turkey

So Bone Broth is a Thing Now

August 31, 2018 · By Ann ·

Finished bone broth, safely preserved in mason jars. One minute to spare before dinner. R accidentally invented a new cocktail with the Waterpocket Distillery Coffee Liqueur. Get you some, but maybe don’t put it in a mojito.

Every now and then, I read some homesteading blogs. Alert: Bone Broth Is a Big Thing! and I guess it has been for a while. I glanced at stories about it occasionally and thought, what’s the big deal? I’ve been making this stuff for 20 years and didn’t need to blog about it. Then I saw what city people were paying for takeaway quarts of containers. Guys, you are paying $6 a quart for other peoples trash!

Once again, we have way too many birds on the ground, and three dozen or more are scheduled for a date with the freezers this fall. The only problem is, the freezers are full right now. Step one was to pull out the various bags of leftover bones and vegetable trimmings that I have accumulated all summer, make some meat stock, I mean”bone broth,” and can it up. On Tuesday morning, I started by rummaging around our three (!) freezers and came up with four gallon-sized bags of bones, onion skins, parsley stems, mushroom trimmings, celery leaves and I can’t remember what else. I put them all together in a cooler to defrost until evening.

Literally, bags of bones defrosting in a cooler

Right now I’m reading Sally Fallon’s Nourishing Traditions, and I thought, I can be open-minded here about this bone broth stuff. So I did some study and learned one new trick: to put a couple tablespoons of cider vinegar per gallon of water in the pot and let it sit for an hour before starting the heat. The acidity is supposed to help extract more minerals from the bones. That was easy enough to insert into my process. After fixing dinner I dumped all my treasures (what other people might have thrown away) into my biggest pot, filled it to cover and stirred in the vinegar. An hour later, I turned on the heat.

It took a while to heat (the suggestion to bring it up to a simmer slowly for more extraction made sense; acetic acid will boil off as the temperature rises), but I got it to a fine simmer right before bed. The dogs had a terrible night, barking at non-existent threats like our own cat, so I was up anyway to check on the progress, but I needn’t have bothered. It simmered on all night. Maybe the smell was keeping the dogs on high alert.

When I got up in the morning, I remembered the parmesan rinds! We use a lot of grated parmesan and I save the the rinds to add richness to the stock, but in their own bag buried at the bottom of the kitchen freezer. I tossed in a few of those and let the pot keep simmering while I did other stuff.

The battle is real. Do something will this food before it goes bad. The smaller zucchini was intended to grow that big for zucchini parmesan coming up later this week. That larger zucchini torpedo weighed 13 pounds, which is why I grow Costata Romanseco. Not to get torpedos, but because I salvaged most of it and the outer inch of flesh still tasted good.

Around noon, I turned it off and let it start to cool a bit. Wednesday was a crazy day, what with a 13 lb zucchini to salvage by dehydrating, baking to use up peaches and a complicated dinner recipe to use up more turkey from the freezer. In between all that, I strained the broth.

What bones are these? Necks from some poultry processing that I didn’t recognize, a pork butt bone from when I made pulled pork, a few lamb chop bones, bones from all the turkey I’ve cooked since last fall, maybe even a beef steak bone or two. This time I also had a couple turkey feet that we’d saved for dog treats but hadn’t been giving to them lately. When we harvest poultry, I get a pure chickens or turkey “single varietal,” but freezer stock is mostly pot au feu of whatever we’ve been eating. I was a bit worried that it would be too muttony with the lamb bones, but all that smell disappeared when I skimmed the fat off.

If I let only one zucchini get away from me this outrageously per year, I must be gardening ok. There was that one big yellow one we gave to the goats, but no photos so it might not have happened. And I’ve been able to actually GIVE AWAY zucchini this summer to people WHO WANT IT!

Gathering the broth-making supplies is simple but slow. I keep a ziplock bag in the kitchen freezer and put bones in it when I do dishes. We compost most of our kitchen waste, but if there are clean vegetable trimmings and I think about it, I stuff that in the same bag between the bones. Occasionally, I’ll pour in some potato-cooking water or a bit of leftover liquid from a braise. When that bag gets full, I put it into one of the big freezers and start another, until we process poultry or I need the space. When we lived in the city with less room, I made stock more frequently and froze it in ice cube trays because I didn’t have a pressure canner.

After the straining. Ever wonder where the phrase, “i have a bone to pick” came from? Right there in that bowl. Didn’t happen this time.

After straining, I started preheating the canner and reheating the broth. The NCHFP instructions for canning meat stock are easy to follow and not to scary for beginning pressure canning. I had seven quarts filled in five minutes, with an extra quart and a half left over. The canner came to temperature while I was sautéing that night’s turkey, and was finished in time for me to use the burner to finish dinner. Right before we ate, the canner had depressurized and the jars were cooling on the counter while I did a shocking amount of dishes.

Sunset and turkey dinner at the ranch. I grew that turkey, and those potatoes, and that cabbage. Someday I will have grown what’s in the bottle too.

