This morning I caught an owl in my pajamas…

What it was doing in my pajamas I’ll never know.

Yesterday I smoked my first home cured ham.  This ain’t one of your dry cured fancy iberico’s, this was brine cured and then hot smoked.  I’m going to try dry curing soon enough but I should learn to slither before I crawl.  In the event it was really good and it’s fun to have the smoker going for any reason.  After a generous 8 hours of oak smoking I brought it in the kitchen and drained off the gravy/fat/grease into a big pyrex pitcher, re-wrapped the ham and went to bed.

I went out to the kitchen just before 5 to get some water and a bird flew from the dining table across the kitchen and landed on the stove hood.  I finally got some eye focus working and saw that it was a screech owl but something was off.  Evidently after being rudely thrown through the kitty door by our favorite predator it had suffered the additional indignity of falling into the ham goo which it had then distributed liberally around the kitchen.  From the (owl) waist down it was completely basted in spicy barbecue ham stuff.  It was resigned to letting me catch it and I toweled some of the sauce off and checked for broken bones.  The cat usually brings birds in unharmed and brings them to me.  I’ve gotten pretty good at catching them and letting them go (it was a meadowlark just last week).  The rodents, pack rats, mice, swamp rabbits, whatever, he brings in but usually eats, pronto.

Feeling that the owl  (its hard not to spell it like Pooh, ‘wol’) was going to be OK I showed it to herself and we let it go.  It flew away with that wonderful muted flight that owls have and I hope that it could groom the ham sauce away.  I bet its mate would have some pointed things to hoot about, what with the spiciness, the smokiness, the cattyness and the sauciness.

 

How much do I miss Mexico?

monte alban

I miss Mexico so much that I made manchamanteles. Usually translated as ‘tablecloth stainer’ it is one of the famous seven moles of Oaxaca, deliciously evocative of that wonderful place though something of a job to make. With onion, garlic, sesame, cloves, allspice, pecans, almonds, prunes, cinnamon, oregano, bananas, pineapple and a big pile of chilis there is a lot of flavor in this sauce. I like the version in Susanna Trilling’s “Seasons of My Heart” cookbook, a great guide to Oaxacan cooking. All the ingredients are toasted or fried and ground or blended and by the time I was done I decided it should be called ‘ensuciacocinas’ (roughly, ‘befoul kitchens). When the various components are all combined the result boils and bloops like lava sending molten blobs around the stove and cook. It was all worth it, the balance of chilis, spices and fruit making for a memorable coating for one of our fat chickens.

In Oaxaca one can buy premixed moles in the market but locals are somewhat dismissive of their quality ( so who buys them? ) and very proud of their own versions. One time I was packing to come back to the States when a knock at the door proved to be our friend Jaime with a big tupperware of his granny’s mole for me to bring home. Mmmm.

the view from Yagul, Oax.

Another visit there I was buying chilis at the market, chilcostles, amarillos, pasillas, etc., and ended up behind a local woman who was stocking up for making a mole for a family reunion at which she’d be feeding more than a hundred. The ingredients filled two large grain sacks and required the services of a porter to get to her car and that was just the spices and chilis. Her care and precision about every aspect of the ingredients was an inspiration to me and I always think of her when I make a mole.

 

Now that, my friends, is a lumberjack you can believe in

We got struck by lightning in the summer and the scoring on the five pines that were hit let the bark beetles in and killed the trees so I’ve been taking them down.  We should get excellent lumber from them although we’ll miss the shade.

 

We’re back!

After months of delay all the patos estan alineados and I’m back in the blogosphere at least this small rural corner of it.  Our computer went all seppuku on us and lots of addresses, passwords and files of all kinds are trapped in the wreckage.  If you haven’t heard from us in a while this is my all purpose excuse and I’m sticking to it.

It is fall here but we still have flowers and butterflies.  I particularly like this one with it’s exotic tropical look and odd fluttery flight.

 

More fermentation

There’s something about early spring weather in south Georgia that makes me want to brew. The afternoons are sunny and pleasant but the nights are cool enough that one can count on a vat of ale maintaining the correct temperature for fermentation. In the past week I made a big batch of mead, which will be combined with our harvest of muscadines from the fall for melomel or pyment. Currently the grapes are in the freezer, repeated freezing and thawing being an acceptable substitute for bare footed peasants in breaking the skins. As I’ve said before Ken Schramm’s method for making fruit meads is wonderful. By making a plain honey/water/yeast mead, letting it ferment to 80% and then adding fruit one can avoid any cooking or sterilization of the fruit, preserving the delicate aromatics and flavors. The alcohol present from the initial fermentation prevents infection and the slowing ferment prevents the scrubbing off of volatiles by CO2. Mead wants a slightly higher ambient fermentation temperature than beer so it’s in a spare room bubbling merrily.

While I went through the fancy beer phase that most home brewers succumb to early on, making raspberry wheats, peach lambics etc. lately I’ve been focussed on traditional British ales. My favorite British beers tend to be country ales from the southwest of England followed closely by London styles like Fuller’s and Young’s. I like a tad more floral hopping than the most traditional British beers but their dry, buttery malt flavor is the grail I seek. This week I made a london ale from Maris Otter Crisp malt and a Wyeast London ale starter, bittered with Northern Brewer hops and finished with Centennial, a new variety for me. I always add lots of honey (more about that later). The ‘07 hop harvest was a near crisis and prices are horrifying, some six times what they were two years ago. Centennial has notes of Cascade and Fuggles and is quite strong with a fine floral aroma for dry hopping.

