Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Making bread should not be this difficult . . .

Of all the skills necessary to learn along the path to self-sustainability, I thought that learning how to bake your own bread was one of the most critical ones.  Humans had been making bread in some shape or form since early on in our existence, so why in the world should I pay $3.00 in the grocery store for a spongy loaf filled with preservatives?  Of course, as with all things, bread making is easier said than done until you learn the method that works for you.  Over the years I had tried unsuccessfully to make bread (without the assistance of a bread machine) and ended up with disaster after disaster.  The yeast didn't activate, the dough didn't rise,the dough rose too much, fell out of the pan and oozed all over the oven . . . After removing yet another rock hard, flat, and extremely yeasty-smelling loaf out of the oven, this basic life skill was becoming a sore point with me.  What was it that every frontierswoman knew that I, for the life of me, could not figure out?  About to throw in the towel and resign my family to a life of over-priced, under-flavored store-bought bread, I stumbled across yet another bread recipe on AllRecipes.com for Simple Whole Wheat Bread.  The only reason that motivated me to try again were the especially tempting photos attached of golden loaves shiny with butter, the scent of warm bread almost rising from my laptop.  That, and the comments of about 1,000 people who had successfully made bread with the recipe.  Come on, a thousand people had made bread with this recipe!  If I could not pull this one off, then it was time to accept my shortcomings and deal with my grocery store-dependency.

On a whim, when loading up with supplies at the store, I grabbed a bag of Gold Medal Better for Bread Flour, and a jar of Fleischmann's Bread Machine Yeast.  Back at home, I followed the recipe to the letter, and to my family's amazement, produced three beautiful, crusty, perfect loaves of bread from my oven.  I could have wept with joy(and I actually might have a little, though I hid it so no one would make fun of me crying over bread for heaven's sake).  I know that there are those of you out there like me, who have attempted something that you feel is so basic over and over again, just to meet with terrible results time and again!  The part of me that is the over-achiever could not handle this total inability to transform a handful of ingredients into something edible for my family.  So, for those kindred souls, print out the recipe below and never lose it!

Simple Whole Wheat Bread

Ingredients

  • 3 cups warm water (110 degrees F/45 degrees C)
  • 2 (.25 ounce) packages active dry yeast
  • 1/3 cup honey
  • 5 cups bread flour
  • 3 tablespoons butter, melted
  • 1/3 cup honey
  • 1 tablespoon salt
  • 3 1/2 cups whole wheat flour
  • 2 tablespoons butter, melted

Directions

  1. In a large bowl, mix warm water, yeast, and 1/3 cup honey. Add 5 cups white bread flour, and stir to combine. Let set for 30 minutes, or until big and bubbly.
  2. Mix in 3 tablespoons melted butter, 1/3 cup honey, and salt. Stir in 2 cups whole wheat flour. Flour a flat surface and knead with whole wheat flour until not real sticky - just pulling away from the counter, but still sticky to touch. This may take an additional 2 to 4 cups of whole wheat flour. Place in a greased bowl, turning once to coat the surface of the dough. Cover with a dishtowel. Let rise in a warm place until doubled.
  3. Punch down, and divide into 3 loaves. Place in greased 9 x 5 inch loaf pans, and allow to rise until dough has topped the pans by one inch.
  4. Bake at 350 degrees F (175 degrees C) for 25 to 30 minutes; do not overbake. Lightly brush the tops of loaves with 2 tablespoons melted butter or margarine when done to prevent crust from getting hard. Cool completely.

You can also go to allrecipes.com for this recipe at http://allrecipes.com/recipe/simple-whole-wheat-bread/detail.aspx and tell Ms. Nita Crabb that she is a bread goddess and thank you, thank you, thank you!    I will say that the Fleischmann's yeast and the Gold Medal Bread Flour are now an indispensable part of my bread routine and everything that I have made with those two products together has risen perfectly, so if you are still meeting with disaster, try these products!  It also helps to have volunteers to help knead the bread. . .

Because of this small success, I have made the commitment to end my bread-dependence at the grocery store.  It has been a few months so far, and I have yet to buy a loaf.  The boys love it and say "Momma's bread is much better than store bread!"  through mouths crammed with warm, fluffy goodness.  Each recipe makes 3 loaves, so I put the other two into the refrigerator to keep fresh until we need them.  I'm baking bread every 2-4 days, depending on how quickly it disappears!

