Getting the firewood supply in for the winter

The weekend before last was all about the firewood. David had amassed a huge pile of cut rounds out in the woods, and had begun hauling them by the truckload up to the woodshed near the main house. We cleaned out the woodshed, including raking out a layer about 8 or 10 inches deep of bark and wood chips that had accumulated over the past few seasons. Now all we had to do was start in on splitting and stacking.

On short notice, my sister Rebecca and her daughter Chaidie came up early on Saturday morning to give us a hand. A happy surprise was that she had brought along our brother John also. As the day was expected to get fairly hot, we decided to jump right in and get to work. John and David drove into the woods and brought loads of rounds, and in between loads, they both split most of the rounds with 6-pound mauls. Rebecca, Chaidie and I quickly figured out an efficient system for getting the split wood into the shed and stacked.

It actually turned out to work perfectly with 3 people. We were stacking wood on 3 sides of the shed, whose sloping roof is between 10 and 12 feet high. As the stack along the back wall grew to 6 feet or so, we started stacking a second row right in front of the back row. Once the second row was about 3 feet high, Chaidie stood on that row; then Rebecca would hand me a piece, I would hand it to Chaidie, and she would put it on the top of the back row. The second row was also important for stabilizing the back row; once the pile got to around 8 feet it could easily have started to lean forward. At times we had to think about when to start another row on the sides also. It was actually a lot of fun, as well as great exercise.

We worked that day for close to 5 hours, then had some lunch. Rebecca and Chaidie came back the next day, and Rebecca and I did quite a bit of the splitting that time, as well as stacking. When all was said and done, about 3 hours later, we had finished going through that huge pile of wood, and estimate that we have 5 or 6 cords in the shed. That's probably not enough to get through the winter, especially if it turns out to be the harsh La Nina we've been hearing about, but it's a really good start.

Thanks to Rebecca and John and Chaidie for all their help that weekend!

Try our homemade ginger syrup

I have been asked several times recently for my recipe for ginger syrup. This was another of those things that we came up with in our efforts to avoid products with high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS). A drink we both like is Canadian whiskey and ginger ale, and we had been buying Canada Dry ginger ale (the only soft drink we ever bought, as we're not soda drinkers) as a mixer. After trying two or three different "natural" ginger ales, we got a bit frustrated; some actually had HFCS, others had a ginger taste that was just too hot to work well as a mixer. So here it is, our homemade ginger syrup.

(Recipe yields about 6 quarts)

Prepare 6 quart-size canning jars and lids. I usually keep the canning jars hot by leaving them full of very hot water in the sink. Have 6 rings ready. Be ready to bring your canning jar lids to a boil in a small saucepan of hot water. As soon as the water boils, turn off heat and keep covered until ready to use.

NOTE: You can, of course, make ginger syrup without canning. You will need to refrigerate it, though, as it may develop mold or begin to ferment if left out at room temperature. (See below for quantities of ingredients for a 1-quart batch.)

In a stainless steel or enamel stockpot, combine:

9 cups sugar (I use organic white sugar; brown sugar gives a different flavor)
18 cups water, preferably unchlorinated
6 ounces fresh organic ginger, thinly sliced (peeled or unpeeled, as you prefer)

Cover and bring to a boil over medium-high heat, stirring to dissolve sugar. Once the syrup comes to a rolling boil, turn off heat. Leave the lid on and let steep for at least 10 minutes. While the syrup is heating, thinly peel and juice:

3 organic lemons (since you're using the peel, you really want to use organic lemons for this)

Divide the lemon peel pieces into 6 even parts. Remove ginger pieces from syrup with a slotted spoon or small sieve. Strain the seeds from the lemon juice and add juice to the hot syrup.

Taking the jars one at a time, empty out the water and put one pile of the lemon peel in the jar. Using a canning funnel, fill the jar with hot syrup to within 1/4" of the top and seal with the canning lids and rings. Let cool completely on rack.

Smaller batch quantities

To make ginger syrup one quart at a time, use the following quantities:

1-1/2 cups sugar
3 cups water
1 ounce fresh ginger
Juice and peel of 1/2 lemon

Suggestions for using ginger syrup

Canadian whiskey and ginger ale

1 shot Canadian whiskey
1-2 shots ginger syrup (2 if you like it sweeter)
About 3 ounces soda water

Variation: Try Canadian whiskey with hot ginger ale. Follow recipe above, substituting boiling water for the soda water, and serve in a mug. We love this on cold winter nights, and it's also great when you have a cold, sinus congestion, or flu symptoms.

