I’m a little obsessed with making stocks of various kinds, so I thought I’d elaborate here. I’m a stock-making fool, and my usual recipe is a good one for colds, but I use it all the time. Stock-making is traditionally done at a simmer to get a really clear liquid, but I don’t care much about that, so I use the pressure cooker to get every last bit of deliciousness out of the ingredients.

I take the carcasses of at least two roasted chickens, plus cleaned feet and necks if I have them, for gelatin. To that I add a couple of chunked up carrots and a couple of yellow onions with as much clean onion skin as possible. I throw in up to a whole head of garlic, and several dried chile pods – right now I have New Mexico and some homegrown tiny dried hot ones, and they both get added. I toss in some bay leaves and a handful of whole black peppercorns. Then I top off with cold water.

This isn’t a science, of course, and I use all sorts of meats. This last weekend, I made one with just the bones of a smoked turkey, with no vegetables added. It’s really strongly flavored, thanks to the smoke, and would have drowned out anything else. Duck stock is good, rabbit stock is fantastic, and ham stock is really salty so I use a lot of water and mix it with some other bones.

Now, I do this in my five gallon pressure canner, so I’m using about four gallons of space, and at least three are of water. I do not make stock by halves, nosirreebob. I heave this contraption over to the stove where I process it on 15 psi for at least an hour, and two is better. Once it’s safe to open the canner lid, I strain the whole shebang through a colander lined with cheesecloth (which I buy by the twenty yard hank – this is a serious hobby of mine!) into my five gallon stock pot and refrigerate it. Once it’s good and cold, it’s easy to scrape the fat off the top.

I can it too, for storage, or else my freezers would be overflowing. Here, let me show you my delicious hoard:

It looks ridiculous, but this spring when I had pneumonia I had almost this much on hand, and I ran out. It was all I could eat for over a week.

When you can any meat or other low-acid, low-sugar products, you absolutely have to use a pressure canner. Water bath canning these things is just asking for a nice case of botulism. I can fit seven quart jars at a time in my big pressure canner, and they get processed for 25 minutes at 10 psi, exactly according to all of the directions I’ve ever found. Only once have I had the jars fail to seal on me, and I’m pretty sure that was because I hadn’t skimmed off enough fat, and grease got up under the seals. I just threw those jars into the fridge and ate them in the next couple of days.

I get seven quarts canned out of a batch and rarely have enough energy to can twice. So I eat the rest out of the refrigerator, making soup every day for lunch until it’s gone. It makes a satisfying gelatinous plop when it’s cold, and has a lovely mouthfeel when it heats up. It sounds like a lot of work, and it sort of is, but it’s not like I have to stand over the stove the whole time. And the end result is so good that it’s completely spoiled me for commercial stocks. Mine is much stronger, but I can always dilute it if I want. Can’t add flavor to a box of vacuum-sealed blandness.

Standard soup is a quart or two of the stock, chunks of whatever chicken or turkey I have on hand, and orzo noodles. I like to top it with fresh Parmesan and dunk crusty French bread in it too. A good summer soup is kind of minestrone-based, with tomatoes, grilled sausage, beans, corn, and whatever else I have on hand. Odds and ends of opened jars never last long either, as they get snapped up for making rice or cous cous.

My in-laws and their friends have been hunting all of their lives. They come from a time and a mindset where you don’t go to the butcher and pay all that money for something that you can do better yourself for next to nothing. They’re also of the opinion that cut bone tastes bitter, and the bandsaw that the butcher uses ruins a lot of meat that way. So instead of taking the easy way out, they debone, cut, and wrap every deer themselves, usually while still up at camp.

They keep a few specific tools around, like giant rolls of plastic wrap and foil, and set up the tables with plastic to keep them clean. Some years they have a great big tent set up in camp to use during the really cold times; this tent also doubles as a poker-playing room and triples as extra guest sleeping quarters if needed. But this time of year is still well warm enough to do everything outside.

