Some Sun-Dried Tomato Recipes

The rush of big heirlooms and romas were processed in August, most dried in the solar unit out on the front (southside) deck. Weather’s back up into the ’70s during the day after a couple of nights of high-30s and frost warnings, looks like the peppers and grape tomatoes survived to finish up before Halloween – more sun-dried tomaisins! I keep making them, they keep disappearing faster than they’re coming in. I’ve found they’re not just great on crackers (with fresh basil, red bell peppers and feta cheese) and pizza, but add lots of zing to pasta and rice dishes as well. Mostly, though, the kids eat them as late-night snacks by the handful, right out of the jar.

As soon as it’s too cold to garden any longer, I’ll be using some of the dry-dried tomato that I’ve turned into powder to make tomato, basil and rosemary fettucini. Fresh pasta is fun to make and freezes very well, great to pull out and cook up quick when unexpected guests drop by. For the leathery half-dried tomatoes I had to go looking for recipes beyond “the usual” diced and tossed into/onto stuff. Discovered Valley Sun, a California company that specializes in sun-dried tomatoes. The linked page offers some general ideas about adding dried tomatoes to just about any recipe for meat, poultry, seafood and vegetables.

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Filed under Cultivated Herbs, Dairy, Food Production, Garden, Goats, Harvest, Homestead, Nutritition, Recipes | Comment (0)

Radioactive Spring

I am probably not the only American homesteader who has been watching with fascinated horror the events in Japan since the 9.0 earthquake on March 11, its subsequent tsunami on the nation’s northeastern coast, and the amazing nuclear disaster underway at the Fukushima-1 power station. We have heard reports of three reactors in various stages of meltdown, we watched horrified as reactor buildings exploded one by one, and we keep on hearing about unshielded (open to the atmosphere) spent fuel pools that are also in various stages of melting.

Radiation levels have been so high that plant workers attempting to prevent worst-case scenarios by spraying seawater onto the melting fuel had to be withdrawn for extended periods of time. We have been humbled by the selfless courage of workers willing to lose their lives to protect the nation from this awful mess. And this past weekend we have begun hearing about radioactive contamination of food crops and water at ever farther distances from the reactor reservation, even as we concurrently hear about the plume of nasty isotopes having made it across the Pacific to come ashore in California, the most important milk, fruit and vegetable producing region for the entire United States.

Thus it seems timely to offer some real information about radioactive isotopes that will continue to contaminate milk, meat, vegetables and fruit in northern Japan, and which may end up in our food supply too (but in much lower concentration). First, let me direct my readers to an excellent blog effort by a friend of mine who spent a long career in government [USDA] assessing various dangers to the food supply, including emergency planning for radiological accidents and how they can contaminate food.

Radioactive contamination of food: A primer for consumers by my friend, who goes by the internet pseudonym of “Deep Harm,” is the best place to start in gaining understanding of how to minimize your family’s exposure to radioisotopes in food, along with very good information about how all this works, what it means, and how to protect yourself.

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Filed under Dairy, Emergency Preparedness, Energy, Environment, Food Safety, Health, Homestead, Pollution, Water | Comments (3)

Some Issues of Concern…

First, to get us all in the spirit of spring, check out Geoff Lawton’s YouTube short on the psychological benefits of gardening. If you like what you see, check out his new DVD, Establishing a Food Forest the Permaculture Way, available from Permaculture.Org.

Most committed modern homesteaders try to keep up with the many issues of concern to us personally, our country, and our chosen way of life. Things like rural development policies, governmental agricultural and energy policies, self-sufficiency (and roadblocks to that), management of forests and water sources, etc. It’s because we care that we are who we are and do what we do. And a good many of us try to keep up daily or weekly with the best sources of information we need to keep abreast of those issues.

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Filed under Community, Dairy, Energy, Environment, Farm Policy, Food Production, Food Safety, Homestead, Rural Development | Comment (0)

Home Made Goat Cheese… Yum!

As we prepare to replace the fence posts and fencing around the garden, I’ve been considering a fenced area on the other side of the garden, or perhaps on the upper terraces, for a chicken coop, a little barn-shed and a couple of milk goats. It would be a big step for us to go into livestock (that’s not dogs, cats or doves), but with the food shortages expanding and the prices rising fast, it might be something that makes good sense.

The folks we bought this place from some 15 years ago raised goats and horses, also kept bees. I’d love to get some bee boxes, know right where to station them at the edge of the woods facing the garden. But we’ve plenty of wild bees and other insect pollinators for the fruit and vegetables and wildflowers. I’d be doing it for the honey! Chickens will have to be well protected from foxes (we have a couple of fox families on the property, and we don’t plan to kill them). We used to keep chickens in the fenced back yard of a house in town when I was a kid, they aren’t difficult if they’re protected.

My experience with goats hasn’t been so encouraging. Got our first goat in Virginia from a friend. She was half alpine, half Nubian, the cutest critter God ever made! All legs and full of energy. By the time she’d grown up enough to breed (yes, they have to be bred regularly in order to give milk), she was convinced she was a dog. Who ever heard of milking a dog? She made an great pet, but we never had her bred.

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Filed under Cheesemaking, Cultivated Herbs, Dairy, Future Planning, Goats, Homestead, Livestock | Comments (8)