Just plain ginger ale

2 shots ginger syrup
5-6 ounces soda water

You might also try drizzling ginger syrup over your fruit salad. And please, if you come up with any other ideas, do let me know. We love this ginger syrup, and I hope you'll try it. I suspect you won't miss the HFCS.

Yippee: The bees are back!

Swarm of bees moving into a hive in the eaves.

We are so excited: Two years after our 2 hives of honeybees were killed off by the unusual cold in early winter, a swarm of bees showed up here. I had been amusing myself by sickling down vetch, blackberries and tall grass (for the third day in a row), and when I got to a good stopping point, I decided to take a break and head back to the house for a bite to eat. I was still about 50 yards from the house when I heard a loud buzzing. I looked up and saw a large cloud of bees circling just above the roof of the house. (If you've never seen a bee swarm, believe you me, it is quite a sight; loud, too.)

At the time, David was down by the pond mowing, and although I was tired and thirsty, I ran down to give him the news, as I knew he would be excited, too. For years, there had usually been a colony of bees that had established a hive inside of the eaves on the east end of the house. This swarm had obviously located this spot and was in the process of moving in (see photo above). This is excellent news, as we have quite a few fruit trees up here, and the crop last year had definitely suffered from the lack of sufficient pollinators in the area.

The thing that concerns us is that it is now August 4, and our first frost tends to be around October 20, sometimes a week or two earlier. Once daytime temperatures start staying below 50F, the bees won't fly; they're essentially immobilized at around 45F. It's critical that they have time to build up a food supply to see them through the winter. The problem is that at this time of the summer, not that much is blooming, and even if there were plenty of sources of pollen and nectar, there isn't likely to be enough time to produce adequate honey stores. So we are "feeding" them with a heavy sugar syrup, a normal thing to do this time of year to supplement their usual food sources.

We have a ways to go before this colony is up to speed. We will give them plenty of time, a year or more, to multiply and build up a supply of honey for themselves, before we even think about harvesting honey for us. We value them mainly as pollinators here, and the honey, when it comes, will be a bonus.

For right now, though, we're just so happy that the bees are back.

Green eggs and Hamlet

"I do! I like green eggs and ham! 

I do! I like them, Sam I am!"

-from Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss

Green eggs and hamlets; are we spoiled or what?

When the Three Little Pigs (our most recent batch of Tamworths) were slaughtered in early May, chef Gabriel at the Alder Wood Bistro in Sequim bought the two bigger ones. Of the one we had left, David's Uncle Stevie bought most of one side, everything but the belly. Usually I reserve the back legs to cure for prosciutto, but this time I decided to try something different. (We already have two prosciutti from last year's pigs, and a large one curing from the one that was slaughtered in January.)

So I took the bones out of the 22-pound leg, left the skin on, and proceeded to divide the meat into eight boneless little hams, which I, quite naturally, am calling Hamlets. Since the pieces were mostly not much more than 2 pounds, I knew they would cure much more quickly than a whole, bone-in ham. I started with my usual dry rub, a mixture of kosher salt, brown sugar, ascorbic acid (an antioxidant that is used instead of nitrates; more about that coming up in another post), and a few herbs and spices. The pieces are simply rubbed with this mixture and put into freezer bags and kept cool for a few days.

Next I took the hamlets out of the bags and put them into stainless stockpots and submerged them in white wine for about a week. This serves several purposes: Additional flavor from the wine; the extra time allows the salt in the dry rub to "equalize" throughout the meat, so it is cured evenly; and the citric, malic and tartaric acids in the wine inhibit a variety of potentially harmful bacteria.

By the way, I used this same curing method for about 15 pounds of  skin-on pork belly. If you've never tried Tamworth bacon, come over for breakfast sometime. Seriously. This is bacon as it should be: chewy, full of flavor, and it doesn't cook away to nothing in the frying pan. Oh, and the drippings are the perfect thing to use for cooking your green eggs.

Finally, the hamlets and bacon pieces were rinsed briefly and patted dry. I put the hamlets in stretchy netting so they would keep their shape (reminds me of control-top panty hose), and put them and the bacon directly onto the racks in my smoker. 2-3 hours on medium heat (about 210-215F in my smoker) with alder chips for smoke, and we had a beautiful pile of moist, perfectly cooked bacon and ham.