They’ve got the process down. Everyone has a role and they set it up like an assembly line. Gutted and tagged deer are hung in the shade for up to a couple of days, well-wrapped to keep the flies and the meat bees from traveling into the body cavity through the nostrils or mouth. When it comes to wrapping time, the equipment is laid out and ready, and the men go and pull the bag off and lower the deer to a good working height to skin it. If someone wants the skin, they’re a little more careful, but if nobody does, it goes really quickly. I’m good at skinning but a little obsessive at getting it off whole without any holes, so I’m slower than they are.

They take the big primal cuts off the skinned deer next. The shoulders and hams are removed and carried over to the tables. The tenderloins were cut out with the gutting, and probably have already been eaten, but the backstraps come off at this time. Any meat left on the carcass is trimmed off to go with the rest of the stew meat. The head is set aside to have the tag validated, if it hasn’t been yet. If it has, they’ll take a saw to it to remove the antlers after everything else is done.

Once at the tables, there are a couple of people for each specific job. Two take the meat off the bones, in whole muscle groups. A couple more people clean the fat and membranes off the cuts, and hand it on down to whoever’s putting packages together. Some people like their steaks and chops to be already sliced when they pull a package out of the freezer and some like the piece left whole in order to cut to whatever size they need when they’re cooking. I’m in the latter group.

Then the meat is handed on down to the wrappers, in chunks of about a pound or two. It’s wrapped very tightly in lots of layers of plastic wrap, squeezing to get all of the air out. Meat can last a really long time in the freezer wrapped this way; I recently opened a package of venison that had been lost in the bottom of the freezer since 1999, and it was still good. That’s twelve years, and it didn’t even have any freezer burn. Since the fat is cut off, there’s nothing to go rancid either. After the plastic wrap, a layer of foil is wrapped around the meat too, and the name of the cut and the date are written on it in permanent marker. That’s how I knew that piece was so old.

Then about half an hour after the deer was hanging, someone’s got a cooler full of fresh venison to take home and freeze. Presto, and the only expenses were in the wrapping, and if you buy that at Costco or Smart & Final, that’s nothing to speak of either. And it will last longer in the freezer than butcher paper will, and it will taste better. And you don’t owe the butchers anything but your labor on the assembly line for the next one.

I’ve been canning fairly heavily for the last few years, enough that I don’t really have to think about some of the simpler stuff, or the stuff that I do all the time. Chicken stock is routine for me, and jams are so easy now that I’ve been canning meats. I still generally follow recipes, but I’m not too afraid to mess with them if the basics are there. I know when to break out the pressure canner and when a water bath is OK. I know what proportions of things go well together. I do still double check processing times, as I don’t want to inadvertently poison anyone.

So when we went to the mountains yesterday to get the trailer set up at camp, and I noticed that a lot of the gooseberries were ripe, I thought that this was the year that I’d finally get it together to make jelly from them. After all, I had child labor to do the picking, and we weren’t too busy doing other things. So I equipped the hooligans with bags and plastic forks to use to try to pop the thorny berries off of the bushes, and showed them how to tell a ripe one from a green one. The first clue is to look at the leavings from the squirrels. They know how to find a ripe berry.

I’ve nibbled, very carefully, on these berries all of my life. My grandfather showed me how to carefully bend the spines back and split the berry to get the good stuff out, which tastes extremely sweet. But I’d never picked enough to do anything with. This year is a bumper crop for them, so when we found a few ripe bushes, it only took us about ten minutes to get enough for a small batch of jelly. Which was nice, as it was raining by then.

When we got home, I rinsed them and popped them onto the stove with a little bit of water to mash and cook some juice out. The spines break into pretty fine pieces, so after they’d released their juices, I ran them first through the food mill and then through a jelly bag. I intended to let the juice drip out overnight but I got a little impatient.

So I got the canner ready and proceeded to make jelly. I had to eyeball the proportions, as I didn’t have enough juice for a full batch from any of my jelly recipes. I had more than half a batch worth though, and I didn’t want to waste it. So I added sugar in a 1:1 ratio to the juice and guesstimated a half a package of pectin.

