Mustards and vinegars

 

   I have been having fun making vinegars and mustards.   Above is a citrus vinegar I have making for cleaning with.   It takes about 20 days to turn into vinegar and then I remove the fruit and give it another 10 days to finish.   It makes everything smell so good when you clean with it.  To make it all you have to do is cut up some oranges and a lemon or two, add 1/4th cup sugar and fill with spring water.   Cover it with a cloth or a coffee filter and stir everyday.   When you Ph reaches 3.5 or higher it is done.   I also made a raisin vinegar for cooking my stir fry's in, it has a lovely mellow flavor.   I made blueberry and strawberry for making vinaigrette this summer for my salads.   I love that it is all organic and so much cheaper then store bought.

 

  Another thing I have gotten into is mustard making.  I love a good coarse brown mustard so the first one I made was a lacto fermented one.  I use yellow and brown mustard seeds, a habarnero  pepper I grew, some garlic and ginger and then I fermented it for about a month.   I loved the flavor and shared a lot with friends.   I then made a maple syrup mustard but didn't ferment that one.  I had some organic maple syrup I picked up from a family in Wisconsin and used that and then for a little kick added just a pinch of cayenne pepper I grew, dried and powered this summer.   It has a sweet taste with a heat kick at the end.   Last week I made a 24 hour mustard using mostly yellow mustard because I didn't want it as strong and added herbs I grew like dill, ginger, cumin, garlic and chives.   It is yummy.

     I love messing around with these and sharing them with some friends who are also mustard lovers.  We trade our products so I get there hot sauces or home made beer.  This summer I had a lot of curly parsley I grew so I made pesto hot sauce out of some and pesto sauce out of the rest.  I froze a lot of the pesto but used the last up last week on some chicken.   Bummer.  I am going to plant a lot more parsley this year.   The flat leaf doesn't taste as good making it into pesto and they don't sell any curly leaf in the stores so I guess I will have to wait until next year to get more.

    Next I am going to make some Blueberry water kefir.   I drink a lot of water and it gets boring so a nice sparkling flavored water will be great.

   I hate to waste anything from the garden so the strawberries I pick and clean to dehydrate I use the cutting from them to make vinegar.  I cut off the top that isn't quite as sweet and stick them in a jar.  If I don't have enough I freeze them until I do then I stick them in filtered water, add a little sugar and make vinegar out of them, green tops and all.  I do the same with apples.  I save all my cores and skins and make apple cider vinegar.   It tastes so much better then store bought and is so much cheaper.

    So that is what I have been doing.  Lots of dehydrating and making soup mixes for storage.  Ready for lean times. 

Getting ready for lean times

     I have been watching the price of food skyrocket for months.   Up over 200% from 3 years ago and unfortunately it isn't ever going to go down.   If this terrible New Green Deal goes down food is even going to be scarcer because how are farmers going to be able to plant their fields and harvest and how will they get to market.   It could be the death of the family farm.

    Ideally you live on a small acreage and can have a few stock, cows, a pig or 2 and some chickens and are able to put in a large garden.    I live on the outskirts of town and am able to put in a garden and if I had the money could have someone build me a chicken coop since I am not at all handy about that kind of stuff but the truth is I am retired and my extra funds are limited.

    I decided months ago I need to start a long term food storage pantry.    I got a really good dehydrator off of marketplace on facebook.  The excalibur 9 tray.   I paid 100 dollars saving me a couple of hundred dollars.  I call mine Big Bertha.

 

   I have been using her a lot.   I also bought the bible of food dehydrating book, everything you always wanted to know about how to safely dehydrate and store food is in the book.  

 

 I watched youtube videos on how to make simple meals and dehydrate them so all I would have to do was add them to water and the meal was ready.  I found the best recipes on camping video how too.  

    As a nurse for 40 years I always go by the old adage, prepare for the worse but pray for the best.   I would rather have enough food to feed us then not enough, we are too old to go foraging for supplies.  

