Puppy. TRANSFORM!

I live with a transformer.

Transformers.

More than meets the eye.

Transformers.

Robots in disguise.

End 80s nostalgia here.

But seriously, I think anyone who's seen Kamja with two different haircuts will agree that every time his hair gets done, he looks completely different. Add on to the fact that he's seriously graying and even I'm surprised after each haircut. What a strange puppy.

It's summer now so I feel that it is necessary for everyone to get into their summer gear.

Puppies and humans alike.

Well, maybe minus Tank since we're growing out his hair. He must suffer!

Unfortunately for Kamja, summer clothes = nakies time!

When it comes to pet grooming, I'm kind of a n00b. I started grooming my pets last year when our income shrunk to 1/6 of what it used to be while puppy grooming costs doubled. I did treat myself to a set of good clippers though. So worth it. That + grooming table = Amy's Grooming Salon!

Due to the lack of competition, Kamja is (unfortunately for him) a regular customer here. He'd been panting lately in the 90 degrees+ weather (in our prehistoric measuring system, 30+ for the rest of the world) and panting up a storm underneath the coffee table, not to mention gurgling and squawking like a dying seagull whenever we went for a car ride. Dark, curly/insulating hair + sunlight = Kamja bake. So not having a fondness for puppy casserole, we decided to go for the look of the year: Tibetan Monk!

I brought in my lovely assistant, PTB, and Kamja posed for his before photo.

What a lush, dreamy coat.

Mommy, I am ready! Mommy, I am ready! Doodoodoo doo doo doo!

Omigosh the first buzz!

Halfway there! Looking like roadkill!

Tank did not approve. Omigosh mommy, PLEASE DON'T DO IT TO ME!!!!

I finished Kamja, and as a lovely touch, BENGALS BANDANA!!!!!! We must camouflage Kamja so he doesn't get beaten up on the streets here in good ol' Cincy.

Finish off with treats to help him forget the trauma that is the Salon chez Amy,

And a tuck into fresh, warm laundry.

Yess!! Fuzzy Jamaican dog into aerodynamic nakies dog!!!

Tune in next time to my next victim--- customer, Paul Thomas!

Spring Bounty!

Oh, I know, it's June 23, it's officially summer. Blah. Blah. Blah. Blah.

Blah.

Things are finally starting to pick up at the farm! After eating tons and tons of lettuce and chard (and asparagus... hehe) the fruiting crops are arriving! Recently we've had peas (whose season is now over! I can't believe it!) and strawberries (also over!). I just got my first squash :) :) and some delicious delicious Carola potatoes~

Oh, but not too long ago were garlic scapes.

This is my first year pickling scapes. I've been meaning to write about this, but just haven't had time.

First and foremost, garlic scapes are the flowery parts of garlic. When garlic figures it's time to reproduce, it bolts and sends out this bud. Most of the time, when a plant bolts, it makes the entire plant gross and bitter. Garlic scapes, I look forward to. :)

When Craig talked about garlic scapes earlier this year I didn't understand what he was talking about. Then I saw them.

Oh the childhood memories!

In South Korea, garlic scapes are a big sign of spring. Everyone pickles them and they're just a delightful condiment served with meals. I don't think I've had them in years but it brought so many memories. Scapes can be preserved in soy sauce, mounds of red pepper paste, or in fermented soy bean paste. It can be cooked to soften the texture first, or pickled fresh to keep in the crunch. I prefer the crunchy pickle.

Garlic scapes are a wonderful crop. They're milder in flavor than garlic bulbs, and the flavor a little more delicate. I think it's perfectly acceptable to just munch on them raw. Pickling them gets rid of a lot of the bite, however, so you can eat lots of them! Craig says that his family runs them through a food processor and freezes them to use just like garlic. I've found that I don't like them cooked at all. Instead of becoming sweet like garlic bulbs do when cooked, I've found they just lose most of their flavor. Just my opinion, though :)

The first week we started having scapes, I was a little wary. I knew that I wanted to pickle them, but didn't know if I'd be able to do it. So I brought a little sample home. And by "little" sample, I mean about a pound of this stuff!

So on this little vegetable, the stem, up to the bulb is edible. If you run your hand on the top, however, you can feel that about an inch above the bulb, the plant becomes tougher. That part gets cut off and discarded. The bulb and the scape along the bottom, however, is all soft and edible.

From there, I cut the scape into manageable pieces, about 1.5" or so and put them in a bowl to rinse.

And voila, ready to go! To make the pickling mixture, I mixed 1 cup of soy sauce, with 2 cups of water, 1/2 c of vinegar, 1/2 c of sugar, and 1/4 c of salt. Brought that to a rolling boil and in the meantime, washed and sanitized my jars and lids!

Once that was done, I packed my jars as tightly as I could (oh, and I should mention, never put a hot jar on a cold surface! Use a towel or a trivet or something). I didn't have to worry about smashing any delicate vegetables or anything as garlic scapes tend to be pretty robust.

And then i filled the jars with boiling hot liquid. Woot!

