Garlic

I've always grown garlic.  I love garlic and eat quite a bit of it.  I also love having garlic tied in plaits hanging somewhere in my kitchen.

My results in the past have been inconsistent though and it was only in the past year that I learned why.

I usually plant a few cloves of garlic around my roses.  It helps keep some of the bugs off them.  While they've always grown, looking back, there was a large proportion that didn't grow very big or were single bulbs.  Those single bulbs were a good size for a clove of garlic, but they hadn't separated into more usable garlic as we usually know it.

I grew some in it's own bed and they tended to stay small.  That was in town and our soil was mostly sand though.  I also put it down to having used garlic from the supermarket as my seed.

Last year, I was leafing through a gardening magazine at a friend's place and there was an article about growing better garlic.  It said there was a lot of urban 'wisdom' about garlic that was just incorrect and that people wanting to grow garlic more successfully should discard it and start treating garlic with more respect.

Firstly, garlic prefers to have it's own bed and be fairly well spaced - at least 30cm (12 inches) apart.  That was a new one for me, having always been told to plant it closer than that and around my roses.  Perhaps that idea was more for the roses' benefit than for the garlic?

Secondly, that garlic likes a heavily manured and very rich soil.  I had been told garlic would grow anywhere, in any conditions, and thrived like most herbs, in poor soil.

The last thing I remember from this article was that your garlic beds needed to be kept well-weeded.  Garlic in it's own bed doesn't like competition and a weed-free bed will grow better garlic.

Looking back at all of this, it does seem rather obvious from a gardening point of view.  Most plants I grow do better without competition from weeds and good soil always makes a difference.  I don't usually do a single crop in a bed or garden because companion planting has produced better results for me, but maybe, as I said earlier, garlic being a companion for something else is not an equal exchange where the garlic is concerned.

When we lived in town, we built some large planter boxes to grow veges in.  It was rather a necessity as any good soil that was added to the sand we had would lose all nutrients rather quickly and sink into the sandy soil and become sour within a season.  A built up and lined bed, filled with good quality bio-blend soil from a garden centre was a necessity for growing any veges (other than beans - they seemed to love the crappy soil and grew like triffids).

We took the boxes with us when we moved.  We never quite knew what we were going to do with them and they were moved several times before they found their current spot.  I think we've had too many choices and between everything else that has needed doing and water issues, they just sat there.

About a year ago, I laid a thick layer of pine needles in each of them to keep weeds down and covered that with flattened cardboard boxes.   Then the planter boxes became a default compost heap or more correctly, a dumping ground for organic stuff that we didn't really know where to put. They became filled with straw, sawdust and chook poo from cleaning out the chookhouses.  They got ash from the fireplace.  They got lawn clippings and some smaller tree branches.

I used some of the badly composted results last year when I was filling up the tyres that I grew potatoes in.  Otherwise, they just sat there like an accusation of laziness and grand ideas that hadn't been followed through.

After reading a fiction book that had a stables as part of the setting, there was a scene where one of the characters had to go and dig over what they called "shite mountain".  The manure from the stable was heaped into a big pile, covered with feed sacks and once a week, someone had to turn it over, poke a few holes in it, water it thoroughly and cover it up again.  The process was explained - the watering and covering killed off any grass seeds that may be in it, as well as created a humid environment that broke it all down.

This caught my imagination as I looked out over the paddock where my cow has been staying.  I'd been constantly raking up the old hay and her manure to try and keep her paddock fairly clean.  I'd had a few ideas about what I was going to do with it all, but nothing that had stood out.  While I wasn't planning to build a Shite mountain, I thought a planter box could work.

I filled one planter box with hay and cow poo.  As I went, I soaked it and covered it with feedsacks held down by tyres.  By the time I was about halfway, Hubby noticed and joined in.  We turned it over probably once a month and celebrated the big worms that were starting to appear.  The last time we turned it over, Hubby suggested adding chook poo and sawdust to lighten it up.

