Backyard Garden

Every year on our birthdays, we get to pick dinner or where to go for dinner. This year, however, we were not going anywhere. We are not big fans of take-out, and due to the stay at home orders, there was not any place to go. Not that we would want to sit around in a mask being waited on by people in gloves and masks. Honestly, I'm not sure we'll be going out to eat for a long time. Luckily we have food, cookbooks, the internet, and a desire to eat things we can't just buy. We decided on noodles, like a ramen bowl or something like that. That turned into Udon, and then we found out that we can make our Udon noodles, and that is something people do all the time. Not people I know, but people somewhere do it. So we did it. The ingredients were: 2 cups or 300 grams of all-purpose flour (we threw in a little gluten flour as well) 1 tablespoon of salt added to 3/4 cups of water (mix well) That's it for the ingredients, and the rest is work. Pour the water around the ...

The garden is doing what gardens do in early May. The lettuce, spinach, and peas Jen planted are trying to bust through the soil while we work to remove any little grass bits that are trying to make a go of the nutrient-dense soil we've tilled into the back yard. She is also tending to the seedlings growing on the front porch, and we are letting them grow for a couple more weeks out there before we even think of transplanting to the garden. Last weekend we hauled a giant oak bourbon barrel up from the basement. Jen's brother James had brought it to the house five or six years ago when I was still brewing beer. The intent was to make a few batches of strong ale, fill the barrel, and let it age in the charred oak barrel for a few months before bottling and enjoying whatever came out of it. I brewed beer in batches of five gallons, so this barrel would have taken ten batches to fill. At around $45-$50 a batch, this experiment would have cost close to $500. Not worth the risk. I ...

So that worked. Who could have known that following instructions would result in something that the instructions were supposed to deliver? We soaked the beans overnight, then blended the soybeans (without cooking them - I learned), then into a pot with seven cups of water. We boiled it, strained it, and that was soy milk. If we wanted soymilk, we could have stopped there, that was not the goal, though. We added a packet of nigari (sodium chloride) made from saltwater to the bowl of hot soymilk and waited, stirring occasionally. Everything curdled up and started to separate, kind of like making cheese. We put the cloth in the tofu press, and the tofu press into a large dish. The large dish was to catch the water that drains from the curds as they are ladled into the tofu press. I'm willing to bet someone somewhere has started to ladle the soymilk curds into the press without something to catch the water. I bet given the right day; I might even do that myself. We were able to...

We bought our house 12 years ago, and our backyard was filled with concrete and a giant pool. It lasted one year before we had it filled in because it was a pool, and we live in Maine. Our entire property is only .15 of an acre, and we've always wanted it to be a garden. You can see on this blog a few of the things we've tried with some success. Our first gardens were raised bed square foot gardens with the fluffiest soil we could put together. They looked cute, and they did alright. Those morphed as the wood we used to build the raised beds decayed like they were supposed to. For the past five years, we have had one long raised bed in the back yard. The first year it was full of vegetables, and it was insanely full. The following year we did the same, but weeds took over, and we ignored it. The next year we changed the raised bed into an herb garden, and it was perfect. We grew tomatoes in pots around the driveway and back porch, and the raised bed was full of mints, flower...