Chili and chickens (and goats)

I'm not a very good food blogger and always worry I make things look far less appetizing than they are...but here's what we've been eating this week - local chili:

It's totally time for chili. The beef was purchased directly from the farmer the tomatoes and peppers are from our garden. Bill made the bread and the beer is a home brew. Yummo.

These pumpkins have been dedicated to the highest purpose to which a squash can aspire - pumpkin ale. We bottled it this week and just have to wait a bit while it carbonates. Waiting!!!

This is Minion, the youngest chick we have. He was odd and unexpected and is still totally attached to his mom even though they should really being going their separate ways by now. Basically, he's a big baby.

On the other side of that coin are the Patooties (as in Cutie Patooties), a pair of chickens that were raised by a turkey along with their sister Duck (who clearly has identity issues). The turkey hen is not convinced that her babies are big enough to be on their own yet and is still trying to mother them. The Patooties rather think they are sheep, though, and spend most of their day in the pasture.

The goats are doing well:

Whenever I see these kittens playing or cuddling together it makes me unreasonably happy that we could keep them together. When we went to the Humane Society we knew we wanted "up to two kittens" and  chose these guys because they were the only siblings. I mean, all the kittens were adorable and any that we brought home would have been wonderful, but these guys tug at my heart strings. I'm sure they don't remember, but they had a tough go early in life and whenever I think I of the long, cold night they spent together abandoned outside Animal Control, and the illnesses they battled through as result, I am so glad they still have each other for snuggling. And biting. And squirrel watching.

The fiber post

Look - I made a cowl with the crazy colored yarn.

And another cowl from handspun Rambouillet.

And socks of COLORS.

Also, Bill made our first beer label, and gave us the name Sweaty Owl Rainy Day Part Time Brewery.
 

A Year in Beer

There was an event in Indianapolis this weekend called Brew Bracket. 400 beer lovers head to the Fairgrounds to do blind tastings of local beers and vote for a winner in a March Madness style bracket. We learned about it a few days before the event and considered going. But then we realized it would be 30 minutes of beer tasting sprinkled among 3.5 hours of Bill and I staring at each other, and decided not to go. (We're hoping to learn about the next one with enough advance warning to get a gang of people to go with us, so I only have to spend 30 minutes or so staring at Bill and the rest of the time chatting with friends.)

Instead, we decided to have our own brew bracket at home with the 10 beers we brewed and bottled this year.

We collected a bottle of each type and a fancy jam jar to pour it in. I also made a spread sheet of each beer, listing the grains and hops (and their proportions) used in making it. It was Very Geeky.

They looked like this, lined up from lightest to darkest.

Bill was very excited to get started.

We tasted them from lightest to darkest and talked about what we liked and didn't, and tried to understand the characteristics of the grains and the hops we used. Then, we set up a bracket and picked our favorites. (We also played Stump The Beer-o [an amended version of Stump the Wine-o] where one of us closed our eyes and tried to guess the two beers that were handed to us by smell and taste alone.)

We determined we really like the unusual beers the best - a grapefruit hefeweizen, a spruce lager, our pumpkin ale with homegrown pumpkins, and a brown - the only beer we've brewed so far from all grains and no extracts.

We thought about the suppliers of the kits and ingredients we have brewed. Three of our favorites were recipes from books and the pumpkin ale was a kit from Northern Brewer. (We bottled a Winter Spice Ale from a NB kit yesterday and preliminary tastings say "YUM!" We also re-racked a Peat-Smoked Porter from them yesterday. That one needs a little time to age, but has promise.)

We did NOT drink the full bottles of each of the ten beers. Much alcohol was sacrificed for our experiment, but we found it to be a fun and enlightening exercise...maybe an annual event??

Bottle Cap Key: The numbers are the month and year it was bottled.

A - Altbier (Brewer's Best Kit)
BAG - Brown all-grain (Monkey Paw Brown Ale recipe from "The Complete Joy of Home Brewing" by Charlie Papazian)
CR - Cream Ale (Great Fermentations kit)
GH - Grapefruit Hefe (an alteration of this recipe)
P - Porter (Dred Brown Porter from Great Fermentations)
PMP - Pumpkin Ale (Northern Brewer Smashing Pumpkin Kit with added 6-row and pumpkin mash)
SP - Spruce Lager (Black Honey Spruce Lager from the Papazian book)
T - Tripple End kit from Great Fermentations
W - Witbier (Brewer's Best Kit)
W2 - Witless in Indiana (GF kit)

Pumpkin Soda

Recipe. Make it. Yum.

Radishes, recently harvested from our little cold frame greenhouse. In November.

Autumn Dinner

Leek Potato soup, crusty bread and pumpkin ale. All made right here. Yum.

Sunday is for Homebrew

Here's what it looks like around here today.

We're brewing our first all grain beer.

And, you can't make home brew unless you are also drinking home brew. We're tasting our latest batches....the dark is a spruce ale, which I think is DELICIOUS (Bill says "meh") and the light is a Tripple which Bill quite likes and I think could use a few more weeks of bottle conditioning. There is also popcorn and cards.

Sugar Pie is here too. Moving too quickly to be caught on digital film, but still adorable.

Fooood!

Yesterday morning, I tilled an area of land bigger (far bigger) than our last apartment.