By this time, we'd filled the second planter box with old hay and manure.  We've left this one open.  No sacks on top.  Partly this was a case of we hadn't gotten around to it, partly running low on feed sacks and partly to see if the difference was noticeable.

This is the box that was left uncovered.

We couldn't decide whether to dig the chookhouse sweepings through, or leave it as a mulch layer on top.  The mulch layer has worked extremely well another vege garden.  So in the spirit of experimentation, we divided the box in half lengthways.  Half was dug through and half was left on top.  Widthways, half was covered again and half was left exposed.

The mulch side is at the bottom, dug through at the top.

This morning I planted garlic in this bed.  The mulch side had fewer weeds and was easier to plant in.  The other side seemed richer and more composted.

Left end was uncovered for the last few months and right covered.  Mulch bottom and dug through top.

I guess the proof will be in the garlic harvest.

Perseverance and Spinning Madly

I think I mentioned it elsewhere, I have been given a lot of unwashed fleeces from both sheep and alpacas.  When I started working on the alpaca fleece, I didn't realise it hadn't been washed until I'd carded the lot and then started spinning.  It was when my fingers turned black from working with it that I realised.

I still haven't gotten very far through the alpaca fleece. And I've only washed two or maybe three of the sheep fleeces I was given before the weather and drying conditions turned against me.  Meanwhile, I have a small mountain of washed fleece waiting to be spun, so I've been trying to get through it.

Washed sheep's fleeces waiting for carding and spinning.

One of the alpaca fleeces though caused a rather rare (for me) ragequit.  I actually took the bobbin off the spinning wheel and threw it.  The wool is short and soft, rather like persian cat hair.  It doesn't spin up nicely at all, regardless of how short my draft is and the thread breaks constantly.

Bloody awful alpaca fleece

This is how it spun up.

It sat in time out in my spare room while I rather resentfully pretended to ignore it and treated it as a betrayal of my trust, while I hoped it learned it's lesson.

I hate waste though.  I hate giving up on something.  I hate finding out I can't do something.  So it sat in the back of my mind while I tried to figure out how to win this battle.

Then it occurred to me to blend it with the much longer and sturdier texel fleece.  Slap forehead, D'oh.

It's terribly obvious as a solution really, but I hadn't been thinking like that. 

It also meant that Hubby could get his socks that aren't creamy white and stop being so obnoxious about the colour of his socks.  It's not like he wears shorts often enough that woolen socks would be visible anyway.

Blending it is fairly simple, I start with some of the texel fleece on my carding comb and add a rough layer of the alpaca fleece and card back and forth until there are no big obvious blobs of brown.  Once it's spun, the colour is uneven, but I think this is a funky feature and we all like it.

Texel fleece on carding comb.

Add some alpaca fleece.

Start carding back and forth to mix up the colours and fleeces.

Sufficiently blended for me.

A rolag ready to spin.

This is how it spins up - this is still a single and not plyed.

So far I've made three pairs of socks with this.  The alpaca fleece makes them warmer and snugglier.  I've had to start adding special stripes so we know whose is whose.

Same yarn knitted into a sock.

Two stripes is Miss Nine's sock.

Winter as a Time of Abundance?

Normally, I would think of Winter as being a time of scarcity.  The grass doesn't grow, the veges (mostly) don't grow and feed for ourselves and our animals is difficult.

While the grass is a fairly large problem this year because we're still in drought, it seems to be the only thing that is scarce for us.

We left our cull later than we should have - partly due to not having the funds to have the homekill man out and pay for the butchering of the cattlebeasts.  But suddenly, we seemed to have money thrown at us from all directions, so we got two steers, three pigs and three hoggets slaughtered.  I still did the butchering of the pigs and sheep and I'm still grateful that there was a two week gap between them as that was a lot of work to do on my own.  By the last sheep I was so over it that it got the barest minimum cuts made to still have meals worth having.

