RetroRevolution

A friend from work just told me about a recipe he was trying for preserving cherry tomatoes.  What makes the recipe really interesting is that it doesn’t involve freezing, canning, or dehydrating.  While I consider canning and dehydrating essential skills for simplifying your life and learning to become self sufficient.  There are numerous older methods of preserving food that are far less resource intensive.

Cherry Tomatoes Ready for Packing in Oil

• Cherry Tomatoes
• Small Onions
• Cider Vinegar (1.5 Tbsp/pint Jar)
• Basil to Taste
• Oregano to Taste
• Garlic to Taste
• 1/4 tsp / pint jar of Coarse Salt
• Olive Oil
• Canning Jars and Lids

Wash and dry several firm and ripe cherry tomatoes.  Peel some onions.  Into sanitized pint jars place cherry tomatoes and intersperse with onions and herbs.  Fill to 1.5 inches from top of jar.  Sprinkle salt over contents.  Add cider vinegar and then cover with olive oil.  Cover with a sterile lid and store in a cool (50-59 F) location for two to three months.  After this the tomatoes will be ready and keep for up to a year.

I’m not sure exactly what I’m going to do with them in three months, but I might find a use for them.  I’ve got a lot of tomatoes, so I’ll put them to good use.  Some things about this method of preserving concern me.  First is that olive oil is not a self sufficient resource in Michigan.  I’m sure the oil could be used for cooking at the end of the storage, but being an oil there is the risk of rancidity if it is kept too long.  On the plus side the oil that must tag along with the tomatoes would be an excellent addition to rather lean meats like venison or rabbit.

Cherry Tomatoes in Oil

Enjoy and consider putting up a batch of your own.

Chicken breasts were on sale this past week and we enjoy the convenience of canned chicken.  When I started canning meats a few years ago, I canned all the chicken the same way; in a bath of boiling water with a bit of salt added.  I then gradually started adding a few things until I ended up with two types of chicken in the pantry.  The first was my old mainstay of plain chicken, and the second was basically chicken noodle soup without any vegetables or noodles.  We continued canning chicken this way for a long while, but then one day it occurred to me that I could add other things to the jar before I started canning.  The first thing I tried was to add some barbecue sauce.  It worked great and we could have pulled BBQ chicken sandwiches without any prep time.  The next thing I tried was adding taco seasoning to the chicken.  Now we could have chicken tacos and burritos with minimal preparation.  Pretty soon I had about 8 different varieties of chicken canned in the pantry for quick easy meals.

This past week I tried a new recipe.  Chicken Scampi.  Scampi traditionally means shrimp in Italian-American cuisine. Although the actual word for shrimp in Italian is gambero or gamberetto, plural gamberi or gamberetti. Scampi, by itself, is also the name of a preparation of shrimp grilled in garlic butter and white wine, usually served over pasta or rice. However the word scampi has evolved as a style of preparation rather than a dish or lone ingredient, with that preparation being called shrimp scampi.  From this simple idea chicken scampi was born.

I got the recipe itself from the Creative Canning blog.  Cyn has some great recipes and isn’t afraid to share her successes and failures through her blog.  The recipe as Cyn posted it can be found here.  Ever the tinkerer I felt the need to modify it a bit for my family’s taste.

Chicken Scampi

• 8 lbs. of chicken breast, boneless and skinned, cubed in 1″ chunks
• 2 tablespoon butter
• 4 tablespoons minced garlic
• 4 cups Chablis wine

Brown the chicken and garlic in the butter and then add the wine.  Simmer for a few minutes.  Pack the chicken into 6 or 7 pint jars.  Split the juice between the jars.  To each jar add the following:

• 1/2 Tbsp minced garlic
• 1/4 tsp of salt
• 1/8 tsp oregano
• 1/8 tsp basil
• a pinch of red pepper flakes
• 1/8 tsp of coarse black pepper

Cover with boiling water and process the pints for 75 minutes.

You can serve the chicken as it is over pasta or rice with some Mediterranean vegetables, or you can mix the can water with some heavy cream and a thickener like flour and serve over pasta for a dish similar to Alfredo.

Last winter I had a surplus of potatoes and I was pretty sure that there was no way we were going to use them before the potatoes went soft.  The potatoes in the garden now are just jutting above the soil and I hope to have a similar problem again this winter of too many potatoes.  I’m trying to grow the potatoes in tires again this year.  The technique is pretty simple and straight forward.

