Tears In the Kitchen

 After harvesting all of the onions in the garden, we brought them inside - out of the hot humid weather where they'd surely be rotten by now.  The sit in our "onion curing room" which doubles as our parlor when we don't have a tarp on the floor and a baker's rack full of onions sitting in the middle of it.  The ceiling fan overhead is on high and has been circulating air for about a month now. We've been quite fortunate to not lose a single onion.  Oh, one or two has begun to get a little soft, but if you peel off the outer layer, everything beneath it is fine.

On Saturday, it was a rainy day and we figured it would be beneficial to begin processing some of the onions.  With so many to choose from, we set our criterion for selecting the first onions to process.  We decided we would begin with choosing any that had the beginnings of a soft spot.  We found only two.  Then we selected all the small onions.  They were put into baskets and brought to the kitchen.

The first step in processing is to pull off the loose skin.  Then cut off the neck and the roots.  Then slice in half and remove the outer, papery skin.  Here's what you're left with.  The other thing that you must contend with is tears.

Finally, we chop them up into chunks.  These chunks will be perfect for cooking with.  We use an old chopper that has seen better days, but it still works like a charm.  I would love to know how many pounds of onions, peppers, and potatoes over the years it has cubed.  It's quite loud when you slam down the top.  Tricia wears ear plugs while doing it.

Just getting started, but we have a long way to go.

After working for a bit and putting a bunch of onion chunks in a big plastic bag for freezing, we decided to take a break for a week or two.  There's no rush for doing this as long as the onions cure and hold well.  Truth is, we are planning to take the bull to the slaughterhouse this summer.  It would be a doggone shame to have the deep freeze full of onions when it could be storing beef.

Just this little bit of chopping yielded a whopping 17 1/4 pounds of chopped onions.  Imagine how much time we've saved on the back side.  No more prepping and chopping onions and crying while you are cooking.  We've taken care of those tasks on the frontside.

Look at the onion curing room following chopping up 17 1/4 pounds of onions.  We didn't even put a dent in the onion inventory.

That's okay, we use a lot of onions in our kitchen.  The only slight rush to clearing this area is that it won't be too terribly long before we will be harvesting garlic and we'll need this area for curing garlic here.

Preserving the Cauliflower Harvest

Gardening can be a funny thing.  Some years, even though you do everything you've always done, the yield is less than desirable.  This year the sweet potato harvest was lackluster, at best.  Some years, though, everything clicks on certain crops.  This year the cauliflower harvest can best be described as a bumper crop.  That term originates from the 19th century when things exceptionally large were termed as "bumper."

Before the big freeze we harvested all the cauliflower as exposing the heads to a deep freeze causes the cauliflower to become mushy and damaged.  We ate all we could, but decided we would need to blanch and freeze the excess so that we could preserve the harvest and eat it throughout the upcoming weeks and months.

Cauliflower grows with large leaves that curl around the head, leaving the head mostly protected.  As a result, the heads are snowball white, clean, with no blemishes or damage.  Tricia and I formed a quick assembly line, cutting off any remaining leaves and stem bottoms.  The upper portions of the stem are tasty and edible. 

We disassemble the heads, cutting them into florets a little larger than a golf ball.  While we are working on this, we get a pot of water boiling.  We also clean the sink and fill with cold water and ice.  We're about ready to get things going.

With the water at a full boil, we drop a batch of cauliflower into the water.  Once the water is boiling, we start the timer for three minutes.  It takes 3 minutes to blanch cauliflower.  Blanching the cauliflower (or any vegetable) does a couple of things: it preserves the color and it preserves the texture prior to freezing.

The beeper goes off, alerting Tricia that it's time to take it out.  I say "alerts Tricia" because I can't hear the beeper.  The timer sounds at a frequency that I cannot hear.  Years of running a crawfish boat with no hearing protection (my fault entirely) have resulted in hearing loss of certain frequencies.  There are worse afflictions, I suppose.  

Once the beeper sounds, we quickly remove the blanched cauliflower into a colander, allowing the hot water to drain out, and then we put the cauliflower into the cold water bath.  We want to immediately stop the cooking process.  To do so, we add more ice to the sink as needed.  Simultaneously, we put another batch of cauliflower florets into the water and start the whole process over again.  Rinse, wash, repeat... Literally.

Once the cauliflower has cooled, we bag it up into quart-sized Ziploc bags and put them into the deep freeze.  We yielded nine bags.