We bought a new chest freezer.  We dithered about it, we went back and forth between chest freezer and upright.  I know that while an upright freezer might officially be a certain size, you lose a fair bit of that in the shelves and drawers, but they are more user friendly.  We decided on the chest freezer in the end for it's capacity and it's now filled to that capacity.

I was a little disturbed by my hoggets.  They looked quite fat and healthy until their skins were off.  There was almost no fat on them at all.  All three were extremely lean.  It showed me that they were not eating as well as they seemed to have been.  Worms and parasites were not an issue on inspection.

I've been feeding out to my remaining sheep, especially as that's (hopefully) all pregnant ewes, but they don't seem to be interested in hay or balage.  They'll have a nibble at it and then go back to sticking their heads through fences to eat the shelter belts.  They all genuinely seem fat though and the neighbour thinks they're in good health.  There are just a few piles of hay still sitting in their paddock to be nibbled at now and then.

So we have meat in abundance because of the cull.  I will probably not need to buy meat for the next year at least and this time, there is variety.

Brownie my housecow seems to have ramped up production of milk.  Where I was getting two litres a day from her which was ample for our needs, I'm now getting between three and six litres.  The calf is still with her and she hasn't weaned him.  I'm also getting more cream from it.  I'm currently out of cheese cultures and the place I usually get them from is out of stock on my cultures, so I've got every possible jug and bottle filled with milk and it's still not enough.  I'm freezing milk as often as I have plastic bottles and freezer space to put it in and I'm still worrying about wasting milk.

So I have milk in abundance.

For some reason, my chickens have also ramped up their laying.  My youngest hens would be coming up to three years old, well past their prime laying days and it's been a cold winter, but lately, the eggs have quadrupled.  At this time of year, I expect maybe four eggs on an average day, I'm currently getting an average of 16 eggs a day.  I still have all the different types of preserved eggs I did a while ago so there's not much point in adding more.  I've been giving eggs to anyone who stops in.

And I have eggs in abundance.

Putting the bird-netting around the vege gardens has worked to keep the chooks out of my garden so that plants can actually grow.  We planted some winter greens that are doing very well.  In one of them, we mulched quite heavily with chook poo and sawdust from cleaning out the henhouses and some torn up egg trays.  Those plants are about four times the size of others in another garden that were planted only two weeks later - and that was a couple of months ago.  This garden is doing so well that plants I'd thought the hens had destroyed have come back and are growing well.  Plants that aren't supposed to live during winter, but they've had hard frosts that didn't thaw for a week and a couple of dumpings of snow and they're still thriving.

Soon it seems we'll have those veges in abundance.

Don't get me wrong, I'm loving it, but I can't quite figure out what I've done right to get so much abundance in Winter.

Ham and Bacon

A lot of people have expressed surprise that I not only butcher my own pigs, but I also cure my own ham and bacon.

There seems to be this idea that it's a lot of hard work and that it always comes out too salty.

I brine both ham and bacon (with different mixes) and find that it's not a lot of work at all.  Once the brine is mixed to satisfaction, it's a matter of placing the cuts in the bucket and leaving them in the fridge for a week.  After a week, I check to be sure the cure has gone all the way through, rinse them (this can take time and lots of water) then slice them, bag them and freeze them.

Bags of sliced bacon

This time I hired a meat slicer for slicing up the bacon and ham.  It was probably not the best model and I don't believe it was worth what I paid for it for the weekend.  I may just buy one myself, even using it only twice a year means it's paid for itself in just over a year.

The bacon was challenging to slice (better once I'd let it airdry for about an hour), but since the ham is baked (to an internal temp of 68 C), it made slicing it far easier.

I got my Bacon Cure mix and Prague Powder from Oskarbutcher.

The recipes and processes are as follows:

Ham

3/4 C salt
1 C Brown Sugar
1/4 C Molasses
1/4 tsp ground cloves
3 tsp prague powder #1

Mix all in warm water.  The salination of the brine is right if a fresh egg floats.  If the egg doesn't float, add equal parts of brown sugar and salt until the egg does float.