 One of our beautiful Ameraucana hens.

Being a longtime fan of Dr. Seuss, and knowing there were fresh Ameraucana eggs in the fridge, I couldn't resist the juxtaposition of green eggs and hamlets. (OK, so I'm a Shakespeare fan too.) Although we are transitioning our dual-purpose laying flock over to mainly New Hampshire Reds, we are keeping 10-20 Ameraucana hens; everyone likes the pretty eggs in shades of blue and green.

Anyway, the book never said "green eggs and GREEN ham," you know. I think I'll go have breakfast while I'm waiting for your e-mails.

Solar installation is underway!

Exciting news, people: for the past couple of weeks, we've been spending most of our spare time on our solar electric project! The pipes, rebar and conduit for the two pole mounts (which will each hold 4 solar panels) are in place; the next thing is to pour the concrete that will anchor the poles. Once the concrete is cured, the next thing will be assembling the frames that hold the solar panels, and installing the panels themselves.

We've been planning for this and organizing this project for a long time, certainly since before we moved to the farm five years ago. A lot of thought went into sizing the system; that is, figuring out how much power we wanted to produce, and from there, choosing the best combination of components to produce that power. No doubt about it, the equipment is expensive, and we didn't want the setup to be bigger than we actually need; frankly, that's just wasteful. On the other hand, we also planned for the addition of hydroelectric power to the system at some point.

Several months back, after burying my head in manuals and studying wiring schematics, I assembled the main power panel. This impressive setup includes two 3.6 kW inverters, a 240-volt transformer, a DC disconnect panel, an AC breaker box, and an 80-amp charge controller. I also built a large wooden box to house our bank of 16 deep-cycle batteries. Before we started working on all this, I really didn't know much of anything about house wiring (or electricity in general, for that matter). I was a bit intimidated at first, but eventually decided I should just dive in and start learning. After all, we're the ones who will be using this system, so I figure I ought to have at least some understanding of how it all works.

Here's the overview: The solar (photovoltaic) panels convert sunlight to electricity. Cables run from each panel, or series of panels, to a combiner box. This box contains breakers and terminal bus bars, to which the cables are connected. Larger cables then carry the combined power from all panels to the charge controller, which in turn carries power to the battery bank. As the name suggests, the charge controller controls the charging of the batteries, partly to prevent overcharging. It is basically the brains of the system.

The 16 6-volt batteries will be wired in two series of 8 batteries each, as we are building a 48-volt system. Very large cables, one positive and one negative from each series, then carry the battery (DC) power to the DC disconnect breaker, and from there to the inverters. The inverters then convert the DC power to AC, and more cables carry this power to the AC breaker box and out to the main house wiring.

Oh, and there will also be wiring from the generator to the AC box; the system is programmed to automatically start the generator to charge the batteries, if the level of charge drops below a designated point.

Pretty simple, isn't it?

Actually, there is a lot of detail in every part of this project. We've invested a lot in all this, one way and another, and we are taking things fairly slowly at this point; it's worth double- and triple-checking to make sure we've done it right the first time.  It's very interesting and sophisticated equipment, and we're fairly thrilled that after all the planning, it's finally all coming together.

Be sure to check back; I'll be posting more soon, along with photos.

The cat who came for Christmas

Sir Winsome de Cosmos, aka Cosmo.

Around Christmas, a cat showed up at our place. For once, it was not a cougar or bobcat. For about two weeks, we'd hear this loud meowing outside our front door after dark, when the birds were all tucked in and we were inside keeping warm by the wood stove. I would open the door and call to the cat, but he instantly bolted away, and I never got more than a glimpse of a very speedy shadow.

Then one night, when I called to him, he meowed back at me, and I could tell he wasn't very far away. I kept calling, and suddenly, he ran right up to me. He let me pet him, and even let me pick him up! For the next ten days or so, we let him in at night and gave him food and water and let him sleep in a pet carrier near the wood stove. Meanwhile, I had posted ads both on craigslist and in the local paper, hoping to find the owner. He seemed like such a sweet cat, very well-behaved, and I assumed someone must be missing him and looking for him.

Unfortunately one day while he was outside, he got into something poisonous and became quite sick. David took him to the vet, and four days (and a large bill) later, we brought him home again. Although we had had several responses to our ads, none of them turned out to match this cat, and eventually we decided to keep him. Our best guess at this point was that someone had dumped him at the end of our road; our gate is 1-1/2 miles up the hill from our nearest neighbor, and unfortunately people do abandon animals there from time to time. Given our location, if he had just wandered away from home, it seems a stretch to believe he would show up at our place.

