Vyxxan's Virtual Venture

Archive for the ‘Cooking’ Category

Got the new screen for the food mill during the week. It’s well made, although hard to see if it’s welded any better. Obviously not made by the same company, but it does fit and the spirals turn inside of it.

I used the old screen yesterday when I made more blackberry jam. Only took out 1 gallon bag and one pint bag from the freezer. Cooked them up, ran the stuff through the food mill twice just like before. Ended up with WAY too much juice/pulp for the amount of jam I wanted to deal with, so I put the extra into a labeled container in the freezer.

This time around I made sugar-free jam. I have a friend who is diabetic and so I said I’d make some jam for her, too. I couldn’t do sweetener free… that would be too tart… so I opted to go with Splenda. The recipe calls for 1.5 cups of Splenda if using. (you can also use sugar with the “no sugar needed” pectin, up to 3 cups, which is WAY less than a normal batch would use)

It gelled quite nicely, but is slightly on the tart side. Tastes great, though, and that’s what is important, right? I got 4 full jars (1/2 pint size) and an almost full jar that I will put in the fridge until my friend comes to visit.

Instead of throwing the seed stuff out in the field… this time I put it on a cookie sheet covered in foil and stuck it in the oven to dry. I’m thinking that it would make a good addition to homemade suet cakes. I don’t usually feed the birds here, but I can see finding some places for suet cakes when it’s all snowy or icy. When it’s totally dry I’ll break it up and store it until I can get some suet or lard to mix up with birdseed and stuff and form into cakes for the birds. (there are tons of recipes online if you feed birds)

Made labels again, too. Probably forgot to mention that I spent about 2 hours fixing a photo of a berry until I could use it on a label, lol! I have a really ancient program that I use to make stickers/labels. It doesn’t really like to run in Vista but it does…. and I can import art, but only if it is in bitmap form! I keep using the program, though, because I can move things =exactly= where I want them. I’ve tried to make good labels with other programs but this old program that came with my first Canon printer is the one I use. I use it for my return address labels, stamping swap labels… anytime I need a label or need to tweak things better than I can do with other programs I own. Only bad thing is that it doesn’t do barcodes for shipping labels. Oh well, can’t have everything, right? I even do baggie headers with this program, as a custom sheet.

On to other stuff. Friday I bought a carpet cleaner machine. Mid-range priced Bissell. My little dog Rita is on medication now for congestive heart failure and it makes her pee more. She’s not hitting the potty pads all the time and I was starting to smell it. Can’t really do anything about how much time she’s outside, as I’m gone for over 12 hours a day. I hate wall to wall carpeting… it’s just a big dirt suck and needs constant vacuuming and cleaning, especially if you have pets. I’m not big on house cleaning anyhow… but the carpets here are a disaster. Not all my fault…. gosh knows how old the carpeting is here and no one ever took care of it. But I can’t have the smell of dog pee, so I have to clean the carpeting where Rita has “missed” her pads.

I vacuumed first of course, and we do have a decent vacuum… so good that you can’t get through one room without having to empty it. Like I said, the carpets are dirt sponges. Then I ran the carpet cleaner 3 times over the area I was doing… twice with cleaning solution and once with plain water. It still stinks… and the carpet isn’t really clean yet. But I was worried about putting too much water into it in one day.

I will be doing over probably next weekend… and until I get the smell out… which may be never! But I’ll try, that room is the one designated as the guest room. Oh, and I blocked Rita from going in there, moved her potty pads and put them where she HAS to hit them in a small area blocked around.

More other stuff…. :)

Early today Ron went out to feed the cats and take Rita out. No cats were on the porch, but when they heard the food hit the dishes they came running…. including Wild Thing who came running from the barn with a giant RAT in his mouth! Silly cat! He sets it down so he can eat kibble, and another cat takes it to play. The rat is still very much alive. They kept taking it from each other and Rita finally came up into the area and got very excited. She IS a rat terrier, you know! Ron made her come in the house… she got her treat, and then she kept jumping up to the window to watch the cats and going to the door and whining. So, Ron let her back outside. She ran out and attacked the rat, gave it a shake, dropped it and let the cats have it again. Ron said she yelped, too, so she might have got nipped by the rat and that’s why she dropped it… but she was done, she had her turn at it and came back in the house all proud of herself. As many rats as these cats get down in the barn, well, the barn must be seriously infested. (oh, and Wild Thing is a BOY cat, not usually the best hunters, but all the boys we have now seem to be)