Adding honey to beer does not do what most people think it does, like sweeten, thicken or darken it. Commercial beers with honey in their names tend to add it after fermentation as a flavoring, taking advantage of the positive connotations people have to seeing the word honey on a label. Dundee’s Honey Brown, made by Genessee is an example of this. Honey by itself has many ways in which it inhibits fermentation, one of which is a paucity of nutrients for yeasts. Barley malt on the other hand is loaded in these nutrients and combining honey with barley makes the honey ferment out quickly and cleanly helping to dry and strengthen the ale, leaving the faintest hint of floral honey flavor. By keeping the honey sugars as 20% or less of the total it doesn’t slow fermentation (a fast steady ferment encouraged by a high pitching rate is a key to good British ale) and tends to a good crisp finish on the palate.

For more about using honey in beer and ale feel free to contact me through the comments. Cheers!

Gratuitous camelias, because I can and for Red Barber’s 100th.

 

It’s alive!

It is a real pleasure to buy something that is exactly what it is supposed to be and that is why I’m pleased to report that we have an excellent new sourdough culture. We make most of our bread at home and have for years. For the last three years we’ve used a starter we got from the best bakery in Maine, Black Crow Breads. With Ellen at work I’ve been doing more of the bakery and at some point I forgot to keep some starter and we lost our line.

Fortunately the intertubes came to the rescue and we got a San Francisco sourdough from sourdo.com  . It’s been 20 years since I tried a dried sourdough culture and back then the results were terrible. I’ve learned a lot about sourdough since ( and beer, mead, lactobacilli etc. ) and this worked out really well. Following the instructions it took three days to really come alive but after a couple of trial batches I’m prepared to give it my unqualified approval.

Sourdough bread making takes endless repetition to be able to recognize and count on the growth curves involved. The way we do it is to take the starter from the fridge in the morning, feed it and let it come to room temperature. Then we make a sponge with two cups of starter, two of flour and one and a half of water, stirred, it sits for 2-4 hours. The remaining cup of starter is fed and after those same 2-4 hours returned to the fridge. The sponge is worked into 5-6 cups of flour and another cup or so of water, kneaded for 12 minutes by hand and left to rise over night. The fridge will do but it is better to have it in the forties (F). Cold rising lets the flavors develop a depth and interest. In the morning the dough is allowed to reach room temperature, formed into loaves and allowed to rise at 70F usually for about three hours, followed by baking in the usual way. The results:

 

What Mikey’s reading now

We’ve discovered the Chamblin Bookmine in Jacksonville.  A huge warren of a place full floor to ceiling with new and used books, it has become a twice a month habit.  A wonderful discovery for me is Shusaku Endo.  Writing ‘calm and understated’ novels of seventeenth century Japan, he is fascinated by the early interaction between feudal Japanese culture and the first Christian missionaries.  ‘The Samurai’ is melancholic yet beautiful and reminded me of Knut Hamsun  (high praise from me).  On our last trip to Jax I picked up another one, ‘Silence’ and I’m looking forward to it.

A book that really lit me up is ‘The Song of the Dodo, Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction’ by David Quammen.  Rare birds and animals, exotic islands, Alfred Wallace and discussions of current understandings of evolution and ecology, all subjects I’ve been interested in since I was just a little twitcher.  The first part of the book spends quite some time with Alfred Wallace.  I heard about him a couple of years after I first crossed the ‘Wallace Line’ between Bali and Lombok in Indonesia.  I had noticed, vaguely but distinctly, that there was a big difference between the islands and that I had crossed something.  Looking back at Bali with the sunset lighting up its clouds and mountains I felt I was in a new and different world but I assumed that perhaps all the Indonesian archipelago had the same variations.  What Wallace saw was that from Bali west and north to the Malay Peninsula there was a commonality to the flora and fauna that changed drastically to the east and south.  Bird species in particular are remarkably different.  Using this as a start Quammen looks at the importance of insularity in evolution and what it means for larger issues of rarity and extinction.  This is a very important, interesting and entertaining book, I can’t recommend it enough.

 

Holiday Thanks To Our Customers

We’ve had a busy holiday season what with moving bees around and sending out all the Christmas orders for honey.  Our commercial site, beeherenow.com, has been hearing from our wonderful customers and they’re really nice.  Here’s an example:

” Hi, everyone   I’m ordering some of your wonderful honey for my auntie in PA.  She’ll LOVE it.  Thanks much for your hard work in providing such a precious product “

And another:

“A long-time fan, love-love your products.”

One all-together excellent customer even sent us some of the mead he made from our honey.  How good is that?  Here’s a picture to prove it along with some of today’s camelias.  It’s nice to be able to pick flowers at Christmas time.  We had more much-needed rain last night and it’s a nice soft day in Georgia.

 

Powerful eggs

Using our own eggs means being a little careful with recipes.  Fresh, large whites can be explosive in the oven.  Ellen had a famous adventure with a honey pound cake that I caught on film but can’t find now.  Imagine pound cake batter in a pyroclastic flow all over the oven.

Here’s a good use of potent fresh eggs,  a carmelized onion and gruyere souffle that stopped just short of volcanic.

 

Here come the Bees

Here’s a sight to warm a bee man’s heart, a full load of bees safely delivered.  These girls sure were happy to get to Georgia after some chilly Maine December.  They’re all settled out in the woods now and seem glad of it.