Place pork to be cured in brine and ensure that it's completely submerged (a plate on top can help as the meat tends to float).

Place in the fridge for 1 day per kg of meat.

Check the cure has gone right through.  Rinse ham and let soak in clean water.
Cut a small piece, fry and taste to check for saltiness.  If the ham is still too salty, let it rinse some more.
Cook at 150C until an internal temperature of 68C is reached.

Notes: 

I've never found it clear whether it's per kg of total meat or for each individual cut.  Most recently, I had 7 kg of ham in 5 different pieces (two were legs on the bone).  I almost forgot about it, so it cured for 9 days and wasn't noticeably different from last time when it cured for 4 days.

When I'm rinsing the ham, I leave my bucket under the tap with the tap running at it's slowest without just dripping and check it hourly.

Baking the ham this way does not affect it's ability to soak in a tasty glaze if you freeze it and then cook it later.  We used a leg ham for Christmas dinner last year and the brown sugar and orange juice glaze I made still soaked right through and tasted great.

Because I'm using whole legs, I use a 15 litre food grade bucket.  I need at least 3C each of brown sugar and salt for this.

Bacon

1 part bacon cure
1 part salt (not iodised)
1/2 part brown sugar

Dissolve in water until a fresh egg floats.  Submerge meat in brine.  Keep in the fridge for 4 - 7 days.  Soak in fresh water for 1 hour and test for saltiness.

Notes:

This mix can also be used as a dry rub in the same proportions, rubbed thoroughly into the meat every 2 or 3 days and finished off in the same way.

French Vanilla Ice Cream

For some reason, we're suddenly getting lots and lots of milk from Brownie.  I have quite a few cheeses curing, several bottles in the freezer for when we dry her off (and I'm gradually adding to this, but not wanting to fill up the freezer just yet when we have 8 animals getting slaughtered for the freezer this week) and every available jug is full.

It occurred to me this morning that I have plenty of eggs and lots of milk and one of the best things I can do with the two together is make custard.  I remembered seeing someone on My Kitchen Rules making an ice cream that was essentially a frozen creme anglaise.  I found a recipe in one of my books for creme anglaise just recently and was surprised to discover that it was simply a custard sauce with no cornflour.

A few minutes spent on google this morning, showed me that creme anglaise ice cream is better known as french vanilla - my favourite flavour of ice cream!  Well, that made it an obvious choice to be making.  I also checked up on making ice cream without an ice cream machine.  It was pretty much as I expected, you just need to pull it out of the freezer every half an hour or so and beat it up again.

The reason for this is the size of the ice crystals that form.  If I just put it straight into the freezer as it was, there would be fairly large ice crystals.  They don't change the flavour of the ice cream, but they do affect the mouth feel of it.  Beating it while it's freezing breaks up those large ice crystals and gives a smoother texture.

Thanks to Nigella, I know that after separating my eggs, I can freeze the egg whites and they'll be fine for pavlova or meringues.  So I place the egg whites in ziplock bags - 6 egg whites in each bag (which is the quantity I tend to use when I make pavlova) and there is no waste.

I have seen recipes that talked about adding the scalded milk tablespoon by tablespoon to temper the eggs.  In my first attempt, I just poured it all in and it came out fine.  

The original recipe was for 1/4 of the amount I have made, but I didn't think it was worth making ice cream 500ml at a time.  This came to approx 3 litres, possibly more.

2 containers of Creme Anglaise for French Vanilla Ice Cream

Creme Anglaise

2 litres of scalded milk
24 egg yolks
3 Cups of sugar
1 tsp of vanilla essence

Whisk egg yolks and sugar together until thick and pale.
Slowly add scalded milk, stirring constantly.
Heat on double boiler, still stirring constantly until thick enough to coat the back of a spoon.
Remove from heat and stir in vanilla essence.

In my case, since I'm making this into ice cream, I let it cool, poured it into ice cream containers and put them in the freezer.  They'll be getting stirred every half an hour until completely frozen.