It’s Superbowl Sunday, and I have no plans on watching… I never do. Always miss all the good commercials, lol! Today is also what I think of as the anniversary for Ron and I. We took each other to meet our Mom’s on Superbowl Sunday. Things were great when I met his Mom… Beulah told lots of stories and told me how much happier Ron seemed since he met me. Then we went to my Mom’s house and she had a house full of people drinking and talking politics. When we left there I was thinking… OMG, he’s gonna run away screaming and never want to see me again. But all he said was… “No Bush fans in that house, were there?” And here we are, all these years later… a gazillion cats that I’ve named, a very prolific blackberry bush, the adoption of 3 dogs and the moving of one here, and kids moving in and out. I cook, Ron cleans it up most of the time… and we work different shifts and miss each other a lot. We take time to have fun together… and manage to talk every day. I’m still his computer guru and he’s still my mechanical guy. Long live Ron and Vyx together! :)

This is all for now…

Hugs,
Vyx

We had good warning on the storm that dumped ice and snow on us, and I made plans to keep busy.

I had planned on making jam this weekend, lots of it. We have that huge thornless blackberry hedge (below) that started out as a single cane the year I met Ron. I can only make so many pies and cobblers and blackberry buckles… I really need to make jam, too. This year I think I’m going to have to work harder at selling some of the blackberries. I offered them up free to anyone who would pick them last year and I still put a gazillion bags into the freezer.

I took 3 gallon bags out of the freezer Thursday night to make jam. Just had a look in the freezer and there are 2 more gallon bags… plus 6 quart bags! That is just from this past year… I took a couple gallon bags to my friend over in Oklahoma last year when I visited. LOTS of berries!

Anyhow, in preparation of the big blackberry jam making, I went to visit my Mom and borrow her food mill. I absolutely cannot stand seeds in berries. I dislike them so much that I won’t usually even eat fresh strawberries… the crunching seeds in my teeth makes me forget how wonderful they taste. I can make all the blackberry pie and such that Ron will eat, but I don’t eat any of it myself because of those seeds.

Mom bought this food mill a few years ago. It’s really wonderful at getting the seeds out… I’ve used it previously on raspberries. Mom uses it for tomatoes, but hasn’t used it in a few years. The funny thing is, we don’t even have the berry screen… just the standard screen that it came with. The berry screen is supposed to even get strawberry seeds out… but the standard screen works great at getting out regular berry seeds and tomato seeds.

So, there we have the machine processing the cooked berries. The instructions do NOT say to cook things first. What I did yesterday was try to process the thawed berries without cooking. They were still a bit frozen but squishy, so I thought the machine could handle it if I went slow.

To make a long story slightly shorter… it couldn’t. The screen broke apart from the bit that holds it to the machine. AUGH! When we looked at it, it was easy to see why… it only had 2 good welds on it and those were both about an inch apart… so the rest of it wasn’t really welded. Pop goes the screen.

I was freaking out… this belongs to my Mom, and now I have to find a replacement part. I did, too. This is an older model but I found a place online selling replacement parts for it and bought one. The internet is great! But I’ve got a dilemma here… what the heck do I do with 3 gallons of thawed out berries? Refreeze them and do this when my replacement part comes? Get seeds out the old fashioned way, with a sieve? (blargh, but that would take forever)

Ron came to my rescue. He has a MAPP gas welding kit. He got it out of the garage and let it all come up to room temperature, and then he welded the screen back to the holder bit. Not a perfect job…. but at least it will hold so that I can get on with my jam making!

While the whole welding thing was pending, I packed most of the berries into a canister and put them back in the freezer. (bags were leaking) The partial bag I dumped out into a pan on the stove and brought them up to simmer. By the time the welding was done and the machine put together to make sure it would work… well, it was late and I was tired of messing around. I got the canister back out of the freezer and put it in the fridge.

Bright and early this morning I got the canister out of the fridge and poured it all into a pot to cook. Didn’t cook it long, just enough to soften things up a bit. I also decided to use the grape spiral for the machine, instead of the regular (longer) spiral. Blackberries have a lot of seeds and they also have a pithy center.

This is what you get out of the end of the machine….

Looks like a lot of pulp left in that too. And it was, so I did like they recommend with the grape spiral and put all the waste back through the machine again. Probably could have gone one more time but the bowl of good stuff was nearly full at that point.

