Whenever I cook rice, I use a hot box. I boil the rice for five minutes, and then throw the pot into an insulated hot box for about three hours, and then have perfectly cooked rice for dinner. It’s a no-brainer way to use less energy.
I wrote up an article for Planetsave about how to make a hot box. You can read about it here: Take Action to Save Energy: Cooking with an Insulated Hot Box
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Other than the massive amounts of cobbing lately, there has been some excitement on the food front, too. On July 31 (my birthday), Jeff noticed the first truly ripe apple on my apple tree, and we picked it and ate it. What a treat. Delicious. I have been fortunate enough to inherit a mature apple tree on my warren (that’s DR speak for ‘plot of land’), and this was the first year it decided to put out fruit. (It may have done so last year, but the late frost killed any potential.)
Over the next week, most of the apples ripened, and last week, I harvested a giant pot’s worth and turned it into applesauce. The final color was a beautiful light pink. I decided to leave the skins in the sauce, just to keep things simple… it was less work, and just seemed right, too. I got about seven quarts worth from the haul - not bad!
The end of April through early May is the peak season for hunting morel mushrooms in this area. Morels are delicious little mushrooms that are short-lived and notoriously difficult to pin down to a specific environment. Generally, they pop up near dead or dying elm trees in cool, shady woods, or especially in recent wildfire areas. There’s not a huge amount of wooded land here at Dancing Rabbit, but there are a few sweet spots to find the elusive morels.
Last weekend, I went out for a walk with two of the kids here to try and find some, and after a good 20 minutes of searching, we finally struck upon a productive area. We walked away with a few good handfuls. Later, I went searching in another spot (where we found last year’s giant maitake mushroom), and found another dozen morels of a different variety - I think they were morels. Not sure, though.
Needless to say, they were delicious, sauteed in oil with a little bit of soy sauce.
It’s easy for me to get pretty excited about food. Especially making new and different types of food. Yesterday, I went to the dairy to get some milk for my usual kefir making. I left an extra quart of plain milk outside overnight, and since it was so cold, it froze and the cap bent up and became loose.
Around lunchtime, I took the milk in after it had some time to unfreeze, and I noticed that the top looked to be distinctly like cream, and since it was still pretty frozen, it was easy to spoon out from the milk. I did so and stuck it in a tiny mason jar, and started shaking it. About 20 or 25 minutes later, I had about two little pads worth of butter floating in buttermilk.
I was enthralled. Last year, I visited the superheroes people / The Possibility Alliance community in La Plata, and they had homemade butter that they made from cream from their Amish neighbors. It was the best butter I ever had. Anyway, ever since then I have been wanting to make butter of my own.
After shaking up that small bit of inspirational butter, I called another local dairy here (not the one I usually go to that is a mile and a half down the road) to find out if they sell cream directly, which they do. It’s $1.75/pint (versus the $3 and change from in the store here in town), so it’s a much better deal to bike out there and get it direct. The milk at the dairy down the road does not have a significant cream content, so it might be worth traveling for the cream specifically if there’s a good deal to be had on larger quantities…
I hope so. Nothing beats fresh, homemade butter. Drool.