Of course, we did hold back 3 or 4 cauliflower heads to put in the crisper in the fridge and we'll eat that over the next week or so.  We always like to eat as much as we can fresh from the garden, but it's always important to be able to preserve the harvest.

Finishing Up the Butchering - 2024

As the final bird in the chicken tractor is processed, there is still work to be done.  All the birds are chilling in tubs of water in the shade.  Meanwhile, we gather around the eviscerating table.  We dump out the bowl of livers on the table and spray them down.  They are mostly clean, but we make sure that they are clean and then pack them in quart bags for freezing.  We like to pan fry them in butter.  We also like to wrap them in bacon and broil them in the oven.  We did that today, in fact.  Liver isn't for everyone, but we enjoy it.  

Next, we pour all the hearts on the table, cut them in half and wash the coagulated blood out of them and bag them up to freeze.  It's just a muscle, so it's good eating.  I didn't get a photo of the hearts, though.  Livers and hearts are pretty easy to clean and freeze.  

The gizzards require a bit more time.  The gizzards are surrounded by fat.  We take our time and pull it all off of each gizzard.  We are kind of particular about getting them super clean.

Then we cut them in half and remove the yellow, plastic-like liner from the inside of the gizzard.  It is always interesting to see what's in the gizzard.  Chickens eat rocks and oyster shells to aid in the break down and digestion of their food.  You can see that these chickens weren't only eating feed and bugs.  They were eating their share of grass and clover.  Healthy birds.

All the gizzards are bagged and frozen.  But don't forget, we have tubs full of feathers, guts, blood, feet, heads, etc.  We've always put that right back in the garden.  I dig trenches in the garden, pour it all in, cover it back up, and it will rot and add good stuff to the soil.  There are sweet potatoes growing in abundance all around the 'gut pit'.  Healthy soil is the key to a good garden.

We go inside and take a break, while we are waiting for the next event of the day, I take the opportunity to sharpen the knives.  They've all been used all morning and have dulled.  I drip some oil on a whetstone and sharpen them and then use the steel to further fine tune.  In the end, the work results in a razor sharp knife, and we'll need that in just a little bit.

A final thing I want to discuss is the Buck knife at the bottom of the photo.  That knife was my Uncle Don's hunting knife.  It was given to me when he passed away, and we used it to butcher chickens today.  Don was a good man and while using his knife today, we talked about him and many fond memories of spending time with him.  I think he would have enjoyed all the flying feathers today.  We certainly miss him.

We brought the tubs holding 32 freshly butchered birds in the house along with the tables.  It was getting hot outside and the flies were bad.  We felt confident that we would be able to clean up any mess that we made on the tile floors.  The birds were on ice and went through the rigor mortis process during the afternoon.

In the late afternoon, we began the final task - cutting up the birds.  We do an 8 piece cut-up: 2 breasts, 2 wings, 2 thighs, 2 drumsticks.  It's actually a 9 piece cut up, because we keep the neck/backbone section for making broth.  I wish I would have taken some photos of that process, but my hands get so messy cutting up the birds that I didn't want to get all that on my phone.  We freeze them in gallon freezer bags.  We froze a couple birds whole (not cut up).  The rest we cut up and bagged either 1 chicken or a half chicken to the bag.

We weighed the final product and kept good records.  Perhaps tomorrow or the day after, we'll show you the results: total weight, average weight per bird, feed consumption, cost per bird, etc.

Carrots For Days

Normally, we're harvesting the fall crop of carrots in February.  Our very cold weather delayed everything.  In fact, I thought it had killed our carrots.  I even planted two rows of spring carrots, which I never do, as I thought all hope was lost.  But alas!  The fall carrots rebounded and we had a reduced, but still sufficient harvest.

On a recent trip to where she grew up in Corpus Christi, my wife returned with a big basket that my mother-in-law had given her.  It works out nicely for harvesting.  We have a nice haul of Danvers carrots.  They're our 'normal' orange variety.

Then I picked the other two rows of the other varieties of carrots we have planted.  We fed the carrot tops to the animals by the fence watching our every move.

Here is a better look at the varieties after they're all washed up.  On the left, we have the Cosmic Purple Carrot.  It is purple on the outside with an orange flesh.  The one in the middle is your regular run of the mill Danvers carrot.  The one on the right is my favorite.  It is the Atomic Red Carrot.  It has a beautiful red color all the way through.

We eat a bunch of them, mainly oven roasted with olive oil and salt and pepper topped with some fresh parsley.  But we preserve a bunch, too.  We will can some of them.  We dice them up with a food chopper and then blanch them and bring them to a cool temperature in ice water.

