couple of weeks. But because it needs to age it is not a big deal. So it will just sit in this secondary fermenter for 4 weeks instead of 2.

I can't wait to get it in the bottle, but even once it is in the bottle I still have to wait 2 to 4 months before I can drink it. Oh well good things come to those who wait right?

Pork Chops

One of the things I enjoy about canning is the ability to share with friends. Also when you come across another canner they are just as thrilled to share their goodies as you are. A good friend of mine gave me a gift the last time I saw her. It was a peach jam with roasted Hatch Green Chile peppers. It was a little on the thin side so she told me how she used it, more as a sauce for meats. It would also work well as a spread poured over cream cheese. I have tried it and it is wonderful. I will be definitely get the recipe from her to make this summer. This sauce works beautifully on both pork and chicken.

We have a standing date one day each week, we go see our buddy the Chiropractor to be put back together and then we go to lunch with Daddy. When I can I try to take a freshly made meal that is still warm when we get to him. So today we made Peach Chile Pepper Pork Chops.

All it really takes is the Sauce/Jam and pork chops.

Then I bread them using water (you can use an egg wash if you want) and a little flour.

I put them in a cast iron skillet and brown them on each side. Adding a little salt and pepper in this step.

Once they are browned I put them into a baking dish and simply pour the sauce over them.

Then I cover it all with foil (this helps keep things from drying out) and bake them at 375 degrees for about an hour.

While everything is in the oven I make brown rice and opened a jar of creamed corn that I put up last summer. It was all done around the same time, so I just put it together and left for lunch with the Hubby. He was very pleased with lunch.

We usually only eat one big meal a day and so is our big meal for the day when we do this type of meal.

Beans...

One of the best and cheapest way's to make a healthy meal is beans! I mentioned that I love the big stores like Costco and Sam's club right? I had purchased a 25 pound bag of pinto beans and finally got around to putting them into bags for storage yesterday. While I was at it I decided it was time to make a batch. It is really easy and once they are made you can do about anything you want with them.

I soaked 5 cups of beans overnight. Then I drained and rinsed the beans before putting them into the crock pot.

Then I added fresh minced garlic. I know I could just cut the cloves in half, but I like to have them minced. For me it is about the texture. I don't want to be eating and bite into half a clove of garlic. As much as I love garlic it isn't my idea of fun. I think of myself as thrifty and so I don't like the idea of buying the jar of pre-minced garlic. I would rather just buy the bulb and prepare it as I needed. I watched a cooking show once and it showed just how easy it is to peel a clove of garlic. You just place a knife (flat on its side) on top of the clove and hit it firmly with the heal of your hand. This cracks the skin and makes it easy to peel off.

Then I just trim off the end of the clove and slice it thinly. From there I just take a minute to mince the garlic.

After the garlic is added into the beans comes the salt. For this I add about 1 1/2 teaspoons of salt.

Then just set the crock pot to low and go about the day knowing that dinner is taken care of.

Update on the Wine

So the instructions said to check the gravity on the wine after 5 to 7 days, however, things get in the way and I put it off because the fermentation was still active in the airlock. After 9 days I finally checked it. The target had been 1.01 for the specific gravity and when I looked I found that it had already gone under 1.0 and was currently around 0.96 This is where it's supposed to be after a couple of weeks in the secondary. I immediately did what any rationale brewer would do. I ran to the brew shop in a panic and started flapping my arms up and down! Actually, I asked the nice man for some input and he generously supplied it, in a nutshell, I was fine, but I should get my project into fermenter #2 pronto! Basically I needed to get the wine out of the primary fermenter and away from the yeast cake because it can make it taste kind of funky if it stays in this state too long. Problem! We only have 2 glass carboy fermenters, and the wine was going to tie one up for an extended period. This would put our next beer brew on hold... (Read: Grounds for dismissal as head brewmaster, a title I currently hold) So today after talking with hubby suggested I could commandeer the 6 gallon carboy to finish out my wine as long as I picked up another 5 gallon brew bucket (much cheaper $5) to get us through this rough patch in our relationship. (What a guy)

 So I gathered my brew bucket for the next batch of beer and went home. As soon as hubby got home from work we began working on moving (racking) the wine to carboy #2.

Quick gravity check before moving.

It was a lot like the moving of the beer, you leave a bit of it behind. I was surprised when we took the top off the bucket and found that the oak chips had all sunk to the bottom.

So according to the guy at the "beer store" we need to let it sit for a couple of days (less than the 10 days that the directions state, but this is why we talk to people who have done it before.) Because of the specific gravity we need to get it moving into the clarification part of the process sooner rather than later. So here is a picture of where we are currently at. I love the contrast of colors between the beer and the wine.

More soon. Hope you enjoyed your visit.

Easy BBQ Chicken

A couple of years ago I stumbled on a BBQ Sauce recipe and used it all before we had tomatoes to make more. I was surprised because we don't normally use a lot of BBQ sauce. So of course I made some more! I have found a couple of ways to use it outside of the obvious BBQ although it does make a pretty amazing marinade too. The recipe says that it should be just a little thinner than A-1 sauce, but mine is even thinner than that. I might let it cook down a little more this year but the flavor never disappoints. We eat a lot of chicken and so I was trying to think of a way to use what I had on hand and make something tasty as well as different. So here is what I did:

I took a jar of my BBQ sauce and 4 boneless skinless chicken breasts and put them in my favorite High School graduation present... my crock pot.