Now, with these jars, I didn't process at all. I figured there weren't that many, so I'd just eat them right away. If you wanted to keep them for storage purposes, they need to be processed and sealed. Up the vinegar in the recipe to 1/2 c, and process in a hot water bath for about 5 minutes. The scapes will be a little more tender, but they should still have some crunch to it. I like putting it into the fridge after 3 days. Because of the salt content, they tend to keep for a very very long time.

I ate these with rice after about a week. OMG. Foodmemoryflashbacks.

I promptly went back to the farm.

I'm set for the year now. I pretty much took an entire bed of garlic scapes, mashing it down into the bag so that I could get as many as I could. There's about 6 lbs of garlic scapes in there..... Christmas presents for my siblings?

Car experiment update

T.T I got cheese, not yogurt.

Checked the temperature of my bottle that I left on my car seat after heating to 180 then cooling to 110. It was 120 when I took it out at 8:30.

The curds had separated from the whey...

I thought maybe I could make a acidic cheese with the leftovers... but the yogurt culture is slightly acidic... once I had dumped in 1/4 c of cider and a teaspoon of ascorbic acid... I realized I'm not getting any more curds from my heated milk. T.T Now I have sour whey. T.T

Welp. Time to go order a yogurt maker.

Milk is not white

Crazy day today. As a kick off to my raw milk conversion (well, it starts as raw, anyway) I decided to pick up the raw milk for my share group today.

At 9 a.m. I drove my little green car out to the Double J Farm expecting to pick up seven gallons of milk (for the 5 sharemembers + 1 for me). Well, SURPRISE! Since this is the second week of the month, Janet had two gallons of milk waiting for me T.T

OMGSOMUCHMILK.

Anyway, I brought the shares back to the pick-up point and dropped it off into a back shed fridge. :) (I felt all 007 and stuff.. hehe) and brought my two gallons of milk home. Interestingly enough, the milk looks pretty swell. I don't know what I was expecting, but it certainly wasn't a regular one gallon plastic jug.

So boring. I guess I was hoping for some kind of clay stoneware or a growler with crude cavemen/hippy designs or something. Such a disappointment.

Well, I've decided, as I mentioned before, to not really drink raw milk.

I keep thinking that it can't be any worse than eating sushi or steak tartare or ceviche or steak cooked rare.. or something, i.e. if you know you got a good product, the danger of you dying from contamination is pretty slim. It's probably harmless....t. Well, since I'm going to be drinking milk all the time though, I don't think I really want to take that one in a million chance. Meh.

OK, here's what I did. I put the milk in a pot, brought it up to 145degreesF, and kept it there for 30 minutes. While I did that, I washed two half-gallon canning jars and stuck them in the oven at 212degrees to disinfect them. Once the milk was pasteurized, I brought the jars out and filled them with the milk. Then in a cold water bath it went, to bring the temp down. Then, to the fridge!!! Done :)



While I was at the farm, I could see a yummy line of cream on the top but I think the car ride shook the jug up really well. The milk was pretty homogenous when I started to pasteurize it. I'm hoping that in the fridge, the cream might settle a little and I can spoon it off tomorrow morning to make some butter or use it in some creamy dish.

I WAS a bit of a bad girl though. I was really curious about what raw milk would taste like so I f scooped a little before the pot got warm. Seriously, I was expecting the milk to be tangy or grassy or onion-y... Something! So disappointed. It just tasted like milk.... albeit, very delicious whole milk. MmmmMMmmmm.

Also, milk is not white. It's more of an ivory. It the color of vanilla ice cream? Creamy, almost. Heh, pun totally intended.

OK, so one gallon down, one to go. Paul has been on antibiotics lately for an infection. It must be killing all of the good tummy bacteria because his bowel movements have been horrible. He started gorging himself on vast quantities of yogurt yesterday, and he swears that it is helping. So, since we had a big tub of yogurt in the fridge, hey, why not make some of my own yogurt? I had another glass jar left so I took half a gallon of milk, brought it up to 185degrees (I'm guessing this kills all the bacteria, but why would you need to do that if you were using pasteurized milk?), cooled it to 110, dumped in about a quarter cup of yogurt.

Voila. EXCEPT I don't have a yogurt maker. So I did the ghettoest thing I've ever done.

I stuck it in my car with the windows cracked. T.T It's 95 out today so I think the car should come up to about 110 (hopefully not much hotter than that because it will kill the yogurt bacteria) in the sun... I'm counting on you, MyDogIsCool.com Recipes I found say that it needs to set for 7 hours or so in 110 heat so I won't know if it worked until tonight.

People, if I'm dead by the end of the week, you know why.

I think I'm going to make some more cheese sometime today, too. Kind of tired of curry though, so maybe not paneer or ricotta.... maybe it's time that I made mozzarella. Got some rennet in the fridge still so maybe it's time for pizza night. Heh. Heh. I guess I'll have to make ricotta too from the whey... T.T

So. Much. Milk.

Raw Milk at Double J Streit Farm

What a fun day! Yesterday was visit a farm day in the Beattie household!

