Vinegar--More Than Just for Pickles!

I've got vinegar on my mind lately, because it's canning season and pickles use up a lot of vinegar.

But did you know that vinegar has many other uses as well? Plus, it's absolutely nontoxic and a natural disinfectant, so you never have to worry about using it in areas where food or little fingers will be. The following ideas are taken from my book What the Amish Can Teach Us About the Simple Life, available in stores and online.

• Mop floors: Use a good glug of vinegar in a bucket of warm water, or your kitchen sink, and get mopping. There is no need to rinse, and when your floors dry clean and streak free, there is no lingering vinegar smell. You can use this on wood laminate floors, by the way.
• Disinfect counters: Spray full-strength vinegar on kitchen and bathroom counters and leave it to air dry. It kills most bacteria, molds, and viruses. Keep a spray bottle filled with vinegar handy in both the kitchen and bathroom and you can spritz and go.
• Clean windows and glass: A quarter cup of vinegar mixed in a quart of water makes a great window and glass cleaner. Keep it in a spray bottle and wipe dry with newspaper, paper towels, or a clean, lint-free cloth.
• In your laundry: Use a cup of vinegar in the rinse cycle of your washing machine. It will make your clothes soft and remove soap residue.
• An old-fashioned drain cleaner: This is my personal favorite. When my kids were younger they loved "helping," and now that I have young grandchildren I expect the help will continue in the coming years! Once a month or so, pour half a cup of baking soda into your drain and then follow that with half a cup of vinegar. You can eyeball the quantities because amounts aren't critical. The resulting volcano is great entertainment and the reason you'll have enthusiastic helpers! Let the mixture sit for about 15 minutes and then pour boiling water down the drain. If you have an actual clogged drain, use this method instead of buying commercial drain cleaner, and when the time comes to add the boiling water, use a clean toilet plunger and plunge until the clog shifts and the water disappears effortlessly down the drain. A few times over the years, I've had to plunge twice, but this method hasn't failed me yet.

Here's a picture of the volcano. It definitely loses something in the translation. :)

There are many more great ideas for using vinegar in my book. But these will get you started. Best of all, vinegar is inexpensive. And if you buy by the gallon, you've got lots of cleaning power for just pennies. Frugal. Simple. Practical. Can't beat that!

I hope today finds you and your loved ones happy and healthy and enjoying plain and simple living at its homemade best!

Blessings!
Georgia

Chicken Tortilla Soup

Here's a soup "recipe" that I throw together when I have the ingredients and want a special treat.

Place some cut up chicken pieces in about a quart of chicken broth; add a small handful of rice so it can cook while the chicken does. The amounts aren't critical, but you'll want plenty of broth. I like adding hot sauce to the broth mixture. Try using Cholula Hot Sauce--it's very tasty but not so hot that it burns your tongue.

Meanwhile, chop up some onions, tomatoes, and avocados; shred some Cheddar cheese; and have broken tortilla chips and sour cream handy.

Ladle the soup into big bowls, leaving plenty of room to add the toppings. Because I love the crunch from the broken tortilla chips, I add those a bit at a time as I'm eating so they don't get soggy.

That's all there is to it. I make this dish even simpler by always having quart jars of home canned chicken and broth on my pantry shelves. Then all I have to do is throw in the bit of rice to cook while the soup is heating and I'm chopping vegetables. A very tasty meal can be on the table in about 20 minutes. Not bad!

 

 

 

I hope you try this quick and easy soup. You're gonna love it!

 

May you and your loved ones be blessed today!

 

Georgia

Peach Apricot Jam

One of my readers recently sent me a recipe for Peach Apricot Jam, and since peaches are currently being harvested in my neck of the woods (and probably where you live as well!), I thought this particular recipe would be a timely offering.

Peach Apricot Jam

 

2 1/2 cups apricots, crushed

2 cups peaches, crushed

1 package MCP pectin (powdered)

1/4 cup lemon juice

7 cups sugar

1/4 tsp. butter

 

Measure the fruit crushed--you'll need a bit more fruit than what's listed because when you crush the fruit you lose volume. Place the measured fruit into a very large, stainless steel pot. Measure out the sugar and set it aside for now. Add the pectin and the lemon juice to the pot with the fruit and turn the heat on to high. Bring the mixture to a full rolling boil on high heat while stirring constantly.