From the color of the squashed berries, I didn’t think it would look all that appetizing, but the juice was bright pink. Once I got the sugar in, it became a beautiful ruby red, which I was somehow unable to capture with the camera. The jelly seemed to set OK overnight, so at lunch time I broke into one and tasted it. It doesn’t quite have the Starburst flavor of the fresh berries, but it’s really good, kind of a sweet and sour thing going on at the same time. It would make a really good sweet and sour sauce for pork, I would think. And it’s pretty, and I made it the same day that we picked these things out of the wild, and that’s cool. Two thumbs up for gooseberry jelly.

With all of this space out back, keeping the weeds down was a real hassle. Junior’s worked hard on getting the soil leveled so it would be easier to run the mower over but it’s still a big chunk. So while we were putting up fences for the chicken yard, we figured we’d put up one more fence for a little livestock.

Sheep are my meat animals of choice right now. I thought they’d be easier to start with than a steer, as the pen’s not all that big. They’re better about grazing grass than a goat, who’ll go for your landscaping if you give it half a chance. And lamb is my very favorite meat.

Growing our own meat (the lambs and the chickens too) goes along well with the big garden. I’ve always wanted to grow more of my own food. If I had a bigger place I’d get even more ambitious, but this is a good start. I like knowing what goes into what goes into me, and I like giving the kids an education in where their food comes from. With all the hunting we do, these kids aren’t under the misconception that meat comes in a plastic package from the grocery store, but this will be even more personal. This is meat that we directly had a hand in growing. We’re taking full responsibility that in order to feed us, we’ll have to kill things. We’ll do it cleanly and with respect, but these are by no means pets, and I’ll be reminding the kids of that every chance I get. They do not get names.

So once we decided to try this, I started asking around for lambs to buy. One lamb would be miserable and lonely, but two are fine. I would have liked three, but two is what I found. I’m not ready to mix lambs from different flocks yet; I want to keep my diseases under control here. I haven’t touched sheep for twenty years, since college, but I still remember some things.

The producer I found was recommended by a local friend. I knew him too, but I didn’t know he had sheep. He’s a rancher and farmer and happens to have a few ewes that he’s accumulated over the years. Only two lambs weren’t spoken for, and he gave me a really good price on them, and lots of good advice. We went and picked them up with the dog crate on Monday, and if I’d waited even another week, I’d have had to take two trips. They’re much bigger than they’d been the week before when I scoped them out.

I was worried that the dogs would run these things to death through the fence. They’re Border Collies, after all. Chasing sheep is what they’re bred to do, and Ringo is a known livestock worrier, which is part of the reason that I have him. Since my training collar was dead and only had one receiver unit anyway, I took the opportunity to buy a pro trainer model, with two collars. I got the set just in time and reminded the dogs what that collar means. They know; they behave perfectly well with the collars on.

Still, I was a little leery when I turned the lambs out in their pen. Ringo was nowhere to be seen; he sulks when the collar’s on even if he hasn’t felt it in days. Angus was intrigued though, paying close attention right at the gate but not getting excited or trying to chase. We stood out there and watched the lambs explore their new surroundings for a while and I was very surprised to see them march right up to the gate. They sniffed noses with Angus and then walked away; all was well. He remains interested and likes to lay near their fence but I haven’t caught him trying to chase one time. Good dog.

So they’ll be an interesting project. There will be challenges along the way, no doubt, but I think it’ll be rewarding. Certainly the end result will be, which we should reach around the end of June. Tasty, tasty lamb in my freezer, mmm!

Last week, Seamus was bugging me to make grape jelly. I’ve been on a jelly-and jam-making tear lately anyway, so what was one more round? I didn’t think there were enough ripe grapes on the vines, but I sent him out anyway to check.

He came back with half a bushel, more than enough. We don’t know what kind of grapes they are; they’re certainly not the traditional purple jelly grapes, but I figured they would work anyway.

It took us two days. On the first day, we picked each grape off the stem and filled a gallon-sized pot with them. We added a little water and cooked and crushed them down to extract the goodness. After that, we ran them first through the food mill and then let them hang in cheesecloth overnight to get good clear juice for jelly. Seamus did much of this work.