I forgot to take photos of any of the rest of the jam making process… or the jars all filled and everything. I made 3 batches of jam today, and now have 6 pint jars and 12 half pint jars of SEEDLESS blackberry jam. There were a couple teaspoonfuls left in the pot after the last batch… so I made some toast and used that up! :)

Still have a bit of clean up to do… as soon as I was done with the last batch of jam this afternoon we went out to walk the dogs in the 8 inches or so of snow we got. I should have taken the camera, it was really beautiful down by the pond. I did upload some more photos, though… continuing yesterdays picture story of the yard. So I’ll just paste them in here…

First, the yard last night just after dark. It was still snowing, and the flash helped catch that.

Then again this morning. The snow had stopped falling, but the sun never actually came out today.

The big tree and the neighbors house… not the exact view as last year, but you could still compare it a bit…..

One of my bluebird houses. Good thing the birds don’t need them this time of year, that’s a lot of ice hanging on it.

Last picture for tonight… the west side of the storm shelter and how much snow piled up on the wood pile. The snow was blowing from the east…. so the boat on the east side of the cellar has no snow on it to speak of. Looks like about 2 feet of snow on the wood. We didn’t get that much snow… only about 6 or 8 inches….

I’m very tired, and my feet hurt. Walking dogs in the snow was fun, though. Right up until I realized I was packing snow up the legs of my jeans and coveralls with every step. Bits started falling into my boots, lol! The snow is pretty deep… beagle tummies were brushing it as they walked.

hugs,
Vyx

Just about a year ago we got this:

That was an inch or more of ice. The weather guys are saying that we are going to get from 1/4 of an inch to maybe 1 inch of ice this storm coming in. A quarter inch of ice is enough to do damage, I don’t know what will happen to our poor trees if we get a whole inch of it!

Only good thing is that it’s not supposed to hit us until tomorrow afternoon. I’ll probably be able to get in a full days work and then zoom home and hunker down until it melts. Hmm, maybe better would be able to miss work, but I need the money.

I have plans for the weekend, anyhow. Stay at home and cook jam plans. I’m going to be doing seedless blackberry jam until I either run out of sugar and pectin or jars, whichever comes first. I know I won’t run out of blackberries… I haven’t counted the gallon bags in the freezer, but there are a LOT of them.

I hope I don’t wake up Friday to something like this photo…

Hugs,
Vyx

Well, I’m home from work early… They let us leave at 1 pm. Closer I got to home, the more rain… and ice already forming on things! Augh!

Jam yesterday, jam tomorrow… oh wait… it’s jam today!

Last weekend I dyed wool yarn. I have a post about what I did last weekend, but I’m not posting it until my friend gets her yarn.

This weekend I could have dyed more yarn, but I decided I’d better make tomato jam instead. We are on our last jar, I think, and I didn’t make any at all last year because of such a poor tomato crop. Ron really likes blackberries but his favorite jam since he met me and my mad kitchen skillz… well, it’s tomato jam. He’d never had any until I met him and introduced him to it. Now it’s his favorite. Me, I grew up with one of my Mom’s friends making TONS of the stuff… I helped one year to make 32 quarts of tomato jam! That’s a lot! (and I totally see the point of quarts when you make that much… less jar filling)

I know, you are wondering where I’m getting tomatoes in January. Well, from the freezer, of course! All extra tomatoes that we don’t eat or give away (or sell), for whatever reason… those get cut up and bagged and frozen. So, this tomato has a big bad spot on the bottom but otherwise is fine? Cut that off, it can go in the freezer. If you’ve ever grown a lot of tomatoes you know that there are those that just don’t make the cut to eat fresh… you hate to waste them but probably do. I don’t. As long as the bad spots, sunburned spots, whatever get cut off, I freeze em. Or rather Ron does… this last year I pretty much took over on the growing part of it and all Ron did was pick them and do the freezing stuff when needed.

So, last night I pulled 4 gallon bags out of the freezer. 2 were pretty full, the other 2 only about 1/2 full. Looked like enough tomatoes for 2 batches of jam and that’s plenty for one day. I used to try to do double batches, but after having to recook countless times, I’ve given that up! It’s easier to do it all at once, but not if you have to dump all the jars back out and add more sugar and pectin and boil it all over again.

So I start out with a bag and a half of semi-frozen tomato pieces. I dump them into a colander and let the excess water drain. Some of that water is tomato juice, some is frost from the freezer. Down the drain it goes… tomatoes are mostly water and water doesn’t make good jam.

