The Peeper Party! ( peeper as in frogs..)

The Peeper party is an annual event which celebrates when the peepers start their peeping.  A great group of friends came over, a turkey was roasted in the outdoor oven, numerous pizzas where consumed, home brews far and wide were imbibed, and music was played till the wee hours of the night. The most profound observation of the evening was made by a friends 5 year old, who was explaining who Zeus and Zeke were to his cousin.
"Zeus is the mom and Zeke is the cat."
 (Zeke is my puppy, and Zeus is the Dad of the puppy. )
Overall, a great evening.

The first arrivals of the evening.

Pizza! 

Menu for Fundraiser : Sat. 29th, Harpswell Grange Hall 5:30-9 pm

Steamed mussels, served in apple wine broth
Fresh bread for dipping.

Corn and Shrimp Chowder
Smoked Chicken and Bean Soup
Squash Soup

Fresh Cornbread

Ginger Snap Ice Cream Sandwiches made with Gelato

Homemade Root Beer
Homemade Ginger Ale
Coffee
Tea

Live Music! Yeehaw!!

Making Soda

On Sunday, we made soda for the fundraiser at the Grange Hall in Harpswell this coming Saturday. ( For details see SSI website).
Making soda is a lot of fun, but it does require making a big mess of the kitchen, and getting water everywhere. However, that is a small price to pay to have 50 bottles of delicious homemade soda pop to share with friends at the fundraiser.

Straining the ginger ale mix

Ginger Ale is made with ginger, lemons and sugar.

The root beer swirling in the container.

Bottles cleaned and ready to go. ( Root beer goes in brown bottles, ginger ale goes in green.)

Pour, cap, and wait one week before partying with friends who want some homemade pop.

Pizza night

As most of you know, pizza night is a very special time. At Stone Soup, making pizza starts with getting the fire going a few hours ahead of time, so the oven is hot. Then, when its all ready to go, pizza dough is prepared. We made dough with whole wheat flour, and generally, make everything with whole wheat flour, even cookies.

The hardest part of making pizza is the implement used to  get the pizza in and out of the oven. It has a long handle, made of a stick, and a pizza board on the end. It does not fit in the kitchen very well, and generally, creates the impression that it will knock over all the things in the kitchen made of glass. However, no such thing happened, and it was a great help in getting the pizza in and out of the oven with no injury incurred.

 Here we have wild mushroom pizza ( we canned the mushrooms when they were plentiful) and wild mushroom and onion calzone. Served with beer, and a rainstorm.

"Screw Pizza. I want hugs."

Smoked Fish

Having acquired 1 1/2 pounds of salmon, the consensus was that it should be smoked. I made a brine for it, and let it sit for about 1 day.

 

 The fire in the smoker is made with apple wood, a very nice wood to smoke foods with.

 The brine sits below the fish, in a bowl right over the fire.

The whole thing gets closes up, and the smoking starts.








About 30 minutes later, we have fish smoked with apple wood.  I pulled off some Apple Wine which I started in late October, to have with it. Delicious.

The art of preparing root vegetables

At Stone Soup, a lot of cooking is done in a  Finnish fireplace. A Finnish fireplace has a woodbox, where the wood burns, an oven to cook in, and a chambered chimeny, which circulates heat back through the chimeny instead of going out through the top. All the wood has to be burned up before you close up the chimeny vent, or else smoke and other noxious death-bringing gases are piped into the house. That is an important thing to understand.

Implements

We cook in that oven a lot- because it is almost, exactly a bazillion times more delicious then any other way of cooking. The flavors are very pronounced, the smoky flavor can be integrated into the food by removing the cover, and it is very energy efficient, because the heat you are cooking with also heats the house.

Carrots, leeks, turnip, rutabaga, beets, celery, my thumb .

Into the oven with you veggies.

And out comes marvelous food.

Adjusting to the Chickens

This is the first time I have lived with chickens.  And they are shocking. A number of things have happened with the chickens.
This is one of the more dramatic chicken experiences:
When we first got the chickens, we mixed two flocks, and there where two little ones that didn't fit in. They got attacked and hassled all the time, so, as their guardian, I decided to keep them outside of the hen yard. I fed and watered them, seperatly, and made a little home for them in buckets placed on the side, filled with hay.  But, it didn't take....after about two weeks, one of them wandered off. They next day the other one did too. After two nights of them missing,  I enlisted Jim to help me find these missing chickens and bring them home.
Zeus, who is a sheepdog and a very good one at that took off on his own way.

We checked the neighbors chickens, and they weren't there.  So we mosied back over to the house and something obviously had gone awry.
Zeus was all worked up, and in the neighbors yard running around their porch.  When we had gone off to look for the chickens, Zeus did the same, but he had found them.
I went and got some food figuring I could coax them with some food and some nice cooing sounds.
When I arrived, with my plan and materials, I saw the situation had gotten completely out of control.
Zeus took it very seriously to get the chickens. So seriously he had bitten both of the chickens in the butt trying to get them to come out from under the porch.  The severity of the damages was not yet assessed , however, I feared the worse.
Jim pulled out the first chicken.......its was all bitten up, muscles showing, and real quiet, not even fighting.  I held that one while Jim pulled the next one out. She put up a little more of a fight, but was also really torn up and hurt.
I never had chickens before, but I knew these two were not going to make it.  You can imagine the rest- we killed them respectfully and quickly.
The next day, we had company, and cooked them up with some root vegetables. The meal came out very well.

I realized that being respectful of chickens is important, however, they are not puppies with feathers. I love caring for them, building a relationship with them. Killing  them is hard, but, in order for anyone to
eat meat, something has to die.

Sumac Tea.....who knew.

Today, I learned something very interesting.  The little, dried up clusters of sumac berries make a wonderful tea.
I always related to them as ornamental type berries,  and in my youthful foolishness, I may or may not have used them as artillery for imaginary battles with my loved ones.

 However, they make wonderful tea.






Strain the tea,

Then make kombutcha!

The Cornbread.

I don't know if anyone is harboring any feelings one way or the other about corn bread. I really hadn't until recently. Cornmeal ground fresh from kernels of corn is delightful. The corn stays very sweet and tastes just like corn, however I think it looses some of its sweetness when its ground up and sits for a while.





Cornmeal, if you think about it, has no reason not to taste like corn, and it is kind of strange to be amazed at the fact that it does taste like corn.....all that aside, I do want to add that last night, I made green bean casserole, with canned soup and canned fried onions.