Pillow Road

Creamy yogurt with berries, finger food

How can yogurt be finger food without refrigeration for up to 5 days?  First make Greek yogurt from organic, whole milk then take the next step to make berry yogurt bites.

Did you know Greek yogurt is made with any kind of milk and simply drained of whey liquid after it sets?  I thought Greek meant goats milk yogurt like feta cheese.  I learned to make yogurt last Fall to organically penny pinch and found it was surprisingly easy.  I am a reluctant culinary adventurer.  The result cannot be matched by supermarket brands in my biased opinion.

Thanks to detailed instructions and cultures obtained from Steve at thecheesemaker.com, it takes no time to heat milk, let it cool and add culture.  I add 1 tsp of flavor in extract form and 1/4 cup of xylitol for sweetness at this point.  You need to incubate the yogurt for 6-12 hours at about 110 degrees.  More about an incubator/dehydrator later.  You will love the creamy thick yogurt from whole or 2% milk, even chocolate milk if you prefer.  Like sourdough you can make future batches using the same culture reserved from the initial batch.  Very economical.

Yogurt Going Greek

As gently as possible, transfer the finished yogurt into cheesecloth while the whey drains for 15-20 minutes.  Help it along by hanging the bag tied to a dowel over a pot.  Chill and you are ready to eat with berries, nuts or dehydrated persimmons as gathered at Pillow Road. If you fail to devour it all, you may go on to the dehydration phase and make yogurt bites.

Below you can see 2″ tart rings (or silicone cupcake liners) hold pureed fruit with yogurt spread on top.  Don’t puree fruit to liquid or it will run when you remove the ring.  You may use frozen berries in a chopper and they’ll be firm enough not to run.

Berry yogurt bites, ready for dehydrator

The Excalibur brand small dehydrator shown below incubates yogurt, makes jerky, dries herbs, tomatoes, fruits and makes fruit leathers.  These foods provide optimum nutrition as warm air drying preserves probiotics, vitamins and enzymes usually lost to traditional cooking.

This dehydrator costs around $120 shipped via internet.  I use it much more than I thought I would.  You might think about adding this handy, healthful item to your kitchen.  Caution:  round ones can’t make yogurt because the containers won’t fit inside.  My inventive friend set the container wrapped in a towel on a heating pad set on medium-high.  This works just fine in lieu of contraptions. Monitor with a food thermometer the first few times to determine a setting that yields the 110 degree target range since a high temperature will kill your culture before it can make the yogurt.

Shelves of yogurt bites inside dehydrator

4-8 hours later you have mini-cheesecake (like) treats that are refined-sugar free registering LOW on the glycemic index. Although rich tasting they are low in calories, high in probiotics, anti-oxidants and vitamins.  They are appealing chilled but like all dehydrated food, no longer require refrigeration.  Plastic wrap separately as they will stick together.  Yogurt bites are mess-free finger food providing nutritious snacks and dessert.

A great advantage of dehydration is preventing spoilage of pricey organic produce.  By dropping extras or leftovers in the blender, resulting purees store much longer sealed in jars and refrigerated or frozen. When I get time I can pour the purees for dehydrating and 8-12 hours later have fruit leathers.  The leathers last 4-5 days at room temp, up to a month refrigerated and one year frozen.  I can post some ideas for making fruit leathers another day.  First you can get started on homemade yogurt whether Greek, plain, chocolate, lemon or vanilla – it’s great.

After sampling Pillow Road dried persimmon and apple slices, we are ordering stock from Trees of Antiquity. We have planted only evergreens from Tennessee up to this point. So we compared notes with Parker Mountain and together ordered apple, peach, almond, walnut and Izu persimmon trees to arrive mid-March. We also ordered blackberry and red raspberry vines from Indiana Berry Company to include in an orchard area. Now we are wondering how to keep the deer from getting our bounty. Will climb that fence when we come to it!

