Fairy godparents in the garden

A few weeks ago our neighbour's dad visited them for a week, and while he was there he pruned their entire orchard. We were sort of hoping he wouldn't realize the friendly fence between us actually marks a property line, and would continue his pruning roll right on into our orchard, but he didn't.

We know the magic of visiting parents willing to pitch in. On her very first visit to Mucky Boots my non-gardening mom weeded the entire strawberry patch, obliterating every trace of the wood sorrel that had infested it. And my dad contributed to my combat-perfectionism-by-enjoying-my-garden-more campaign by assembling new garden loungers that came in a million parts, with nothing but his engineering expertise and some badly translated instructions.



The magic of visiting parents indeed. Fairy godparents in the garden. And we're being visited by some now: Kim's folks are visiting us from Ontario, and, bless his heart, her dad is a gardener and brought his pruners.



Their very first morning here they were on a mission: Ken watered, shovelled compost and spread straw mulch while Saundra helped me plant squash. And that was just the first morning. The next day Kim fired up Johnny D and loaded up the trailer with compost, and then she and her dad started in on the backlog of plants waiting to be transplanted while Saundra weeded, kept us all hydrated, and kept me and my sore joints from overdoing it.

Friends in the garden are as good as fairy godparents, and we were also visited by some of them on the weekend: Margaret and Julie came for tea.



This was Julie's first visit to Mucky Boots, and it was so much fun trailing after her as she recognized historic landmarks from her faithful blog reading: "Oh, that's the chicken door Kim had to crawl through when she locked herself in the coop!"

When the tour was done we had tea in the garden.





Those amazing lilacs aren't ours - Ken bought them for us at the farmer's market, to help me celebrate my new sense of smell.



Tea was accompanied by a treat, of course: rhubarb coffee cake made especially for Margaret, who thinks rhubarb merits its own food group. She has a point.

How to turn orange in 30 days

As I mentioned a couple of posts ago, I have been on an elimination diet for the last six weeks or so in an attempt to figure out if anything I eat exacerbates my arthritis. I have a suspicion there is, and I have a good idea what it might be, but I thought I would try a systematic approach so I can find out for sure.

The program I am following can be found here, and it works like any elimination diet: you begin by restricting yourself to a small number of  foods least likely to be causing problems, and then once your symptoms have subsided you slowly add foods, one at a time, watching for any kind of reaction. The plan sets out three groups of food - Phase I, which should be safe for most people, Phase II which has foods that are more problematic, and then Phase III which contains the heavy hitters like dairy and gluten and nuts.

For someone with a chronic inflammatory condition like the arthritis I have, the suggestion is to stay on Phase I for at least 30 days. I won't bore you with all the other details, but what you need to know (for the purposes of this post) is that many of the Phase I foods are orange.

Sweet potatoes. Squash. Carrots. Peaches. Orange, orange, orange, orange. Yes, there are green foods too - green beans, peas, broccoli and zucchini. But ever since I regained my sense of smell I don't like broccoli, and zucchini is a stretch.


Here is a typical meal: chicken, rice and veg.


Here is another typical meal: chicken, rice and veg. Sigh.

I know I am not too compromised nutritionally because I am also taking a hypo-allergenic supplement while my diet is so restricted. The problem is, I am turning orange.

This first came to my attention about Day 30, when Kim was walking behind me and said "Your ears are orange."

"No," I said.

"Yes," she said.

"No they're not," I said.

"Yes, they are. You're turning orange," she said.

Then a couple of days later, when I was taking off my gardening gloves, I noticed that my palms had a distinct orange hue. I moved to a different light. Still orange.


I cook my orange vegetables in bulk these days.
If I had to choose between being orange and having arthritis pain I know what my choice would be. But still, I think it might be time to start eating some kale.

A lovely cup of tea

My friends Jean and Jim drove up from Victoria the other weekend and it was a perfect excuse to visit a place I've been wanting to see for a while: Teafarm. It's a local farm owned by Margit and Victor, who are experimenting with growing tea (real tea, from the camellia plant) as well as blending teas (black, green, white and herbal) and making art.


Jean and Jim picking out Rooster tea as a surprise for Kim

They sell and serve their tea and pottery in a converted dairy barn filled with light and with amazing views out to pastures and hills. When you first arrive you're treated to a sample of their daily brew, served in one of Margit's handmade cups. Then, if you like, you can order up a proper pot of whichever tea you like (and there are dozens to choose from) and even try a sweet treat, some of which incorporate tea flavours.

It's entirely charming, and the tea is so flavourful I have already purchased four different kinds from their Chinese Zodiac line: Monkey (green tea, ginger, cinnamon, pepper, orange peel, cardamom, fennel), Goat (lemon balm, hibiscus, licorice root, rosehips and ginger), Pig (roasted green tea, rose petals and vanilla bean) and Snake (white tea and holy basil).

