Le Grand Fromage!

While I'd like to think we'd come up with all these ideas for homesteady things to do on our own, I have to give credit where credit is due, and in most cases it's due at least in part to Mother Earth News magazine.  If anything  I write here interests you, I can pretty much guarantee you'll love Mother Earth News.  Maybe this shout out will even get back to their editors and they'll ask me to write for them?  Now wouldn't that be bonkers! ;)  They've featured several articles over the years on home cheesemaking, and it was on my list of things to try for a long time.  I've now made cheese three times, with varying results, but it's something I definitely want to work on and learn more about!  Especially since it is so crazily easy!!!

My first attempt at cheesemaking was a mozzarella recipe in their June/July 2008 issue.  While I thought I was doing things correctly, the end result was much more like ricotta or very small curd cottage cheese than anything shapeable like fresh mozzarella should be.  Tasty nonetheless, but not what I was hoping for.  Like anything new, one should never give up after a failed first attempt, so later that week I tried my hand again at the mozzarella and discovered my error the first time (didn't get the curds hot enough, and stirred too much!) and was successful!  I actually was a little too successful, and the result was much firmer and dryer than true fresh mozzarella, and more like regular mozzarella... (Not sure what to call it, since it usually is only found in grated or string cheese form...)  I ended up using it in a pasta dish, and it was incredibly stringy and delicious! It would have made perfect pizza cheese!  Now that I know I can make ricotta and pizza mozzarella, next time I'll try a third time and maybe I'll get the recipe right and get fresh mozzarella!

It's amazing how little cheese comes out of so much milk- this is the result from a whole gallon of milk!

My third and most recent cheesemaking adventure occurred this morning, when I tried my hand at making cream cheese!  Unlike the mozzarella (which required rennet and citric acid), the cream cheese didn't require any special ingredients- just milk, salt, and white vinegar.  I have yet to have some on a bagel, but I did taste it  on its own and the flavor beats the pants off of Philly!  The texture isn't quite as smooth as storebought cream cheese, but I have a feeling that the texture could be improved, possibly by draining it longer, using whole milk (I used 2%, cause it's what I had on hand) or even just giving it a good stir.  Next time, I think I'll substitute some buttermilk in place of some of the milk, and see how that turns out.

The only bummer to home cheesemaking (if you don't have a dairy cow or easy access to truly fresh milk) is that you can't use most organic storebought milk.  Most organic milk companies ultra-pasteurize their milk, pasteurizing at a higher heat than regular pasteurizing, which kills more of the natural bacterias in the milk.  It gives milk a much longer fridge life, which is great, but unfortunately in cheesemaking, you need that bacteria to help the curding process along.  Fresh, unpasteurized milk would be ideal, and I hope to find a supplier in the spring, but until then, regular ol' storebought milk is the answer.

Crazy Easy Cream Cheese

1 quart milk (I used 2% but whole would probably be better)

2 tsp salt (non-iodized, kosher is my preference)

2 tbsp white vinegar

In a saucepot, bring milk and salt just to a boil very slowly over low heat, stirring occasionally.  Remove from heat, and stir in the vinegar.  Let it sit undisturbed until cool.  Pour into a cheesecloth or muslin bag, or a very fine mesh sieve, and let drain until it looks like cream cheese.  Store in the fridge and enjoy!  (How easy is that?!?)

Homeground flour!

This fall, part of our filling the root cellar involved buying 100 pounds of wheat, and a hand crank grain mill.  We had been baking all our own bread for a couple months, and decided to give home ground flour a try.  Ever wonder why all store bought flour is enriched?  Because wheat berries (the whole wheat kernel), when crushed or cracked or ground, lose about 80% of their naturally occurring nutrients (vitamins, minerals) within about 72 hours.  Store bought flour would otherwise be virtually nutrientless if not enriched with shelf-stable vitamins and minerals.  Freezing cracked wheat or flour can retard this nutrient loss, but in order to be successful you'd have to buy flour directly from the flour mill on the day that it was ground.  The whole wheat berry, however, is so non-perishable you can store it for years!  The choice to go home-ground was a pretty easy one, though finding a good non-electric grain mill proved challenging.  Thankfully, customer reviews are often extremely helpful in finding out more information than the product's packaging will give you, and we decided on the Back to Basics hand crank grain mill.

We are fortunate enough to live within a reasonable distance of a pretty awesome flour mill, Cortez Milling.  You can buy their flours in supermarkets (under the brand Blue Bird Flour), but you can also buy wheat directly from the mill, for crazy cheap.  To start ourselves off on our home grinding adventures, we bought 50lbs of Hard Red Winter Wheat and 50lbs of Hard White Winter Wheat.  As we've learned through research and personal experience, the white wheat makes a much better flour than the red, and the red makes an excellent cereal grain and substitute for rice in any recipe.