The next afternoon, we started in again. We cooked the juice with the sugar and pectin, and prepared everything for canning. Seamus did some of the canning himself even, being very careful with the hot stuff. He’s a little too short to safely reach into the canner, so I did that part.

The end result was nine jars of a pretty pink jelly.  After a week, it’s already fully jelled. We whipped up some biscuits for breakfast on Saturday morning and tasted it – fantastic stuff! I know what he’s going to be packing for lunch come fall, and good for him!

It’s still really new to me to share life with someone that I can share lots of different activities with too. The hunting is easy enough; plenty of men are into that. But the gardening and food preservation that I’ve always dabbled in, I’ve dabbled alone.

Not any more though. Junior was right on board with making the garden, even if it started out as my project that he was helping me get started. At this point it’s both our project; he’s enjoying it every bit as much as I am. He gets out there and weeds and checks every little plant for signs of vegetables popping out. When his peppers started growing little micro-jalapenos, he was the proud papa.

It did surprise me to find him developing an interest in food preservation. He started pretty traditionally, wanting to make deer jerky. Since he gave me a smoker for Christmas, we cured some meat and gave it a shot. Come to think of it, I don’t think I got to taste much of that first batch of jerky. I think it all went to work with him to share. That led to a kitchen purchase, the electric slicer, and my realization that two people in a hobby do nothing but feed off each other in the purchasing department. That can be hard on the checkbook, but at least we’re acquiring some of the machines that I’ve wanted for a while.

The next logical step was to try to make snack sticks from venison. We do have a lot of venison and it’s so expensive to have the butcher make them, but they’re always the first things to get gobbled up. I already had a meat grinder as part of my KitchenAid, so we defrosted a little bit of meat, per the recipe on the sausage spice pack we got, and added some pork roast to it. Deer meat is really dry; the fat tastes about terrible, so we trim it very lean when we initially process it. Pork fat is added back in to give some body and moisture. Since we’re on diets, we stuck with whole pork, not just the fat.

We had a good old time stuffing these things. I’d bought the stuffer attachment and some casings for myself for Christmas in 2007, and hadn’t got to using them yet. They went on really well, and then into the smoker they went, to cook slowly for six or eight hours. We had some lessons learned in this batch, but we’ll try it again and continue tweaking as we go. This also gave us incentive to finally get that vacuum sealer that really makes a lot of sense when you’ve got a lot of meat to process.

Since I was online buying a meat slicer anyway, I added to my cart a giant pressure canner that I’ve always wanted. I’ve done a little canning but only with a water bath – pickles and jams. I’d love to try pressure canning, like you need for low-acid vegetables, meats, and fish. Since we live in one of the most productive agriculture areas in the country, we could probably be preserving something local about every weekend. For now, we’ll start with the easier, safer stuff, and work our way up into the more complicated.

This weekend, it was pickled asparagus. I don’t have an asparagus plot yet. If I did plant one this year, it wouldn’t be producing enough to set aside for a long time, considering how much I adore fresh grilled asparagus. So we bought about nine pounds at Costco; it’s California-grown and a really good quality. I’ve been buying two to four pounds a week there anyway.

Junior’s not a vinegar fan, so he did the cutting of the vegetables and peppers to spice things up while I made the brine. We didn’t need to use the pressure canner – any old big pot would have done the job – but we broke it in anyway. It works just fine for water-bath canning. We learned the lesson that for things not under pressure, we might as well set up a table outside and use the turkey fryer and gas grill burners, and keep the heat out of the house while heating the water faster.

We did it in two batches, producing less than I would have thought from that giant pile of asparagus spears. But at the moment we have about seven quarts sealed and cooling on the counter and we’re very pleased with ourselves. We’d thought about wokring with strawberry jam while we were at it today, but the fruitstand was closed. It’s just as well; that canning is more work than it seems reading through the recipe. It’ll just take practice; I hope by the end of the summer that we’ll be old hats at it. Maybe we can even justify that tuna fishing trip that I’m jonesing for. Home-canned tuna is to die for.

Junior kept asking me if I wanted my Christmas gift early. I kept telling him no, Christmas would be fine. We’d already got his, and I thought he wanted to make it even.

