Ann Torrence [the Ann-alog]

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The Woman’s Tonic-Dr. Pierce’s Favorite Prescription

December 12, 2018 · By Ann ·

The Woman's Tonic Dr. Pierce's Favorite Prescription sign on a barn in Logan UT
I got lucky that day with the clouds and fall colors. That particular shot wasn’t the planned image for the day, I think I was aiming for aspencade and Bear Lake, but the light was perfect as I was driving home.

I was looking for this picture on the Internet to ask a bottle-collecting friend here in Torrey if he had seen it in Logan. Not only had he seen AND photographed this sign (repainted with some controversy a few years before I took this shot for the Highway 89 book), he HAS A BOTTLE. How is that for coming full circle?

Note to self, pin this image to Pinterest and get some love. There isn’t another like it out there.

Filed Under: Highway 89 Project Tagged With: Highway 89 project, Logan, Utah

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.

Filed Under: Food and Drink Tagged With: bone broth, canning, turkey

9 months later

August 26, 2018 · By Ann ·

Zucchini pineapple preserves

No, not that. Were it not for the wonders of modern medicinal chemistry, you could already call me a crone. It’s been 9 months since my last post, which I wrote about the time my sister died, I find myself talking in my head to the blog again. I blame this thread on Twitter where I started documenting my daily acts of food preservation. It’s something Carla Emery recommended in the Encyclopedia of Country Living, to plant something every day as soon as the soil could be worked until midsummer, then preserve something everyday until winter.

Keeping up with that thread is busting my butt. I’ve run almost out of zucchini. And I have more to say about every project than fits in 280 characters. And I should own my own content here, not just give it free to @Jack’s profiteering machine for Russian bots and their treasonous handlers. Not that any Russian bots care about homesteading, cider making, or living in a small town at 7000′ on the Utah edge of the Colorado Plateau with too many animal mouths to feed.

I gave away two zucchini today and almost regretted it when I decided that today’s food storage project would be Zucchini Pineapple. And I decided that on a whim, because it sounds just weird enough to be good. We don’t eat a lot of desserts or baked goodies, and I despise zucchini bread, so this is an odd choice, but it’s only zucchini. We’ll probably end up putting it in pancakes or maybe I’ll make a coffee cake with it when it’s cold and blustery. Worst case is that it ends up on ice cream.

Zucchini trimmings for the compost pile.
Peeling the zucchini was the hardest part, and that’s because we grow a ribbed variety called Costata Romanesco, which actually has real flavor. And deep ribs that are hard to peel. I didn’t know that because I’ve never peeled zukes before. Even if the Costata Romanescos get to be larger than baseball bats, they are still tasty, and I’ll grill them. I’ll make zucchini parmesan with them, and I want them at least 3″ in diameter for that project. It’s really good and freezes well, but I can’t make it more than once or twice a year because it makes an awful mess. Mostly I’ve been dehydrating chunks for spaghetti, and in slices for zucchini chip snacks. I only made a half recipe; I may be the only gardener in the county who doesn’t have a surplus of zucchini right now.

And since when did zucchini start giving me a skin reaction? It’s apparently not uncommon for one’s hands to get dry, taut and itchy. Luckily I remembered to bust out some nitrile gloves. Naturally, living with a biologist, we are well-stocked in the sanitation department.

Efficient home canning set-up, not too much to clean up but everything I need to get the job done. Took 7 minutes to fill 5 jars and load them in the canner.
Here’s a photo of my set-up for filling canning jars. Using the baking sheet to catch the spills has been amazingly helpful in the ease of clean-up afterwards. I have mostly shifted over to using the Tattler reusable canning lids, which I sanitize with boiling water. Those magnetic lid lifter doohickeys don’t work with the plastic lids, so I use the tongs to fish them out of the hot water. The canning funnel was recommended by Erica, and it has the different fill markings on the rim. I wish I’d known about it when I first started canning. A ladle, a spoon for adjusting fill level, a wet paper towel to wipe the rims before putting on the lids, and I’m good to go.

One thing I try to do is prep two more jars than the recipe calls for, one in the size intended (pint, quart, etc.) and one a half size smaller. That way I’m ready if the predicted amount is way off, as it often is. This recipe should have made 4-4.5 pints and I got a full 5 pints. So what if I end up with an extra clean jar to put away that I didn’t use?

It doesn’t look like pineapple.
When canning at this high altitude, my success rate has improved as I have gotten better at rejecting recipes out of hand that just won’t tolerate the additional processing required. Just because they tell you how long to process it doesn’t mean it will be good when it’s done. Our boiling point of water is 199 F (92.8 C) here, so I have to add 15 minutes to whatever time the recipe calls for at sea level. That’s no big deal with tomato sauce, but a cucumber pickle slice is going to turn to mush. If there weren’t so much sugar in this recipe, I probably wouldn’t even have attempted it, but I’m hoping the grated zucchini will still have some texture afterwards. If not, it’s only zucchini.

The canner finished up in the time I was writing all this up, and I remembered a couple other little tricks I’ve adopted over the years. When I take the jars out, I put them on a towel on the baking tray. That way, if I have to move the jars around on the counter before the 24-hour cooling period is over, I can gently slide them across the counter. I’ve even stacked trays when things are really cooking in the kitchen.

I used to print up nice labels for each jar, but they don’t fit so well on the reusable lids. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do until R told me that you can remove the Sharpie ink from plastic (or glass or metal) with hand sanitizer alcohol gel. Mind blown. So now I do my labeling with a fine point Sharpie.

And that’s that: another day’s food harvest safely stored away. I think Carla would be proud.

Filed Under: Food and Drink, Stray Arrow Ranch Tagged With: food preservation, garden, homesteading, zucchini

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