Things I Love About Small Town Life #201

Buying our Christmas tree from a cut-your-own tree-farm just down the road from our house.

Cheesecake Flop

I tried making a cheesecake this week. Other than the top being burnt, it was great! I kind of combined the recipes from Ina Garten and Joy of Cooking, but used less cream cheese.

I used Ina's recipe for the crust, expect that I needed more graham crackers (about 13) to get to 1 1/2 cups of graham cracker crumbs. For the filling I used

2 lbs. of cream cheese
1 1/2 cups of sugar
4 whole eggs
2 egg yolks
1/4 cup sour cream
1/4 cup cream
zest from one lemon
1 1/2 tsp. vanilla

Using one of the Joy of Cooking methods, I cooked it at 500 for 15 minutes. That was my mistake. I should have kept an eye on it and just cooked it until it was lightly brown, but instead I set the timer and left the kitchen. By the time the 15 minutes had passed, it was burnt. On the positive side, I had fun playing 6 card golf with my girls. I continued following the directions, turning the heat to 200 for one hour and then turning off the oven and opening the door for 30 minutes and finally taking it out to cool. Other than the burnt top, the flavor was really nice. It had kind of a "cakey" texture, which is fine for me. I will try it again, but will remember to watch it during the 500 degree stage.

Turkey Leftovers

Friday, we made the usual turkey sandwiches with cranberry sauce with the leftover turkey, but Saturday we had turkey and rice soup.

We were very proud of ourselves for actually saving the carcasses and making turkey stock. We talked about it last year, but never actually got around to making it. The hardest part was separating the meat from the bones at the end. We could have just thrown it all away, but the meat was just so tasty it seemed like a waste. Maya ended up with most of that meat. Pretty sure that Thanksgiving is now her favorite holiday.

For Saturday, we added carrots, celery, onion, yellow squash and a little bit of basil. Maybe we'll try some different ingredients on Sunday.

Thanksgiving Menu

I wanted to write down all the things that we made for Thanksgiving dinner so we can remember next year.

The nigh before Thanksgiving, Ron got dough ready for four loaves of bread. He's been using Ken Forkish's book, Flour Water Salt Yeast for his bread. He made two loaves that were 10% whole wheat and two that were 40%. They were both delicious. It was colder than it has been, so they took longer to rise and we didn't get to cook them as early as we wanted, but still in time for a small lunch and of course for dinner.

I was going to make the cranberry sauce the day before, but it got late after all the cleaning, so I just made it early in the morning. I just followed the recipe on the bag, but added some lemon zest. I wanted to add orange zest and some juice instead of just water, but the oranges just aren't quite ripe. Maybe I'll make some for Christmas with oranges.

The stuffing turned out tasty, but dry. We didn't put any in the turkey and I think I just needed more liquid. I found a recipe from Ina Garten. I didn't follow it exactly, I just wanted to get an idea for the ratio of bread to liquid, but either I used too much bread, the bread was too different (I used some of Ron's) or not enough liquid. But the flavor was great and I know that my kids loved it, so that's what really matters, right? I added sausage, granny smith apples, onions and celery. The only herb I used was oregano, but like I said, the flavor was great!  

I also made green beans with garlic and pine nuts. I made them before and that is now my favorite green bean recipe. You just boil the bean until they are barely tender, saute garlic and pine nuts in a olive oil and then add the green beans to the garlic and nuts just to coat them. They are quite tasty! 

We ended up with two turkeys because Costco had small hens. One was 11.8 lbs and the other was 10.5. That meant we needed two ways to cook them, so one was roasted and one was deep fried. We thought the roasted one was going to take at least three hours, but it was done in like an hour and a half. Ron put onions, apples, fresh rosemary and cinnamon in the cavity of the one we roasted which gave it a very nice flavor. Good thing to remember about small turkeys, those hour per pound estimates don't work. 

Now we have a big deep fryer for outside. We will be using it to heat up the water to help with de-feathering the chickens once we get around to butchering them. Maybe we'll try deep frying chickens, though they are getting old now, so they will probably need to be cooked differently.

Homemade Cinnamon Rolls

Thanks once again to Alton Brown, we had homemade cinnamon rolls this weekend.

Since we ran out of butter and had no cream cheese, we made a simple icing with two cups of powdered sugar and about 4 tablespoons of milk - goats milk from the neighbors. They were scrumptious!

A Lot of Cooking Going On

One of the best things about having fresh ingredients at home is all the fun you can have cooking. Here is a list of some of our recent cooking adventures:

1. Key lime pie with meringue topping (from Joy of Cooking)

2. Various hot sauces with our peppers. One of my favorites was made with our Trinidad Perfume peppers. They have a taste similar to habaneros, but are not hot. How amazing is that!

