Breakfast for Dinner

 El Nino Years can be challenging.

I miss the sky.

The basement is flooded.

The house smells of wet basement and an old fire.

The backyard is flooded and muddy. So muddy. So very muddy. Even with new stepping stones, which are now under water.

The world is too wet to prune or build beds.

The cats are restless, sniping at each other, and pooping under The Ark.

The bunny is SAD. She wants out.

All of our coats and shoes are damp.

The chickens are not laying because there is not enough light.

I have not seen the bees since November. I think they died.

There is no solar gain or solar power.

The Ark’s rug is sodden.

My best seed catalog has gone AWOL.

Jeans are not drying, so we are wiggling around the drying rack for days.

My students are dim, staring out the window, and quiet.

We need Breakfast for Dinner. French Toast with the last two eggs.

Our Daily Bread

          There are two foods that we make at home every week that are essential to our health and well- being—yogurt and bread. Both are incredibly simple to make, much tastier than any store bought version, and reduce packaging waste in ways that I did not realize until I shifted to making my own.

            I have always baked bread at home. It was my second culinary experiment, following the birthday cake with pink paprika frosting. My mother told me, over and over, that the paprika she sprinkled on my potatoes was “just for color” and had no flavor. I believed her. She was wrong, as we discovered with her Mother’s Day cake. I used the recipe in the 1958 Betty Crocker Cookbook that I adored.  I mixed, kneaded, proofed, shaped, and baked two loaves of white bread on a Winter Saturday afternoon and I was hooked. For thirty years, I followed the basic recipe I learned then. Fresh bread was a staple of my college existence and I only stopped baking  my own when I worked at Ceres Bakery—I ate Shelly’s bread then.

            Five years ago, we shifted to a slow rise method of bread baking. It is much easier, tastier, and better for our digestive track. Because the dough rises overnight, it is not rushed. It does not need extra gluten to hold firm. It does not produce extra gas. It is easy to digest. We love it. It also lends itself to dozens of variations—combinations of flours, added sweeteners and dried fruits, nuts and seeds, eggs and honey….the options are endless.

  This is our daily bread:

1. In the blue ceramic bowl, sprinkle a tablespoon and a half of yeast and cover with three cups of warm—never hot—water. Whisk. Add six and a half cups of flour—we use half hard red wheat white flour and half home ground whole wheat from Greenwillow Grains, our local wheat farmers—and a tablespoon and a half of salt. Mix with a long spoon. The dough will be wet.
2.  Cover the bowl with a re-used plastic produce bag and leave on the counter. Two hours is the goal, but it’s flexible. If it sits out for three, it’s fine. It should be about doubled.
3. Toss in the refrigerator overnight. It can sit there for up to a week without harm, although it will tasty a little more yeasty later in the week and the dough may be a little grey. No worries, however. Its still good.
4. Take out half of the dough. It may need to be sprinkled with a bit of flour if it is sticky. Work fast! Shape into a ball. Toss some cormnmeal onto your sheet pan, which has no edges so the bread can slide off.
5. Let the bread rise and relax for about half an hour. Meanwhile, heat the oven to 450 degrees.
6. Slide your loaf onto a baking stone placed on the bottom rack—mine is always in place. Bake until it sounds hollow when thumped, which is about 40 minutes.
7. Eat.

You can also use the dough for pizza, bread sticks rolled in cheese and chilies, sticky buns—anything that needs a slow raised dough.

Homemade Yogurt, simplified.

            I’ve been making yogurt for years. It is not a complicated process requiring specialized equipment! I use a large pot, large bowl, canning jars, a small beer cooler, and a cooking thermometer, all of which I already had.. My recipe came from Sunset magazine.  It is amazing. Homemade yogurt is significantly better than store bought  (and cheaper). It is light and delicate. No need for sugar; it has not had time to sour. Pair it with some homemade cinnamon walnut blueberry granola and you are styling.

So here’s the process, which takes about ten minutes:

            Start the kettle to boil two quarts of water, which will keep your yogurt warm while setting up.

            Heat 4 cups of milk to 180 degrees. I use homogenized whole milk from the grocery store. Some of the brands with cream on top do not work as well; I am not happy with skim milk, either.

            Cool the milk to around 120 degrees—I put it in a sink with some ice water and stir occasionally.

            Add a couple of tablespoons of yogurt from the last batch or from a single serving container of plain yogurt that you like.

            Pour into a quart canning jar.

  

          Put into small cooler with the two quart jars of hot water for 8-10 hours. In the winter, when the cooler is chilly, I pre-heat it beforehand with some of the boiling water.

            Put the jar in the fridge to stop the fermenting process. Leave it for twelve hours.

            Eat.

            Repeat.

The trickiest part is not having the kettle boil right when the yogurt is ready to be poured into the jar.