We bag up a lot of quart bags of carrots.  These work perfectly for a quick meal as a side dish or, our new favorite, Cream of Carrot soup.  Into the freezer they go until we're ready.

We are trying a new experiment this year in dehydrating some carrots.  We'll do a couple of trays to see how they come out.

This is the same tray as above after drying.  Wow, they kind of went away, didn't they?

We'll put them in a jar like this.  When we were finished, we had a pint full of dehydrated carrots.

Tricia is thinking that when we don't have fresh carrots, she can throw a couple of tablespoons into stews where they'll rehydrate.  We'll know how this experiment turns out and whether or not this is something we will continue to do as another option to preserve the harvest.

A Perfect Quick Meal Fresh (Frozen) From the Garden

We've done this post many times, but doing this in advance (a stitch in time saves nine, right?) has pulled us out of a bind many times when we ask ourselves "What's for supper tonight?"  Of course I'm talking pesto.  Time after time, we raid the leaves off of our basil plants and make pesto.  We freeze it in individual containers and pull them out and thaw and make some pasta and BOOM!  There's a delicious, quick and nutritious meal idea.  Today I added another ingredient that stepped up the pesto a notch or two. 

I moved a bench next to the basil plant and picked a bunch of the fresh tender, new leaves.

I picked 8 cups of basil leaves.  The secret ingredient I used this time?  Green onions.  You might call them shallots or onion tops.  I added a cup of these to the 8 cups basil leaves.

I grated some Parmesan cheese in a big measuring cup.

Here are all the ingredients.  You can see the green onions with the basil, the grated parmesan cheese.  Since we have pecans, we substitute them instead of walnuts or pine nuts.  Extra virgin olive oil.  12 cloves garlic.

Here's the recipe we have used for years.  You can see that we quadruple the recipe since we make batches for freezing.

This is the dry-looking paste that is made by mixing the leaves with the pecans in the food processor.

Then the cloves of garlic go in the processor...

And then the olive oil...

A delicious concoction indeed, but we're not done.

We add all the cheese along with salt and pepper to taste.

Then I spoon it into containers for freezing.

I wish you could taste how good this stuff is!

We have served this over pasta.  We've used it as a base (instead of tomato sauce) for homemade pizzas.  We've also made grilled cheese and pesto sandwiches before.  All were terrific!!

The "Besto" Pesto

Welcome to the Jungle!  In July, the sweet potato vines always engulf this section of the garden.  If one were to stand for too long in one location, you are in danger of the vines encircling your body and tying you down.  The vines are knee high and very healthy with all the rain we've gotten.

Barely holding its own in the middle of the vines are two Sweet Basil Plants like you see below:

And two Genovese Basil plants like you see below:

We really like fresh basil in cooking various dishes and love fresh pesto on pizzas with homegrown tomatoes, corn and mozzarella.  But today we're making pesto.  While standing in the vines, I pull off the healthiest leaves and fill a big measuring cup that I've brought with me that will hold 8 cups.  Once I get 8 cups of basil leaves packed down, I bring them inside and soak them in water.  We don't like bugs in our pesto!

We start grating Parmesan cheese as the recipe calls for 2 cups.

In fact, I've assembled all the ingredients.  You will need:

8 cups basil leaves

2 cups freshly grated Parmesan Cheese

2 cups extra virgin olive oil

1 1/3 cup cashew pieces

12 garlic cloves, minced

Salt and pepper

Process the basil leaves by pulsing until the leaves are uniformly chopped.  It smells great!

Add the cashew pieces and process until mixed.

Mince the garlic and pulse again until mixed.

Pour the 2 cups of olive oil into the mixture while it is on.  Once done, I scrape the sides of the food processor down with a spatula to ensure all is properly mixed.

Now is the time to add the grated Parmesan Cheese:

Pesto freezes remarkably well, so we spoon the pesto into Daisy Sour Cream containers that hold 16 ounces each.  Of course I taste it.  It is delicious!

I made two batches of pesto as described above.  I ended up with Five Pounds of pesto.  I labeled it with a Sharpie and freezer tape.

And that's it.  So simple to put together a quick meal.  Just thaw out a container of pesto and put some pasta on.  Voila!  Pesto Pasta for lunch after church.  Everyone loves it.  Pro tip: Be sure to check your teeth before going out.  Pesto tends to stick in the corner of your teeth.  That can be embarrassing!  That's experience speaking...