3. I finally found a recipe for pancakes that turn out nice and fluffy - Thanks Alton Brown!

4. Ron made some amazing rustic french bread that is light on the inside with a nice crust.

5. I made a homemade chocolate cake with whipped cream frosting. Note to self: do not use whipped cream frosting between the layers of a layer cake. The top may slide off...

Tarantulas

Why, oh why do these creatures feel the need to come in the house?

Butternut Sqash

I was never a big squash eater, but we decided to try growing some butternut and acorn squash. The acorn squash didn't do too well. It was outside of the fenced-in garden area and the chickens and rabbits got to most of them before we did. The butternut squash however was inside the fence and is doing very well. So far we have tried it cut up into small pieces and baked, and as a soup base. Both ways have been delicious. I was surprised at how flavorful it was simply baked with olive oil and a little salt and pepper.

This week Ron baked some and then put it in the blender and used it for soup. He added some chicken broth, coconut  milk, curry paste and some kaffir lime leaves (from our own tree). It was so tasty! He even added some coconut milk at the end for presentation!

Figs

Our fig tree had lost of ripe fruit and we managed to pick some of it before the birds ate it all. While delicious on their own, we had fun trying a couple easy recipes with them. The kids are still warming up to them. I think they just aren't quite used to the texture, because the flavor is amazing!

Our first recipe was very simple: figs cut in half, dipped in balsamic vinegar and topped with goat cheese. We put them in the toaster over for a few minutes and they were delicious.

Our second recipe was only slightly more complicated. Figs and pears sauteed in butter and brown sugar in home made crepes topped with cinnamon and home made whipped cream. Yummy!

Home Made Tomato Sauce

Today we made tomato sauce. We bought a food mill that basically strains out the seeds and skin so all you need to do to prep the tomatoes is wash them and cut them. We cooked them in a pot for about 20 minutes and then just put it in the mill. Ron turned it into spaghetti sauce by adding onions and basil.

Prickly Pear Margaritas

In addition to all the fruits and vegetables we are growing in the garden and in the orchard, there are a few things that are growing wild on the land that we can use in cooking. One of these things is the prickly pear cactus with it's lovely purple fruit. It's not easy to pick a prickly pear (or to say it either), but the juice is pretty sweet and we were able to make margaritas without too much injury to ourselves.

Ron picked the pears using a pair of tongs (I think that I am going to take up writing tongue twisters) and placed them in a bowl of water. After they soaked for a short time, he cut them in half and cut off any parts that looked bad and put them in the blender. We used an old t-shirt to strain the juice by stretching the shirt over a juice container and pouring the juice. Ron had read that a t-shirt is better that cheese cloth, I'm guessing that you want the smaller holes to keep out any of the small spines. I was going to reuse the shirt and started rinsing it off only to get a couple small spines stuck in my hand. They are very small and hard to see! Needless to say, I ended up throwing the short away. Luckily the kids outgrow shirts at a fast rate so there will always be more.

Dork that I am, I forgot to get pictures of the actual margaritas! But they were good thanks to Emeril Lagasse.

Next we need to find a recipe to eat the pads, nopal.

Garden Friends: Snakes

As we were walking down to the garden, we saw a big gopher snake (about six feet long) slithering in the wood pile. We were all happy to see him there and hopeful that he would catch some of the gophers or squirrels that were eating all of our tomatoes. 

Suddenly, we heard a high pitch squeak. We thought (hopefully) that it might be the sound of a squirrel that was just caught by a snake. Maya, our dog, was very excited and ran to the wood pile, sticking her nose in a little hole in the woodpile. We called her back so we could see what she was sniffing at through the hole. Lacey was the first to see a bunny's head. She said that it looked like it was laying still. 

As we were all crowding around trying to see what she was talking about, Maya stuck her nose back in and that is when we heard a very loud hiss. Seriously loud, I did not know that snakes could make such a loud sound. We decided that it was probably a good idea to give the snake its space and called Maya away again and found some work to do away from the garden. 

After about a half-hour or so, we went back to see if the rabbit or snake were still around. All we could see was part of the snake's body sticking out of the hole where we had seen the bunny. One less rodent to eat our bounty.

This was a different gopher snake we found previously in a different part of our land.

Pest Control: Squirrels

Our tomato, tomatillo and pepper plants were finally looking beautiful. We had so many little baby fruits starting on all the plants we were already thinking about the number of different sauces we could make, learning about how to can tomatoes,thinking about whether we should invest in a pressure canner.