There are three heavenly loaves just out of the oven!  I know that some people might be wondering why I am driven to do this.  Believe me, I am not a person with idle time on my hands that needs to be filled!  Yes, it would be absolutely easier to go buy a loaf of bread at the store.  Making your own bread saves money, as a bag of flour sells for about $3.30, and I can produce at least 9 loaves from that bag.  However, economics alone is not the driving factor that makes me do this.  My boys were eating their lunch the other day, which was the tried-and-true kid staple of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.  It hit me that everything they were eating I had made - the peanut butter, the strawberry preserves, and yes, the bread.  I knew exactly what was in the food they were eating. The only way it could have possibly been better is if I had grown my own wheat and milled my own flour (something I am reading about, but have yet to take on!)  I can't begin to describe the feeling of pride that came from that simple realization.  These boys are the reason why I do everything that I do - for their health, their safety, and their future.  There is no greater purpose that I can imagine.


Tuesday, May 22, 2012

The First Spring Broccoli Harvest

One of my first major acts as a person on the path to a sustainable lifestyle was to, of course, subscribe to Mother Earth News.  This magazine is the do-it-yourselfers Bible, with articles on everything from gardening and preserving to building your own solar panels or wood-fired hot tub (no kidding!).  I subscribed to their garden planning tool, entered my garden dimensions, and got to work moving around little icons for broccoli, squash,tomatoes, cucumbers, anything and everything.  What resulted was a beautiful blueprint for my garden with correct plant spacings, estimated planting times, and ideas for crop rotations.  Unfortunately, the incredibly helpful garden planner does not adjust itself for user error, including the inability to place rows and plants at appropriate distances from each other or thin seedlings whatsoever, because it was "a really healthy looking little plant, and you never know, one of the others might die . . ."  This resulted in my first year of the big garden transforming into a riotous jungle by June, with squashes growing in the watermelons and watermelons growing around the cucumbers and pumpkins growing on top of everything.  When Dad asked what exactly was the sort of plan that I was following for my garden layout, I emphatically pronounced that I had planned the garden exactly this way so that I would not have to weed so much and I attempted to huff away.  In reality, I stumbled through the knee deep undergrowth, tripping frequently while attempting to keep my wounded dignity intact.  This year, I tried to be a little sterner with the thinnings (something that I still find painful), and as of today I can actually walk through about 80% of the garden without being tripped up by sneaking sqaush vines among the broccoli.  It is indeed a personal triumph.



Yesterday, the boys and I deemed the bulk of the broccoli ready to harvest.  Greyson and 19-month old Eli backed their Gator up to the garden and loaded up for me.  We carried armful by armful of heavy-headed broccoli into the kitchen.  For the first time in my life I had harvested more broccoli at one time than we could eat at one sitting.  The point of my Mattamuskeet Momma experiment is to grow, make and otherwise locate as much local food as possible, and hopefully the bulk would be as local as our backyard.  In order to feed my family of 5 throughout the year, I needed to become a master at food preservation.  My one stop source for all things food preservation can be found at http://nchfp.uga.edu/  The National Center for Home Food Preservation.  Under "How do I freeze?"  I chose broccoli and followed the instructions.  Interestingly enough, one of the first steps was to immerse my broccoli in a brine of salt water to remove insects.  I gave the broccoli a once over and did not see any obvious bugs, but I decided to follow directions.

I heated up the water for the blanching process while the broccoli  enjoyed its brine bath.  As I started shuttling the broccoli from the sink into the waiting pots, I began to see little green floating worms every so often.  Now, I had just been congratulating myself on how bug-free my produce has been thus far this year without the use of any organic pest controls.  I turned to trusty Google and found the wormy green villains in countless webpages - the caterpillar of the Cabbage White Butterfly.  Nasty little things.

Regardless, I carried on with the blanching (three minutes in boiling water) until my broccoli florets were a beautiful emerald green.  Thankfully, any cabbage worms that made it through the brine bath were blanched a lovely pale shade of greenish-white, which made them quite easy to pick off.  I am attempting to be very Earth Mother cavalier about this, but honestly, the little buggers did trigger my involuntary gag reflex from time to time. I was thankful that I did not have an epidemic of the monsters.  From blanching, the broccoli headed into an ice bath to stop the cooking process.  
Though I know this is a  necessary step in getting the broccoli ready for the freezer, it also served as yet another soak to get rid of any potential blanched worm hangers-on.  I feel a little unsettled that none of my home preservation handbooks prepared me for the possibility of being made slightly nauseous during the noble quest to provide healthy, home-grown food for my family.  I will consider working on an article entitled "How to Freeze Broccoli, Not Worms" or "How to Freeze Broccoli and Still Want to Eat it Later."  Finally, after careful soaking, rinsing, dipping, shaking, and intense floret-by-floret scrutiny (Here's a tip for my future article:  "I find it helpful to shake the florets by the heads, not the stalks, so that any blanched cabbage worm corpses can fall freely into the ice bath, rather than getting hung up in the heads.  This avoids the situation precipitating into your 6 year old son finding  the worms among his broccoli and cheese at dinner and, after much shrieking, vowing never to eat vegetables again.").  After all of this, the end result was four gallon freezer bags of beautiful worm-free broccoli (99% sure about that . .  .)  