Turns out, it was big and he didn’t want to wrap it. So when we stopped by his folks’  house, he made me cover my eyes and dragged it down the hall.  It was an electric smoker, the exact model I’d oogled at Bass Pro Shops a couple of weeks before. Good thing too, as he’d already bought it when we went there. I’ve wanted a smoker for a long time, one that’s easier to use than the vertical charcoal models. He has one of those, but we’ve had the damnedest time keeping the temperature steady in that one.

Besides the smoker, his dad had a gift for me of a bag of trout fillets that he’d caught for me. It was the perfect gift, really.  A bag of fish may not suit everyone, but it suits me just fine.

Last night, I marinated the fish and this morning, we seasoned the smoker. Just before lunchtime, I set the fish on the grates and Junior set the timer. I put the wood chips in and set a bowl of some more out there with it, although I never needed the extras.

Three hours later, it smelled delicious and the fish was smokey-brown. I pulled them out and sealed the extras up to freeze for later. Five bags of smoked trout are too much for one sitting.

Since Junior was gone to work, I had myself a light supper of smoked trout and cream cheese on crackers. Delicious!

Now I’m all jazzed up about smoking everything that will hold still for it. Ribs, brisket, jerky, tri tip. The dogs better keep out of the way too; if they hold still, they’d be delicious too.

My family’s never been big on insisting that Christmas be held on the actual day, which came in real handy when I got divorced and swapped which holidays I got every year. We figure it just spreads out the fun, and have been known to have it on the fourteenth just for convenience’s sake. Since the boys were going out of state with their father this year, I wanted to have it on the weekend before. Since Junior’s Grandma seemed to be getting tired of hosting Christmas and Thanskgiving herself every year, we combined the two and invited both families over this Saturday, so I only had to cook one feast.

And feast we did; I cooked to my heart’s content. The men went outside and deep-fried a turkey (which needs more practice, as it was really dry) while I worked the kitchen and tried not to get twitchy when people wanted to help. I’ve got a little family quirk, you see. We women don’t like to let other people in our kitchens. As big as it is, I was using all of it. So Junior’s mom brought her delicious ham and I did a prime rib in the rotisserie, and somehow we got everything to the table at more-or-less the same time. Except for the deviled eggs, but at least I did remember them mid-meal.

Their family traditions have been fairly consistent over the years. Grandma cooks, and I think usually the same things every year. I like to shake things up a little bit, and added in some of our family traditions too. They were polite and tried the Brussels Sprouts, but I don’t think most of them liked them. That’s OK, there were plenty of other vegetables to pick from.

It was a little weird having two tables, plus the kids’ table, but none of the rooms are big enough for eighteen people. It didn’t matter; it was just fun. Our families seem to like each other, and everyone hung out late enough for pie and coffee. My twitchy self managed to get out of the way when some of the women swooped in on the mess and did dishes – I’m usually the one in that role, but I could get used to it!

I think this is probably what we’ll do every year, which gives me a nice excuse to pick up a couple more serving dishes and maybe a tablecloth or two. Nobody noticed that the one I used was an old sheet. It was in a set of tablecloths that my Grandma had given me, and I assumed it was one too, until Seamus and I tried to spread it on the table and discovered that it may have actually been a homemade sleeping bag liner. Oh well, I shrugged and used it anyway, but next year, a real one is in order. I had a nice time using some of my treasured dishes, mixed with paper plates to make cleanup easier. I really do like to cook for lots of people, and this house has the room for it, so I’m happy to take the job, especially with a husband who fully pitches in.

The new kitchen won’t entirely feel comfortable until I do some serious cooking in it. I don’t have a lot of time for that, what with being gone every weekend, but I can squeak a little in here and there. So when the local paper had a recipe for homemade marshmallows in the food section, something I’ve always wanted to try, I went for it.

I do make candy every year, so it wasn’t that foreign to me. The first part is a standard candy-making procedure, melting sugar on the stovetop. No pictures of this phase, as there’s no way to hold the pan, stir, and click without the tripod, which is in the mountains.