 

Quickly stir in the sugar and return to a full rolling boil; boil for 4 minutes, stirring constantly. Remove from heat and add the butter. Stirring occasionally, allow the jam to settle for 4 to 5 minutes, so the fruit is dispersed throughout the jam. Skim off any foam that collects on the top.

 

Ladle the jam into clean, hot pint or half-pint jars, filling to with 1/8 inch from the top.

 

Wipe the jar rims and threads using a wet paper towel or cloth and cover with the two-piece lids, screwing the bands on tight.

 

Place the jars in the canner that has been filled half full with simmering water. Make sure there is a rack on the bottom of the canner so the jars sit off the floor of the canner. When all your jars are in, make sure the water covers them by 1 to 2 inches. Add simmering water if necessary to cover them adequately.

 

Cover the canner and bring the water to a boil. When the water comes to a full boil, start the processing time as follows:

 

0 - 1,000 feet in altitude: 10 minutes

1,001 - 3,000 feet: 15 minutes

3,001 - 6,000 feet: 20 minutes

6,001 - 8,000 feet: 25 minutes

8,001 - 10,000 feet: 30 minutes

 

When the processing time is complete, carefully lift the lid and remove the jars from the water. Set them on a surface that has been covered with a folded towel and allow them to sit undisturbed until completely cool. Check the lids to make sure a tight seal has formed; if a jar didn't seal properly, it will need to be refrigerated and used within about 3 week.

 

Once the jars have sat for about 12 - 24 hours, remove the rings and wipe down the jars and lids before storing.

 

Enjoy the season of harvest!

 

Georgia

Dutch Babies--A Breakfast Treat!

This morning dawned cool, windy, and cloudy. There's already a hint of fall in the air, which is about a month earlier than normal. It makes me wonder if winter will come early and strong this year.

In thinking what to have for breakfast on this cool and cozy morning, I decided Dutch Babies would be just the thing to brighten my day and fill my stomach.

Dutch Babies are economical and tasty, and, when topped with powdered sugar, maple syrup, or jam, they have a certain elegant look to them. No one but the cook would guess that the ingredients are few, quite inexpensive, and generally on hand in most kitchens.

Here's the recipe, which, by the way, can also be found in my cookbook, The Homestyle Amish Kitchen Cookbook, published by Harvest House Publishers:

Dutch Babies

2 eggs
1/2 cup milk
1/2 cup flour
1/4 tsp. salt
pinch of nutmeg (optional)
2 T. butter
powdered sugar for dusting (or you can use syrup, jam, or jelly if you prefer)

Place a 10-inch cast-iron or heavy, oven-proof frying pan with sides inside your oven and preheat the oven to 475 degrees.

While the fry pan is heating, in a medium bowl, beat eggs with a whisk until they are light and frothy. (This will take several minutes.) Add the milk and whisk again to mix well. Gradually whisk in the flour, salt, and nutmeg if using.

Remove the fry pan from the oven and immediately reduce oven temperature to 425 degrees. Melt butter in the hot pan so that the bottom and sides are completely coated with butter. Pour the batter into the pan and immediately return to oven.

Bake at 425 degrees until puffed and lightly browned, about 12 minutes. Serve immediately, either plain, or with powdered sugar, syrup, jam, or jelly.

 

The Dutch Baby looks small in this picture, but it's in my 10-inch cast iron pan!

 

 

And here's a picture of my breakfast, half eaten before I remembered to take a photo. Powdered sugar was the choice of the day for me.

 

If you have toast and sausage or bacon to go with these, you can actually feed four people with one batch. But if Dutch Babies are the only thing on the menu, two people can fill up on one pan. However, if you have big eaters in your family (read "teenage boys") they might be willing and able to eat an entire Dutch Baby by themselves--so plan accordingly!

I hope you give these a try. They are delicious!

Blessings to you and your loved ones,
Georgia

 

 

Lard--Good for You and Your Family!

Used to be, pretty much everyone used lard for their baking needs. Many families lived in rural areas, and keeping a hog or two wasn't out of the question. Besides the hams, bacon, roasts, and chops, farm women rendered their lard supply from the pork fat at butchering time.

When I was raising my sons in the country, we kept hogs. Our first foray into raising our own pork was less than stellar because we fed them store bought feed with the end result that the meat was too lean and dry. But then we got a new neighbor--a retired man from Oklahoma who, as a kid, helped his family to raise hogs. He taught us how to feed our hogs mash, and our next batch of pork was fabulous! The meat was marbled and very tasty, and the color was richer. At butchering time, I decided to render the lard so I'd have a supply to use in the kitchen and for making soap.