If I'm waxing rhapsodic it's because I think this tea has saved me: for the last six weeks I have been on an elimination diet to try to determine if there are foods that are exacerbating my arthritis. Which means I eat rice, chicken, a small assortment of vegetables and peaches. No gluten. No sugar. No dairy. No eggs. No coffee. No nothin'. But I get to have green tea, and so the ritual of making a fresh pot of flavourful tea has replaced all the other food rituals and treats that used to make my life worth living.

And what lovely tea. I have settled into a routine of a pot of Monkey in the morning with breakfast, Goat with my afternoon break, Pig when I'm settling in for a relaxing evening, and Snake whenever I'm feeling I need an extra lift. All made in the favourite tea pot Kim gave me as a birthday gift many years ago, and sipped from one of my three beautiful handmade tea cups.

A lovely cup of tea indeed.

Lentil salad

I have been making this salad for at least twenty years, so I guess I like it. I have made it so much I don't need to look at a recipe any more, but when I opened the book this morning the dog-eared, balsamic-vinegar-splattered page (I am a messy cook) spoke volumes about how often I have made this salad. It's substantial and flavourful, healthy as anything, and the best part is it easily lasts in the fridge for a week, so you can make a really big batch and enjoy it all week long.

It comes from Still Life With Menu, by Mollie Katzen of Moosewood fame. I have a good selection of Moosewood cookbooks and Mollie's cookbooks, and this is hands-down my favourite, especially for its salads: Jewelled Rice Salad, Cabbage Salad with Peanuts, Levantine Carrot Salad, to mention a few. And there are other recipes, too, for red pepper soup, banana and cheese empanandas, and the best scone recipe I have ever tried.

The book is out of print now, but Mollie has kindly provided the recipe on her website. So go there right now, get the recipe and make this salad. Right now. You won't regret it.

You're welcome.

Drought and small pleasures

Drought? On Vancouver Island in January? Believe it or not, we haven't had any rain (or snow, for that matter) in eight days. Impossible.

That's Item Number One on today's list of fascinating news from Mucky Boots. Here's Item Number Two.

Yes, chocolate pudding. Newsworthy chocolate pudding. Newsworthy because I am back on my anti-arthritis can't eat anything fun diet: no gluten, no dairy, no eggs, no caffeine, as little of any kind of sugar as I can manage. Which means small pleasures seem hard to come by. Until this, that is.

Quinoa Revolution is the second cookbook produced by the sister team of Patricia Green and Carolyn Hemming. Their first book, Quinoa 365, has been a favourite of mine, so it was an easy decision to add the second book to my cookbook collection. 

To celebrate my new purchase I decided to make Cafe Mocha Pudding. I don't want to violate any copyright laws, but since I'm giving them a free plug maybe the authors won't mind, so here's the gist of the recipe.

Cook 1/2 cup quinoa in three times as much coffee (decaf, if you prefer). Since this is more liquid than is normally used, the result is very soft, almost mushy quinoa. Put it in a blender with 1/2 cup milk (I used almond milk), 1/3 cup cocoa, 1/2 tsp vanilla and as much of any kind of sweetener as you would like (they suggest 1/3 cup sugar, but I used a small glug of maple syrup instead). Then blitz the heck out of it for 2-3 minutes, until it is very smooth.

The authors then suggest refrigerating it for an hour or two before eating, but I found the looser texture right out of the blender a bit more pleasant than after it had set up, at which point it was pretty stiff. Either way, it was delicious, legal, and definitely a pleasure. As you can tell from this photo.

Just think of the flavour variations that are possible with this technique: I could cook the quinoa in chai tea instead of coffee. Or green tea. Or any flavour of tea. Or lemon-spiked water. Or orange juice. Or berry juice. Or almond milk with a vanilla pod.

Yum. That's all I can say, just yum.

Smell-O-Rama

I haven't wanted to write much about this because I don't imagine the world is very interested in the state of my sinuses, but I had surgery on my shnozz a couple of weeks ago. No reconstruction - just a good scraping out of my sinus cavities. And now, after about a dozen years of chronic sinus congestion, I am happy to tell you I can smell!

This is taking some getting used to.

Some things stink. It turns out Frankie has really smelly farts. (At least Kim tells me it's Frankie.) And I had forgotten the distinctive smell of an orange growing green fur in the fruit drawer.

Some things smell marvellous, like Petunia's fur when she comes in smelling of wood smoke. A t-shirt fresh from a cedar-lined drawer. Hot water hitting coffee grounds first thing in the morning. I knew this intellectually, but there's a huge difference between knowing it, and remembering it, and actually smelling it.

