Home-Made Pasta and Ravioli

With the power out, I got kind of bored so I decided to try my hand at making homemade pasta. First big issue... I had no recipe. I rely on google for anything new I try. No power means no google--gasp!

I used my perogie dough recipe as a start and made some modifications--with great success.

This was our first attempt at cooking with the dehydrated eggs from our food stores. I mixed 1 tbs egg with 1 tbs water and assumed that made about 1 egg's worth of egg-like goo.


Egg Noodles:

6 tbs dehydrated egg
6 tbs water
Mix until smooth.

To this add:
2 cups all purpose flour
~5 tbs more water until the dough holds together.

Mix and knead until smooth, then roll out to about 1/4 - 1/8 inch thick. Munchkin kitchen labor is optional.


Slice with pizza cutter into ribbons.



Place on towel to dry slightly.

Boil in lots of salted water until al-dente. We ate them with just a little butter and they were delicious.

For the Ravioli, I followed a similar pattern with fewer eggs in the dough (not sure why, it just seemed like the thing to do).

Ravioli Dough:
2tbs egg, 2 tbs water, 2 tbs powdered milk
~1 cup flour, more water to make dough.

Filling:
1 cup cottage cheese, 1 fresh egg, 1 tsp Italian seasoning, ~1/4 cup bread crumbs

Assembly:
Roll dough as thin as you can (this dough was harder to work than the egg noodle dough).

Place ~2tbs globs of filling on half of dough at even intervals



flip second half of dough onto globbed half and seal between raviolis.

cut with pizza cutter.



Boil in salted water until they float.

We served these with spaghetti sauce and they were good. The thinner the dough the better they tasted.

Texas Blizzard

Sounds like a joke of a title, but we actually had about 8 inches of snow in Dallas on Feb 12th. It broke all kinds of records for snowfall in our area--and also made for some beautiful winter scenes--so uncommon in Texas.






Oak Tree


Redbud



Crepe Myrtle


Potato Boxes


Hackberry





cottonwood



We lost power for more than 24 hours and got to practice our 'emergency prepardness'... and we did pretty darn good--with help.

Good Points:
1) had flashlights and candles ready within seconds of power failure
2) hot water and range top stove run on gas and were functional without electricity
3) doubled up on PJ's for kids and eventually all piled into our bed for warmth
4) open blinds allowed for plenty of light during the day
5) did fun activities like making homemade pasta to keep from getting bored during the day
6) both of our jobs were flexible to allow us time for this local emergency
7) we have GREAT friends, who loaned us a generator to hook up the blower to the gas heater so we had heat.
8) house only dropped by about 10 degrees overnight

Bad Points:
1) had to borrow a generator
2) Had no alternative heat source w/o electricity
3) Had no safe, long term light source, only candles and flashlights
4) Sandra did not have enough warm clothes to really bundle up
5) got kind of bored during the day, and would have gone nuts during the evening before bed
6) had no means of baking (very minor point)


It was kind of a fun experience, almost like camping at home. It really opened our eyes to what we need to work on and what seemed to work well for us.

Daylily History

The daylilies I planted this weekend have quite a history, which I'm plugging in here, because I can think of no better place to track it (well, my paper garden journal too, but copy paste on the computer is so much easier). So from my MIL:

Curtis' great, great, grandpa, Ananias Kauffman, a man educated by the Kansas City School of Business, fell on hard times during the depression and went to work for the WPA, a federal work program that built roads in Missouri. While clearing land for a road one day, he dug up those lillies and instead of trashing them, he threw them in the back of his truck and brought them home to his wife and daughter-in-law, (my grandma). (Ananias' grandpa or great grandpa was Amish.)

They have been transplanted each time a move was made and passed on to the next generation. They are the generic, non-hybrid daylilles that grow wild in that part of the country.

Neat to have a history of the daylilis which now happily reside in North Texas and we'll see how they do in our little yard in Farmers Branch.