I let the lambs and their mother outside their pasture on Saturday. The lambs would run away from their mother, amuse themselves for a bit and then run back. I caught a segment of them playing on video when they notice that Mom is moving on.

Seed saving from 2009 cucumber crop

This is my first attempt at posting to a blog. We live on a farm in Kentucky and a few friends get together here every couple of weeks for Garden Chat.  I am Dale’s sister and we share project notes and outcomes via phone, mail and now this internet blog.  Fun to trade info and keep in touch.  Our parallel interests have developed intuitively and we can agree that genetic pre-disposition has little to do with it.  Maybe the California sunshine inspired us early in life?

Barn and workshop on a Spring day in Kentucky

Our shared farm projects are cheese and yogurt making, cooking with herbs, dehydrating garden harvest and seed collecting.  I am becoming the ‘dehydrator queen’ and chose the WellFarm moniker for fruit and vegetable snacks for kids and weight watchers eating on-the-go.  I have not ventured into livestock or brewing as Dale has.  Members of our group are from Parker Mountain farm down the road and they raise Tarantaise cattle and lambs. Godspeed Farm, our immediate neighbor has constructed a 6 hen condo providing fresh eggs that are splashes of color never seen in a supermarket.  So little by little we are sprouting a farm micro co-op and marvel at the quality of our simple, new ventures.  As empty nesters we invite young married couples into the fold to support their interests in natural food, farming and organic product choices.

Currently we are reviewing our seed inventory to prepare for ordering. In addition, we have tree (nut and persimmon) and vine planting aspirations (blackberry and raspberry).  Since seeds are this week’s topic, here are some amazing numbers I calculated for the mighty backyard cucumber. It gives us an idea of the exponential value of  a single seed and the abundant provision we have entrusted to corporate interests.  Seed saving is of great value and becoming more critical each year as heirloom lines are bought up, controlled and/or destroyed to the benefit of genetically modified seed marketeers.  I became determined to save our seeds after learning more and can now be perceived as ‘nutty about seeds’.  Rightly so when you digest the following:

Q: How many cucumbers do I need for seed* in 2010 so the yield in 2011 supplies enough cucumbers to provide one seed for each citizen in the United States? (300 million population)

A: 3 cucumbers

300,000,000 seeds come from a 3,000,000 cucumber supply next year. 3,000,000 cucumbers can be harvested from 300,000 plants.

300,000 seeds for 2011 plants require 3,000 cucumbers this year. 3,000 cucumbers can be found on 300 plants. 300 seeds come from 3 cucumbers holding 100 seeds each.

*Key: 1 cucumber holds 100 seeds and 10 cucumbers harvested from 1 plant. A single seed can yield 1 million seeds in 2 seasons.  Yes there is waste but this gives us an idea.  So we start with 4 cucumbers in case 1 million seeds don’t sprout?  Oh well.

Save one seed – reap a million blessings!

Some years ago around Christmas, I visited Argentina and fell in love with empanadas. They are small pastries that usually come with a meat filling. In Buenos Aires, you can find small shops that sell them as a specialty. They are ordinary, everyday pleasures but also a delicacy.

I’ve wanted to re-create those empanadas. I’ve been disappointed several times when I’ve ordered them in a restaurant, and even a version I had in Spain didn’t match the little treats I enjoyed in Argentina.

So I made my own empanadas over the holidays and here’s how they turned out.

The secret of empanadas is the pastry, which means that butter makes all the difference (1-1/2 sticks). I made the dough in advance and let it sit in the refrigerator for a few days until I was ready to make them.

I found a good recipe in Cook’s Illustrated online. (It requires a subscription.) Here is a similar empanada dough recipe at laylita.com. You mix the ingredients in a food processor and roll it into a ball. This can be refrigerated and it is a good idea to do so even if you are making them the same day.