If it wasn't late fall, and consequently cold and miserable outside, I would be spending the day taking my nose from plant to plant, sniffing up all the smells I haven't smelled for years. But it is late fall, and the nice smelling plants are asleep for the winter, so instead I have celebrated with a Smell-O-Rama Festival in the kitchen.

French onion soup, loaded with home grown onions and garlic.



Chicken pot pie, with my first attempt at gluten-free pastry.

Roast vegetables - an entire pan full, most grown right here at Mucky Boots. Amazing - the taste, as well as the smell. Did you know that sweet potatoes, squash, beets, carrots and rutabagas all actually taste different?



Apple crumble - apples, cinnamon, butter and brown sugar baking in the oven and filling the house with their aroma.

My heart is happy, but my poor nose is feeling just a little overwhelmed. I think I overdosed on lavender yesterday when I was making sachets, and even stepping into the room where I am storing all my (naturally scented) Christmas soaps makes my head hurt. It feels like there is a direct electrical connection between my nose and my brain and I keep getting zapped. But I keep sniffing and smelling, restocking my mental catalogue of smells.

I can't wait to smell the lilacs in the spring.

Surplus

We've reached the point in the season where we can't keep up with what's ready to eat in the garden. That means it's time to switch into preservation mode. And for me, with vegetables, that largely means freezing.

I've gone the pickling and dehydrating routes, and neither seems to totally fit the bill. I enjoy pickled beets and beans and cucumbers, but there's a limit to how many I want to eat. I understand the economic and health advantages of dehydrating - you don't have all those additions of salt and sugar, and you're not paying to keep things frozen until you eat them. But with the exception of dried tomatoes and fruit leather, I find the end result not very palatable, even disguised in soups and stews.

So most of the excess vegetables around here get vacuum-packed and popped in the freezer. Instructions generally call for blanching vegetables first in order to destroy the enzymes that will cause them to deteriorate. I do that with hardy greens, like kale and chard and beet greens: they get blanched, refreshed in cold water and squeezed dry before being popped in the freezer. But with other vegetables I find blanching makes the thawed product too mushy, so I just clean and chop into chunks and freeze.

The only exception: cabbage, which gets fermented into sauerkraut, of course!

Even though we're now adding a steady stream of food to the freezer, we're still enjoying everything the garden is giving us. In fact, I think that's one of the major differences between Miriam the First-Year Gardener and Miriam the Fourth-Year Gardener: I'm much more inclined to enjoy the food I am growing every day rather than waiting for a special occasion (as I am famous for doing with fennel), or for the vegetable to get bigger (meaning I never got to enjoy baby carrots or potatoes), or freezing it all before I could enjoy it fresh (I think Kim scarcely got her hands on a fresh strawberry our first year here). Now my philosophy is eat fresh first, preserve second.



This was supper last night: two kinds of kale, a rainbow assortment of chard, red and yellow beet greens, red cabbage, broccoli and snow peas, all home grown and cooked in a stir fry with some onions and leftover chicken.

That still amazes me: home grown!

Best things ever

Okay, maybe not ever, but there are two things making my life a lot happier these days. 

Happy Thing #1: Gluten-free Breadsticks
I do much better when I stick to a gluten-free diet, but man, do I miss bread. Not regular bread, but  the kind of rustic loaf that's crusty and crunchy on the outside and chewy on the inside. If I wasn't intolerant of gluten I would probably be living on bread (which, come to think of it, I did for a couple of years in my early adulthood, which is probably when I developed said intolerance...).

When we quit our jobs and began our new lives Mucky Boots, one of the things I planned to learn how to do was bake bread - gluten-free bread. I knew it was theoretically possible to make good gluten-free bread (even though I had never tasted any myself) and I was determined to find a recipe good enough to satisfy my hankerings. And I tried. I really, really tried. I bought books. I trolled through blogs and websites. I bought every kind of gluten-free flour (there are sixteen different kinds in my pantry at this very moment) and every necessary additive like guar gum and xanthan gum and gelatin. And every single loaf turned out more like cake than bread, unpleasant to eat unless toasted.

Until this. Just look at this!



It tastes as good as it looks. Crunchy outside: check! Chewy inside: check! Gluten-free: check, check, check! Plus it's easy to make, versatile (I have used the dough to make flatbreads for pizza, and it would make wonderful crackers), and it keeps in the fridge for a week so you can bake fresh as you need.

The recipe comes from the Gluten-Free Girl and the Chef, and the secret ingredient that makes this dough so unlike the usual sloppy, sticky, pourable gluten-free dough is psyllium husks.

Strange but true. You can eat this bread and be regular at the same time.

I am a happy, happy woman.

Happy Thing #2: Aprons
I have a small issue with stain management. I accumulate stains like nobody I know, and I am more useless than anyone I know at getting them out. I think I'm doing all the right things, but somehow my pile of fit-to-be-seen-in-public t-shirts keeps getting smaller while my shockingly-stained pile grows and grows.

