Cooking in the time of uncertainty

Yup, I'm a home body these days. The world is an uncertain place right now, and the best thing I can do for it is to stay home and take care of my people. I got this.

So, I've been turning to my home making. We have an orange tree that needs to be harvested, and a bumper crop of mint out front with all of the spring rains we have been getting. My daughter and I had a kitchen day yesterday.

 First up was making up a batch of sekanjabin. This is a drink that I usually make for SCA camping events. But my daughter had her tonsils out a few years ago, and we found that this is awesome stuff for sore throats. She had a hard time getting water down when she was recovering, but this stuff did the trick. I decided since we had so much mint, it might make sense to have some of this already made and on hand for if/when we get sick. The syrup lasts for a long time without refrigeration, and you just dilute it with water to drink.

Sekanjabin

5 lb honey
4 c water
2 c apple cider vinegar
big handful fresh mint

Dissolve honey in water. Bring to boil (watch this, it will boil up all of a sudden), add vinegar. Simmer 1/2 hour or more. Remove from heat and add mint. Let cool. Strain out mint. Dilute resulting syrup with water to drink, about 8-1 water to syrup, or to taste. 

 Then we harvested some oranges and juiced them. Store bought tastes nothing like fresh squeezed from the back yard!

We also had a dozen lemons from a neighbor's tree, so we made up a pitcher of fresh lemonade. Which reminds me, I want a drink. Just a sec...

Ok, I'm back. Yum.

And then we took the time to make candied orange and lemon peels. Luckily I wrote on this a few years back, so I could just pull up my own blog entry for the recipe. Thanks, past Melissa!

http://tangibledaydreams.blogspot.com/2010/02/cooking-post-candied-orange-peel.html

 And here are the fruits of our labors. Two containers of sekanjabin syrup. Candied orange and lemon peels, which are really yummy. Little containers of lemon and orange syrup. A pitcher of lemonade. And I saved all the sugar that fell off of the finished candy, and tucked it into the tea cabinet.

The afternoon of slow cooking and chatting served to settle me from my anxiety. I know things are going to get worse before they get better. But I also know that home arts speak to the heart, and provide comfort. We've got this.

Orange Mint Tea

This is a follow up to this post on drying my garden mint: http://tangibledaydreams.blogspot.com/2012/05/first-try-at-drying-mint-for-tea.html

So, last week I harvested some of my overgrown mint and hung it in the window to dry, with the thought that I might be able to make my own mint tea instead of buying it at the store. I hadn't tried drying my own herbs before, so it was a bit of an experiment. It seemed simple enough in theory. And in fact, it worked beautifully. A week of hanging in the dry Arizona air, and the mint leaves were crumbly.

I stripped them off of the stems, and sealed them up in an air tight container. There was enough to almost fill the container!

Now, yesterday we were juicing up the last of the oranges from the back yard tree, and I had a thought. I did a bit of a web search and sure enough, dried orange peel is also a good tea ingredient. And I know that there have been no pesticides sprayed on our tree, and the peel hasn't been waxed like the store bought fruit often is. (If I make this with store bought oranges, I'll be sure to wash them very well first.) So I had my sweetie take a vegetable peeler to the outside of the orange to slice off just thin orange rind part. I put the shavings on my food dehydrator, and put them on low for a few hours until they also became kind of crunchy. I let them sit over night to cool, and today I packaged them up too.

So tonight? I took a handful of the dried orange peel, and broke it up into smaller pieces.

I took a handful of the dried mint, and crunched it up too.

That all got added to a tea infuser.

I heated up some water, and then added a dollop of honey.

Then the mint and orange peel went in.

And then I let it steep for awhile.

And now? I am sipping at a perfectly delightful cup of tea! It is gently fragrant, very tasty and mellow, with no hint of bitterness from the peel. And I know exactly where the ingredients came from.

(Hmm...except the honey. I don't suppose the dogs (or the neighbors!) would appreciate hives in the back yard, dang it. I'll have to find a local bee keeper next.)

First try at drying mint for tea

My mint pot out front is getting just a bit unruly. (Actually, I have two pots that look like this, but I can only get one in the picture at a time.) I've been harvesting the mint to flavor my cold drinks, but obviously I haven't been keeping up with it nearly well enough. The stems are long and getting woody, and there isn't enough room for new and tender growth.

I am also out of mint tea bags. I thought about it...and figured it was absolutely silly to go out and buy commercial mint tea when I had a perfectly good batch of leaves out front. I've always just used the mint fresh out of the garden, but it should be easy enough to dry some for later use as well, right?