Dried Herbs

Just before our first freeze back in early December 2009, I picked everything that was frost sensitive and put it in the garage. The veggies were dealt with quickly (see the pickled pepper blog), but there was a basket of random herbs that just sat... until now.



The basket contained Stevia, peppermint, and pineapple sage cuttings. Just sitting in the dark dry garage for 2 months let them dry very nicely. They kept the green color and were not as crisp as the herbs I dried in my dehydrator last year.

I was able to get a large baby food jar full of dried stevia, which I am enjoying in my tea right now.

I had more than a jelly jar's worth of dried mint. There is much more, but i"m not sure what to do with it. I'm just so-so on dried mint tea, it tastes a bit like hay to me. I also made a salad dressing with the mint for tonight's dinner. I'll see how the family likes it and may post the recipe if it is a winner.

Finally, my favorite... a jar of pineapple sage leaves and blossoms



The flowers kept their amazing red color, even dried, and they made such a pretty edition. The taste of the flower is really good, sweet pineapple-y and almost citrus-y.


I have found that my two favorite spices this year have been my home-made dried parsley and dried thyme. After finshing nearly a baby food jar worth of thyme, I've decided to try to make more of my own dried herbs and blends. No sense in wasting money on old store bought stuff when I have all of these wonderful things growing right in the yard.

Permaculture and Potatoes

We've been busy in the yard the last few weekends. We got two more truckloads of compost and created some new beds.

First was my potato coffins, I mean boxes... We used leftovers from our fence and to avoid any waste, we just used the board sizes as they were previously cut so the boxes are perfect coffin size, oh well.



The plan is to plant in the dirt below the bottomless boxes, then back fill with dirt and hay as the plants grow. We'll add front boards as necessary to hold in all of the dirt and stuff (and hopefully lots of potatoes). The idea is that the potato plant will make potatoes in any portion of the stem that is covered by soil, so ideally we could have up to 18" of potato growing stems instead of the pretty waist high potato plants I had last year.

The potatoes are not planted yet, they are biding their time in my kitchen window until this cool rainy spell passes (as of Feb 8th).

The other benefit of the potato boxes is that this will free up two big sections of the garden for other things... gee what to plant?!?


Most of the new dirt went to hubby's permaculture berry areas along the side of the house.



We put down a layer of cardboard to block out weeds and then dumped 8" of compost on top to create a planting area. This is a very low area of our yard, so the extra soil height will be a help.

Per hubby's design specs, we have planted:
3 Blackberries
30+ strawberries (Ozark Beauty, Quinalt, Sequia)
40 dayliles (heritage plants from Curtis' grandmother)
1 Celeste Fig tree (that was my addition)


Bare root Strawberries from Home Depot ~10 for $3.48, but most packages had 12 or more plants


Celeste Fig from NHG, $29.99, I could have gotten the same one a lot cheaper else where, but oh well.


All of this is behind the fence in the back yard. Directly in front of the same fence we also have a new berry area with:
2 blue berries
2 raspberries
5 Buddleia (4 white, 1 purple)


All of this fits into our plan of LESS LAWN, more edibles. While I tend to enjoy my annual veggies, hubby has been in love with the idea of permaculture... basically permanent plantings of things that you can eat--hence all the berries. I'm kind of excited about it too.


My permaculture addition is the asparagus bed. This is located next to our veggie garden, just to the east side of our back fence. There was a load of sandy top soil here from the fall, and I added and tilled in about 2 wheelbarrow loads of compost. I used boards across the bed to prevent smashing my pretty fresh soil when planting.



Here is a bare root asparagus crown. I got 18 Mary Washington and 3 Jersey Giant plants.

Celebrate!

You might have to click on the pic to see it, but this is a screen shot of the mortgage balance on our home as of January 14th, 2010.... ZERO DOLLARS!! (Just imagine me doing a little happy dance now). Hooray for us!