The stains come from all sorts of activities. Working in the garden, of course, but I have learned my lesson there and don't venture into the garden unless I'm wearing my Dirty Clothes. But also things like eating.The likelihood that I will spill on my white shirt is in direct proportion to the stain-making potential of the food I am eating. I can drink water without spilling, but as soon as I have a glass of berry juice in my hand an accident is practically inevitable. And there's cooking. Grease splatters, beet juice droplets, chocolate sauce - they all find their way to the front of my shirts.

But there's this thing called an apron. It's a garment that is easily donned, that doesn't restrict your movement or feel too hot or too heavy, and when you need to quickly look presentable because the neighbour has appeared unexpectedly on your doorstep, it is quickly doffed and hidden in a drawer. It comes in a variety of styles, and is easily made by even the most novice of sewers.

But the best thing about it: it protects your clothes from stains. Why didn't I know this? How could I have four aprons in my pantry and somehow not realize I could wear them and keep my shirts from being wrecked one by one?

Now I am a convert. And to celebrate, to mark this turning point in my life, to show my confidence that this simple garment will change my life forever, I have bought two new t-shirts.

White, of course.

Kale without a hangover

(Please know that I am not a food photographer. If I was, I would have special light deflectors for eliminating those funny glints off the egg, and I would have a hand thrown pottery plate with the perfect colour for setting off the cooked greens without making them look anaemic. You're just going to have to trust me when I say this meal was delicious, even though the photo may make it look just a touch unappealing...)


You may know that this is my summer for overcoming my aversion to kale. I planted two different varieties this year (Red Russian and Lacinto), determined to find a way to make culinary friends with it - it's just too nutritious and too hardy in the garden to keep avoiding it any longer.

I've been eating it for a few weeks now, always chopped into oblivion and mixed in stir fries with other greens I like better, like chard and baby bok choy.

But yesterday...yesterday I made it the star of the show for the first time, using a recipe from Julie called "Joe Beef's Kale for a Hangover". (Joe Beef is a chef and restaurateur in Montreal, and the recipe comes from his book The Art of Living According to Joe Beef.)

I didn't have a hangover, but I was tired after a long and busy day, so this was my supper. And maybe it was that I was so tickled there's a chef named Beef, or maybe it was that this meal was amazingly quick. Or it could have been the beautifully oozing fried egg. Maybe it was the bacon. (Yes, I think it was the bacon.) In any case, I shovelled back this kale-centric meal like nobody's business, and not only survived, but am looking forward to making it again.

When I have enough kale, that is. In fact (she says with shy pride) I am eating the kale in my garden faster than I can grow it. I'm going to have to plant more...

Just for Jean

What's that growing in my garden? No, you are not seeing things. That's kale.

If you have been reading this blog for a while, you probably know I don't like kale. I have tried really, really hard, but I really, really don't like it.

My friend Jean, on the other hand, loves kale and thinks I should too, because it's so darn good for me. She's right, of course, and when I read that my go-to greens (spinach and chard) contain enough oxalic acid to add to my struggle with arthritis, I knew it was time to get over whatever feelings I may have about kale and just start eating the darn stuff.

So now there are two lovely rows of kale in my garden - Red Russian and Lacinto - and here is a photo, just for Jean.

And now I need some good ideas. What's your favourite way to eat kale?

Feta

Close your eyes and cast your mind back a few thousand years. You're stirring a vat of milk over a fire, and someone walking by accidently drops in the stomach from a just-slaughtered calf. (I'm sure you could make up an interesting if implausible story to explain that.) And a miracle happens: cheese is born!

There were no calves or camp fires here this week, but I am happy to announce the birth (or coagulation?) of the first Mucky Boots cheese. Yes, we made cheese! Goat's milk feta, to be precise.

Our interest was piqued by our friend Rebecca who began making hard cheeses a few months ago. She has had us over for a couple of cheese-making experiences in the last few weeks, and we came out of them with the confidence to try it on our own.

So I ordered a couple of different cultures (one for feta and one for chevre) and some rennet from Glengarry Cheesemaking, and sourced some local goat's milk just in time for a visit from my dad. Put a Math teacher, a Science teacher and an engineer in the kitchen with pots and thermometers and bacterial cultures, and for sure something interesting will happen!

We followed a recipe from here, but basically this is what happens:

Step #1: Gently heat the milk, add the culture, and let it sit for an hour.

Step #2: Add the rennet, stir, and let it sit for 40 minutes. [Our rennet came as liquid in a dropper bottle, which made me wonder how folks a hundred years ago would have done it. If I remember Laura Ingalls Wilder's account correctly, her ma got a piece of calf's stomach from a neighbour. But does that mean people only had cheese when a calf was slaughtered? It turns out people would dry pieces of the stomach and reconstitute it when it was time for cheese making. Go figure...]