Now a bit of pork fat facts: You don't want to use fat from the entire animal. The very best fat (that renders down to white and odorless) comes from around the kidneys and is called leaf lard. The next best area to harvest pork fat is along the back and shoulders of the animal. This is known as back fat or fatback. Leaf lard is what you hope to have for pie crusts and other pastries, biscuits, and doughnuts. Fatback can be used for baking as well, but it really shines when used for frying and sautéing. You could use the belly fat, but why would you want to? The belly (along with the marbled fat) is what gets made into bacon, which to my way of thinking, is a much better use.

If you want to render your own lard, it's not difficult, but you will probably get better at "reading" the rendering once you've done it a few times. Here's what you do:

Using a heavy pot (stainless or well seasoned cast iron), first place about 1/4 cup of water into the bottom of the pot. (This isn't absolutely necessary, but it will help the fat to not burn on the bottom of the pot before it begins melting.) Next, add cut up or ground pork fat. Turn your heat to fairly low and, stirring regularly, melt the fat. Once the fat begins to melt, bits and pieces of "stuff" will start to show. These are called cracklings. Don't overcook the fat. If you are using water, the hot fat will tend to spit and sputter so be careful not to get burned. But the water will gradually evaporate. Once the fat is melted, pour the liquid through a fine sieve that you've lined with a coffee filter or several layers of cheesecloth so as to catch the bits of cracklings. Put the melted lard into sterilized jars (wide-mouth canning jars work great), cover, and let them sit on your counter until they've congealed. When the lard is liquid, it will be light yellow in color, but will harden white. Store your lard in the fridge or freezer so it will last longer before going bad, although it will be fine in your pantry for probably several weeks (at least) if you don't have fridge space.

By the way, you can toast the cracklings in the oven, sprinkle on a wee bit of salt, and use them to top casseroles or add to salads or vegetables. Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote about loving to eat the cracklings when Ma and Pa rendered lard and for good reason . They are tasty!

But I no longer raise hogs and I don't have a line on a local hog farmer willing to give up his/her fat, so I bought lard this week:

 

 

 

I'll grant you that store-bought hydrogenated lard has little in common with homemade naturally rendered lard, but I was feeling nostalgic and used it.

 

 

I made biscuits (see recipe below):

 

 



 They were wonderful! Very light and flaky. If you've never eaten a biscuit made with lard, you are in for a treat. Here's the recipe:

Light and Airy Lard Biscuits

 

2 cups flour

4 tsp. baking powder

1/2 tsp. salt

3 T. lard

3/4 cup milk

 

In a medium mixing bowl, mix together the flour, baking powder, and salt. Cut in the lard with a fork until the mixture resembles coarse crumbles. Make a well in the middle and add the milk all at once. Mix with the fork until a soft dough forms. Then use one of your hands to gently knead the dough right in the bowl, about 10-15 times. Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured surface and roll to 1/2-inch thick. Cut with a biscuit or cookie cutter and place the biscuits on a greased baking sheet.

 

Bake in a preheated 450-degree oven for 12 minutes.

 

While the biscuits were baking I whipped up a batch of sausage gravy:

 

 



Give lard a try. I think you'll agree that your baked goods will taste better.

Blessings!
Georgia



Quick and Easy Cloverleaf Dinner Rolls

I'm writing a baking cookbook currrently and realized it would be nice to add a Cloverleaf Dinner Rolls recipe. I looked in my cookbooks for inspiration and in an old, out-of-print book (that wasn't even a cookbook!) I found a recipe for cloverleaf dinner rolls that could allegedly be made in 30 minutes.

Too good to be true! I thought.

Turns out I was right. The ingredients list was totally out of whack and what I ended up with was a gooey mess. Certainly not anything resembling a yeast-raised bread dough.

But the idea intrigued me, so I left the computer and the book writing, put on an apron, and started experimenting. I loved the idea of a quick dinner roll recipe--one that could be ready in a hurry for those times when you suddenly have more people than you were expecting to feed, or you realize that dinner will be slim pickings otherwise--so I knew that I had to keep that thought in mind.