It's not difficult to grind flour or crack grain for cereal (trust me, there is nothing like freshly cracked oatmeal!!!), and Wyatt even likes to help!  It doesn't make a truly fine flour, unfortunately.  It doesn't get the bran as fine as the rest of the kernel, and bread made solely with the flour does tend to be a little bit denser, but it is delicious, and oh so nutritious!  We have found that when a finer flour is needed, a quick run through the food processor helps to break up the bran more, and you can sift out the bran (but then you lose a lot of fiber, and it's no longer whole wheat flour, which fairly defeats the purpose).  Eventually we plan on upgrading to the grain mill attachment for our Kitchenaid stand mixer, which reportedly does make a fine flour, but until then, we're pretty happy with our little grain mill!

Our root cellar!

This fall, we finally built our root cellar!  Well, not so much a cellar as a shed... We built it over the existing crawlspace access on the side of the house, so we can use the constant temperature of the crawlspace as a heating source in the winter and cooling source in the summer.  Go geothermal!  Since in Colorado you can't add directly onto a mobile (dumbest. law. ever.), we had to build it 'adjacent' to the house, but it's right up against it, which also helps in temperature regulation (in fact, the wall up against the side of the house isn't even insulated).  We do have to keep the crawlspace trap door open, and with the help of a single incandescent bulb, we're able to keep it a very constant temperature of 40 degrees, even when it's dipped down to 0 outside at night!  Without the light bulb on, it gets down to about 33, which is just a wee bit cold for our liking.  But 40 is perfect!  And it makes an awesome wine/beer cellar!!!  

It's not sided yet, but it's functional!

 That's looking under the house- Not too comfortable to get down under there, but it's great for critter-proof buckets of stuff we have multiples of.  Those buckets have wheat grain in them- the real deal!

 Great bucket storage for wheat berries, flour, sugar, beans, etc., and non-perishables that aren't in critterproof containers are in that big rubbermaid tub on the floor.  We've also got a good stash of household items!

 Home-canned goods look so pretty on the shelves!

The downside of having to leave the trapdoor open- Watch that first step, it's a doozy!

And there's the root cellar!  It's not quite as full as we'd like it to be, but it's a start!  Plus it frees up a TON of cabinet space in the house, which is a precious commodity as it is!  I hope it's as much of a success in the summer as it is in the winter- only time will tell!  

Back to the garden...

It's time for a revamp.  Considering I haven't posted in about 6 months (deplorable, I know...), I think it's time to expand my subject matter a bit.  Not to say I haven't been getting my craft on, I have.  But I think recent decisions in our lives have lead to many lifestyle changes that kind of fit into the crafty mold.  And so, without further ado, I give you the new and improved Made in the Mountains...

I've added a new wee quote to my page, one that I think is pretty befitting our life now and hence, this blog.  The inimitable Joni Mitchell said it quite well in her song "Woodstock"- "We are stardust, We are golden, and we've got to get ourselves back to the garden..."  I'm not about to go traipsing through an upstate NY field covered in mud and daisy chains, much fun as that might be, but that line rings pretty dang true to me these days.  The homesteaders had it right, and so did (do) the folks on 'hippydippy' communes (minus the cultishness).  Back in the day, growing your own food, building and making your own homes and tools and furnishings and toys, preserving food, and generally being self-sustaining wasn't just what Earth-conscious nature freaks did, it was what most everyone did.  It's in our racial memory, imprinted in our brains from thousands of years of being hunter-gatherers.  And yet, in just the past 60 years or so, our lives have become so accustomed to once-novel ideas like packaged foods, freezer meals, and drive thru fast food, that for so many, the thought of baking your own bread, or *gasp!* grinding your own flour is crazy!  'It's too time consuming!  Who really grinds their own flour anyways?'  How can it be that in such a relatively short amount of time we have made ourselves so utterly dependent on supermarkets?  On foods shipped in from all over the world?  There are children in our country who cannot identify whole fruits and vegetables, but know tater tots and chicken nuggets like their own two hands (For proof, watch Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution... it's frightening, to say the least).  This is so wrong on so many levels.