 

But once it hit the ideal temperature, into the mixer it went. Man, I love this mixer. It took half as long as the recipe said to fluff it up to the consistency of marshmallow fluff.

Then I spread it out into the pan, sprinkled with powdered sugar to keep it from sticking. I couldn’t keep the sugar up on the sides of the pan and I paid for it the next day, but it wasn’t that big of a deal.

I let it dry for almost 24 hours and then pried it out and cut it into squares. I dusted the edges with more powdered sugar and ziplocked them with lots more to keep them from sticking together too much.

I hauled them out around the campfire and we made S’mores with a couple. They are more tender and flavored a little more strongly than the commercial variety, but it’s not terribly different. They melt much better, but all in all, I spent an hour and several bucks on something that costs about $1.39 at the grocery store. It wasn’t about the price though; it was about having fun in my new kitchen. They certainly served that purpose.

I forgot to bring the leftovers home; we’ll see if they go stale as fast as storebought marshmallows.

If we didn’t fail this course, we didn’t do so awful well either. I give us a generous C+.

It started out fine. I had an overly-optimistic plan, as usual. Remember the Great Meat Jello-Mold fiasco of 2007? Junior, who hasn’t yet exactly learned how I am with overly-optimistic plans, thought he’d help me out with it. I’ve always wanted to learn to smoke, and rolling a turkey up into a big fat doobie just isn’t practical, so he brought over his bullet-style smoker. I picked up some mesquite charcoal and applewood chips, and had every intention of having smoked turkey for dinner.

 

Like any good rednecks living in town, we did this little piece of performance art in the driveway. The neighbors were delighted. But hey, the dogs would have knocked it over in the backyard, and where better to sit with a beer and watch grass grow all day?

Oh, and did I mention that, even though he owned the smoker, he didn’t know how to use it either? So we were both going in cold, with some instructions for a similar model that I’d swiped off the internet. We had to figure out a lot as we went. That is what I do. It’s driving by the seat of my pants, only in the kitchen. Or in this case, the front yard, because I am classy like that.

 

One of the lessons that took us all day to master was getting the temperature right. We started off with a bang, and let the coals get good and going before we put the turkey in, but then it kept wildly fluctuating. It would sit in the right zone just long enough for us to think we could go do something else. Then the damn thing would see us walk into the house and snicker, and drop the temp down into the red zone. So out we’d come again, and stoke it back up, and try again. Eventually, we figured out that if we took the lid off, which seemed counterintuitive to keeping the heat in, it would let the coals get enough air to really get going. Then we could leave it alone for about two hours at a time.

But it took us half a day to learn that, and at half an hour per pound, with a 17-pound turkey, which is what I had in the freezer leftover from a turkey shoot that Junior won, minus the times where nothing was really happening at all, it looked like we’d be eating dinner at approximately 11 AM next Tuesday. So we had hamburgers, as the natives were getting restless. So much for making other people help me eat 17 pounds of turkey.

Eventually though, the skin looked right and the juices were running somewhat clearly and we were really getting tired of this crazy-ass project, so we poked it with the meat thermometer and called it good enough. Junior stripped the meat out, and it was cooked through, and it did smell pretty awesome, but I was all full from hamburgers and pretty tired of smelling smoke by that point. Although a smoked Junior still smelled delicious.

I was disappointed in how dry it was. Most of my oven-turkeys come out nice and juicy, but not this one. I had some gravy fixins ready to go, but by then it was bedtime. Junior had a sandwich and I grazed a little, but I was in no mood to stand and stir gravy.

 

I’m going to be eating smoked turkey for the rest of my life, approximately. I have the carcass in the fridge waiting to be made into stock, and turkey meat coming out of my ears. I had a smoked turkey caesar salad for lunch yesterday. Junior took some more sandwiches to work. I’m considering making turkey Divan tomorrow night. I expect by Friday, I’ll be eating smoked turkey sprinkled over ice cream or whirled into a smoothie.

Perhaps it’s time for another overly-optimistic cooking project: Meat Canning 101? I suspect he’s learned to run away screaming though.