Then I start slipping the skins. This is another reason to freeze… the skins slip with out all that boiling water, dipping, and trying to peel them. It’s a messy business, and the longest part of the process. Not only do I slip the skins, but I try to get any bits that are green looking or seed holders that are white. (I could skip this if I could get Ron to squeeze the tomatoes before freezing, something to work on this year)

Tomato pulp goes into a bowl. I do try to get out a lot of the seeds while I’m slipping the skins, but it really depends on how frozen the tomatoes are. Tomatoes that are still mostly frozen are not as easy to peel, and they have a lot more water held in them than ones that have sat in that colander longer. BUT! The seeds pop out easier when the tomatoes are still pretty frozen. The good bits will be almost like wet sundried tomatoes when you slip the skin. All pulp, not fluffy with water. The less water the better, too… as this jam is very hard to get to set. It’s taken me years to get a good recipe and it’s =still= iffy sometimes. If you have never made a jam or jelly before you probably don’t want to try this as your first attempt.

Sometimes I chop the pulp as I go, this year I skipped that step… it’s a bigger mess. And we all know how tomatoes just sort of come apart when they cook anyhow, right? So, finally I have a bowl of tomato pulp that I stir around looking for bits of skin or big chunks of green that escaped my eye while slipping the skins.

Measure it out. 4 to 5 cups is good. If you have more, save it for the next batch. Make sure it’s not too watery. It should look like this photo. (and yes, I know this looks like a lot of chopped meat or something, except it has seeds) It should NOT look like bits of tomato swimming in juice.
BTW, if you want to do this in summer with fresh tomatoes… you peel, squeeze, chop and then let drain for a while unless you LIKE standing at a hot stove for hours cooking it down and boiling off the excess water. The water draining off easy is my second reason for using frozen and thawed tomatoes from our garden.

I used powdered pectin this time, some that I’d bought a while back when I couldn’t find the liquid stuff. Not a big deal, the basic process is the same sort of… I did forget with the first batch tho, and added the sugar first. According to the powdered pectin recipe you add the sugar later, after it’s at a boil. Oh well! With liquid pectin you add the sugar first and boil, then add the pectin. Whatever, I figured it wouldn’t really hurt it as long as I made sure to cook the tomatoes a while before getting up to that boil.

Whatever kind of pectin you are using…. you want 7 cups of sugar to that 4 or5 cups of pulp. Plus 1/4 cup of bottled lemon juice. If you think your tomatoes are really watery… go with less pulp or cook them longer before adding the pectin. I like my jam rather soft, but not runny…. however, even 5 cups of pulp in the mix tends to work out… it’s very spreadable! This jam is mostly pulp, not juice, after that freezing thawing thing.

So, bringing it up to a boil. Not something you want to go watch tv while it’s cooking. (I have done that, and scorched the jam) Stand there and stir, stir stir. It’s going to get very, very, very, very hot when it has sugar in it and reaches a rolling boil. You don’t want small children around who could get splashed. I’ve had it pop at me, that’s a burn if it lands on skin. I managed to splash it all over myself tonight… face, arm, shirt, pants and headphones. That’s because I was pouring in the partial jar I’d made earlier… so it could get cooked in, heated… I forgot that I was going to just heat that partial jar in the microwave and fill it. Of course I got it all over the floor too… what a mess! I don’t think I got burned, tho…. I jumped back and ran in and washed off with ice cold water as fast as I could drop the spoon in the pan.

I have all these pictures but they wouldn’t upload before I started this post. So I’m not sure where I am now. Oh, yeah! Me making jam! With headphones… standing at the stove is boring, so I needed music to dance to while stirring my tomato jam. Yes, Ron was laughing at me. I sing, too… and badly. But as long as I’m not too loud he doesn’t care. The important thing was making him the tomato jam. :)

Have 8 jars and a partial jar cooling on the counter. It’s still runny, but I hope with time and some refrigeration that will resolve itself. It usually does. We don’t want jam that is hard to spread, like jello or commercial jams. Spoon in the jar and smear it on a buttered biscuit… heaven.

Lastly, a recipe that might still need to be tweaked. I usually use a strawberry jam recipe to start from… with my frozen tomatoes, that is. I figure the water content is pretty close. Your mileage may vary… tomato jam isn’t for beginners.

Tomato Jam

4 to 5 cups tomato pulp (no skins and the less seeds and juice/water the better)
1/4 cup bottled lemon juice
7 cups sugar
Liquid or powdered pectin

Follow basic pectin jam instructions. Pour into jars, put lids on and seal with a water bath as recommended. Or do like we always did… put boiling jam into jars right from the burner still going and put lids and bands on, and turn over like this for 5 min. Then turn back right side up.