Keeping it real: said dishes and everything else R & I did that day impeded one last step I usually do: pick over the bones for dog treats. They love the parmesan rinds, and there’s often enough bits and bobs of meat to top up their kibble for a week. But it has to be done that day and put in the refrigerator to hold. After a lovely yard dinner, R and I looked at each other and said, nope not this time.

Is it worth the bother? Last time I priced organic chicken stock in the store, it was $3.50-$4 for a quart-sized box, and I don’t particularly find anything to recommend about its flavor. Artisanal bone broth-you pay out the wazoo for that. I must be too frugal, as evidenced by the fact I save bones and other trash. Our broth is so good, and now that I trust we have an ongoing supply of the makings, I use it profligately. If I priced my stock at $5/quart, with my only costs being water and energy (the jars and lids are reusable, sunk costs), I netted $40 in nega-bucks, that is money I didn’t spend. Considering that the actual focused work was literally five minutes loading jars, and the rest of it was as I passed through the kitchen doing other tasks, it seems like a pretty good ROI to me.

Last winter, R asked for soup and sandwich night once a week. We kind of drifted off that routine over the summer, but as the weather changes, I know we will speed through these jars. Happily, in a few weeks, the chicken harvest will begin, providing more backs, necks and feet for the stock pot to get us through the colds months of winter. The other six days of the week? We eat well on other things, and pile up the bones.

Homestead Log November 20-26

November 28, 2017 · By Ann ·

Why disassemble it just to put it back together again? (photo by Robert Marc)

Americans have got the concepts of feast and famine all wrong. I’m reading a new-to-me cookbook, European Festival Food by Elisabeth Luard (republished as Seasonal European Dishes but I’ve got the older edition). A major theme is the rhythm of fast and feast, externally dictated by the liturgical calendar, but driven by nature’s immutable cycles. The fast precedes the feast, the labor before the festival. What do we do? We feast like fools from Thanksgiving to New Years Eve, then go on a national diet of contrition, imported celery and “scientific” fads that end in spectacular failure and shame. At least Lent or Ramadan has a defined end point and a celebration to look forward to.

We feasted well at the homestead this year. Turkey breast, cornbread dressing, mashed potatoes and gravy, all raised here. It would have been our green beans, but I took the wrong package out of the freezer and we had Costco asparagus I had frozen when it was in season instead. (The consequence of breaking an important homesteader’s rule: label everything, no matter how sure you are you’ll remember. You won’t.) I made a pie out of a Burgess buttercup squash, the one winter squash that we seem able to grow in quantity. The dark meat of the turkey went into a mole I have been making since 1992, when I found the recipe in a Texas Monthly article on what my first star chef hero Robert del Grande would serve if his family let him cook on Thanksgiving Day.

Husbandry and gardening: It has been ridiculously, unseasonably warm here. If we still had access to the irrigation system, we would water the trees. But we do not. R has been using the time well to put a coat of white paint on the trunks of our trees and to trim back the grasses around their bases. Now that the turkeys are out of the orchard, the dogs are having a wonderful time romping while R works—Wyatt has paint INSIDE his ears.

After Sunday’s harvest, I can report that six geese are a lot quieter than nine; one male is more harmonious in the flock than two.

Food, harvest and preserving: The weather pretty much decided the timing of our turkey harvest, which resulting in seven days of aging on the turkey meat we cooked on Thanksgiving. I think we accidentally hit on something successful, because the flavor and texture were excellent. Our aging method is primitive: put the vacuum-packed meat in a cooler and dump ice on it.

We reloaded the cooler with goose meat, except the gizzards (corned and slow-cooked for 24 hours) and the liver (paté flavored with Calvados instead of brandy). R smoked the wings, which we will use as a substitute for ham hocks while cooking beans this winter. The rest of the meat is a project for the coming week.

I restocked the freezer with cornbread dressing and leftover mole sauce to make some quick meals later this winter. The rest of the holiday leftovers are gone, just about the time I started hankering for anything other than poultry.

Finances: We have two bills that come before all others: the property tax bill and the irrigation company assessment. If you are late on the property taxes, your name gets published in the paper. If you are late on the water assessment, someone else can scoop up your water rights. We set the money aside every year, but I am always anxious until I get the bills paid, for fear I will forget somehow. Disaster averted this week for 2017.

Community: We joined some friends on Friday for an amazing Alaskan crab feast. I was bludgeoned with crab.

Creativity and recreation: It’s a good thing cooking is fun.

Next week: We are closing up our apartment in Salt Lake City next weekend, doing some shopping and seeing friends. There might even be some cocktail attire involved.

Seasonal observations: Winter hawks and migration stragglers show up regularly now. R saw a peregrine checking out the barnyard, I spotted a rough-legged hawk over the orchard. The deer in town are becoming brazen, ambling across the highway in the middle of the day and having out in yards.