Ok, don't get me wrong, I shop at a grocery store, I love packaged foods, I appreciate their convenience, and I don't think poorly of anyone who only buys their food.  I know not everyone can have a garden, and for most people who do garden for food, they can't support their vegetable food needs completely.  We certainly can't!  And in our efforts to fill our new root cellar, we're filling it mostly with food we've bought.  There's nothing wrong with that!  But it is our dream to sell our house and buy a bigger piece of land, build our new home, and grow as much of our own food as we can, both crops and livestock.  In the meantime, we're trying to do as much of that as we can on our little half-acre in the mountains.  And that, my friends, is where this new blog is headed- getting back to basics!

Grown in the Mountains ;)

Hello blogland! Sorry for the haitus- it's been a busy summer! I have indeed been crafting, but most of our free time lately has been spent working on our little mountain homestead. Now more than ever we are trying to be as self-sustaining as we can be, with what we have. This year we've expanded our gardening areas by a lot, and even simple tasks like watering take up a very significant portion of our day every day (our water pressure is crap, so we can only have one sprinkler on at a time, and most sprinklers don't work for us (again due to lack of pressure) so it is a lot of moving the one sprinkler all over the gardens and the yard, which is doing the best it's ever been this year!). We've already been preserving foods this year as well! We have a food dehydrator, but the heating element is broken so only the fan works, but this suits us much better than a fully functioning dehydrator, since instead we just put it out in the sun! We've dehydrated a huge batch of green onions, which we made into dried (pseudo)chives (excellent on baked potatos!) and a very flavorful green onion powder! We also dehydrated a batch of grape tomatoes (not our own, purchased from the grocery store in bulk, it was a great deal!), and some basil that I had forgotten about in the fridge. We also took advantage of a 10 for 10 deal at the grocery store on organic blackberries, and so we put away 9 cups of pureed blackberries in the freezer to make preserves with in the fall, when the weather is cool enough to make preserves and can all day. We're also in the process of making two batches of cherry wine, made with the sour cherries from our tree that we had frozen from last summer's bumper crop. We just transferred the first batch yesterday into the secondary fermenter, and with the dregs and fruit from that batch, we made a second batch, adding more cherries from the freezer. In total, it will be about 4 gallons of cherry wine! Yum!!! We also had a gallon baggie of frozen green tomatoes from last year's frost-killed tomato crop, which we finally thawed and made into a very tasty green tomato salsa, with some green onions and three Siberian hot peppers from our garden as well! For still being June, we've had a very productive food-preserving summer!

As for crops in the ground, this summer our biggest crop (we're hoping!) is potatoes! We have about 54 organic Russian Banana Fingerling potatos planted, many of which have multiple plants coming up from them, so we're hoping we get to put away lots of potatoes in our soon-to-be root cellar we're going to build! Potatoes are probably our most-often-consumed produce, and therefore our biggest crop this year. We're also growing= many varieties of lettuce, spinach, strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, tomatoes, green onions, Siberian hot peppers, elephant garlic, arugula, parsley, mint, cilantro, cabbage, pole beans, sugar snap peas, and broccoli (at least we think we're growing broccoli, we have the broc and cabbage planted in the same bed, and one of them is coming up, the other one doesn't seem to, but we can't really tell what is what... they look so similar! But we're pretty sure what is coming up is cabbage... Only time will tell!), and of course the cherry trees! I think that's the extent of our edibles crop, but I could be forgetting something! Who knows what of all this will actually make it to harvest, at 7800 feet above sea level nothing is a given in gardening, even in the greenhouse, so knock on wood we have a productive season this year!!!

An AWESOME sewing resource

I have to share this again (first posted on FB) because this site is probably the best free sewing resource I've found, and has already served as great inspiration for me!!! I could spend hours clicking every link to see all the projects, and have already checked out a bunch of really interesting ones! There are projects here that are easy enough for beginners, and a lot have photo tutorials like the one I posted yesterday, so they're really easy to understand even if you don't know the sewing terms. I can't wait to try these hair curlers, I've been curious about using rollers but don't want to buy a set (my hair is so thick it doesn't hold a curl well, so I am hesitant to spend money on rollers in case they don't work), and I want to make this bag to hold them in (only slightly larger than the one she has pictured). And just for good measure, here is the full address of the awesome sewing pattern site, in case the first link is funky for you ;)

http://www.angelfire.com/planet/mcshelpsite/sewingstuff/freepatterns.html/

30 Minute Project- Clothespin Bag!

30 minute project- Clothespin Bag!