Step #3: Cut the curd and let rest for 10 minutes. During this time the curds will start to release the whey.

Step #4: Hold at a constant heat and stir gently for 45 minutes. This "cooks" the curds and makes them a bit tougher.

Step #5: Pour into a cheesecloth-lined colander and hang to drain for 24 hours. After a few hours we turned the cheese in the cloth, so we would get a more uniform ball.

Step #6: Cut the ball into manageable pieces and let sit covered at room temperature for 2-3 days. Then cover the pieces with brine and refrigerate for 1-4 weeks. 

Step #7: Eat!

We're in the middle of Step#6, so it will be a while before we know if the cheese is any good. Even if it's fabulous, this experiment isn't likely to be repeated soon, since we used about $28 worth of organic goat's milk to get a ball of cheese the size of a large grapefruit. Not so cost effective, but worth the experience. One time, anyway!

Too much of a good thing

I have been going just a little bit overboard in the fermentation department. As soon as I started to get better from the horrible cold that knocked Kim and I flat, I craved anything and everything fermented, and the Mucky Boots Fermentation Factory kicked into high gear. While I waited for those efforts to bear fruit I made my first yogurt (so easy, once I realized I could use my dehydrator to keep it at 110 degrees for 7-10 hours) and bought some miso that I've been using to make soup almost every day.

Then a couple of days ago I tasted the sauerkraut I started at the beginning of the month, and realized it's spectacular, even though it could use a bit more time fermenting. Really flavourful, and way less salty than my first batch. So I've been eating a bowl of that every day. And today I drank my first home-brewed kombucha, and it was wonderful, too.

Clearly my body is looking for something, and I am happy to do my best to provide it. But I am learning that there can be too much of a good thing. Not that it's dampening my enthusiasm for all things fermented, but I have realized a certain period of acclimatization is probably in order...

Today the two crocks of kombucha that have been fermenting for a few days reached a nice balance between tart and gently sweet, and so I started the second step of the double-fermentation process.

I set aside the scoby from each crock, along with a couple of cups of kombucha that will be used to start the next batch, and ladled the rest into clean 600 ml canning jars, along with about an inch of pomegranate-blueberry juice in each jar. Lids were screwed on tightly and the jars were put back in the warm music room to ferment for two more days. This is the step that should give the kombucha a bit more fizz. Then the set-aside scobies and kombucha were used to begin all over again, this time with freshly brewed chai tea for one crock and green tea for the other. (Instructions for all of this can be found courtesy of Kristen at Food Renegade.)

In the photo above you can see one of the jars of kombucha, along with a glass of pure kombucha - which I drank right up as soon as the photo was taken, and it was delicious!

Wondering what the tulips have to do with anything? So many people were grossed out by the scoby I thought some nice tulips might lend a more positive association.

Is it working?

Scoby-dooby-doo

The Mucky Boots Farm Fermentation Factory is proud to announce the birth of its very first kombucha scoby. Have a closer look at that beautiful baby...

The two scobies I started almost two weeks ago have been quietly fermenting in Kim's music room, the only consistently heated room in the house. You might remember I was a little worried about whether either would work, since I mistakenly bought raw kombucha that had been adulterated with other things: ginger juice in one case, and spirulina in the other. The ginger juice scoby is developing v..e..r..y....s..l..o..w..l..y but the green one grew lickety split. The white rubbery layer on top is the scoby and it's very strange to handle. Kind of creepy.

I was worried enough that neither scoby would grow that I ordered one online, from a source in Ontario, and it arrived today, double bagged along with about a cup of the fermented kombucha it grew from.

So today I started brewing my first batches of kombucha, using the purchased scoby and my home-grown one.

To brew kombucha, start with about four litres of strong brewed tea, sweetened with a cup of sugar. The sources I have read don't hesitate to use regular white table sugar, since it's eaten by the friendly bacteria during the fermentation process. The sweetened tea is cooled to room temperature, and then the scoby is gently added, along with at least half a cup of the already fermented kombucha it came from. I put one batch in a ceramic water crock and the other in one of my fermenting crocks. The top of each crock is covered with a clean towel to let oxygen in and keep bugs out, and the crocks are put back into the warm music room to ferment for about a week.

I tasted a bit of the fermented spirulina kombucha before it got added to kick-start the newly started batch, and it was delicious: zingy and tart. I can't wait for a whole lip-smacking glass!

Fermentation Factory

We are definitely back in the land of the living here at Mucky Boots, after about ten days' worth of coughing and wheezing and feeling miserable. Kim ended up with pneumonia, and my asthmatic lungs were crackling so loudly my doctor didn't know what to call it, but today we are both feeling human again.