A few Christmas trees, strapped to the tops of trucks and SUVs and sporting green Forest Service tree-cutting permits, passed through town over the weekend. So did a truck carrying a fully assembled trampoline with safety netting, held down by some of the most excited looking kids in the world. Santa must have come early, driving a faded white pick-up.

Homestead Log Week of August 21-27

September 1, 2017 · By Ann ·

R busted out an ancient enlarger filter to observe the partial eclipse in Torrey, Utah.

On Monday the sun disappeared with the partial eclipse; on Wednesday the skies opened up. We had a half inch of rain in about twenty minutes, plus a pounding of hail that probably didn’t get measured. We almost never get standing water-this time we had puddles all the way to the south fence, the driest part of our property that never gets irrigated. The dogs were in heaven. Wyatt would bark at the thunder and they would chase each other through the puddles until the next bolt of lightning. If we’d had fruit on the trees, we would have had something to worry about. Since we didn’t, we just marveled at the power of nature. At one point it had nearly stopped at our place but I could hear and see the hail pounding on our neighbor’s roof about a 100 yards away. A half hour later, the water was gone, the sun came back out, and we were left with a muddy mess of stinky, tired, happy dogs.

Husbandry and gardening: The duck pen clean-out is finished. I made a compost heap in an old kiddie pool, about 4′ across and 4′ high. It took off, internal temperature of 155 degrees F and hasn’t cooled off yet. Once it’s done, there’s another pool full of leftover bedding, ready to be combined with the end-of-season garden waste, like tomato vines, into another pile.

We rescued the fall transplants from being completely pummeled by hail.

The hail pounded the tomatoes and corn, but everything seems to have bounced back. The pole beans are flowering and should start to produce about the time the bush beans give out. I’ve replanted some greens for fall and have more to plant once I make room.

Ben the turkey tom looks terrible. It’s temporary, he’s only molting, but he has lost all his tail feathers and isn’t strutting so much these days. The young turkeys are growing fast now, they are almost to the size of Tom’s pair of adult females. I assembled four new supers for our beehives for when we get around to checking on the bees. All the other animals are doing great.

Food, harvest and preserving: Harvest season is ramping up. We are eating artichokes, green beans, cucumbers, summer squash and all the herbs I want. My shallots from last year are still in good shape, and I’m trying to use them up instead of buying more onions, such a luxury problem.

R bought a box of peach, which we peeled and froze for a wine-making project when the temperatures cool off a bit in the house. I’ve been picking, blanching and freezing extra bush beans every 3-4 days. And I finally weighed the garlic before putting it away: over 10 pounds. I see loads of roasted garlic heads on the winter menu this year.

As far as the annual zucchini glut, I think I have found a solution. When we bought the dehydrator last year, I had read in the manual that summer squash weren’t great candidates for drying. This year I decided to study and test out that assumption a little further. When I found Hank Shaw had a traditional Sicilian recipe for dried zucchini, I knew I was on the right track. I’m ok if rehydrated zucchini isn’t the same as fresh, so long as it’s good, kind of like how marinated artichokes don’t much resemble fresh but are delicious in different dishes.

So I did a test run of dried zucchini noodles, cut on my ancient mandolin. That mandolin is so old, it says “Made in W. Germany.” I julienned the squashes (we grow both regular and yellow zucchini) in both regular thin strands and a much thicker, almost french fry cut, then salted them to release water for about an hour. After their trip through the dehydrator, I used them for dinner. Instead of rehydrating them separately, I stirred them directly into some reheating spaghetti sauce. The flavor was great, and the texture from the larger shreds was just fine. The smaller julienne seemed to just disappear in the sauce. Since then, I’ve dehydrated all the extra squash before they’ve grown too huge, and no one need fear having me shove zucchini in the cars when they visit. I’ve kept up a little too well, in fact and I need to set some aside to try Shaw’s recipe.

Other projects: There is a plan to get over to Richfield to gather materials for fall projects, but we keep putting it off.

Community: I finished the grant for the town’s tree planting project. Two different sets of friends from Salt Lake dropped by, one bearing tomatoes and eggplant (thanks Al!). We had a little dinner party for Robert’s band after their performance for Entrada on Saturday night

Creativity and recreation: My mandolin teacher has assigned me to start playing with the community band, but we have to change my lesson times so it doesn’t conflict.

Next week: Get over to Richfield for supplies, keep freezing and dehydrating, look in on the bees and decide how much honey we can take.

Seasonal observations: The morning light comes directly into the east-facing kitchen window at sunrise now, and the shadows from the cottonwood trees hit the front porch an hour earlier each night. These are the easy days at the end of summer, a little more sleep, a little less heat, baby critters growing fast, kids back in school. The barn swallows are done with nesting but are still here. Carson spends hours trying to herd them around the house. Wyatt sneaks away every chance he gets to play in our neighbors’ irrigation water and comes back soaked, smelling of horse manure and thoroughly self-satisfied. He’s growing out of his puppy stage too fast. His ears are about to stand up and he’ll be a grown up dog. I don’t want to rush through this part, his puppyhood or my favorite time of year.