Hells yeah I had a beer with lunch. Tilling = blech. But I'm excited to plant tons o'pumpkins in that area. The front half is for popcorn.

Bill fired his oven on Sunday (more on that to come) and we ate really well on Monday as a result. He made pizza and bread with the "crappy" flour because he wasn't sure how it was going to all turn out and he didn't want to waste the good stuff on his first experiment. We ate French Toast for breakfast:

...and leftover pizza with an arugula salad and homebrew wheat beer for lunch. This meal was very, very exciting because we could see it all coming together. The pizza is all from scratch - bread, sauce and cheese made by Bill. Someday the sauce will be from homegrown tomatoes and we'll get some goats to milk for the cheese. Bill also talks about growing wheat, but I think that will be more of a fun experiment than a long term, sustained project.

The salad is arugula and radishes from our garden with a simple balsamic vinaigrette (I already lost the recipe. ooops!) homemade croutons (a great way to use up substandard bread) and a young Parmesan cheese. The cheese is not supposed to be done until November, but Bill couldn't wait. It tastes young, but is very good. Check it:

A very satisfying lunch!

For dessert we had some blackcaps.

Already.  

In May (in 2009, we picked at the end of June). I'm sure we've eaten a quart already and they've only just begun. Some day I'll show you the madness that is our blackcaps. They are probably some sort of horrible invasive here in Indiana, but I don't care!!! We let them grow wherever they'd like and are happy to share them with the birds.

Speaking of sharing with wild animals...there is a family of three red squirrels living in our basement. We see them in our mulberry tree every morning and every evening. They don't even wait for the mulberries to get ripe before chowing down.

Here's one of the babies:

Too cute to be evicted, right?

Auto Photo!

Alert! Alert! There have been four posts in a row now with no pictures. This triggers an auto photo post. Please now to prepare for the photo bomb.

This is an adorable bulb garden Bill's mom sent us for Easter. Well, this is what it looked like two weeks ago. There were also crocuses and big red tulips. 

This is Sugar Pie. She always demands to be in on the photo bombs. 

Socks. 

Baby chickens, hatched this afternoon.  

Poofy and her two chicks: Poofy Jr. and Baby Barred Rock. They hatched about a month ago. 

An Araucana and Dorking pullet. They came in the mail in March. They were only just released to play outside earlier this month (they don't have a mom like Poofy to keep them warm and safe). At first, they didn't go far from their coop and they kept running away from us whenever we approached. But over the past few days they learned "human + pitcher of food = awesome." So now they follow us around a lot.

Finally - today's project: a porter in the making. 

Brew, brew, brew

Our experimentations in brewing continue! This week we've been drinking blackberry ginger soda. I saw a post on a brewing board that making fruit soda doesn't really need a recipe and I felt empowered.

The recipe sorta went like this: take frozen blackberries from freezer. Simmer in a pot with some water. Add some grated ginger and lemon juice. Dissolve 1/2 cup sugar. Cool. Strain into carboy and add cool water to make a gallon. Pitch yeast. Shake. Bottle. Wait 2-3 days. Drink!

The soda is really purple. It makes your teeth purple. Bill thinks it's too dry, but I think it's perfect. And yup - we totally drink it from awesome golden harvest drinking jars we got at Goodwill. I am not ashamed of my love of drinking from canning jars, even if it makes me a redneck.

Tonight we reracked our Altbier. It's been fermenting for 3 weeks and has some time to go still.

But now it's in a carboy rather than a plastic bucket - so we can look at it. AND...and...way better airlock. In the background you can see the previous airlock. That one is Very Uneventful. It bubbles boringly. The new one has much more exciting bubbling action.

Finally, Bill is brewing (?) mead. First step is to heat honey and water. Then, I guess he cools it and pitches the yeast and it sits in a carboy fermenting for, like, a year? I dunno. Mead does not interest me. Bill likes the sweet stuff (like me! (booo)) much more than I do.

First attempts...

Today we cracked open Bill's first aged cheese. It was a farmhouse cheddar that was aged for 4 weeks. It looks like this:



It tastes yummy but is a bit wet. This has something to do with undercooked curds...or so it seems from Bill's mumblings as he was searching the internet for clues.

We have another cheddar that he cooked the day after this one that is still aging. That one was pressed longer so more of the whey was squeezed out. It looked a lot more compact and a lot drier when he waxed it. That one won't be ready until May. But in the meantime, we'll be spreading this first attempt on bread and happily eating it all up.

We also brewed our first soda - a ginger beer. Brewing soda is like brewing beer, but you stop the yeast before it eats all the sugar. We mixed grated ginger, lemon juice and sugar, cooked it up, let it cool a little and added yeast. Then we plopped it in bottles and expected to wait 24-72 hours for the yeast to make enough carbonation that we could call it soda.

Yeast work faster or slower depending on the temperature. We know it's a bit cold in our house, so we were thinking it would be closer to 72 hours. It's a bit nerve-wracking because if we waited too long the yeast would make so much CO2 that the bottles could explode.

After 48 hours...and again after 72...we opened a bottle and found our soda was still a bit flat.

Today - a week later (162 hours) - our ginger beer has a delightful sparkle.


Next up...we'll be brewing beer, more soda and making some Parmesan cheese. We're happy with how we've started and are excited to build on our experience!