When you’re ready to make the empanadas, roll out the dough on a floured surface. I read that the dough should be about 1/8 of an inch thick. Next, you’ll cut out circles. The recipe said to use a 3″ biscuit cutter. Mine was about 2.5″ in diameter. Choose different sizes if you like. The small ones are nice as appetizers and in a tapas-type of meal. You can make them larger, but there’s something nice in keeping them bite-size.

I put the discs on parchment paper on a cookie sheet. I cooked a meat and cheese filling, which wasn’t particularly special. I also made a spinach filling for my family’s vegetarians. A teaspoon of filling on half the disc is all that’s needed. Then fold one half over the filling and use a fork to press and seal the edge.

I made about two trays, totaling about 40 empanadas. I preheated the oven to 350 degrees. Before they went into the oven, I brushed egg yolk over the tops. I cooked them about 25 minutes and then let them cool down a bit.

I served them with a beet salad, made with rainbow beets from the garden and a homemade split-pea soup, which was based on a nice Deborah Madison recipe that didn’t call for blending the vegetables.) The empanadas stood out, and everyone loved them.

I had some dough leftover and several days made another batch of larger-sized empanadas, served again as an accompaniment to soup.

I could see getting into a routine of making empanadas regularly, keeping a ball of dough in the fridge. I could experiment with a variety of different fillings.

I’d bet that empanadas would be a hit with young kids as well, a good way to show a little love for the little ones.

Here are books recently bought or received as Christmas gifts that are on my Pillow Road reading list for the new year.

The Garden of Invention: Luther Burbank and the Business of Breeding Plants by Jane S. Smith. Burbank’s Goldridge Experimental Farm is less than a mile away from Pillow Road. I did not realize that Burbank came from a New England family of brickmakers, which were used to build mills. His background was more industrial than agricultural. He saw plants as an opportunity for inventors.

Hard to Swallow: A Brief History of Food by Richard W. Lacey. I found this book at a bargain price in a used bookstore (while shopping for others!) Published by Cambridge University Press, the book is by a microbiologist and media critic. It seems to be a fairly technical book, incorporating science and history while also considering the environmental consequences of industrial food production. I bought it for the chapter on food poisoning.

Useful Work versus Useless Toil by William Morris. This title is in the Penguin Books Great Ideas, short paperback books on select topics. In Chicago at the Art Institute recently, I did a quick drive-by of an Arts & Crafts exhibit featuring William Morris and the British movement he started. I slyly gifted this book to my daughter, Glenda, who was with me at the exhibit. Morris believed that machines de-valued work, and while I perhaps see machines differently than he did, I think there’s a real need to be thinking about the quality of the work we do now and in the future. It was really the major theme of Matthew B. Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft.

The Industrial Revolutionaires: The Making of the Modern World, 1776-1914 by Gavin Weightman. Carl Malamud pointed out this book to me. It’s a social history of the changes brought about by inventors and engineers. I’ve always been fascinated by the origins of the steam engine in Britain.

Dry Storeroom No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum by Richard Fortey. Katie gave me this book, which I had not heard about. It’s about the British Natural History Museum, where Fortey worked for most of his careers. It’s a behind the scenes tour of the collections and the collectors. I’ve always like the term “natural history,” which also seems to have its origins as an idea in Britain.

Bay Area Produce Calendar by Krank Press. Glenda bought this small calendar on Etsy for me. I’ve set it out on my home desk because it’s really useful and nicely produced. For each month, the calendar lists what to plant and what’s in season. For January, I’m in good shape with chard, onions and spinach but the calendar reminds me I should have some radishes growing.

Earth to Table: Seasonal Recipes from an Organic Farm by Jeff Crump and Bettina Schormann. Katie and Ryan gave it to me. This looks like a reasonably practical cookbook shaped by the ideas of the Slow Food movement in America. I say practical because from what I’ve read in the introduction the authors seem to nicely bypass the heavy-handed ideology of the movement. They say that we all know what good food is and where it comes from. This book is as much about the photos of farm life as it is cooking. You wouldn’t want to order these kind of cookbooks on the Kindle and lose out on the colorful presentation that print makes possible.