Then one day, Ron went down to check on the bounty that was our garden, and he saw the dreadful squirrel hole right in the middle of a row of tomato plants. After successfully battling the earwigs and other six-legged pests, controlling the moles underground, keeping out the rabbits, the squirrels could not be stopped. They will enter the garden from underground, get through any chain linked fence or just climb right over it. Not only did they make a hole inside the garden, but as if to taunt us, the squirrel left a half-eaten tomato right outside the fence. You may have won this battle my friend, but the war has just begun...

Half-eaten tomatillos left outside of the garden by squirrels

Scorpions, really?

I found a scorpion on the living room floor the other night. As if just finding a scorpion wasn't bad enough, my niece and one of my daughters were both sleeping on said living room floor. Like any normal mother, my first thought was to wake up Ron and the kids, run out of the house screaming, and burn it down. Instead, I found the nearest container, placed it over the scorpion and ran to get Ron so he could kill it. Ron came out to see it, but rather than wanting to kill it, he wanted to capture it.

The container that I had placed over the scorpion was one of those plastic food containers you get from grocery stores or delis. The kind with a plastic lid. Since Ron wanted to capture it, rather than kill it (crazy man!), I got him a piece of stiff construction paper that he could slide under the container and flip it over so that the scorpion would be inside the container and not likely to figure out a way to get out from under it. Once he had the container flipped over with the scorpion inside, I went to find the lid for it and handed it to Ron. As Ron took the lid from me, he asked, "shouldn't there be holes in it?" "Only if we want it to live," I replied. Unfortunately, he wanted it to live so he put holes in it.

Ron had bought a black light that could be used to find tomato hornworms in the garden. Hornworms glow in the dark with these lights and make them easier to find. Ron wanted to see if the scorpion would also glow, and it did. It was actually pretty cool to see it glow, but I still thought it would be cooler to see it dead.

Once it was safely in the container, I started looking up information on scorpions. Basically, I wanted to know 1) what would happen if you were stung by one and 2) did finding one in your house mean that you were likely to have more, like with rats, ants or cockroaches. I was glad to find out that most stings are not deadly and that they do not nest, so having one in the house did not mean that were was a nest in the house. Unfortunately, they do tend to come in houses in the summer, which means that we could find more.

Knowing that this was not likely to be our last encounter with a scorpion as long as we were in East San Diego County, I thought that we should find a place to live where there are no scorpions. While perhaps burning down the house was not an option, we could always move somewhere without scorpions. Sadly, the only place on the planet without scorpions is Antarctica. So, now I have to try and find a research job so we can move there. So far, I have not had any cooperation on this move from the rest of my family though.

Vegetable Garden Update: Squash and Melons

The squash and melons also had a rough start. We made some mounds out on the land, outside of the fenced garden area, so in addition to pest like earwigs and worms,  they were pray to rabbits, squirrels and our own chickens.

We planted summer squash, including green and yellow zucchini, winter squash like acorn squash, water melon, honeydew and cantaloupe.As they first started to sprout, they were getting eaten by some sort of pests so Ron protected them with water bottles by cutting off the bottoms and putting over the plants. That helped them get started and once we took the bottles off, the squashes started doing very well. We put some deer netting over them for a while to keep the rabbits, squirrels and chickens off. Now, they are flowering and producing lots of great looking fruit.

The melons on the other hand kept struggling and finally died off.  We planted them a little early and the nights were still a little cold, so Ron started some watermelon seeds in the house. Now they are outside and looking healthy with some deer netting to help keep out critters.

Vegetable Garden Update: Tomatoes and Peppers

The vegetable garden is going great these days. We've got tons of tomatoes and peppers growing in the garden and squash and melons growing on mounds outside of our fenced garden in some mounds we made.

The peppers and tomatoes had a tough beginning, but are doing great now. Here's a summary of what we learned our first year.

1. Starting them in pots in the house worked well. We bought a warming mat and some lights to get them going.

2. When we first put them in the garden, they were getting devoured by the earwigs. We learned NOT to put mulch in the garden when the earwig population is at it's height, which seems to be winter and spring. Of course we had an unusually warm winter this year, with days in the 90s in January and February. The earwig traps worked well at that time too.

3. We didn't stake the tomatoes or peppers and some of them broke with the heavy rains we finally got in May and with the wind. Next year, we will want to be sure to stake them.

4 .Once the nights start getting warm, the plants will go crazy! Another reason to stake them, the tomato plants are so big that they are spreading into the walkways and I am not sure how we will reach all of them.

Spring In the Desert

We are in a very arid area, close to, but not quite the desert. At times, it feels very desert like to me as can be seen in the picture below.

But even in the desert, spring brings lovely flowers.