I got the idea for this bag one, by the awesome weather we're finally having (perfect for drying laundry outside!) and two, from checking out ideas on the internet (just do a google image search for "clothespin bag" and you'll see lots of cute stuff!). I make no claim to the design though, since I kind of copied one I saw pictured online. I made it in about half an hour, probably less even, and I'm hoping that this will be the first in a series of quick projects, ones I hopefully can do start to finish during naptime! :D

This project uses a single fat quarter of fabric. What's a fat quarter, you say? If you're not into quilting (or cute fabric hoarding, like me), you might not know that a fat quarter is a 1/4 yard of fabric, but cut in such a way that it's 'fat', not long and narrow like if you asked for a 1/4 yard of fabric cut for you at the craft store. Most places sell fat quarters already cut, since it's a quilting thing. Even my Walmart's puny fabric section has fat quarters, both individually and in bundles of coordinating fabrics. You could go the high-tech route and make this out of a weatherproof fabric, like a coated ripstop like a tent is made out of, but they don't usually come in cute patterns, so I opted for a funky batiq cotton instead ;)

Materials-

Fat quarter of cute fabric

Children's size coat hanger (not wire)

bias tape or ribbon to match

Step 1- Cutting the pattern-

Fold the fat quarter into a square, and trim the extra edge (keeping the selvage edge of the fabric, if there is one)

Fold it into another triangle, with the first folded edge on the bottom (This will make the bottom of the bag), and place the hanger on top as shown below, halfway along the hanger, with enough room at the edge of the hanger for a seam allowance.

Trim the sides and the top edge as shown below, leaving adequate seam allowance.

Next, unfold the fabric, and refold it the long way once. Cut a keyhole shaped hole, large enough to fit your hand in easily, but keeping the bottom fold of the bag in mind (so don't make the hole too far down, or the pins will spill out!)

This is what your fabric should look like once all the cuts are made, and completely unfolded.

Step Two- Bias tape-

sew the bias tape or ribbon to the edges of the keyhole opening. I machine basted the ribbon to the wrong side of the fabric first, then folded it over the edge of the fabric and sewed it to the right side, using a decorative zig zag stitch (which also helps the ribbon to lie flat and hold the opening open when completed)

Also sew a piece of bias tape or ribbon to the top edge of the back of the bag (I just basted it on)

Step Three- Assembly-

Next, bring the RIGHT SIDES TOGETHER, and sew along the edge seams of the bag, starting at the top of the keyhole opening to ensure evenness as you sew towards the folded bottom edge of the bag.

Here's the completed bag, inside out. Trim any ribbon/tape ends and thread, turn right side out, and...

Add the hanger and VOILA! Ready to go!

A nice full load of pins!

Sure beats struggling to stick the pins back on the line when your arms are full of clean laundry! :D

...in which I show off more completed projects!

Not to sound braggy, but I'm pretty dang proud of the baby blanket I made my new niece, Lucy! Though it took what, four, five months? for me to finish it, it was at long last received yesterday by its new owner, and now I can show it off to the general public! :D

A funny story about the blanket, it took me three tries to get it right (thank goodness third time's a charm, cause the mistakes were getting old...), the best mistake of which was when instead of "Twinkle twinkle little star", I had inadvertently misspelled it as "Twinke twinkle", and didn't notice the mistake until AFTER it was embroidered... Whoops...

I finally finished my MITM needlepoint, which will find its home on the wall in my shed!

Two of three lap quilts I made, the top one for my brother and his family, the second one for my mother-in-law (the third unpictured quilt was given to my parents for Christmas, these two were *supposed* to be Christmas presents as well, but we all know how that turned out) ;)

Lately I've really been enjoying knitting on looms! It is SO quick and easy, and it's easier to work with funky chunky yarns that would be difficult to knit with regular needles. The green hat is one of two I made for my mother-in-law (who is undergoing chemo), the pink one for our friends' Ian and Gayle's new baby girl, Sydney!

And I am very proud of the VERY FIRST sweater I have ever actually completed!!! (I've started several... and, well...) This I also knit on looms, with crocheted button bands, also for baby Sydney! It is SO soft, and I love this chunky yarn, but unfortunately it does not like to stay knotted at the end of where it's been bound off, so I'm hoping it doesn't unravel any more than it did while I was working on it!

I think that's about it for my most recent projects! My work-in-project list is now happily crossed off, and now I can finally get to some new projects that have been waiting patiently for me to begin! :D

Some recent projects

As promised in my previous post, here are some photos of some recently completed projects! (ok, it's being weird and not letting me re-order the photos...)

Here's what my 'winter setup' looks like, my little folding table (counter height!) in the corner in our bedroom. It's tight but it gets the job done!

Here's a hat that I crocheted, I think last fall or summer, and just rediscovered it amongst all my yarn! Wyatt being a non-cooperative but very cute model ;)

Here's a hat I'm working on, on a round knitting loom. Loom knitting is SO much fun, goes quite quicker than needle knitting, and you can use chunky or otherwise difficult yarns to work with! This one is done with a double strand of a very soft plush yarn, it's going to be delicious!