Maybe because of that emphatic reminder of how awful it is to be sick, or maybe because my cold-deadened taste buds needed reawakening, I woke yesterday morning convinced that there was nothing more important on my to-do list than gearing up production again in the Mucky Boots Fermentation Factory.

The health benefits of fermented foods are well known. By introducing probiotics into the digestive system they not only help us get the full nutritional benefits of the food we eat, they can help the immune system and play a role in fighting chronic diseases, among other things. Plus they taste great.

I've had some spectacular successes fermenting food (sauerkraut and deli pickles) and some spectacular failures (broken glass in the sauerkraut, and a batch of unintentional sauerkraut wine). Sure, the fermentation disasters bummed me out, but yesterday when I woke up craving the sour bite of home-brewed sauerkraut, I realized those unhappy memories had faded into oblivion and I was ready to try again.

Just a few hours and a lot of chopping later, the kitchen counter looked less like a place to make toast and tea, and more like the site of a science experiment, with three different fermentation projects on the go. A big crock of sauerkraut, of course. But also, for the first time, a smaller batch of kimchi, that potent mix of fermented vegetables my Korean students used to obsess over.

To make kimchi, add a few chopped carrots and radishes to a chopped head of Napa cabbage. (I also added some locally harvested kelp.) Cover with brine, weigh down with a plate and leave it overnight. The next day drain the vegetables, saving the brine. Make a paste of chopped onions and garlic, grated ginger, and some fresh or dried hot peppers (I did this in my food processor), add it to the drained cabbage mixture, and then tamp it all down in a jar or crock. Weigh down the top with a plate or jar and add as much of the reserved brine as needed to make sure the vegetables are all submerged. Cover with a clean cloth to keep the bugs out but let the bacteria in. Taste it every day until you're happy with the flavour - this could take as little as a week in warm weather - and then store it in the fridge.

The third project now fermenting away on the counter is kombucha - a fizzy, slightly-sweet-slightly-tart fermented tea that many people drink as a detoxifier. I can buy it in 16 ounce bottles at my local health food stores, but at $3.95 a pop, that adds up. With a "mother" (an established kombucha culture sometimes called a scoby) it's apparently as easy as pie to brew up a couple of gallons of the stuff in 10-12 days, for only the cost of a few tea bags and a little bit of sugar to feed the bacteria.

The hard part is finding a scoby in the first place. If you're lucky enough to know a fermentation master with their own scoby, bring them a batch of home baking and they will probably give you a daughter scoby from the next batch of kombucha they make.

I'm not so lucky. I'm not sure I even know anyone who knows what kombucha is. Enter one of my favourite new blogs, Food Renegade, where Kristin gives instructions for growing a scoby using a purchased bottle of raw, organic kombucha. Unfortunately I failed to read the instructions carefully enough, and came home with kombucha adulterated with other ingredients: ginger juice in the case of one bottle, and spirulina in the other. I decided to give it a go anyway - the worst that happens is the loss of two perfectly good bottles of a tasty, refreshing drink.

One of the issues with fermenting here at Mucky Boots is how cool our house is. This isn't a problem for many things - in fact, some people believe a slower, cooler ferment results in a more flavourful outcome. But the recommended temperature for growing a kombucha scoby is 25 - 30 degrees Celsius. Our kitchen is 15 degrees on a good day. So I brought in an unused heat mat from the greenhouse and put the kombucha jars on top. This could just end up cooking the whole mixture instead of helping it ferment, so between this and the adulterated kombucha I started with, I don't have high hopes for this experiment. But I already have Plan B in my back pocket: purchasing a scoby online (which convinces me all over again that you can find anything on the internet...)

And so here they are: two jars of kombucha and one of kimchi, all lined up on the counter.

Don't they look like the Three Wise Men from a school nativity play?

Leftover

I feel a little silly about this post, because I know many of you are experts at making good use of the food that comes into your home. But this isn't something I've been especially good at. Things changed a bit when we moved to Mucky Boots and started growing our own vegetables: my mindset started to shift from "What's the recipe, go buy the ingredients" to "What's ready in the garden and how can I make use of it." But the fridge was still a place where leftovers found their own way to the back corners and died a slow, smelly death.

I am determined that this year, that's going to change. Part of it is trying to make better use of every food dollar. But the bigger part is out of respect for the food itself and the people who produced it, and out of recognition for how lucky we are to have it when so many in the world don't have enough. No, I'm not about to start packaging up my unwanted kale to send to the starving children in Africa. But I think I can do better with what we have.

