In the Back of the Refrigerator

Before I get to today's topic, I wanted to show you one thing that my wife reminded me about the honey harvest.  Obviously we got honey and lots of it.  We also got beeswax and honey water.  The one thing I neglected to tell you that we also got was fire starters.  When we strained the impurities out of the beeswax, it left us with muslin rags filled with a waxy-debris substance.  These make great fire starters for a campfire or fireplace and we've put them into a zip loc bag to save for cooler weather and fire building.

Back in April when the weather was nice and cool, we posted THIS POST that explained one thing that we were going to do with the last of our cabbage crop.  We made kimchi or Korean sauerkraut.  If you click on the link highlighted in blue in the first sentence of this paragraph, it will take you back to that post and show you just how we did it, using lacto-fermentation as a food preservation method of choice.

We pushed the two quarts to the very back of the refrigerator.  The best thing to do is just forget it's there.  Then, on a hot, summer day, you reach back there and pull out a jar of kimchi that's been aging for months.

I guess ordinary folks would throw this out.  It looks kind of sketchy.  When you open the cap and sniff it, it smells very strong.

When you take a fork and dig into it, magic happens.  It's packed in there tight.  You have to work at it to get it unpacked and out of the jar and onto your plate.

Now for the taste test.  It's cool and tangy, effervescent and tart. It's also spicy.  In short, it's delicious and perfect for taking a few bites before your meal to get your digestion into gear.  We've been eating some for lunch each day and I suppose we'll be opening the second jar that's hiding in the back of the fridge.

What To Do With All This Cabbage?

We had a bumper crop of cabbage this year, and we need to do something with it quickly.  We've had cole slaw, egg rolls, cabbage and sausage jambalaya, and sautéed cabbage.  This morning, we decided to make Kimchi.  We used the recipe from Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon of the Weston A. Price Foundation.  We gathered the ingredients:

The recipe we used is shown below.  I think if you click on the photo, it will enlarge.

We shredded up the cabbage, chopped the green onions, grated the carrots, the radishes, the ginger, and the garlic.  Then we added the pepper flakes, sea salt and whey to the big bowl.  Tricia had whey left over from when she made mozzarella cheese the other day.

Then, with a wooden masher tool, we took turns banging and pounding on the contents of the bowl.  What we're attempting is to crush everything and release all the juices,  After Tricia had enough, she gave me the pounder and I worked on it for a good while.

We used a canning funnel and spooned the contents into each jar, packing it all tight while pressing down.  The juices should cover the vegetable mixture completely.  We have some glass weights the sit on top, pushing it down and keeping the liquid covering everything.

Here's an up-close look at the kimchi.  It has a nice color and aroma to it.

We put lids on top, dating the kimchi and set on the counter.  We'll leave it there for three days at room temperature.  They we'll put it in the fridge and let it ferment and age.

After a few months, we'll pull it out of the fridge and give it a try.  We do a lot of lacto-fermenting.  In fact we've been eating on lacto-fermtented banana peppers that we did last year and have 2 1/2 quarts left. They are still holding up well and taste great, like hopefully the kimchi will turn out.

What To Do With a Bunch of Carrots

We harvested yet another row of carrots.  We had already pulled the Cosmic Purple variety, the Kyoto Red variety and now it was time for the Danvers variety.  These are the normal (boring) orange carrot that we're all familiar with.  Some of these carrots aren't so boring after all.  Like these for example.  I call them the love carrots.  They're snuggling.

I scrubbed them all up real good with a vegetable brush and washed them.  They were loaded into bowls and brought inside.

The tops were cut off, but we don't peel them.  There are a lot of nutrients in the skins.  As long as they are clean, we leave them on.

We shredded a number of them in the food processor.  This reminds me of the carrot salad with raisins that you used to see in cafeterias like Piccadilly or Luby's.  (But we're not making carrot salad.)

Today, we're making Ginger Carrots.  It's a favorite recipe of ours from the Nourishing Traditions cookbook.  This is made using lacto-fermentation.  Here is the recipe:

We grated up some ginger...

And we got out some whey that we had in the fridge from the last time we made kefir...

This was all combined in a large stainless steel bowl and now the fun part occurs.  We get out a meat tenderizer, which for all practical purposes is a stainless steel hammer. and we beat the carrots while stirring, this releases all the carrot juice that mixes with the whey, salt, shredded carrots and ginger.

We pack this very tightly into quart-sized mason jars, ensuring that the carrot mixture is submerged beneath the liquid.  We left this out on the counter for two days.  I opened the jars to check on them and they were fermenting.  The bubbles were coming up through the liquid in the jar and it overflowed on the counter.  After two days, we put the jars into the fridge.

We'll forget about them in the back of the fridge for a couple of months.  Then we'll pull them out and eat as a side dish.  It is tangy, refreshing, cool and tasty.  To top it off, Ginger Carrots are good for you!

What to do With All These Radishes?

We grow French Breakfast Radishes in the garden.  Radishes are one of those crops you grow that is one of the fastest maturing things I can think of.  We cut them up in salads and we also enjoy them in a radish dip we make.  I highly recommend it.  The recipe is from a blog post back in 2017 you can see by clicking HERE. 

We still have a bunch of radishes in the garden.  We'll make another dip or two, but wanted to try our hand at lacto-fermenting some.  We have used lacto-fermentation in making Sauer kraut, kimchi, pickles, and gingered carrots.  Now, we'll do radishes.  This afternoon we picked a colander full.