Occasionally, something goes wrong with the process. When I first started making yogurt, I would throw it out. Now I have learned to let it sit a while longer. Ninety percent of the time, it sets up just fine.

Give it a try. It is worth the effort—and you do not need the   huge hairbun.

Living within Our Limits: Tracking solar Consumption and Production

            For the next year, we will be tracking our electric usage and consumption each week—production and consumption. I will take the data weekly, but calculate the chart for daily average. This will allow us to smooth out some of the challenges and spikes in usage and give a clearer picture of what is happening. I know that we would forget—or not be home—to take a daily reading. We have already missed days and the set-up is new. I know that we will also be gone for a couple of weeks during the summer. So, a weekly (or occasionally bi-weekly) reading allows us to adjust for these contingencies; we just change to formula from seven days to eight. It also smoothes out the spikes of an occasional snow day, when I am trapped in the house by sleet and ice on the sidewalks, and turn on the oven, radio, and internet, as well as several lights!

            We started on the longest night of the year—December 21^st. The two weeks of Yule are our highest usage for the entire year. We are both home. There is holiday baking and lights and music. It is dim in the house by three-thirty and we turn on the lights and we stay up later (no school the next day). Production is also at its lowest. The sun barely reaches the panels until about one-thirty. Being Oregon, there is considerable cloud cover in December, although we do have a few glorious days of bright blue sky. We are located right near the 45^th parallel, which is the equivalent of Calais, Maine, right where the state leaves the ocean and heads North. It can be dark. The opposite is also true—June will be a glorious month for solar production!

            The chart of production and consumption will ride as a banner for the year. I am hoping, by making the information public, to help us learn to live within our limits.

Beets and Greens over pasta
Sunbow  Farm has had lovely baby beets for the past month. We have been eating them every week.

Start pasta water.
Chop a small onion and begin cooking in olive oil. Trim the beets from the greens. Peal the beets and chop in a medium small dice. Add to onions. Chop the greens and add. Cover and cook until tender. Season with fresh ground pepper and some salt, if you are not using feta cheese.

Cook half a pound of whole wheat spaghetti. Drain, plate, crumble feta cheese over it, and cover with beets and greens.

2016 Goals

Work for Change: Listen more than talk. Two ears, one mouth.

 Improve Recordkeeping: weekly notes on electric usage and production and garden notes.

Clear out the yarn stash: at least twelve small knitted projects to give away next December.

Garden Greens in the winter.

Spanakopita: Christmas Dinner

Thaw a package of filo dough and two bags of chopped spinach.

Sauté a large onion in olive oil. Add some salt, pepper, and oregano.  When almost soft, add the spinach.

Melt two tablespoons of butter and add a couple of tablespoons of olive oil.

Meanwhile, mix five eggs, a pound of cottage cheese, two cups of cottage cheese in a large bowl. Add the onions and spinach.

Working carefully, lay down two sheets of filo dough, brush with melted butter, and repeat several times. Spread the cheese and spinach mixture. Layer more filo dough on top. Sprinkle with sesame seeds.

Bake in a 350 oven until done. Eat. Freeze any leftovers for an emergency dinner in Febuary.

Living Within Our Limits,

            In September, our new solar panels went live. It is a 2.2 kw system—eight panels sitting thirteen feet off of the ground, above the greenhouse. Whenever people see it, they nod— it’s a cool design, unlike anyone else’s system. We like it a lot. The panels should, over the course of the year, cover our electric use. But, because I am not convinced that they will, I have been investigating energy savings. It’s not easy. We have already picked all of the low-hanging fruit, like power strips on the computers, replacing light bulbs, and insulating all of our spaces. I borrowed a Kill-a-watt gadget from a friend and I have been exploring our energy usage for the past month to see where we could conserve.

            My first step was monitoring the lights we left on, but after running several through the kill-a-watt, I realized that, even with three or four lights on, the impact on our panels was minimal. The table lamp used .03 kwh for two hours. No big deal.  I then checked the internet modem-- .12 kwh for 24 hours, so turning off the modem would save up to 1.2 kwh in ten days. That is significant and worth our efforts.

  How Bad Are Bananas?, boiling water using a gas stove burner or an electric kettle is about equal, and the stove is better, carbon budget-wise,  because it heats the room a little bit as well. We, however, have an electric stove. I believe the electric kettle is more efficient, partly because we save by boiling only what we need, but do not have the data to back it up. It is certainly faster. Maybe we need to drink less tea…

          I then turned my attention to the biggest energy hog in our house—the stove/oven.  It is difficult to get accurate measurements here, because we do not have a meter to measure 220, although Mark is considering a purchase, IF our stove plug would fit into the meter. (The stove is from the mid-1950s.)  Is it more efficient to boil tea water on the stove or in an electric kettle? The kettle takes .11 kwh to boil three cups of water. According to

            I have also been examining the crockpot rather than cooking soup beans on the stove.  The Carbon Buster’s Home Energy Handbook suggests that crockpots are more efficient than an electric burner.  Ours, which is from 1972, cooks a pot of dried beans into a rich soup using .7 kwh but saves hours of monitoring and washing stuck-on food off of pots. We are eating far more local beans than we did before, which saves transportation energy—although not electricity.