Please forgive me if this all sounds like Leftovers 101 - but that's where I am: at the beginning. And the first challenge of the year was what to do with all the remains of our Christmas dinner. There were a lot of them, since Kim and I were on our own this year. Some things were obvious: we did a couple of days of reheated encore dinners, I made a batch of stock with the carcass of the turkey, and then a great turkey and vegetable soup. But there was still an awful lot of turkey, potatoes, gravy, squash and cranberry sauce left when New Year's rolled around.

Let me try to contain my glee as I tell you what I did.

Inspiration #1: Turkey croquettes. I took the last 4 cups of turkey meat, the last 2 cups of mashed potatoes and the last cup or so of gravy and whizzed them in the food processor until I got a pretty smooth mix. I added some green onions and a bit more seasoning, then formed it into croquettes and did a rice flour/beaten egg/smashed cornflake coating. 30 minutes or so in the oven and they were done, and didn't they go nicely with the leftover cranberry sauce! The best part is that I now have about 2 dozen of them in the freezer, for quick and easy dinners in the future.

Inspiration #2: Squash muffins. I have a killer gluten-free pumpkin muffin recipe that I make regularly, in a double batch so half can go in the freezer. So it occurred to me to replace the pumpkin puree with the leftover acorn squash, mashed into oblivion. I was worried about the seasonings: the maple syrup and cinnamon I had flavoured the squash with for Christmas dinner would go nicely in muffins, but I wasn't so sure about the thyme. But I tried it anyway, added a bit of streusel topping to compensate, and they were fabulous. More distinguishable from the pumpkin version than I had anticipated - a bit denser, sweeter, more squashy. Yum.

Like I said, Leftovers 101. But with the exception of about half-a-cup of cranberry sauce still lurking in the fridge, every bit of our Christmas dinner has been used.

Just call me Suzy Homemaker.

Waffles

Breakfasts are a problem for me. No...let me put that a different way: breakfasts are a minefield for me. Between needing to avoid gluten, dairy, eggs, nut butters and sugar, and just wanting something warm and comforting, I end up with depressingly few choices. Just think about it: what do you eat for breakfast that avoids all those things?

The obvious choice is oatmeal, maybe served with some fresh or stewed fruit. But I don't even want fruit in the morning, on a regular basis - I seem to do better if I can avoid any kind of sugar at the start of the day. For a few weeks I was stuck on toasted gluten-free bagels, topped with home-made veggie pate, but I was getting more bored - and even more congested - the longer that rut went on. My reliable, good-for-me standby is rice and steamed veggies, but after a few mornings even that lovely feeling of being virtuous starts to fade.

And then, through some kind of serendipity (or maybe it's just a food fad) I started seeing recipes for waffles everywhere. Gluten-free waffles. Waffles that can be made with egg-replacer instead of eggs, and soy milk instead of cow milk. Waffles that have virtually no sugar in them. Waffles that have vegetables in them. Waffles that are hot and comforting and easy to freeze and reheat.

So yesterday I bit the bullet and bought an inexpensive waffle iron. I thought about this hard for a week or so, because I have been carefully avoiding acquiring more kitchen appliances for the last couple of years . But I decided that the benefits outweighed the downside: a nutritious breakfast option, the convenience of being able to make a big batch and freeze them for instant re-toasting, and the fact that given the outrageous cost of gluten-free bagels, a waffle iron would pay for itself in about a month of breakfasts. Plus, I could make waffles with vegetables in them. (Have I said that already?)

This morning was the inauguration of the new waffle iron, and the recipe I chose came from Quinoa 365: The Everyday Superfood. It uses extra-nutritious quinoa flour as the base, with pumpkin puree and all the right spices: cinnamon, ginger and allspice. The waffles turned out tender and tasty, even without any maple syrup, and even though I made a big batch I'm not sure there will be any left by the end of the day to freeze.

I'm thinking that a different recipe, with more neutral or even savoury flavours, would give me a nice alternative to gluten-free bread. Because even though I've tried about every gluten-free bread on the market, I have yet to find one that has a decent texture and doesn't cost six or seven dollars a loaf. (Actually I did find one I liked enough to pay that much for, but then the company stopped making it.) I have tried baking my own, and found one or two recipes that are okay, but they are very starchy, and the texture is still not great.

So I'm trying not to think that waffles are going to save my life, but can I be forgiven if I'm just a little bit excited about having a cheap, nutritious, bread-like option for breakfast?

Welcome back friend

My shadow. I haven't seen this for a long time. The sun is out today, and the forecasters promise about a week of sunnier than normal and colder than normal temperatures. I'd say that's a fair exchange.

We've been busy working on the house - specifically painting and installing baseboard in the living room and finally, after two years, in the bedroom upstairs. It always amazes me what a difference a coat of paint can do, and after years of living with the raggedy edges of baseboard-less rooms, it feels so nice to see something more finished.