This process was indeed a learning one!  The conclusions of the Mattamuskeet Momma Spring Broccoli experiment were:

1) Do not eat a large breakfast before processing unsprayed broccoli heads.

2) Be prepared for the odor of cooked broccoli to permeate every corner of your home.  (Febreeze may not be quite as effective in this instance as is normally the case, and I am left with the odiferous blend of Lavender Vanilla and Comfort and Broccoli, which is definitely not comforting . . .)

3) Look into organic broccoli pesticide options (I hear Neem oil may work.  Row covers as well, but I am not yet into that stage of gardening)

3)Send your children into the garden early and often for a "Butterfly Hunt" armed with nets, tennis rackets, whiffleball bats, etc., in order to whack the white moths before they can lay their eggs.  

4) PLANT BROCCOLI IN THE FALL!!!.

Public Broccoli Enemy Number One



Sunday, May 20, 2012

The "big garden" is born . . .

It is amazing how many volunteers I have to help in the garden when a tractor is involved.  Armed with his recently acquired New Holland tractor and disc, my husband would probably have readily agreed to plow up the entire yard had I but asked.  As it was, I marked off a small section of ground and set Ed to the task of breaking up a workable rectangle for me, all the while executing impossibly tight turns to avoid taking out a corner of the garden shed on one end and a telephone pole on the other. After countless passes, the stubborn wiregrass let loose its tenacious grip and I was left with my own 60' by 30' block of rich, black Hyde County earth.  Ed and the boys made one more pass "just to smooth it out" before sending Ol' Blue back to the barn.  One's luck, however, can only just go so far, and the last turn of the tractor and disc was met with the rending sound of metal as the pole holding our DirecTV dish went crashing to the ground.  After much pushing, pulling, and kicking, my husband pronounced the dish "good as new," his words belied by the drunken swinging of the dish, streaked with dirt and festooned with streamers of grass.  In my experience, customer service representatives in India have a great sense of humor, and the repair man was scheduled at no charge.

After relaying the status of my garden to my on-call garden expert, a.k.a Dad, he deemed that the garden could not progress without being gone over with a tiller and then neatly rowed up.  He, of course, volunteered for this duty (see the trend here  - men, volunteer, "power" gardening . . .)  He and my mom made the trip from Knotts Island the next weekend with his battered old Craftsman tiller.  He and I unloaded the beast from the back of truck and got to work.  Well, Dad got to work.  Remember that I had been more of an observer than gardener when it came to my Dad's type of gardening?  After about 20 minutes of watching him man-handle the roaring machine of whirling teeth through my garden, I thought that didn't look so hard after all and gamely volunteered to finish my garden.  In case you had ever wondered what exactly it might feel like to be inside one of those paint shakers that you see whirring away at your local home improvement store, grab a hold of an old front-tine tiller.  An hour, two numb arms, four ground molars, and 50% temporary hearing loss later, I stood beside my Dad and gazed proudly upon the fluffy soil that was to become my "big" garden.  I thought that I would go over one more spot, "just to smooth it out," and tried to restart the tiller.  You would have thought I would have remembered the danger in this type of behavior (see above). The old machine gave a cough, belched a small puff of black smoke, and was quiet, never to start again.   I like to think of the tiller in a better place now, where the soil is rich and the rows are endless.

A lesson in creating straight rows from Dad involved twine pulled between two sticks, held tight from beginning to the end of each row and piled with soil on either side.  The lesson was peppered regularly with me asking obviously ridiculous questions to my father, "Why are we doing this again?  Why do I need rows?  Why do the rows have to be straight?  Does it really matter if the rows are straight?" after the 5th time in the same spot of him resetting the twine and re-piling the dirt.  After everything, we had 12 beautiful rows, plus room for tomatoes. I had also built a small walkway using some of our salvaged bricks from our house restoration so that the boys could run through the garden without trampling too much.   In the next few weeks, I put in plants and seeds, built a cucumber trellis from old fencing I found under drifts of honeysuckle in the woods, and the "big garden" was born.

A look a the garden in all of it's messy, leafy glory.




Friday, May 18, 2012

So the gardens begin . . .