He seems to be quite used to being an indoor cat, which is good, considering all the predator problems we've had lately. David thinks he may decide to go outside during the warmer weather, so we'll see. As I said, he's a very sweet cat, and the vet said he'd been neutered and was probably 2-3 years old. He's a beautiful charcoal grey tabby; actually the vet called the color Russian Blue, and in a certain light his fur does look blue-grey. He's also very quiet. He's officially been christened Sir Winsome de Cosmos; David says that when he gets that inscrutable look that cats so often have, it's because he's busy controlling the universe. I call him Cosmo.

We sure are enjoying having a cat around the house. He even caught a mouse last week, which definitely raised his stock with us. It's hard to imagine a nicer cat than this one, and although it's very sad to think that someone may have abandoned him, we feel very fortunate that he's now a part of our lives.

As you can see from the photo above, his only problem is that he can't seem to relax. :)

Baking bread in a wood-fired oven, Round Two

This past Sunday I was down at the Alder Wood Bistro again, having fun baking more bread. This time I had four batches going: A naturally leavened multigrain bread, sourdough, onion rye and Montreal-style bagels. The only other time I had tried to make a naturally leavened bread (no yeast added), it didn't turn out well. This time, I had actually planned to make this batch a yeast bread (although I was using a starter left over from the previous week's bread), but (oops) I forgot to add the yeast. I realized it at about 4:00 AM, when I got up to mix the dough from the leaven that had been fermenting since Saturday morning. I decided to just do the best I could with it and see what happened.

Well, surprisingly to me at least, it turned out great! Although it never did look as if it rose much in the proofing baskets, I thought it looked good when I slashed it just before putting it in the oven. When I checked on it 30 minutes later, I was amazed to see how much it had risen, and it was coloring nicely. 10 minutes later it was out of the oven.

 Naturally leavened multigrain hearth bread; oh boy!

As soon as the multigrain  and sourdough loaves were in the proofing baskets, I mixed up a batch of dough for the Montreal bagels, and the rye dough. After working pretty hard for the first 45 minutes or so, I now had at least a couple of hours to kill while things were proofing and rising.

After the bagel dough had risen for 2 hours, I shaped the bagels. Then into the boiling pot they went, a few at a time, for a minute and a half. Then they drained briefly on a clean towel before being dredged on both sides with sesame seeds. Montreal-style bagels are traditionally baked in a wood-fired oven; the Bistro's oven was about 530F when the bagels went in. Naturally, being much smaller than a loaf of bread, I was nervous about over baking them, but I needn't have worried. They actually took about 20 minutes, not much less than what it takes in the gas oven I use at home. This is one bread item for which we're willing to disregard the rule of waiting until it cools to eat it; we were both pretty hungry by that time, too, and David had thoughtfully brought along some butter and cream cheese.

Montreal-style bagels just out of the wood-fired oven.

By the time I was done baking the bagels, it was time to load in the sourdough and multigrain loaves. Next I shaped the onion rye loaves; I had carmelized the onions while the dough was rising. The two loaves went into the oven about 15 minutes after the others, and while I had the oven door open I shifted around some of the other loaves; some seemed to be browning a little faster than others. I'm getting used to figuring out where to put the loaves in the oven, depending on their size.  I'm actually a bit surprised at how easily I'm learning to use this wonderful oven.

It was really hard to wait for over an hour to cut into one of the multigrain loaves, and I was anxious to see what the crumb looked like. I had used the same formula that I had the previous Sunday, but I adjusted the hydration level to 70% (it was 65% last week), as we both felt that in the center of the loaf, the crumb was a little on the dry side. (I've just recently learned a formula called the "baker's percentage," which is a means to calculate how much water and flour you need to get a dough of a particular hydration level; I'm so happy I finally got my mind around this one.) I could see right away that it was a big improvement; the crumb was uniformly moist and tender inside a delicious, crisp crust. Once again, I felt thankful that I have been keeping good records of every batch of bread I've made, so I will be able to duplicate this result.

Interior of naturally leavened multigrain bread.

The really difficult thing with this baking is that I want to make a lot of bread at a time (it's a big oven, and I'm having a lot of fun). What to do with all this bread? Hmmm. I feel a taste-testing party coming on...