I remember when I was a young girl, my folks volunteered on the weekends at the Miller-Cory House in New Jersey. It was a restored colonial farm house, and it had an herb garden out front. I remember being interested by the bundles of fresh herbs being hung up in the cook house to dry. I don't know if they ever actually used them, though there was often something tasty coming out of the kitchen pot. And they did smell wonderfully good. Anyway, I hunted around the web to refresh my young girl's memory on drying herbs, and headed out the front door.

I cut a nice big basket full of mint stalks, and brought them inside.











They got washed well...

...and picked over. Any leaves that I wouldn't want to eat, I figured I don't want to drink either. Browning leaves got tossed into the bag headed for the compost pile.

Then I tied some kitchen twine around the stalks.

A rummage around in the junk drawer turned up some curtain hooks that looked like they would do the trick.

Herbs are supposed to hang in a dark, dry place. I'm kind of short on those, but the window over my kitchen sink doesn't get much in the way of any sunshine coming into it. And I was never fond of the frilly little valance that was on the curtain rod there. I ditched the fabric, and hung the bunches of mint over the curtain rod. In this Arizona climate, I'm not really worried about any excess humidity from the sink.

I've got five bunches hanging (and you can't really tell that I touched the mint plants out front). These will hang until the leaves dry out and get brittle--probably a week or two, maybe less in this desert climate. Then I'll strip the leaves off of the stems and store them in mason jars until I want a cup of tea. At that point, I'll grab a tea ball and crush some leaves into it, and have myself a very organic cup of mint tea, courtesy of my own garden.

At least, that is the theory. I'll let you know how it goes in reality!

Edit: It worked beautifully! See this post: http://tangibledaydreams.blogspot.com/2012/05/orange-mint-tea.html

Orange Vinegar

It is getting close to Estrella time for me (estrellawar.org), which means I'm starting to look at doing some food prep. One of the things I make every year is a drink called sekanjabin. I did a post on that one a few years ago, here: http://tangibledaydreams.blogspot.com/2010/01/sekanjabin-and-dried-fruit.html . It is a syrup made of vinegar, honey, mint, and water. The syrup lasts unrefrigerated for quite some time. To drink, you mix one part syrup with about 8 parts water, and serve it either chilled or hot.

Well, it is also orange harvest time here, and I was squeezing some oranges for juice today. I got to thinking...and put a cup of white vinegar aside with some orange peels and rosemary in it. I'll let it sit for a week or two, strain out the solids, and then put it in a spray bottle about half and half with water. I use vinegar water for cleaning, and I think the orange oils (cleaning) and rosemary (disinfectant) will add a nice punch to the home made cleaner. It should smell better, too.

And then as I was putting that on the pantry shelf to do its thing, I got to thinking about the upcoming batch of sekanjabin. And wouldn't it be good if I used orange infused vinegar to make it with? I had to try it. So, here is how I'm making the orange vinegar:

First I went and picked 8 oranges.

I brought them in and gave them a good washing, to get air born whatever off of the skins.

Then I used a potato peeler to take just the orange outer layer of peel off of the orange.

I had a bottle of apple cider vinegar with just over 2 cups left in it, which is what I need for the sekanjabin recipe. I popped the peels right into the bottle.

I juiced the oranges, of course. Fresh squeezed is soooo much better than store bought. The oranges were a little more slippery now that the outer zest was off of them. But it was easier to deal with that than to try to cut and juice them first, and then take the peeler to the rind.

8 oranges worth of zest was probably excessive, but I didn't want to waste what I had picked. At this point, I'll leave it a few weeks, and then strain out the solids and see what I'm left with.

To be continued.

Cooking and Creating Love

A follow up to yesterday's posting (http://tangibledaydreams.blogspot.com/2011/01/measuring-warp-dried-apples-and.html). My daughter finished her shawl. Is it not wonderful? I am so proud of her. I really enjoy teaching the fiber arts, and love seeing the next person in line light up and make the process their own. Particularly when it is my own kin. My mother is a wonderful knitter, and my dad was awesome with a torch and metal. Though I don't follow either of those arts, I did learn to really value creativity and handwork from them. I am extraordinarily tickled to see my own daughter taking up those family traits. Down through the generations it goes!

My own project yesterday is not as impressive...


...but quite tasty. And the value of creating good food for my family came straight down from my folks too. Boy, can my folks cook! Among other things, I remember the dehydrator going as a kid, making wonderful fruit leather out of local harvests. There was a year my folks picked up a bushel basket full of slightly bruised peaches from the orchard, and mushed them up for the dryer. I still remember the house smelling wonderful! As I recall, the resulting peach roll-ups didn't last long at all. Yummy.