I was not a complete stranger to gardening when I started.  My Dad always planted a garden, usually one that was entirely too large, even for a family of seven.  With five girls, you would have thought that he would have had plenty of field hands to help out. Strangely enough, I don't remember my four older sisters and I actively taking part in any aspect of the garden besides occasional picking and frequent eating.  Dad, driven by his inner farmer, just took care of everything.  Our summertime meals would consist almost exclusively of sliced tomatoes, cucumbers floating in a golden pool of apple cider vinegar with an ice cube on top for extra chilly goodness, and fresh white perch fillets pulled almost daily from the surrounding waters of Back Bay.   It is funny, looking back on things now, that eating locally and sustainably wasn't a choice, nor did it require special effort.  If my father did not grow it, catch it, or shoot it, we usually didn't eat it.  My mom bought other meats from Ansell's, the local country butcher, and eating out was usually reserved for special trips "to town" when we left "the county" and ventured into Virginia Beach proper.   

So while I had a lot more experience with enjoying the fruits of the garden rather than the labor, upon our relocation to Hyde County I felt the best way to learn was to jump right in.  We moved in to the house in May of 2008, and by the time we got settled it was late July.  When visiting the local hardware store, my oldest son, then two years old, asked if we could grow pumpkins.  So we bought a package of seeds, planted them in little cups, transplanted them in a small patch in the yard, and a few months later . . .

Cole and Greyson picked their first homegrown pumpkins.  They weren't the prettiest or the biggest, and the plants had barely held on through an onslaught of squash vine borers, but there were ours. That was really all that mattered.

With the next year came the idea of raised beds.  I had been reading up on gardening all winter, and after being enticed by the glossy pages of seed catalogs throughout the blustery winter, I was more than ready to try my hand at real gardening.   The end result should only be attributed to beginner's luck and the unbelievable rich, black soil that makes Hyde one of the best counties in the state for agriculture.

Of course I planted way too much of everything, which grew into each other and out of the garden and into the yard.  Summer squash, winter squash, cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers, watermelons and cantaloupes were all intertwined in leafy embraces,  but it was green and mine, and I was proud!  The garden became one of the boys' favorite spots, because you just never knew what you were going to find nestled among the leaves.


Greyson and Cole never got tired of watching the swallowtail butterfly caterpillars make short work of my parsley, and I was more than willing to donate my fresh herbs in exchange for the opportunity afforded to my boys as witnesses to their metamorphoses.  The raised gardens worked beautifully for two seasons, but inevitably, I heard my father's voice emerging from my mouth -  "The garden needs to be bigger!"

Thursday, May 17, 2012

Welcome to Hyde County

Hyde County, North Carolina.  It is probably one of the most beautiful places that you have never heard of, duck hunters and nature enthusiasts aside.  The county slogan is "The Road Less Traveled," which is as honest, and poetically appropriate, as any I have ever come across.  You might think that being home to the largest natural lake in North Carolina, Lake Mattamuskeet, that we would be a bustling resort area filled with tourists, vacation homes, and all the trappings that go along with serving the masses.  That may be the case on Ocracoke Island, an almost completely different world that happens to have found its way within our legal boundaries, but the mainland is a mix of farm fields, woods, and marsh, interspersed here and there with small hubs of civilization.  Hyde County has a population of 5,810  spread over 612 square miles, and about 1000 of those people live on Ocracoke Island.  That makes us the second least populated county in all of North Carolina, only being beat out for top honors by a few hundred people in our neighboring county of Tyrell.  We have no stoplights, no fast food restaurants, no Wal-marts, and that, in my humble opinion, made it one of the most perfect places in eastern North Carolina for my husband and I to pack up our (then) two little boys and put down roots.

In 2007, we fell in love with an 1800's farmhouse on the shores of Lake Mattamuskeet.  Our first architect said we were crazy, but we found another who could feel the heart of the house of much as we could.  After a year of watching the magic performed by craftsman Louis Chesnutt and his crew,  the neglected hunting camp was transformed to her former glory - a gentile, welcoming lady, cloaked with warm memories that hung about as thick and sweet as the perfume of gardenias.                   

We went from this . . .

to this.

There is something to be said for believing in your own vision. Now, five years and another little boy later, I have found that just raising my boys in the quiet of this peaceful place is not quite enough.  I want them to grow up with a sense of the land around them, to understand how these fragile ecosystems work together, and what our place is within them.  I want them to understand what it means to live sustainably - to nourish our environment as it nourishes us.  I want my boys to have their hands in the rich, black earth every spring and learn how to coax from it the food that sustains us throughout the rest of the year.  There are so many lessons to be learned, and I want to learn right there beside them.  My fondest wish is, as they build a bean trellis or thump on a ripe watermelon with their grandchildren, that they remember our days spent together, fingers black with soil.  That will be my legacy.  And thus, the Mattamuskeet Momma experiment was born.