            Finally, I have been eyeing the oven. We considered insulating it, but, when we took the side panel off, someone had already beaten us to it. There was white fiberglass tucked in all around; it looked like a late 1970s project, but was still clean and tidy. Once again, I cannot measure the energy used, but it is a large oven. I consulted the Carbon Buster’s Handbook. It says a toaster oven is twice as efficient as an electric oven. Even if it uses more energy per square inch, our little toaster oven, by virtue of size, has to be more efficient! It used .3 kwh to cook a batch of sweet potatoes last week. The biggest drawback to the toaster oven is its location; it lives in the unheated back hall, rather than the center of the house. It cannot warm the kitchen on a rainy fall night as it bakes our potatoes.

            For the stove and oven, the best energy savings may be in cooking habits. I can only run the oven when full—bake bread, granola, and a gratin for dinner, rather than just baking a loaf of bread. I can turn it off as the food comes close to being done. When I have something small, I use the toaster oven. It is large enough to hold a casserole dish easily, but not a muffin tin for twelve muffins. I need to buy a smaller tin at Goodwill. I am working on peeking in less, as well. In the winter, the oven does heat the house while it bakes or dinner.

            Our other energy hog must be the refrigerator. It is a small one, nine cubic feet, with a freezer above. I cannot measure how much energy it uses and I could not find it on-line, but it is a new model, about four years old, and small. It is usually full and the freezer is packed. If I could give up ice cream and frozen local berries, I could shut the whole thing off for the winter and store my vegetables and mustards in the larder. We would have to buy small quantifies of milk and yogurt, but it would not be any different from week-long car camping trips.

            We will be monitoring all of our energy use closely in the coming year. I am very interested in how much we will produce as the sun comes back. Right now, on a dark and rainy day, we are lucky to eke out .5 kwh for the day. A bright day will produce 1.3 kwh, mostly in the middle of the afternoon. We have calculated how to see what our consumption is as well as production. When the lines cross in the spring, life will be good.

Whole Wheat Anise Cookies-- A December favorite

Cream 1/2 c butter, 1/2 c margarine,  and 1 cup of sugar.

Add one egg and 2T anise seed.

Add 1.5  t BP, 1.5 c whet flour, 1.5 c white flour.

add 1/4 c water.

Roll out between sheets of waxed paper and chill for several hours. 

Cut into star and mmon shaepes and bake in a 350 degree oven.

Homestead Hygge

          As December comes on, we move inward. The garden is put to bed; there is no work to be done; nothing is growing. The outside world has paused, balancing on the point of solstice light. Inside, we move towards coziness, or, as the Danish call it, Hygge, which is more than just a warm seat by the fire. It has two faces, inward and outward.

            Inward Hygge involves tucking ourselves into our home for the winter. We hang the storm windows, which makes the interior quiet as well as warm. We break out the extra blankets for the bed, rocking chair, and reading nook. We light fires—candles in the windows and on the table, fires in the hearth of the house, with chairs pulled close and cats near-by.  We clean. We bake bread and cookies. We hang lights around the front door and greenery on the mantle. The house glows on foggy nights, welcoming us home in the evening.

            Outward Hygge involves a whole series of small festivals, which begin with Thanksgiving and the Pie Social. Every few weeks, we have another. There are potlucks with friends, the Lucia Day walk, complete with warm, fresh Lucia buns, cocoa, and a happy dog running head up the hill. We send out handmade cards to our friends far and near.  We are mindful of the long nights around the Solstice, eat salmon on Christmas Day, visit the Chinese Buffet on New Year’s Eve, and celebrate both our anniversary and Mark’s birthday in January. The season of small festivals ends with Candlemas, where we plant the first seeds of the new year.  Bringing friends together around food and long winter walks helps us focus on what is important in our lives.

           Because of these small rituals, we have come to love the long dark winters and look forward to the evenings alone and with others.

Winter Squash Bread—the new Lucia Bun dough

Make a batch of bread dough—3. cups of water, 1.5 T yeast and salt, six and a half cups of flour, half whole wheat. And a tablespoon of cinnamon and a cup and a half of mashed squash. Stir together and allow to  rise overnight before baking. This is an excellent sandwich loaf, but also makes nice rolls and buns.