My family shows its love by feeding each other, and creating beautiful (and useful!) artwork for each other. And that? Is not a bad thing at all. From mother to daughter...and on again to the next. All good.

Measuring warp, dried apples, and teaching my daughter to weave

It was a day spent doing this and that, but all in all a peaceful, creative time. I'm starting to work on prepping food for my upcoming Estrella trip in February, and apples were on sale for 88 cents/lb. That meant making up a batch of dried apple chips in the dehydrator. My daughter snapped a picture of me using my apple slicer/peeler/corer gadget. It makes this task go so much quicker!



My spaniels were delighted that I was slicing and peeling their apples for them. Of course, they were getting some of the peel as a treat. I think they were not quite clear on the idea of peeled apples, but they had a grand time. The apples slices went in the dehydrator, and the rest of the peel and the cores went out in the compost bin.



Since my daughter snapped a picture of me, I figured it was only fair to get one of her. We went yarn shopping together the other day, and she picked out a color combination that she wanted to make into a shawl. I showed her yesterday how to weave on the triangle loom, and she took to it like a pro! I just now took a break from typing to show her how to add the fringe. Yes, she's been doing little else but weaving today, and having a marvelous time doing it. She's trying to get the shawl finished before she goes back up to college on Saturday. I think she'll make it with no problem.



When I wasn't teaching, or cooking, or taking down the Christmas tree (yes, that is going slowly this year), I was rearranging my studio to make room for my weaving project. I've finished up spinning the yarn, made my calculations, and early this evening I started measuring out my warp. The hand spun skeins go on the umbrella swift to keep them under control and to easily feed onto the warping mill. I love having the right tool for the job! I'm making 7 warp chains, each containing 48 threads, each 11 yards long. I'll set them on the loom at 12 threads per inch, so the fabric will start out 28" wide before shrinkage. I'm aiming toward a finished fabric of 21" wide, 8 yards long.



And then, I also took time off this evening to go out to dinner with my sweetie. We wandered the mall afterward. I took this picture as we exited the mall at closing time. I really like carrying a pocket camera around--it lets me capture just little things, like the way the green tree trunks curved in front of the lights. Beautiful.



And now, I should head off to bed. I have more warp measuring on tap for tomorrow, and we'll need to get my daughter packed up and ready to go for the semester. But I can sleep knowing it was a full and productive day, full of quiet creative moments.

Cooking post: Candied Orange Peel

It is late winter, which in Phoenix, AZ means it is citrus season. We have an orange tree in the back yard, and each year at this time it is loaded with juicy goodness--usually more than we can eat! (Citrus is Arizona's equivalent to zucchini in the Midwest USA. If you're not careful, folks will play ding-dong-ditch with baskets full of the stuff!)

So for lunch today, I served my kids fresh squeezed orange juice off of our tree. Then, instead of throwing the peels away, I decided to give my mom's recipe for Candied Orange Peel a try.

Candied Orange Peel

8 oranges (or 14 lemons)
water
4 cups sugar, divided
1 cup water


After juicing the oranges, cut the peel into sections and remove the remaining pulp.









Place the peels in a 4-6 qt pot, and cover with cold water. Bring to a boil, uncovered, then simmer for 10 minutes.







Drain, and allow to cool.













Using a spoon, scrape the white pith from the colored part of the peel.













This takes awhile. No, really.













I suggest press-ganging random teenagers to help you out.

(I understand there is a recipe that blanches the peels several times to remove the bitterness, and skips this step. I'm going to try that one next.)








Discard the pith, and slice the peel into 1/4" strips.













Return saucepan to heat, and add 2 cups sugar and 1 cup water. Heat to dissolve sugar.








Add peel, and simmer gently, 45 minutes, stirring occasionally.









Remove peel and drain on fine mesh cooling rack, with a pan underneath to catch the drips. Spread the peel out so it will dry evenly. Allow to cool and dry 1 hour.






Do save the orange flavored syrup for later use. It is nummy on pancakes! Mom also uses it in BBQ sauce, or brushed on pineapple and ham slices before grilling.






Place the peel in a large bowl, and toss with the remaining 2 cups of sugar, until evenly coated.








Take peel out of bowl, letting the excess sugar sift through your fingers. Place sugar-coated peel on a cookie sheet, and allow to dry overnight. Store in an air-tight container.






Save the left over sugar. It is also subtly orange flavored at this point. You can use it for your next batch of peel, or sprinkle it on french toast. (I'm going to use it in tea, myself.)










The finished candy! Slightly bitter, very sweet, and altogether addicting. This is my first attempt, and I'm really pleased with the way it turned out. Now I know what to make if someone sneaks bushel baskets of citrus onto my front porch in the middle of the night! Yum.