Speaking of cookbooks, we watched the movie “Julie and Julia” after Christmas and I thoroughly enjoyed it. My big takeaway was that Julia Child was an amateur and she wrote for an audience of amateurs. She translated the fairly rigorous and esoteric aspects of professional French cooking for a largely female American audience of at-home cooks. Julie Powell is also an amateur, as we all are, cooking our own food and taking great enjoyment in it. As the authors of “Earth to Table” might say, we know what good food is and sharing it with others makes us happy. Julia Child lived it — hers was a rather simple recipe for good living.

The River Cottage MEAT Book by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall has a recipe for making bresaola, an Italian air-cured beef. I had never tried curing meat before and I was intrigued. I chose two cuts of top round from the freezer — meat from our own grass-fed steer.

I began by creating a marinade for the meat with a bottle of red wine and 1-2 pounds of salt. I believe those are the two essential ingredients. Additional spices can be added such as fresh rosemary, garlic, cloves, pepper and zest from lemons and oranges. I put each piece of meat in a ziploc bag, divided the marinade between them and then put them in the refrigerator. I turned the bags over once or twice a day for about a week.

Then, the meat was ready to be air-cured. I removed the meat from the marinade, patted it dry, and then wrapped it several times in cheesecloth. I tied a string around each piece of meat for hanging it easily.

The next challenge is to find a place to air-dry the meat for a period from 10 days to two months. Fearnley-Whittingstall says to hang it in a “cool and draughty place (such as outbuilding or covered porch).” I chose an area off of a sun porch.

I let the meat cure for two months and it was ready just before Christmas. Over this time, the meat becomes hard, as its water evaporates. Checking on the meat over this period of time, I could tell the difference as the meat changed from soft and spongy to rock-hard.

I bought an electric slicer to cut it as thinly as possible. I don’t know if it would be possible to cut it with a knife without hacking it to bits.

I arranged the thin slices on a plate, as below, and sprinkled a little lemon juice over them. You can use it as part of an antipasto platter.

I liked the taste and the texture. It’s similar, of course, to other cured meats such as prosciutto, which is made from pork, but it’s darker and a bit musty.

What fascinates me is that curing meats was an old-world way of preserving meat. It doesn’t involve cooking the meat at all. Today, it’s an arcane practice rather than a necessary way of storing food. Yet making bresaola is satisfying and produces a quite distinctive taste from a rather ordinary cut of beef.

After a few days away, we returned to find two new lambs had been born. I looked out this morning and there they were, beside their mother in the pasture. One black, one white. They were romping around in the frost-coated grass.

This is the earliest date of birth for lambs in the three years we’ve had sheep. In previous years, they’ve come in late January or February. Also, it’s our second set of twins, after a single birth last year.

More of this morning’s photos on this Flickr set.

Earlier in the fall, we dried apples. We slice the apples, sprinkle lemon juice over them and they dry overnight. We have a few bags left in the pantry. They were a nice surprise gift sent off to our daughter who is away at college.

This year is the first time we tried drying persimmons and we were pleased with the results. We were using the Fuyu persimmons, although I understand the Hachiya work as well. We have plenty of them on hand.

The persimmons don’t need to be pealed. We tried two methods of preparation: I diced them in cubes and my wife sliced them in strips.

We put them on racks in the American Harvester drier and they were done in less than eight hours. Certainly, the strips look better on the drying rack. You can also dry them on a cookie sheet in an oven set to a low temperature.

The dried strips and cubes each have their virtues. The cubes were maybe a little small, They stuck together as they dried. However, these bits are more like raisins. The strips are larger and have more flavor. Both make colorful toppings for salads and they’re too easy to eat as a snack. I intend to add them to breakfast cereal.