I just put the chicken in and then emptied the jar over top of it. Put it on low heat and left it alone for about 6 hours when I went in and shredded it all.

For dinner I just served it over brown rice with a side of steamed broccoli. It was as good as I had hoped! The picky 4 year old even enjoyed it.

During the week we have had it for lunches on home made bread and on tortillas with cheese. I will definitely be doing this meal again!

Healthy Breakfast made easy

We eat a lot of oatmeal around here. So much in fact, that it alone is reason to belong to either Sam's Club or Costco. We go through at least a 10 pound container a month. How you say? Easy! We eat oatmeal for breakfast every morning and a lot of times the hubby will take a second serving for second breakfast in his lunch. We have found a very tasty recipe for our oatmeal, but we like different versions of it. So I will share our current versions with you.

I have been trying to make meals or at least part of meals ahead to help with lunches, they are my nemesis! (More on this topic soon) So in trying to make certain things ahead of time, breakfast was an area that I found we were coming up short. Since it is refrigerator oatmeal I make 5 days worth at a time. It makes getting ready for bed a little less stressful. I was making it one day at a time and there were simply nights I didn't want to do it, it make me feel like a whiny 2 year old and so I started to do it in advance. Much better!

The first thing I do is gather all of my ingredients together. Like I said hubby and I prefer different versions of this so this is for both of them. The one he likes has Vanilla (home made of course) and syrup (on this it is a matter of picking your poison, do you want sugar or aspartame in your syrup. We chose sugar as the more natural option.) While I prefer a version with some home made jam in it for flavor/sweetness.

Next I set out the containers I will put them into and measure in the oatmeal. We use 2/3 cups oatmeal per serving.

Then we add in the milk the original recipe that I found called for 2/3 cups milk, we like a little more in ours and so I use 3/4 cups. You can use any milk product that you want. We use unsweetened almond milk, but it tastes wonderful with real milk too.

Next we add in our flavors. For the hubby's breakfast I add in about a Tablespoon of the syrup and a splash of vanilla (I won't pretend that I actually measure for this). For mine I add in home made jam (just about any flavor that sounds good when I am making it. This week I used Blueberry) again I don't really measure but it is around 1 to 2 Tablespoons of jam.  I stir it all together, put the lids on and then give them a good shake before putting them in the refrigerator.

Now all we have to do is pull out a serving after our morning workout and enjoy. If you want you can add fresh fruit to the oatmeal when you serve it. Bananas work great on the maple/vanilla oatmeal. I like fresh berries in my oatmeal with the jam. Also if you want it warm instead of cold all you have to do is pop it in the microwave for 30-40 seconds and you are done.

I also make my hubby's second breakfast in advance. Just so I can put it in his lunch and be ready to go. For this I use 1/2 a cup oatmeal and 2 rounded teaspoons of home made brown sugar. Once he gets to work he has a bowl there that he empties it into and then he uses the container that I send the oatmeal in to measure 1 cup of water. Then all he has to do is cook it in the microwave add  natural peanut butter (completely optional but try it... it is wonderful).

I go ahead and make a few of these in advance as well. That way all I have to do is put it in his lunch. Anything that will save time in the morning is good with me.

Wine... not whine

There are a couple of things that I have been wanting to do but just had not gotten around to just yet. One of those things was to make my own wine. So for my birthday I asked my wonderful hubby for a wine making kit. We already had most of the equipment so it wasn't too much of an expense beyond the kit itself. All I needed in addition to the wine kit was a 7 gallon bucket. So I thought I would share my experiment with you. One thing I understand is that this will not be a quick process. The kit says it should be drinkable in 2 months, but from what I have heard from others who have made their own wine is that it takes more like 4 to 6 months. With all of the scary stuff we have been hearing on the news about stuff put into wines lately it seemed like a good time to give this a try. I went with a Chardonnay because it will be ready(ish) in the summer. Always a good time for a white wine. As soon as I get this batch into bottles I will probably get started on a red of some sort.

So here we go on the process... of course the first thing that I did was to sanitize my new bucket and all of the equipment needed to get our wine going. I started with a half gallon of hot water and then added a package of bentonite  into the water and stirred it for 30 seconds to make sure that it dissolved. After that I added the grape juice that came with the kit. After emptying the bag of juice the instructions said to add another half gallon of water back into the bag to get any left over juices. So After I put the water in the bag I shook it really well to get all that I could out of it.

After adding the juice I added enough water to bring the volume up to 6 gallons. And then we stir! Not easy to do with such a big bucket, but the spoon I have is fairly long. I was still glad that I had sanitized my hands! After stirring for 30 seconds it was time to check the specific gravity to make sure we were where we needed to be. It was right on the money at 1.097.