Following is the recipe that I came up with. They are tasty, have a lovely soft texture, and are really, really good slathered with butter! Here's a picture of the finished result:

Quick Cloverleaf Rolls

2¼ tsp. (1 package) active dry yeast

1¼ cups warm water

¼ cup sugar

½ tsp. salt (I think a bit more salt might be good, but cook's choice)

2 eggs

2 T. oil

4½-5 cups flour

butter (optional)

In a large mixing bowl, dissolve yeast in the warm water to which a pinch of sugar has been added. Let set for 10 minutes. Add the sugar and salt and mix together. Beat in eggs one at a time, using an electric mixer if you have one, or else vigorously with a large wooden spoon. Add oil and beat again to blend.

Gradually beat in 2-3 cups flour and keep beating the mixture for 3 minutes. By hand, continue to add flour until the dough begins to form a soft ball and leave the sides of the bowl.

Turn out ball of dough on a floured surface and, with buttered hands, gently knead for 3 minutes, adding small bits of flour if necessary. This dough is very soft and sticky, but persevere. Keeping your hands buttered will help.

Grease a muffin tin. Keeping your hands well buttered, break off small pieces of dough and roll into balls about the size of large marbles. Place three balls of dough in each muffin tin cup and gently press down.

Cover and let rise in a warm place for about 30 minutes.

Bake in a preheated 400° oven for 15-17 minutes or until done. Remove from oven and immediately brush the tops with butter. Remove the rolls from the muffin tin cups and place on a rack to cool.

These are worth making. They are simple and quick. And if you time things right, they should come out of the oven just minutes before dinner is served; the aroma will surely bring your loved ones to the table in a hurry!

May God richly bless you and your loved ones.

Enjoy!

One Potato, Two Potato...

Pre-summer is upon us here in the Pacific Northwest!

This is the season when gardeners in my area kick into high gear in the vegetable patch. We haul out our tillers, broad forks, shovels, and hoes and get busy readying our soil to accept summer's bounty...whether in the form of seeds, starts, or by simply weeding around permanent plantings such as fruit trees, grape vines, or blueberry bushes.

Potato planting time is always a highlight for me. It's ridiculously easy to plant, tend, and harvest potatoes. Really a beginning gardener's friend. And if you've never eaten a fresh-from-the-garden potato, you're in for a treat--and quite possibly a surprise, too. They are dense, sweet treats, with delicate, thin skins just perfect for buttering and eating. There's no need to add a lot of fancy ingredients--just bake, butter, and enjoy.

To plant potatoes, this is what I've done for years and is considered blasphemy by some folks, but it works for me: Toward the very end of winter, I keep back around 5 pounds of the potatoes (organic) that I've bought in the grocery store. Out they go into my cold garage, whereupon they eventually begin to sprout from the potato "eyes."

When a likely day appears in the garden (in my area, it's usually sometime in early May), I take those potatoes and plant them about 4 inches deep, making sure there is at least one sprouting "eye" for each tuber that I plant. In years' past I've taken the time to cut larger potatoes into pieces in order to get more starts and, theoretically, more eventual potatoes, but I believe I have my best success by simply planting whole potatoes, no matter how big they are. I have no idea why this is, but my gut tells me it's because we have very wet springs here and the cut portions tend to rot faster than the intact potatoes.

When the potato plants emerge, I occasionally add well-composted soil and/or straw to increase the depth at which the tubers are maturing. You'll find that some of the potatoes want to stick through the soil...and if that happens, those potatoes will turn green...and green skins on potatoes are toxic. So I do my best to keep my potatoes well hidden under a protective covering.

After some time growing, you'll notice blossoms on your plants. I think they are actually quite pretty--plus I know what's coming soon, so that makes them even prettier, in my opinion.

When the potato plants begin to die back you can begin to harvest the tubers. Carefully dig down and collect them. You'll be amazed at how many you get!

One of my sons and his wife recently bought their first home and promptly put in a vegetable garden. I went over to exclaim on their wonderful new garden and hear them tell me in minute detail just how they did it. They were so proud of their efforts and kept talking about "eating clean and fresh." And then the best moment came when my son looked at me and smiled and said, "Remember how we used to love to go outside and dig up potatoes for dinner?"

Frankly it amazed me that this was his recollection because my recollection is that when he and his brothers were required to go dig up potatoes, they sometimes carried on as if I was about the meanest mom on the planet.

And then I turned to watch my sweet little grandson (age 2) happily digging in the dirt. And I had to smile because I know that soon it will be his turn to dig up potatoes for dinner, and he'll likely gripe about the forced labor just like his dad did.

It's the circle of life, and it's good.