We started in the summer of 2007, after Andrew was born, with a plan to be debt free as soon as possible. We worked through our ~22k in consumer debt pretty quickly and then targeted our mortgage with every extra cent we had. Since both Curtis and I work full time, we were able to put nearly one full salary toward our debts. We have been eating a lot of beans and rice, cut out extras in our budget like cable and gym memberships and instead enjoyed 'free' activties like the library, thermostat is set to 66 in the winter and 82 in the summer, we dried clothes on the clothesline instead of using the dryer, driving well-used cars, brown-bagging every lunch...


Why did we do this? I (Sandra) have always been thrifty and a good saver, my primary motivation is security--to save for a 'rainy-day'. Curtis' motivation was mostly me at first, then he started to see our future as his biggest motivator. The embarrassing thing to mention is that we --like so many other people in the country now-- had one of those awful Adjustable Rate Mortgages... we got a great rate on our mortgage to start, but we had a huge increase looming over us. It made me mad to see just how little of our house payment was actually going toward paying for the house and knowing that soon it would cost us even more.

The catalyst was when my sister Lindsey loaned us a copy of the Dave Ramsey book "TOTAL MONEY MAKEOVER" just after Andrew was born. It details the steps of getting out of debt and changing attitudes about money--Ramsey calls it "God's and grandma's way of dealing with money". We were also both strongly influenced by God's word on money:
Proverbs 22:7 (English Standard Version)
The rich rules over the poor, and the borrower is the slave of the lender.
Can't be much more clear than that!


So what now? Well, first order of business is a party to celebrate our achievement (and a few other family miles stones such as our 6th wedding anniversary, Andrew's 3rd birthday, my 30th birthday--yikes). We are renting a bounce house, buying lots of fun party food, and inviting everyone we know to come celebrate with us.

We have been so very blessed in our lives to make all of this possible.

Plan and Play--Veggie Garden

We've got ice today and blistery 26 degree weather, but it is a great day to plan out the garden--on paper at least!

I'm going to try a new layout this year using the "Martha Method" of row spacing that was highlighted in my all time favorite issue of MSL from March 2008, I call this issue my garden porn and when I refer to it, my hubby knows exactly what I am talking about. It is really that good.

So the rows will be 30 inches wide with 12 inch paths. For my 25 foot garden that makes for 7 planting sections. I plan to do a path along the middle of the bed, so I'll have two sets of ~10foot x 30 inch beds for a total of 14 planting areas.

I'll have the same basic garden foot print, but I'll have more clearly defined areas and hopefully not have to wade through planted areas to harvest. Perhaps this will also keep me from overcrowding things... yeah right.

I'm excited about getting out there and planting, but definitely not this week.

Some interesting finds from the web:

Planting dibble

http://www.beekman1802.com/general/a-homemade-dibble.html

Succession Planting

http://www.gardenguides.com/596-succession-planting.html

http://attra.ncat.org/attra-pub/continuousharvest.html Has a great chart for planting by temperature. Looks like I've been really jumping the gun with my squash plants.

Soil Temperature Germination Ranges for Select Vegetables
TEMP (° F) PLANT
45–85 cabbage, kale, broccoli, collards (germinate well at 85, seedlings prefer 45–65)
35–80 lettuce and most salad greens (at more than 80, germination rate drops 50%)
35–75 spinach (optimum 68)
50–85 onions (optimum 75)
45–95 radishes (optimum 85)
50–85 beets, Swiss chard (optimum 85)
60–85 beans, snap and dry (optimum 80)
70–85 beans, lima (optimum 85)
40–75 peas (optimum 75)
60–95 corn (optimum 95)
65–82 tomatoes (optimum 80)
60–95 peppers (optimum 85)
65–100 cucumbers, melons, squash (optimum 80–95)
From: Market News, March 1995.



Row Trellis: Here is a row trellis design that I saw online. Not sure if it would work for us, but it sure looks like it woudl be those flimsy wire tomato cages I have been useing for everything.