Home dried potatoes

• Place a piece of cardboard on the ground
• Place a tire on top of the cardboard
• Put about two inches of soil in the tire
• Set a couple seed potatoes in the soil
• Cover with 2-4 more inches of soil
• When the leaves are well developed add more soil to the tire until the bottom leaves of the stem are covered
• After the plant grows some more repeat the above step until the dirt has filled the tire
• After the tire is filled, stack another tire on top and add more soil as above
• Repeat until it is time to harvest in the fall.  You will probably have 5-6 tires stacked up.

Potatoes in Tires at Planting Time

You can easily get 50 pounds of potatoes per stack using this method of intensive gardening.

One of the things I like to do with the potatoes is make Latkes.

• 2 cups of re-hydrated shredded potatoes
• 1 tbsp re-hydrated onion
• 3 eggs beaten
• 2 tbsp flour
• 1-1/2 tsp salt

Stir all ingrediants together and form into patties.  Fry over a medium heat until golden brown.  Serve hot with sour cream or a side of apple sauce.

I especially love this recipe because it can be made with so many of the things that are easy to produce yourself or store.

Home Dried Potatoes Cooked as Hashbrowns

Crystallized Honey

Like many of you I discovered a jar of what used to look a lot like honey hiding on one of our shelves.  This odd looking concoction is resembles something between rock candy and yellow Crisco!  Fortunately honey that has crystallized can be restored to the state that it was in prior to the crystallization.

Honey is basically a super-saturated solution of glucose and water.  It is typically over 70% glucose with as little as 20% water.  This crystallization happens when glucose, one of three main sugars in honey, precipitates out of the supersaturated honey solution. Glucose losing water becomes glucose monohydrate and forms a crystal. These crystals form a lattice which capture other compounds in a suspension forming a viscous semi-solid state. The water that was previously bonded with the glucose is now free and increases the moisture content in some parts of the container. This free water ma make the honey susceptible to fermentation.

Crystallization is usually undesirable in honey, controlled crystallization is used to make creamed honey. This is also known as spun honey, whipped honey, churned honey or honey fondant. Uncontrolled crystallization will result in a coarse product resembling rock candy. Controlled crystallization will result in a product with a smooth, spreadable character.

Regardless of the method, as long as fermentation has not set in the honey can be returned to its original state.  Heat the honey in hot, but not boiling water for about 30 minutes.

Heating the Honey

By slowly heating the honey the crystals will liquefy and dissolve back into the solution.  If much of the honey’s water evaporated out when it was crystallized there is a chance that that it may crystallize faster in the future, but the procedure can be repeated again and again if necessary.

The Honey Restored

The curd ready to be kneeded.

A few weekends ago, the youngest daughter and I set out to make some cheese.  Our first go at it was mozzarella.  I also think we did a pretty good job.  I can’t say that it was bursting with flavor, but then again mozzarella isn’t exactly known as a cheese that takes a bite out of your tongue.  I’m looking forward to making more in the future, but I need to build a smoker first.  I think smoked mozzarella sounds very tasty.

The hardest step in home cheese making is obtaining a source of milk.  I don’t have goats or cows, yet.  We all really want to get a couple goats, but we aren’t quite prepared to give up going on vacations.  We really need some friends that live nearby to get some animals that we can trade off animal care duty with.  There is a co-op very near here where I can buy a share of a cow relatively inexpensively, but it is a lot more milk than we could use in a reasonable amount of time.  I’d need to make cheese and butter nearly every weekend to use it all.  One solution is purchasing milk from the store.  This is the route I am going to take until I master the craft.  One hidden downside to this is that more and more dairies are no longer just pasteurizing milk.  They are now ultra-pasteurizing it.  When milk is ultra-pasteurized, the proteins that make time travel cheese making possible are broken down and a good curd will not form after addition of the rennet.

The youngest daughter kneeding the cheese.

To make the cheese you need milk, rennet, an acid, and some salt.  That is it for mozzarella.  Basically you heat it up, press/kneed out the moisture, and then stretch it like taffy.  That’s it.  There are some important temperatures and timings, but you can google those for now.  I’m not going to go into all the details of making the cheese this time.  There are a lot of good resources out there that will teach you what you need to know.  I want to get a few more tries under my belt first.  This time I was concentrating on how to pull it off.

Stretching the Cheese

One other interesting tidbit on making cheese is that it can be made from dried milk.  Most of the recipes call for the addition of cream to the dry milk, but I have seen a few that don’t.  I am excited to start experimenting with this.  I also wonder if you could add melted butter back into the dried milk instead of cream.  Another idea for another day.