Rice Vinegar Success

After 5 weeks of fermentation I tasted my rice vinegar I created following these instructions. I peeked in my closet a few times during the weeks and noticed no bubbling and was worried something had gone wrong. However it tastes good and very sweet. I heated the vinegar over a double boiler to set the flavor (kill the yeast) and stuck it in the fridge. Now I just need to finish up my bottle of extremely delicious home made French salad dressing so I can experiment with rice vinegar dressings.

Prickly Pear AKA Tuna Syrup

I've been wanting to harvest the prickly pear fruits, called tuna, for a year now. While traveling on Thanksgiving I found a lonely prickly pear cactus in front of a closed up restaurant in a run down town. Weilding a pair of tongs, I twisted the fruits from the paddles, being careful of the sharp pricklers. I tossed 'em in a plastic bag and took them home.
Today I juiced about half of them which gave me about 10 cups of juice! I searched the internet for how to prepare prickly pears and found the various ways to remove the spines. I tried to peel the skin carefully but it was difficult to do, so I tried soaking the fruits in water for an hour, swishing them around and rinsing them to remove the spines. This removed most, but not all. Lastly I found Chile Chews blogger site and followed the directions she used to prepare prickly fruit juice. The one difference I did was I used an old T-shirt to strain the juices through because I was scared a spine may squeeze through my cheesecloth.
I made the syrup following her recipe for the most part and the bit that spilled during canning tasted very good. I can't wait to try it over ice cream! I may even try to use it as a substitute for maple syrup in granola.
No matter how careful I was I did end up with spines. Most of them I was able to remove with tweezers but I have a few that broke off close to the skin and are very irritating. Next time I plan to use tongs, hold the fruit over a fire and burn the little spines off.
With my left over 7 cups of juice I plan to freeze some of it, and make jelly with the rest. I want to try to use the low sugar pectin, so I will report how that goes.

Overcome The Recapitulation

We've had enough of these politician's wars
All we need right now is love
We've had enough of these military scoreboards
All we need right now is love

Turn it up
The future is held in the hands
Who right the textbooks
Ignorance is bred when falsified thinking is taught
To the youth instead of
Past mistakes and mind elevation,
Like the graves that manifest destiny has created
So we can build our
Capitalist consumer based economy,
To build, market,
And sell commodities we don't need
But we are trained to believe like celebrity imaging
Well I'm here to take my feelings back and I hope That you will be with me

I can't wait for that day
When I hear us all screaming.
Ahhhhhhhhh,
I can't wait for that day
When I hear us all singing together,
Ooooohhhhhh

I can't wait for the day
When I hear us all screaming,
HERE COMES THE REVOLUTION.
When every race color
And creed of militant human beings stand up
With fists together for substance and true meaning
Because right now we got our feet stuck in cement
We're too caught up in
A material status quo punishment
And one thing is for sure
And that's the sun will always set,
Darling you can bet our moon is quite the opposite
So baby take a axe to your makeup kit
Set ablaze the billboards and their advertisements
Love with all your hearts and never forget
How good it feels to be alive
And strive for your desire
Just cause you can't see
Your cage doesn't mean that you are free
When there are laws against nature
But its ok for you to be
Addicted to over the counter prescriptions
And magazines dictate all our human relations

I'm not buying, no I'm not giving in
To a culture that objectifies all of our women
I'm not buying, no I'm not consuming
The apathetic dribble on the news media's chin
I'm not buying, no I'm not giving in
The lies that are sold through textbooks to children
I'm not buying, no I'm not consuming
Cause the positive will
Always overcome the negative right

And we stay inside, its right outside,
We stand in line
We all enjoy the fences to keep it at bay
But I'm not giving in

RX Bandits, Overcome. This is why I am the 99%. We Must Overcome!