Yummy.

Read More:
New Ice Cream Recipe with Variations

Winter is Certainly Here

We woke up this morning to frost on the inside of the windows.  I'm confident we only got the predicted -5 degrees Celsius overnight and we're still not a patch on Lake Pukaki's -20 from yesterday.  That isn't much comfort however, especially as tonight -7 is predicted.

From MetService.com

As I'm sick with the flu, my darling Hubby has been starting work late and coming home early.  He's been out in the icy mornings getting Miss Nine off to the school bus and milking the cow before he goes to work.  He drags Miss Nine along with him in the evening to feed out the animals and get them settled for the night.

Next week, the homekill man is coming and there will be 8 less animals to worry about.  2 steers, 3 hoggets and 3 pigs are going into the freezer.  This will take some of the strain off the meagre feed resources after a drought-laden Summer and poor growing season.  We've already had to buy in more hay.  I'm a little cranky at how much more we paid for it as there are big chunks of wood throughout the bales - they're big enough that I'm putting them in the wood shed for firewood.

For some reason though, my hens have started to lay more.  They're all older birds so I don't expect an egg a day from them all, most moulted last month (with one changing colour as her new feathers came in) and it's been cold.  But somehow, my daily collection of eggs has doubled in the last week.  *Shrugs* I'm not complaining, I just find it a little odd.

Taken at 11am.

For now, we're keeping the fires burning, wearing thermals, feeding out the animals and I'm keeping an eye on the spots that don't thaw out at all during the day.

Some Thoughts on Cheese Making

Again today, I'm in the process of making cheese.  This time I'm having a go at Edam - it's currently setting after the addition of the rennet.

It struck me today that the really hard part about trying new cheeses is that they take months to cure.  I like to know the success or taste of a cheese before I attempt to make another one.  If the recipe I've used is not right, or something was lost in translation (translation from cheese-making jargon to what I understand).  I'd prefer to know about it before I charge on in potentially making the same mistakes over and over and having a shelf full of cheeses (this represents hours and hours of work and plenty of milk) that are only good for the pigs.

My last batch of Camembert was a disaster.  I'd been getting rather hard crumbly Camemberts but they were still completely edible, you could slice it and eat it just fine on a cracker.  I did some research and wondered if I'd been a bit rough with my curd.  So for the last batch I was extremely gentle.  The curds didn't look like cottage cheese this time, they held their mostly cube shapes.  But it was harder than ever.  you can't safely slice this batch.  I've taken to grating it with a lemon zester and using it in potato bakes where I might have used parmesan.  It's worked okay, but it is frustrating.

Camembert only cures for a month!  Today's Edam will need to wait for two months before I know if it's any good.

I've been making different types of hard cheeses so I'll have a variety to try and decide whether or not to make again.  Currently curing is Gouda and a Farm Cheddar.  Actually, I think they're both up for tasting in the next couple of weeks.

Another thought is that many of the recipes available are not really designed for the home cheesemaker.  The smallest quantity of milk I've found in these recipes is 4 litres.  Most are approximately 10 litres and I've found a few that are 20+.  Four litres is manageable.  Ten litres is easy to work out reduced amounts and conversions.

Ten litres isn't entirely practical unless you go and buy special equipment for cheesemaking.  I've taken to sterilising a large bucket and using that.  Otherwise I have one large stockpot that will only barely hold ten litres and a large bowl that isn't really big enough for all the whey.

A further thought is that it really is quite incredible how a small difference in process can make such a different cheese.  I've made feta, minas, camembert, gouda, edam, cheddar, mozzarella and ricotta.  With the exception of mozzarella and ricotta, most of the cheesemaking process has only small variations in what you do to create such vastly different cheeses.  They use the same cultures (I only have two cultures) and the same volume of rennet.  Camembert has Penicillum Candidum added.  The time left to set, whether or not it's then heated in whey and whether it's pressed are the main differences and then how long it's left to age.

It's a journey anyway and one I'm having fun with.