They can be stored in plastic bags once you’re sure they’re dry. Let them sit out for a day to air dry before bagging them.

Persimmons are the last fruit of the season, coming late in the fall and staying around through December. The trees lose their leaves but the fruit remains on the branches, hanging like ornaments. We are fortunate to have two kinds of persimmon trees, the Fuyu (left below) and the Hachiya (right below).

The acorn-shaped Hachiya is so astringent that it cannot be used until it is ripe and softened. I have not started using ours yet.

The Fuyu can be eaten directly from the tree. Dice a persimmon as a salad topping, which is especially nice when mixed with pomegranate seeds. However, like many fruit, you simply have too many of them, if you have your own supply.

Bara Brith: A Welsh Holiday Bread

I made a holiday bread substituting persimmons for candied fruit. I don’t like anything about candied fruit and I had fresh persimmons.

I modified a recipe for Bara Brith, a Welsh “speckled bread” that uses currants and golden raisins. It’s in the family of fruit cakes but I think it’s more like raisin bread. I found the basic recipe in Bernard Clayton’s “New Complete Book of Breads.” There are versions online that use self-rising flour and no yeast. Mine had yeast but it was slow to rise. In fact, I thought the recipe had failed.

In a mixing bowl, add a cup of flour, a teaspoon of cinnamon, 1 teaspoon of salt, 1/4 cup of sugar and one packet of dry yeast. In a pan, warm a half-cup of milk and 1-1/2 tablespoons of margerine. Then, after removing the pan from the heat, add two eggs to the liquid and stir. Add the liquid into the flour and begin beating with a mixer — I used the dough hooks. Add up to another cup and a half of flour and knead for ten minutes. The dough is a tan color and seemingly dense, a bit like taffy.

Set aside the dough in a greased bowl and cover it. Let the dough rise for at least an hour. I allowed two hours because I didn’t see much change. It was a cold and rainy day outside. In writing up this recipe, I found this account on the Food Glorious Food blog of a similar experience. Next time, I plan to try adding the yeast to the warm milk and letting it proof.

While the dough is rising, put a cup of diced persimmons and a half-cup of golden raisins in a bowl to soak in a half-cup of apple brandy (or sherry). Let them sit while the dough is rising.

Turn out the dough on a floured surface and knead for a few minutes. Now it’s time to mix in the fruit. (The Clayton recipe called for 1/2 cup of candied fruit but I omitted it.) The persimmons and raisins had been soaking in brandy for a couple hours. I drained off the remaining brandy and began working them into the dough, which is not easy. It really does seem as though there is too much fruit for the size of loaf. I wondered if the recipe underestimated the amount of dough to use.

I did not plan to use a loaf pan but instead hand-shaped the loaf. Now the loaf is set aside to rise again for about an hour. I had the same problem — that it didn’t seem to rise much. And I was nearing a deadline when I was having to leave the kitchen. Thinking the room was cold, I slid the loaf into the oven. Unfortunately, I went out for the evening and did not get back that evening in time to bake the loaf. So it sat overnight in the oven. When I removed it, the loaf had maybe tripled in size. Finally, it seemed to be alive, in the bread sense.

I reshaped the loaf and let it sit out while I pre-heated the oven to 350 degrees. I cut a slash down the top of the loaf before putting it in the oven. When I took it out a half-hour later, it looked and smelled wonderful. I could hardly wait to taste it — such that I didn’t get a good photograph of the untouched loaf.

My wife thought this bread was outstanding. I was amazed that Bara Brith had such a deep brown crust, almost as though I had glazed it. the bread was lighter than I thought it would be. The persimmons were a nice subsitute, adding an unusual color. I could taste both the sweet persimmon flavor and a bit of the brandy but none was overpowering.

For Christmas, I’m going to follow a James Beard recipe (from David Lebovitz’s site) for making persimmon bread from a puree of ripe Hachiya persimmons.

Next up: Drying Persimmons