Sauerkraut Update

As a first time sauerkraut maker, and someone who does not personally appreciate the flavor of sauerkraut, it is up to my husband to sample ours to determine it's progress. In Bill's own words - "It smells like death, but it tastes awesome!" I'm going to go ahead an consider that a positive review.

Getting Sauced with my Mom

Believe it or not, Mom & I managed to use up our all of our apples in just one day of industrious peeling, simmering & canning. Approximately 35 pounds of apples yielded just over 25 pints of applesauce for us, and could have made more, had we opted to add sugar, which, in spite of my daughters persistent pro-sugar lobbying, we did not.

We were fortunate to have willing and energetic helpers in my girls, who had great fun using our apple peeler, then feeding the resulting yards-long, skinny apple peels to our chickens. I would love to have documented our three-generation applesauce making effort in pictures, but unfortunately, my darling husband hijacked our camera for a hunting trip and it has not been seen since. :(

Despite a few technical difficulties and a cranky, arthritic knee that makes such long days on my feet somewhat punishing, the process was relatively easy and the sauce turned out delicious. The best part of the day, of course, was the experience of making food the old-fashioned way with my Mom and my girls. Pictures or no pictures, I have a feeling that my girls will remember this day for a long time, and hopefully, will someday make applesauce with their grandchildren too.

Crouching Pullet, Hidden Huevo

Following the monumental event that shall forever be known around here as Egg Day, our chicken fortunes have been fickle. We were blessed with two gorgeous eggs in one day, then nothing at all for two days in a row. As of this morning, the mystery has been solved. Check out my sneaky chick –



That’s my Annabel, who typically, when let out of the coop to graze, either heads straight for the garden to devour my infant peas & arugula, or follows me around like a lost puppy. However, yesterday upon being sprung from the run, she high-tailed it straight over to the woodpile/junk collection area behind our garage and mysteriously disappeared for a few minutes. This morning, she did the same, and being a little slow on the uptake, I finally figured out why –



She seems to prefer her little dugout to the nest box in the henhouse. This little henny has gone from barren to broody in the space of a week! What I’m wondering now, is whether or not I should slip one or two of my dummy eggs into her hidey-hole after I collect her eggs? I don’t want to squash her motherly instinct by raiding her “secret” nest, but I’m too nervous about predators getting wind of our eggs to risk leaving them there for any length of time. If anyone has any thoughts on how to best handle this, I’m open to suggestions.

EGGS!

Hallalujah! While checking on the hens this afternoon, I discovered our first egg. I'd been pretty worried that we weren't going to get one before the laydies closed up shop for the winter, but I guess we lucked out. I decided to let the girls find the egg as soon as they got home from school, and when Scarlet opened the nest box door, lo and behold there were two eggs in there! Both were small and a lovely pinkish brown, and must, therefore be Annabel's, she being our only non-Americauna (blue egg) hen. Behold the proud Grannies -



:)

The Apple Man Cometh...

...tomorrow! Mom & I ordered a 40-pound box of Fuji apples as part of a Lions Club fundraiser, and they're due to be delivered tomorrow. I'm thinking applesauce for sure, but does anyone have any other tried-and-true canning or freezer-friendly recipe suggestions for an abundance of apples?

Sauerkraut für doof Leute

I don’t speak German, which is probably very obvious to those of you who do, considering my hastily translated title; roughly, Sauerkraut for Dummies (That’s me!). Even so, I am proud to be of German heritage. My great-great grandparents emigrated from the town of Chemnitz, coming to this country in the 1880’s and settling amongst many of their countrymen and women in northern Minnesota. Over a century later and several states west of where they started, our family is trying to recover some of our German family history and traditions. Project number one – sauerkraut.

After doing a little research on making sauerkraut, I was pleased to find that the process was relatively simple. In fact, I found that I already had everything that I’d need, minus the cabbage, already in the kitchen, owing to my zeal for winemaking and canning. Here’s what it takes –

-Cabbage (or carrots, turnips, apples, etc. – kraut is a process, not a specific food)
-Canning salt
-A good sized crock with a lid (I used my 6-gallon food grade wine bucket instead. You can pick one up at any homebrew store.)
-Kitchen scale

That’s it. Seriously! The recipe/process that I used is an amalgam of the many recipes I found in books and online, with a generous sprinkling of advice from my far more experienced sauerkraut-making friends at KitchenGardeners.org. Essentially, you clean and core your cabbage, and slice or grate it as thinly as possible (we cut sliced ours with knives, but kraut cutters or mandolines are also good options), with one recipe calling for the cabbage shreds to be as thin as a quarter. Weigh your shredded cabbage as you go, adding roughly 1.5 tsp of canning salt per pound of cabbage. The salt will soften the cabbage and cause it to release much of its liquid, thus creating the brine in which the cabbage will ferment.

At this point, you’ll begin putting your cabbage and brine into your crock or bucket. It will likely take a little muscle to get the cabbage really jammed down into your container tightly, well below the level of the brine (4-5 inches is recommended), for which some folks employ a pounder our a stout mallet. My husband just punched and pressed ours down with his fists. After beating your cabbage into submission, a plate and weight must then be placed inside your fermentation container to hold the cabbage down, lest it float around and encourage funky molds to grow. We used a large salad plate that is just a little smaller around than the inside of our bucket, topped with a very heavy stoneware bowl for weight. Slap a lid on that puppy and you’re done. Mother Nature then steps in and if all goes well, fermentation begins. We are only on day 3 of our kraut, so I have no results to report at this point, but we are checking it daily for signs of progress or distress. No scary smells or mold, so I’m optimistic that we will have some edible sauerkraut in around 4-6 weeks. I’ll let y’all know how it goes!

In the mean time, here are a few pics of our cabbages’ journey thus far, from field to bucket, with more to come as things move along.

Are you there, God? It's me, Chicken.

I am a mother of two young girls. A job that has always been complicated, nerve-wracking and amazing all at the same time.

Girls with throw you for a loop. One day they’re digging worms and climbing trees, the next they’re telling you who they have decided that they’re going to marry, and how that, when they’re finally allowed to wear makeup, they’ll be caking it on “just like a Bratz doll”, (I think I’m having chest pains.) All this, mind you, by the age of nine.

Without getting too soapbox-y, I daresay that I am not alone in my concern that our daughters’ innocent childhood years are becoming less and less so with each passing year. Thanks for everything, Paris Hilton!

Keeping all that in mind, when it comes to my other girlies – the chickens – I find myself actually rooting for puberty. Their fuzzy babyhoods were a lot of fun. Their awkward “tween” phase was very awkward and also pretty funny. To look at them, you’d swear that they were mommas in the making, and yet, our flock has yet to bless us with so much as a single egg. El zilcho. With fall coming down hard and fast here in Western Washington, I’m concerned that my hens will go dormant for the winter before we’ve ever seen our first egg.

How can I get these chickies across that magical threshold called puberty and into the egg business? I’ve been so busy shutting down this premature “maturity” thing around here, that now I haven’t the slightest clue about how to actually encourage it. Maybe if I hang a few posters of hunky, misunderstood roosters around the coop and pipe in some Marvin Gaye tunes…