While Kim takes the lead on the baseboard front today, I've been getting ready for the return of more friends: Margaret and Mary, who are coming for lunch tomorrow. So I've been making veggie pate and bread, and a vegetable soup with tomatoes, red beets, yellow beets, carrots, garlic, onions and leeks all grown this year at Mucky Boots.

A visit from friends, hot soup on a cold day, my sweetheart trotting up and down the stairs with pieces of baseboard, Frankie playing B-A-L-L in the sunshine: that's home to me.

Guess who came to dinner

That's right: Big Boy. Only he wasn't a dinner guest - he was the dinner.

Big Boy ended his walk on Death Row on Tuesday, when we took him to the local chicken slaughter house. Even though this was a return trip for us, it wasn't a whole lot easier than the first time.

When we brought him home I looked at the skinny, long-legged carcass in the plastic bag, thought of his three brothers in the chest freezer, and deliberately put him in the fridge instead. No more delaying: it was time to see if we could actually eat a chicken we raised.

I did a bit of research before I started cooking. According to the experts, since Buff Orpingtons aren't meat birds, Big Boy was likely to be scrawny (which he was) and tough, which meant I had to chose my cooking method carefully. I opted for Coq au Vin (the two-day Alton Brown version) and got started yesterday.

The first step was to cut the carcass into portion-sized pieces. I have broken down chickens before, but never like this: a full 30 minutes of wrestling with kitchen shears and sharp knives later, Big Boy was finally in pieces. And what funny pieces. I have never seen such long skinny drumsticks, and such concave breasts. The meat was very dark, and those thighs! Muscular hardly says it.

After 90 minutes of preliminary preparation yesterday, an overnight sleepover in a winy marinade and three hours in the oven today, we finally sat down - with some trepidation - to a Big Boy dinner. We cheated a bit by stripping the meat off the bones, so we weren't faced with a leg in our dinner bowls, and that made a difference. The meat's texture was more like beef than chicken: it was tender from its long slow cooking, but with long fibers like a piece of roast beef. And it had a much stronger taste than the chicken we're used to eating.

The final verdict: we'll eat the other three roosters in our freezer, but I don't think either of us will really look forward to it, just from a culinary perspective. But we both feel like we passed the farmer test, and will look with open minds at the possibility of raising meat birds (which should produce plumper, more chicken-like meat) in the spring.

Thanks, Big Boy. You'll make good leftovers.

Peas

I'm having a few issues with my peas. You might remember I struggled with mice eating the newly planted seeds - I thought I might not end up with any peas this year. Ha. Ha ha.

There is a chaotic jungle of pea plants in the pea bed. Part of it is my fault and part is the mice's fault. It turns out the mice didn't eat as many of the seeds as I thought they had. So when I planted them for the second (and the third) time, I was creating some trouble for myself. It would have been okay if I had thinned the plants once they started to sprout. But the seedlings were getting nibbled (mice again) and I thought I would keep them all a while longer for insurance. Only I sort of forgot to get around to thinning them until it was too late. Much too late.

So I have way too many plants in the bed, making it hard to spot the peas for picking. The other problem is that I planted three kinds of peas: snow, snap and shelling. Of course I planted them in orderly sections so I would know what was what. But I think the mice did a little shuffling - probably laughing all the while. I'm serious: I know they carried newly planted peas to other locations, because I now have pea plants growing in the oddest places. So I think the mice are responsible for the fact the three types of peas have crossed my carefully planned boundaries and are happily intermingling. That would be okay - I'm not that anally-retentive. But it means I don't know what to pick when.

The snow peas are meant to be picked early, when they are beautifully thin and svelte. The snap peas are meant to be picked when their pods feel plump and juicy. It's the pods that are so tasty - any peas inside are irrelevant. But the shelling pea pods need to be plump, too - only they need to be full of peas, because you don't eat the pod.

So there's a bed full of wildly mixed up pea plants, and I'm staring at what I think is a snow pea. But is it really a snow pea, or is it really a snap or shelling pea that I should leave until it plumps up? If I leave it, I might get a tough, aged snow pea that's not worth eating. On the other hand, what a waste if if I guess it's a snow pea and pick it and it's really a shelling pea.

To complicate things even further, I clearly have something to learn about when to pick shelling peas. I managed to find a pod in the midst of the pea chaos that I was quite confident was a shelling pea pod, and it looked in its prime: plump, firm, just ripe for picking I thought. There it is, in the picture at the top of the post. Here's what it looked like when I opened it up.

Not quite what I was hoping for. You practically need a magnifying glass to see those peas. They were tasty, though.

I did manage to locate, correctly identify and pick a handful of snow peas yesterday, and they wound up in the salad I made for supper: leaves picked from the still growing cabbages (shredded), garlic scapes (sliced), the snow peas (slivered), and green onions (cut up fine), all from the garden. With a dressing made with good mayo, curry powder and lime juice. Yum.