And here is the market bag which I made on the long knitting loom (the top edge and handles are crocheted). It is VERY stretchy and can hold a lot of stuff! I plan on making a bunch more of these soon!

More photos to come as finished projects are delivered to their recipients! :D

OMG I suck at blogging...

Nearly two whole months without a post? Really Julia? Oy! I am sorry! Don't let the lack of blog posts fool you, I have been quite busy with craft projects, or at least as busy as I can be when being a mommy to a two year old! (Ok, I admit, I could be spending a lot LESS time on the computer and a lot more time crafting, it's something I'm trying to work on and hopefully once the weather warms up and I can be in my shed, things will change...) Unfortunately, most of my projects are still Works In Progress... Ah, the dreaded WIP... I have a BEAUTIFUL baby blanket for my new niece Lucy, waiting to be finished (I won't post a photo of it here until I do finish it and send it to my brother and his family!). I have a hat on a loom to be completed for Kayla (my wonderful Mother-In-Law who was recently diagnosed with Breast Cancer). I have a whole list of projects that actually haven't even started yet- Red's bivy sack (we ordered the fabrics for it from Outdoor Wilderness Fabrics, an excellent resource for all things outdoor fabric!), fixing his enormous stack of ripped jeans, crocheting a bag for my grandma, goodness I can't even think of the other projects without getting my list, but you get the picture... and yes, there are more, many, many more.

Some projects I've actually completed recently are- a loom-knit and crocheted market bag (SO cute! I'll post photos another time); a crocheted hat and monogrammed baby blanket for our good friends' Gayle and Ian's baby-to-be, Sydney; a crocheted cell phone pouch for my grandma; monogrammed towels and sheets for my friend Stacey's husband, who is currently in Afghanistan; I repaired my favorite pair of jeans with a little bit of darning stitch over a small hole which, if not darned, would have quickly turned into a very large hole; Also repaired two pairs of Red's jeans (it's a start, albeit a small one, on his enormous stack of holey jeans) and replaced several missing buttons on a shirt. Sadly, not much else comes to mind... I feel like there is more, but if so it escapes me right now!

I also have been dabbling in cake decoration, though not too much. Two times I baked cakes, I got horribly sick the next day, even though the second time I didn't so much as taste the batter... I'm sure it was coincidence and not actually food-related, but it was enough to turn me off the idea for a while. I did bake and decorate Wyatt's birthday cake, which I must say I think came out quite well and was very tasty! (patting self on back) We're getting ready to plant our garden and greenhouse, which I consider to be a crafty sort of thing, so I'll be posting about that more as the summer goes along (first of course it has to show up, but that's another story all together...)

Post Holiday catch up!

Yet again it has been too long since my last post! Thankfully, a LOT has been going on in my crafting world since then, mostly holiday related. I mastered the soap crayons, and made 8 complete sets of colors- Red, blue, green, yellow, and purple. They are a ton of fun in the tub, Wyatt loves them! I also made many batches of bar soaps of various flavors- Vanilla, lavender, vanilla mint (my fave), chocolate mint, eucalyptus mint (Red's fave), and I think that was it...? They made great Christmas gifts, and I'm proud of them! They were really easy to make, and I think I'd like to experiment with making soap from scratch this summer, when I can do it outside. Making soap from fat and lye can be a bit dangerous, and the fumes as it's cooking are caustic I believe. The soaps I made were from store-bought glycerin soap, so no danger was involved.

I also have made (and am still making) a few smallish lap quilts as gifts. Only one of the three has been given, the second is awaiting shipment, and the third is partially completed, so I'll wait until they're all done and given to their recipients before I post photos. Same goes for the baby blanket I am making for my new niece Lucy! Funny story about the blanket- Wyatt spent Saturday night with Red's mom so I could have the afternoon to work on these sewing projects (it can be difficult with him around). I worked on the baby blanket all afternoon, and had a number of problems with it. I was embroidering designs with my amazing machine, but the thread I was using was quite thick (I bought the wrong kind of thread unknowingly), and it was getting bound up in the bobbin case (no good). I devised a way to 'fix' the destroyed design in the center by making an applique patch to go over it, and continued embroidering. Then, as I was embroidering the words to "Twinkle twinkle little star" along the edges, I realized too late that I had misspelled the first "Twinkle"... I had spelled it "Twinke"... AHHH!!! The font I used was a very loopy script and I guess I just didn't notice it... Whoops... That was the last straw, and so I decided to cut my losses and start completely over with new fabric. Oh well... it's always a learning experience! Twinke... :P