And be careful! I used the oven to keep my jars hot and sterilized today and kept trying to move them with bare fingers. Then I splashed my jam on myself, it’s a wonder I’m not burned. Sticky but not burned. Ron can always lick me clean, lol…

hugs,
Vyx

I actually took a photo this time of the finished rolls! I’m funny, tho… I had to come to my own website to read my recipe, lol! I tossed the paper where I’d written my adjustments after I typed it in here.

Need to revise the recipe, bit less milk I think. I kept adding flour, adding flour. Dough wasn’t all that sticky when I turned it back into the bowl to rise, but after rising it was VERY sticky. Might be the humidity level in the house… we’ve got the humidifiers going full blast.

These rolls didn’t turn out as nice as the previous ones… the dough got to rise for a lot longer and it was so sticky that I didn’t form the rolls… just plopped chunks of dough into the pan. I think they could have stood another 3 to 5 min. in the oven, too! That’s another thing I need to revise in the recipe, the cooking time. If you make big rolls like these, they need more time in the oven… 20 to 25 min.

But they still taste great, and I got the other pork roast out of the freezer and thawed/warmed it. We STILL have red cabbage slaw left over… that “4 servings” on the original recipe was a typo, for sure. What we don’t eat tonight, well, I’m gonna have to toss it. Getting too soggy, plus I have a thing about leftovers in the fridge too long… not allowed!

While I was out at the grocery store this morning buying yeast, I also got some cube steak to make MM’s favorite sandwiches… well, my version of em. I’ll do that tomorrow some time… it was going to be our dinner tonight, but Ron reminded me of the pork roast. I was going to make the potato rolls, and thought the cube steak would be great on them. I was craving bread today. Probably need those carbs to help keep me warm when I have to be outside!

And speaking of outside… I walked the dogs in the 8 degrees or whatever it got to today. Bundled up in the quilted overalls, underneath that: jeans, 2 shirts, quilted vest. Over the overalls: hooded sweat jacket and another jacket over that. Hat, gloves and a fleece scarf. Hiking boots instead of my normal athletic shoes. Hey, they do say to do layers… I had a lot on. Go out to get the dogs and the pups head for the house! No, c’mon kids… we are doing walkies. OH! Pups came running back to join Sadie and I. We did our normal walk down around the pond (frozen so well I bet I could ice skate on it) and came back up to the house. I wasn’t intending on bringing the dogs in at that point… Ron was sleeping. But BuddyMack went to the door and refused to come down to his part of the yard, so we all came inside for a while.

Just in case you are worried about my dogs being out in this frigid weather: they have heated houses. Heat lamps that are on constantly in this kind of weather and I check the temps in their houses. BuddyMack’s house is warm, about 55. The girls house is a bit cooler at 53, but they have each other to keep warm. The worst thing is keeping BuddyMack in water he can drink. That heated water bowl is looking better every day… we were worried about him eating the cord, but I don’t think that would be a problem the way they have a metal spring over the cord now. Going out to knock the ice out of his water bowl the past few days is a constant thing… and I never see the punk drink any water! Girls don’t have a problem… I keep their water inside their house since it’s so large. We’ll probably be doing that for BuddyMack, too… Ron is going to build him a better house, one like the girls and the cats have.

I was worried about the cats last night. They also have a heated house (up on the porch), but it didn’t seem to be getting very warm. Their water dishes are inside that house, and the water was frozen! I gave them some old clothing to lay on, replaced the broken water bottle that was pouring water all over the floor of the house…. and stuffed the ventilation holes in that house with cut up rags. Still wasn’t warming. The poor cats all pile up on each other on one shelf… but a couple of them moved to the other shelf when I put the clothing down. Still, it’s out of the wind, and they do have fur coats. Ron fixed the problem today: he put in a bigger wattage heat lamp. For some reason we only had a 125 watt lamp in there, and that wasn’t enough. Now it has a 250, and the temp is more like what the dogs have. Silly cats, tho… they thought rags in vent holes were toys… those are gone. Sigh.

Lastly… for Christmas my sister Val sent me a set of flashlights with a couple headlamps. I’d mentioned walking the dogs in the dark here on the blog. So, I had Ron take a photo of me wearing one. I look very tired, and I’m wearing my dog walking jackets, but I didn’t just come in from walking them. I look work week tired.

I do know these will be handy… Thanks again, Val! (and happy birthday, too… hope your cookbook gets there soon)

hugs,
Vyx