We washed them up and scrubbed the dirt off of them with a stiff-bristled vegetable brush.

We wanted to see how much we picked.  A hair over 2 pounds.

I cut the bottom root off as well as the top.  In probably an unneeded step, but I like to follow directions, I peeled the radishes with a potato peeler.  By the way, I want to give credit, we're using a recipe from Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon coupled with one from The Survival Gardener's Blog.

We cubed up the radishes and packed them in wide mouth quart sized jars.

The recipe calls for 1 Tablespoon of salt, 1/4 of whey and then fill with water.  A little backstory on the whey.  We make the whey as a byproduct of making kefir yogurt.  Whey is what drips off, leaving the curds behind.  Whey is a natural preservative.

The whey and salt and water are added and thoroughly mixed to ensure the salt dissolves.

Then the mixture is poured over the radishes in the jar until it fills.  You want to make sure the radishes are beneath the surface.  To accomplish this, you'll need a follower.  We don't have any followers, but we improvised.  In the jar on the left, we used a crystal napkin ring to weight down a pint size lid to hold all the radishes under the fermenting liquid.  A few cubes escaped.

For the jar on the right, I used a leaf of cabbage torn a little larger than the size of the jar to push all the radish cubes down.  This worked much better!

We'll allow to sit at room temperature for five days and will then place in the fridge where they'll last for months.  Anxious to try them!  They are supposed to be tart and tangy.  We'll report back if we were successful (if they are tasty).

Cool Hand Cuke

The cucumber crop from Our Maker's Acres Family Farm is coming to a close after a very prolific season.  We plant two varieties - Boston Pickling Cucumbers and Suyo Long Cucumbers.  I like them both.  They climb on a trellis in the back part of the garden.  We have been eating cucumbers every day for weeks and weeks.

We eat them many different ways.  So far this year, we haven't made pickles like dill pickles or bread and butter pickles.  Tricia made her traditional Lacto-Fermented pickles, though.  She slices up the cukes, puts them in a quart jar, adds 4 tablespoons of whey (a by-product she gets when making kefir), 1 tablespoon kosher salt and adds water to fill the jar.  Then she'll sit the jars out for two days and then refrigerates them.  They'll last for quite a while.  The lacto-fermented pickles are crispy and salty.

I have to admit that I like dill pickles, but Tricia has never been a big cucumber-eater.  However, with the lacto-fermented pickles, she really enjoys them.

Another way that we enjoy eating them is in a fresh cucumber salad.  It is so cool and refreshing!  We dice up cucumbers fresh from the garden, slice up some purple onions that we just harvested, add some cut up homegrown tomatoes we just picked and toss in some blueberries from our bushes.  Finally, drizzle vinegar and oil over the top and add sea salt and cracked black pepper.  Allow to chill and you have a fantastic salad!

It's just not summer without a nice cucumber salad!

Once we polish off the last of the cukes this summer, I'll try to get a fall crop planted in late August so that we can enjoy a few more salads.  Perhaps we'll re-stock the pantry with more dill pickles with the Fall Crop.

Making Beet Kvass

We're wrapping up our beet theme today with an interesting recipe that I promised last night.  We're making a beverage called Beet Kvass.  It is a fermented beverage that is popular in Russia and Ukraine.  Now, I'm not used to seeing the consonants, 'k' and 'v' used together, so I was guessing that this recipe is from another culture and after looking on Wikipedia, that assumption is correct.  Kvass is an old Slavic word that means, 'yeast' or 'leaven.'

It all starts off on the row of beets.  After you've grown some nice beets, pull them out of the ground and bring them inside.

Bull's Blood Beets

We use a recipe from Sally Fallon's Nourishing Traditions Cookbook.  Sally Fallon is associated with the Weston A. Price Foundation, a foundation we belong to whose mission is "to restore nutrient-dense foods to the American diet through education, research, and activism."

First you want to peel and chop up 3 or 4 medium beets.  You don't want to shred them - just chop them into some nice sized chunks.  Beets are a boring, drab looking root vegetable, but when you peel them and cut into them, they come alive with a vivid red color!

Chopping up the beets

Clean up a half gallon sized Mason jar and put your cut up beets into it.

The only ingredients you need besides beets are 1/4 cup whey and 2 teaspoons of sea salt.  We had just made some kefir, so we had plenty of whey.  Add the whey and the sea salt to your chopped beets in the jar.  

Beets, whey, and salt

Then add filtered water to fill the jar.

Adding filtered water

Stir well and then put the cap on securely.  Give it a good shake and leave on the counter at room temperature for 2 days.  After 2 days move it to the refrigerator.  The neat thing about this recipe is that when you have drunk almost all of the liquid you can fill it back up with water and do it again.

At room temperature for 2 days

According to the Nourishing Traditions Cookbook: "This drink is valuable for its medicinal qualities and as a digestive aid.  Beets are just loaded with nutrients.  One 4-ounce glass, morning and night, is an excellent blood tonic, promotes regularity, aids digestion, alkalizes the blood, cleanses the liver and is a good treatment for kidney stones and other ailments.  Beet kvass may also be used in place of vinegar in salad dressings and as an addition to soups."

I don't know how to adequately describe the taste to you.  The first time we made it I was a little suspicious of it because we were new to lacto-fermentation and I was afraid that it was going to kill me.  Well, I'm still here!  A cup of cold beet kvass is salty, slightly sour, but is refreshing and makes you feel better.  And it doesn't kill you. Enjoy a cup of beet kvass today!