More frequent, not so long reviews...

Since my last post was so long, I think I'll post every week about what I read during the past week (presuming, of course, that I read enough in a week to justify posting about it).

I continued reading Back to Basics this week. I covered about 75 pages (I skipped a number of those pages because they were recipes that I didn't feel like reading). The first section was about "preserving the harvest". It discussed different methods that can be used to preserve produce, including live storage, canning, freezing, drying, jamming (can you say that?--making jams and jellies), pickling, and salt curing. She also has a good little chart that lists the different kinds of produce you're likely to have and recommendations on how to preserve it.

Using covered basement window wells as a root cellar was a recommendation that caught my attention. Burying your vegetables seems like a funny way to preserve things, though in Norway, the worst dish I ever had was traditionally prepared by burying the fish you caught in the spring and summer along with some ashes from the stove/fireplace and digging back up in the winter. You boiled the fish to get out as much of the lye produced by the ashes and moisture in the ground, and then put some bacon grease on it to make it tolerable. Perhaps that's why the thought of burying vegetables is not a preservation method that appeals to me.

I'm still very interested in pickling (if I didn't mention that with my mini-farming review, I've been interested in it since I read about it there). Joining my interest in pickling is making jams and jellies. I think preserving fruits and vegetables in glass jars is more appealing to me than actually eating them--especially if they're buried. Outdoor dehydrating seems like a good skill to have if you've got no power for a real dehydrator. Did you know they used to "sulfur" food to dry? They'd burn sulfur while dehydrating their food. Imagine food that tastes like gunpowder--gross.

The next section really surprised me. Preserving meat has to be at least as interesting, if not more interesting, than preserving produce. I was most surprised to read this, "Smithfields [a smoked ham] have reputedly been stored for as long as 25 years--from a girl's christening until her wedding."

How many of you knew that goat's milk is naturally homogenized and if you want the cream, you need a centrifuge? I didn't. However, I think I would have known this without reading it: "Even a minute quantity of dry goat manure ... will damage the milk's flavor if it should fall into the milk bucket." Uh...yeah. Imagine that--poop doesn't taste good.

I learned that you can get 15-20 gallons of sap from a mature maple tree and that that sap will boil down to 2 quarts of maple syrup. So, with just a few trees, you'll have all your pancake and waffle needs satisfied. Of course, you have to boil the crud out of it, and, apparently, if smoke gets in the syrup, it tastes nasty. Also you don't boil the stuff indoors because it will leave your home coated with a light layer of maple syrup...

Apple cider is made by smashing apples and then squeezing the juice out of them. If you let the juice sit around too long, it will become alcoholic, and if you let it sit even longer after that, apparently, it will become apple cider vinegar. This process doesn't fit with what I understood about vinegar production, but I'm certainly not an expert. I thought vinegar and alcohol production were competing processes and you favored one over the other by controlling certain variables--do any of you know any more about this? I'll add it to my list of stuff to figure out someday.

I also read about fireplace cooking, including the use of spits and dutch ovens. A dutch oven might be something worth owning, though I'm really interested in owning a wood burning kitchen stove. I haven't looked yet, but I'll bet they cost a lot--I just looked, they seem to start around $2k and go up from there. Anyway, they are supposed to be difficult to become accustomed to, but they're not bad once you know what you're doing.

I just started a new section on home crafts and have read about dyeing fabrics (yarn mostly) using natural materials for the dyes. It was interesting to consider that if you didn't dye your clothes that you made for yourself, you'd just be colored like a sheep all the time...

Again, if this stuff is interesting, you should get this book and read it.