Foraged

I've been researching wild edibles and a romp in the woods produced some large wood sorrel. I meant to eat it in a salad but I forgot about it, so now it sits in fridge in a cup of water.
I also found a dead, dried tendril of seed pods (without seeds) that were slightly sharp when crushed but smelled like licorice. Could it be dead Anise Hyssop? I do not know, but there was a lot of it along the path in the woods.

Home Made Mayo is easy for a beginner

To go with all this bread I made mayo to make chicken sandwiches. I am not a huge fan of mayo and I have purchased just one tub of miracle whip in my life, none of mayo. Recently I had olive oil mayo on a sandwich and I just loved it! Knowing that everything tastes better made fresh at home I looked up some recipes. I followed Alton Brown's recipe on making mayo, but I made some changes to go along with what I had at home.
I used just regular white vinegar and added just a smidgen less. I also used olive oil, which gave my mayo a nice light green color (the mustard color came out more in the pic though).
When adding the oil I added it a teaspoon at a time while I was whisking quickly the whole time, towards the end I slackened a bit and added the oil a little quicker because the mixture had "emulsified." This is easy to do with just a whisk but I did have to switch arms a few times, because you want to keep the quick movement of the whisk so it the mayo doesn't turn out runny. I used a bit less than a cup of oil also, because others had theirs come out runny. It came out perfectly and although I am not brave enough to try it on its own, I mixed it up into some chicken salad tried a bit on my Amish white bread, died and went to heaven. :)

Thankful for bread

This November I am being thankful for learning how to make my own bread! My mom & dad bought me a 50lb bag of bread flour Friday, and come Sunday they already had a loaf of focaccia and 1/2 dozen bagels. Last week I also made Amish sweet white bread. Here are the links to the recipes I used with some alterations I made written below...
Amish White Bread ~ I cut all of my ingredients in half with this one, and it came out very light & sweet. Next time I will cut down on the sugar though, it is a bit too sweet for my taste. Also it is a bit chewy, but good for sandwiches.

Easy Bagels~ Making these I had to measure out my sugar and salt with a kitchen scale per the directions. Everything was measured perfectly and once all the flour was combined the dough was much too wet still. Turns out I had proofed my yeast in 1/2 cup more water than needed. So I added more dough and followed the directions anyways~ boiling the bagels before baking them, letting them rise again after shaping, etc. They came out great! The outside is crisp with a soft center~ just a perfect bagel.

Focaccia Bread~ I followed the recipe on the back of the 50lb bag of bread flour and it told me to used 1 1/3C water and 3 C flour. If you've made bread before, this may seem like too much water to flour ratio. With my hands all covered in sticky dough I had my boyfriend keep emptying more flour little by little until I had something that was workable. It was very soft still, not like the dough I am use to making, but since I never made focaccia before, I don't know if the dough should be soft and gooey or a bit dense.
After the first rise I divided the dough and lightly patted it into two round loaves. After the second rise they were touching on the pan so I moved the smaller one to another greased pan, and in doing so make the dough fall. I baked them both as they were and they both turned out delicious and different!~ The large one was more just a round loaf of rosemary bread, while the smaller, flattened one (on the left in photo) was more like naan or flat bread. I guess the larger one was more like the focaccia I have had before. I LOVE having a rosemary bush growing in my neighborhood.

Here's an updated look of my garden, I have had to move the buckets to keep them from falling within the shadow of our apartment building. I wish I had been able to get a South facing apartment. Lobster (my cat in the pic) also moves around the yard to lay in the sun. I fertilized my broccoli and the lettuce and they are doing great. I keep picking little salads off my lettuce plants and they do not mind. I also have some resident lizards that have been eating those horrible bugs off my plants~ thank you lizards! When I have a my garden later in time, I may try to put out a rock for lizards to sun on and attract them to eat the bugs. However I do not want to attract snakes to eat the lizards.
Yesterday I caught a small black snake in my sun room. I got one of my long metal stakes that has a loop at the top, grabbed the snake up in the loop and tossed him into the yard. Pretty easy~ but fun! I'm glad to practice "snake wrangling" with a small non-threatening snake.