Attack of the Killer Tomatoes (and tomatillos)

The tomatoes are gorgeous, I sure hope that no one comes to eat them before we get them!

Pest Control: Earwigs - Round 2

Apparently, earwigs like to live in straw that is used as mulch in your garden. We were providing a safe, comfortable place for the earwigs to live by day with plenty of food to eat by night. Once we got rid of the mulch, the earwig problem became much more manageable. We had added mulch early in the year because we had an unusually warm winter. As summer approaches, we are noticing fewer earwigs in general, so we may try mulching again this summer. We'll see how that goes.

Backyard Birds

Just a couple pictures of some of our feathery backyard visitors.

Easter Eggs

We never got around to decorating out eggs, but we did lots of cooking with eggs on Easter. Our neighbor brought over some goat milk earlier in the week and I wanted to do something fun with that. I was surprised at how delicious the goat milk was. I remember trying some from the store before and thought that it tasted a little "grassy." The fresh milk was just sweet and creamy and yummy! We definitely have to get some goats soon.

I am still a little unsure about using unpasteurized goat milk however, so I decided to do something with cooked milk. I decided that with that milk and our eggs, we just had to make some gelato. There are a ton of recipes online, but I was looking for something very simple. I ended up mostly following the recipe at FoodNouveau because they had a nice simple base that you could add anything too:
2 1/2 cups of milk,
5 egg yolks and
1/2 a cup of sugar.

I used all goat milk for the cream and added about a tablespoon of vanilla to the milk. When it was time to heat the mixture including the eggs, I just put it all back in the pot that I was heating the milk in, I didn't use a double boiler. It came out delicious! It freezes much harder that regular ice cream. Strawberries and blueberries make it even better!

Since you only use egg yolks for the gelato, I had 5 egg whites left to do something with. The only thing I could think of was meringue cookies. I followed the recipe from my Joy of Cooking cookbook. Again a very simple recipe with just egg whites, cream of tartar and sugar, It calls for superfine sugar, but I just used regular granulated sugar. They came out perfect, nice and dry and crispy.

Pest Control - Red Ant Battle: Round One

As anyone in San Diego County (and probably the whole Southwest) knows, we live on a giant ant hill. We are constantly battling ants in our houses and in our gardens. For the most part, ants can be ignored when they are outdoors, but when they come in the house or they infest the vegetable garden, sometimes they just have to be killed. There was a big ant hill in our garden and we had to get rid of them. We are trying to avoid using poisons in the garden since we want to eat the food and we don't want the friendly animals, such as lizards, frogs, birds and our dog, to eat either the poison or poisoned animals, but ants are really hard to get rid of!

We are trying Amdro Fire Ant Bait. The ants take the bait to their home and all the ants, including the queen, eat the poison. The dead ants pretty much stay underground, so hopefully it won't affect the lizards, frogs and birds. We've done two applications. It seems to work at first, but then we see more after a few days. Hopefully this second application will do the trick. 

Our First Bounty

We have enough ripe sugar snap peas to make a meal, well at least a side dish for a meal
If the kids don't eat them all as we pick them, we will make a recipe Ron found with blanched peas and a ginger citrus dressing.

Pest Control - Earwig Battle: Round One

We think that our vegetable garden is being attacked by earwigs. We see them everywhere around the garden (and house for that matter - which is really disgusting by the way!). Thanks to Google, we discovered a pretty simple trap for them. You put about an inch of vegetable oil and something smelly like soy sauce (some of the articles and YouTube videos suggest the water or oil from tuna) in a shallow container (we used yogurt containers and small cans) and bury the container in the ground so that the opening is at ground level. The earwigs are attracted by the smell and fall into the container and the oil coats them so that they cannot get out. When you go out in the morning to check your traps you will be both delighted and disgusted at the number of dead earwigs in your containers.

We've only done it for a couple nights so far and it seems like there are less holes in the new leaf growth. Hopefully it will help a lot.

How Does Your Garden Grow?

Our garden is coming along quite nicely.  We have peppers, tomatoes and basil that Ron started from seeds indoors. Some of them are being eaten by some kind of bug, mostly the basil, but some are thriving. Hoping for a lot of big, juicy tomatoes! We also have some beans growing that we planted from seeds early on. They are beautiful and producing lots of beans.

The pictures below show some of the beds that are almost ready for planting. This area was just an flat space with nothing but weeds. Now we have raised beds and vegetables!

There is still a lot of work to be done. We need to figure out what pests are eating the basil and how to deal with them. We also planted some carrots, beets, lettuces and spinach and those never made it. As soon as they came up, something ate them. It seems to be an insect, not the rabbits or squirrels, because we can see holes in the leaves that are left.