After the wine was tested it was time to add one last ingredient Oak chips. After they were added to the liquid you had to stir it to get them wet. OK so we are done putting it together and notice... there was NO cooking to it! The whole process took only about 30 minutes including the time to sanitize everything. I hope it turns out well because this could be the start of something really cool!

We were not able to put the yeast in for a couple of hours because the liquid was too warm by a few degrees. But I managed to get the yeast in, the bucket sealed and the airlock in place before bed. We put it to bed in an area of the kitchen where it will be out of the way. Just in a corner where it will be in a climate controlled environment and no sunlight.

Update: The fermentation is supposed to start in 24-48 hours and our started is around 18! So we are off and running.

To the Keg we go!

I wanted to give the latest update on the beer we had in process so here we go. The beer clarified nicely in the secondary fermenter for a week. It looked beautiful, and the specific gravity had not changed beyond our second reading of 1.012. So it was time to move it to the Keg and ultimately the kegerator.  One thing that needs to be stressed when handling homebrew is sanitation. If any bacteria gets into your batch you can lose it all from a taste perspective. My husband disagrees, but he has also been known to win bets guzzling ketchup, uh, where was I. So the first thing we have to do to is to sanitize the keg. We use a two phase cleaning ritual, PBW powder and Star-san. PBW first, to power clean the surfaces, then Star-san, an easy product to use, and you don't have to worry about any of the suds being left behind as they are not harmful to the process. It is commonly said, don't fear the foam :) .

The infamous Corny Keg.

Having a bucket full of sanitizer on hand to rinse anything that needs to be handled.

An easy way to remember left and right, or in and out connections. Set up two bowls of sanitizer for the smaller parts.

So after the Keg and assorted equipment is sanitized it's time to move it directly from fermenter number two to the keg. This is accomplished with a syphon. In this case it is a auto-syphon (MUCH more sanitary than trying to start a syphon with your mouth) and it makes the whole process pretty easy. The only thing that you need to keep in mind is to make sure the bottom of the auto-syphon does not touch the bottom of the carboy where the left over yeast cake is sitting. You are trying to leave the sediment in the carboy but take all of the beautiful beer you can get. And yes that is another batch of beer sitting up there with the beer we are moving. We started a new batch of a Christmas Ale that we found and enjoy.

After all of the beer is transferred to the keg you close it up and put it where it will get cold, either a refrigerator or in our case the kegerator. We charge it slightly with Co2 and "burp" it. This releases the air (oxygen) out of the keg. At this pointt the beer is pretty safe from any contaminates and can be cold stored for long periods (right, like that will happen) .Tomorrow we will hook it up to the Co2 so it can begin carbonating the beer. We set our C02 level to 10psi. You are supposed to let it sit like this for a couple of weeks (the set it and forget it method) I will let you know if we make it that far! Perhaps one of these times I will document a process entitled Force Carbing the beer. This method can get you from the filling of the keg to 'decent' drinking beer in a matter of days.


Just wanted to show you the inside of the kegerator. My hubby even managed to get the new keg in there with the help of our monkey. Here is the new keg, next to another that has my favorite, Pecan Nut Brown Ale (Yummy). In the freezer section we keep our frosted glasses! Ready at any time! Come on over for a pint!

 We will be adding another pull to our kegerator as we realized that it will hold three kegs nicely and we have room for one more on the front. Yea, three taps all pouring delicious homebrew! Heaven!
 

Things to do with Apples

I have finally identified my favorite variety of apple. I prefer the flavor of the Fuji apple for eating. Honey-crisp makes a pretty amazing pie. But for today we will deal with the Fuji. I found a good sale on organic Fuji apples last week at the grocery store. And so I did what I normally do when I find my favorite apples on sale... I bought a bunch of them to play with. When I brought them home I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do with them. I could make apple sauce, or even apple butter. But currently my favorite snack is dehydrated apples. So my snack food won out as I was running low.

When I am going to make my apple chips as my 4 year old likes to call them, I simply wash, quarter, core them and then slice them. The apples I was dealing with this time were HUGE, so one apple was filling a tray on my dehydrator.

I let them go for 4 to 6 hours at 135 degrees and then once I turn it off I let them sit. Most often overnight, this completes the dehydration process and leaves them crisp like chips.

Once I take them out of the dehydrator I put them in an airtight container for snacking. Another option is to put them into a freezer bag and seal it. The freezer bag is recommended because of its heavier plastic and keeps air out and the fruit from spoiling.

When you make these you can also sprinkle the slices with a mix of sugar and cinnamon. I normally just let the apple flavor shine through but have tried the other and it was very tasty. As much as I like these for a treat the four year old won't touch them. Some day she will figure out what she is missing.

When I was making these, I found that I had more apples than would fit in the dehydrator. Not enough to do a whole batch of apple sauce, but enough to do for immediate use. There were two large apples, with one I quartered and cored it and then because the four year old doesn't like the peels I peeled one. The other apple just got quartered and cored then I sliced them both into fair sized chunks and baked them. They don't need any added water as they produce their own juice. Once they were cooked until they were soft I let them cool and put them through the blender. Now we have enough apple sauce to enjoy in the short term.