Eggsperiment

Kathy had read somewhere that eggs could be frozen raw and then later thawed and used. I decided to do some experiments on what way works best to freeze them. I have tried separating whites and yolks into separate trays, breaking the yolks, puncturing shelled eggs and putting them in cups to freeze. A whites-only cube has thawed already and I cooked it - it looked a little watery and separated once it thawed. I had concerns but it cooked up and tasted just like a regular egg white! The rest of the results will follow.

Catch Of The Day

Out fishing this morning I caught about a 1lb catfish. It was cold and the water was quite muddy. 3 other people were at the fishing spot (just 3 miles from my house.) The other people had been there since 5AM and hadn't gotten a bite. I arrived at 9AM and was there an hour when I caught it. Another half pound of meat for the freezer! Total fish at this point in my stores right now are around 1-1/2lbs.

Acorns...Let's Try Again!

Wild Food Girl experimented with acorns after collecting the acorns in the fall (vs. I collected them in the spring for last year's challenge). So come Sept-Oct when the acorns are ready I will collect them and try again!
Here is the blog entry: http://wildfoodgirl.com/edible/zen-and-the-art-of-acorn-processing/#more-695.
She used the acorn chapter information from Samuel Thayer's book, Nature's Garden (2010). I will have to look that up...Anyone up for collecting acorns come fall?

Red Clovers

I collected a small bag of red clover flowers yesterday at Spencer Lake. With much resitance I ate one and it tasted pretty good. I thought that it could be used in a stew or soup but it appears that they make better beverages.

Wildfoodgirl.com is a useful website for ideas about preparing foraged foods. She prepared the "weird" clover flower soup recipe. First of all, note that "wierd" is in the title. Not a good sign. This is what she had to say "I sampled the broth while cooking and it tasted like watered down tahini" http://wildfoodgirl.com/edible/weird-clover-flower-soup/#more-348.... Ok that won't work.

On the Prodigal Gardens website there are numerous beverage suggestions so I am going to try the red clover blossom syrup. If that works, I will collect more for the challenge and use challenge approved ingredients. http://www.prodigalgardens.info/red%20clover%20recipes.htm... Details of this experiment to follow...

Cattails!

Cattails were plentiful at Spencer Lake yesterday. But what do you do with them? The prodigal gardens website has some interesting recipes:

http://www.prodigalgardens.info/cattail%20recipes.htm

Cattail shoots:
Rice pilaf
Wild-rice soup

Flower heads:
Cattail flower pickles
Cat-on-the-cob

Cattail pollen:
Pancakes
Biscuits

Back to Collecting

It took a bit of searching but I found the post from last year when I started collecting Mulberries. It was on June 7th last year. Despite the cold weather earlier this year the tree is only about 4 days behind last year. I put down some tarps in the back to catch the falling fruit this year. A few ripe berries have fallen so far, I expect the first big dump in 1-2 days.

Sharon, the Jacksons, and I are going on a fishing and foraging excursion early early tomorrow morning. Hopefully there will be exciting things to post!

Ugliest Invention of the Day

So finally today one of my machine designs has moved from concept to reality. When I got my bag of oats to plant it became apparent that i would need to come up with a way to remove the hulls. While contemplating the task I saw my noodle maker machine sitting on a counter top. Could it be that easy? No, of course not. After a bit of contemplation and a discussion with a brewer friend, who regularly has grain processed, the rollers on a rolling mill need to be textured. At an auction a few weeks later I spotted another pasta maker. I built a hopper from scrap sheet metal scrounged from an old computer. Today I finally installed the new drive belt on my century-old lathe. This was the first time I got to do more than a few minutes worth of work on it. Unfortunately the slowest speed is still really fast, not so good when you're trying to do knurling work. Blah blah blah, boring to anyone who is not a machinist. Bottom line is, I managed to texture the rollers. A handful of screws, a scrap of laminate flooring and part of a small crate assembled together to make my rolling mill.

I have a philosophy - ugly but effective is still effective. The mill won't win any beauty contests but it does the job. Now if I can just build a device to separate the hulls from the oats...