    I have been having fun making these and learned a lot on the way.  I also have been making mustards, vinegars, extracts, you name it.

   So this morning I decided I wanted to do something with these blueberries I dehydrated.  Frankly out of all the fruit these were a disappointment and I can't get they to re-hydrate to where I like them.  I could have powdered them and added them to pancakes, cakes etc but I saw a youtube video today where he talked about the fact that dried fruit works better for making vinegar then fresh and it is really easy to make vinegar.   I have been making apple scrap vinegar with my apples cores and peels for awhile and love the freshness, it is not a true apple cider vinegar but for flavoring it is wonderful and works great in cooking.   So I put my dried blueberries in a sterile jar, added bottled water and put a coffee filter and a rubber band on it so it can start to ferment.   This needs to be stirred daily but he says you have less chance of getting mold.   Taste it in about 10 days and when the taste is what you like then strain it and bottle it.  He also ranted and raved about the raisin vinegar so I made some of that also.  Please excuse the labels, when I bottle these I will print some nice looking ones but I reuse these so often I am getting lazy.  The really important thing is dating them, and stirring the vinegars daily.  In the back row I have some triple strength vanilla I have made.  To turn out really great it takes 18 months, you can have good vanilla extra in a couple of weeks but for great concentrated vanilla this is the best.  I used bourbon madagascar vanilla beans, 2 whole beans to 1 pint of vodka.   This needs to be shaken daily for about a month and then just once a week or so when you think about it.  I used Tito in one and for kicks and giggle Captain Morgan in the other.  The darker one is the Captain Morgan.

       A few days ago I dehydrated 10 pounds of onions and about 25 large bunches of garlic.    I really like keeping this on hand and trust me, it is so much more flavorful then store bought you have no idea how long it has been on the shelf.  Every time I see a good deal on either I buy it up.  The prep time sucks and many tears are spilled but my mandoline.    I use one similar to this. 

 I had a different one and kept cutting my finger tips even with my cut resistant gloves.   This cuts down the chopping time by hours.  Then I dehydrated them which took about 18 hours.   I will condition them jars and then in a couple days I will make onion powder out of some and garlic powder out of some and then just keep the minced for adding to soups.   I like to make meal packs to add to my long term storage so then when I have enough of everything dried I measure it up into different soups and use my vacuum sealer to seal them.  I usually don't had the spices directly to my soup mixes but will make us seasoning packets and after I have my meal sealed in the first vacuum pack I stick the both into a mylar bags,  I will vacuum seal my seasoning packets in small bags.  I date them, very important, and then I keep them in my finishing cupboard for a few days to make sure I have no bag failure and then I transfer them to my food storage buckets and transfer them to my long term storage shelves.   

    I love to eat and although I don't consider myself a true prepper I am getting prepared because our country has been taken over and things are going to get bad.   I am not so stupid to think the government will provide for our needs.   Never trust politicians as they don't give a hoot about you.  I think Trump was the only one there who was fighting to keep our country free and it is because he wasn't a politician.  So they are doing their best to steal the election and I am afraid they might succeed. They have done a hostile coup.  I have read the  Communist Manifesto,  first time decades ago and I re read it again last year, they are following the guidelines to turn us into a communist country by the book.   They started in our schools and slowly turned our children against the country, then they put them in offices, had radicals teach in our colleges, started the politically correct movement to effectively shut people up and then we are seeing our freedom of speech being silenced by social media sites.   The news is all the same owned by the same people.  Go to any channel and listen to the news and it is read off the same teleprompter approved by their leaders.  Go against it and you are attacked and your career is over.  Doctors speak the truth and are silenced.   The mindless masses blinding follow instructions and people listen to politicians instead of scientists and doctors.

    Not all of us though.  So in a nutshell that is why I am preparing.   I know communism doesn't work, I know we have to provide for ourselves and like I said, I like to eat.