Ever since Paul took his food course at Miami, we've both been trying very hard to eat as local as possible. It all started with lamb. :) The Colegate farm, located about 10 miles south of Oxford, Ohio gave us a taste of hormone-free, antibiotic-free, vaccine-free lamb in April. We have never looked back. Since then, we've joined a CSA where we get organic produce, buy our eggs from free range chickens that live on a hill, and now we're adding milk to the mix.

Enter Double J Streit farm.

The Double J farm is a quaint 60 acre farm located in Hamilton, OH, just about 13 miles east of the Miami University campus. Joe is a retired architect that started offering raw milk to the Cincinnati community about 8 years ago. Since then, his program has grown to over 300 shares. His shareholders live as close as a couple feet and as far away as a couple hundred miles. Boy, am I fortunate to have this farm closeby! His 22 cows are milked twice a day, and produce a little over 70 gallons of milk a day.

About a month ago, I found Joe's e-mail off of a website and asked about his herdshare program. He got back to me right away but I was a little skeptical about doing this. Raw milk is a controversial topic in the US. There is a big question of whether raw milk is safe for consumption and whether the health benefit of consuming raw milk is worth the risk. Honestly, I have no idea. The reason I am joining this herdshare program is not so I can consume raw milk, although I will inevitably drink some to see how it tastes. I love the idea of a herd share because I can have a say in what goes into my body. When I visited the Streits' farm, Joe did not hesitate to show me the cattle, the facilities, and feed.

It's amazing what people want to show you when they have a product they are proud of :)

Heck, I got so engrossed with his family sitting on his front porch that my intended 30-minute visit turned into a 2 hour discussion. They have a very lovely home.

This is Joe's in-laws, Janet's parents, and Janets aunt?

I have thought about the possibilities of buying organic milk at the store, but after finding out that even Horizon (the biggest seller of the organic milk market) cows are kept cooped up in a pen their entire life, I decided that supermarket organic milk was honestly not worth the hike in price.

At Double J farm, cows live like they are meant to. They roam the pasture, they have calves, and they produce milk. They aren't given hormones, antibiotics, or vaccines. The one unnatural part of the cows' lives is the artificial insemination that is practiced at the farm. I have no problems with this. After all the horror stories from my mom about the bulls on her farm, I definitely wouldn't want a bull running around on my farm of 22 sows in heat? The delivery of the calves, to my knowledge, is natural and calves are born all year round to rotate the pregnancies. (don't be a meanie and steal milk from a calf!) I got to see one that was 8 days old and one that was 2 weeks old.

And yes, all baby animals are playful and adorable :) :) :)

Really, the only drawback is the cost. Paul and I don't really have a lot of extra income to just splurge on gourmet food, but this venture is possibly the most expensive component to our local eating project. The upfront cost to buy a share in his farm was $50, which Joe would actually buy back from you whenever you decided to opt out of the program - this isn't really a cost. (But it is SUPER exciting to know that I can go around telling people "I own a farm"... although... it's like I own a teeny weensy piece of a farm..... hehe) The real cost is the monthly upkeep fee. As a herd shareholder, I will be paying a $26 monthly fee for the upkeep of the herd. In exchange, I will be entitled to one gallon of raw milk weekly. Assuming 30 days in the month, that comes out to about 5.75/gallon of milk. Twice the cost of a non-organic gallon of industrial milk, but roughly the same cost of an organic gallon of industrial milk. However, it might not be so bad... Raw milk, especially from purebred Jersey cows, have about a 30-40% fat content in their milk. In a gallon of milk, I will end up getting roughly a quart of cream that I can skim off the top. And since the milk isn't homogenized, the cream naturally separates from the milk. At the supermarket, a quart of cream costs about $5. There, I'm done. This is how I justify my herdshare. With all the baking I do, I usually spend about $2.50-3.00/lb on butter (I stock up when it's on sale and keep it in the freezer), and once in awhile, I'll splurge and buy a pint of cream for $2.50 or so. On top of that there's yogurt, and cheese... and OH do I spend money on cheese. I'm not saying that the herd share will replace all of my dairy needs, but I will definitely make yogurt, butter, ricotta, ice cream, and best of all, Paul will get his whole milk.

At the end, I'm pretty sure that the costs is a little higher than what I spend at the grocery, but it won't be significantly more than what I already spend. Plus, the less I go to the grocery, the less I'm tempted by chocolate... and Pop Tarts.... ... Hooray! I can't wait to make my cookies from my free range eggs and free range organic butter :)

Oh and did I mention, Double J farm is home to a lot of other animals too like pigs...

I think the guy on the right was named Laverne or something ridiculous like that (Joe knows all of his animals by name). Laverne was not happy about having to get up from his nap so say hello to a strange person!

These piggies had funny sacs around their mouths. I forget what they're called already... but remember it had a double t in it... like bittles or dittles or something like that... ay...

Piglets were there too, getting fatten up for the smoke house :( It's definitely better to be a sow on this farm.

I think I saw chickens running around somewhere... I asked and they have over 200 chickens!!! Oh my!

In any case, I'm definitely getting my milk from happy cows!! :)