Freemotion's food journal: Expanding the gardens, pics p 53

[freemotion]

Here it is over a month later and I still don't have my gas stove! We are waiting for the inspector, STILL. He has to inspect the tank and the lines before we can have the stove delivered and hooked up. This is ridiculous. It is a good thing I still have my electric stove.

This morning I made 4 gallons of laundry soap. I waxed my Caerphilly cheese before going to work, then picked the mint (I saw a flower bud on one and wanted to get it picked fast!) and made more mint extract. I used a quart jar for the peppermint, and a pint jar for the spearmint. I will have to start searching for recipes for using them.

I now have a small collection of smooth, roundish flat rocks to weight my ferments and extracts and tinctures down while they are working, so I won't have to use a ziploc anymore and can keep more plastic out of my food. I could use a few more, but these work great. They really keep the mint under the vodka nicely and look kinda nice, too. I should get a picture.....

I melted some chocolate that I bought at Whole Foods, added some raw coconut oil to it, and it still tasted too sweet for my taste, so I added a bit more bitter chocolate to it. This went into ice cube trays and into the freezer for use in my next batch of mint chocolate chip ice cream. I found that the chopped Lindt dark chocolate bars where a bit too hard, and am thinking that the addition of coconut oil will soften it enough so that the texture is just right in the ice cold ice cream.

Those were my food tasks for today...I am off (mostly) for the next couple of days and have a HUGE list!

 

[Javamama]

That is a GREAT idea for the chocolate for ice cream! I might have to steal that one.

 

[freemotion]

I'll let you know how it works out. My folks are coming for dinner and I have plans for lots of good stuff, ice cream included. If the hens cooperate, that is. I use a lot of yolks in my ice cream, and it becomes a very high-quality, high energy, low sugar snack.

Rrrrrrrrr, now I'm hungry again! (That was my stomach rumbling....)

 

[freemotion]

I mis-read your post, Javamama. I am using the chocolate/coconut oil mixture to make chunks for my mint chocolate chip ice cream. Plain chocolate is hard as little rocks when frozen. The coconut oil makes it just the right texture. Reminds me of the chocolate that they used to dip soft-serve cones in....my favorite years ago when I still could eat that stuff.

The problem was in chopping it up. I will melt it next time and pour it out very thinly on a cookie sheet and freeze it, then break it up quickly. When I put thicker pieces on a plate to chop with a knife, it melted all over the plate and was very difficult to work with. Of course, I didn't try chopping it until the freezer was done churning it and I needed to stir the chips in right away.

I made a triple batch, with 15 eggs! My recipe called for 6 egg yolkds per batch, but I only had 15, so I used four yolks and one whole egg, all raw, per batch.

Here is how I made it:

5 c whole, raw goat's milk
6 raw egg yolks
1/4 c white sugar
3 squirts of liquid stevia
1+ Tbsp homemade peppermint extract
2 Tbsp arrowroot powder
dash of sea salt

I mixed it in batches in the VitaMix and put three batches in the big ice cream freezer. I added the chopped chocolate after the freezer finished. We each ate a big bowl fresh out of the freezer, and I put the rest into 5 oz paper cups, each with a popsicle stick in the middle, and froze them. I got 24!! This is a high energy snack. I think it could easily be made with all stevia, as the mint covers the taste nicely. Then it would be a quick meal if needed. I don't use a lot of chocolate, and it is cut in half with the coconut oil.

I may make a batch with the stevia/coconut oil/cocoa powder chocolates as the chips. Those are so good, I think it would work as a sugar-free treat.

For those of you who want to know how I get so much done....yikes. What a week. Seems like hardly anything got done, but it really did. Tonight I collapsed on the couch at 9:00 to watch "The Closer" and suddenly remembered the cukes I'd picked yesterday, along with a bunch of dill flowers. They were still sitting on my counter, a day later. The first commercial break I found a two quart jar and lid, washed the dill and stuck it in the jar with some whole mustard seeds, and started washing the cukes and putting them in the jar. I filled it with filtered water, topped it with a spoonful of whey and a couple tablespoons of sea salt, and topped it with a rock. I'll get a grape leaf tomorrow, meanwhile, the rock is holding the cukes under the brine. I got back to the couch within a few seconds after the commercial break was over! Two quarts of pickles made DURING A COMMERCIAL BREAK!!! Either I'm fast, or there are more commercials than there used to be!

Yesterday while racing around the kitchen to get a sandwich (garden cucumber! Mmmm!), a veggie shake, and a cup of tea for the ride to work, I got a pot of water boiling with spices for chai tea and set the timer. I asked dh to turn the heat off when the timer went off and leave the lid on the pot. This morning I strained it into four quart-size swing-top bottles. Probably spent about two minutes putting stuff in the pot, including running out to the garage for the vice-grips to crack the nutmeg, and no more than five minutes to bottle it....four quarts of chai concentrate in seven minutes.

Tomorrow I really need to make cheese.....but fencing comes first. Ugh.

 

[big brown horse]

OMG free, I'm drooling over here!!

My all time favorite ice cream is mint chocolate chip! I have not had it in years.

Guess what I'm making this weekend??? Too bad I can't get raw goats milk yet. (The local, indoor "farmer's market" where I get my raw cow's milk will soon be selling raw goat's milk too, can't wait!!)

YUM!!

 

[freemotion]

Oh, make it, make it, BBH! It is sooooo good! Let me know how you like it, and how you ended up tweaking the recipe. We always tweak, don't we?

 

[Javamama]

We were on the same page Free Thanks for the recipe! My favorite brand around here is Graeters (local place) They have these chocolate almost ribbon like pieces that just melt in the mouth I need to figure out how they do that.

 

[freemotion]

I bet an all-coconut oil version would be just what you are looking for!

 

[lorihadams]

wanna come to my house???

 

[Dace]

Hi Free!

Just popped in to say hi and see what you are up to. That ice cream recipe looks yummy. I am not a stevia fan though...maybe I'll try it any way.

Hope all is well with you and your critters