So Cheesy (and Cracker-y)

I had a revelation: I can make crackers AND I can make cheese...It is not only possible, but relatively easy to make crackers and cheese. It all started when I tasted some oat crackers my mom made, with just a few ingredients: oat flour (oats ground in an electric coffee bean grinder), salt, water, and rolled onto sesame seeds. I had given up eating crackers because I didn’t like how many preservatives the ones that tasted good had in them, but these little oat crackers were really tasty! I started experimenting using different types of grain from the bulk aisle at the grocery store, and started using a pastry stamp I picked up at a garage sale and voila! tasty multigrain pretty little crackers! I love using local wheat from my Farmer K, too, grown in Carver, Oregon, that I helped harvest last year. Also, Eric bought me a hand crank grain mill as a holiday present last year, which does a much better job (in terms of fine grain and consistency) than the coffee grinder. So I guess I can always fall back on my cracker making skills as a job if I need to :-)

Here’s a very basic cracker recipe (I’m not ready to share my super tasty secret recipe quite yet):

½ cups Water
1 ½ cups Flour, Oat flour is the tastiest
1 teaspoons Salt
4 tablespoons Seeds (sesame or flax)

Directions

1. Mix water, flour and salt in a bowl
2. Roll onto seeds directly onto baking pan, to between 1/4 and 1/8 inch thick
3. Score with pizza cutter into 20 crackers. Stamp with pattern (optional)
4. Bake at 350 degrees for about 40 min (depends on thickness), until completely firm

I mentioned a grain mill earlier. It’s a really great thing to have if you’re really into baking, because you get more control over your flour. Fresh flour is a completely different food than store bought flour, it smells pungent, sort of piney, and is more moist than store bought flour. The local wheat I get from my farmer is a softer wheat as well, so when I bake with it things are less cakey more corn-meal-like, but very delicious. I got a Wondermill Junior Deluxe grain mill, with stone burrs, so it can’t do oily seeds like flax or any kind of nut, because it will gum up the burrs, but works great for all the grains I’ve tried.

Here’s a picture of me trying out the mill. It takes me about 20 minutes to grind 2 cups (I think, still need to time it more), but it’s good arm exercise, so I’m not really worried about the practicality.

As for the cheese-making, I found out about the New England Cheese Making Supply Company from Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (look for a future blog post). From there, I discovered the founder of the New England Cheese Making Supply Company, Rikki Caroll, and her book, Home Cheese Making

Pacific Northwest Blueberry Bonanza, Urban Gleaning, and other almost free food

Jam! Cobbler! Smoothies! Muffins! Blueberry Bites!

We found a U-Pick blueberry place (orchard?) in far South East Portland, spent an hour picking, and got 10 pounds of blueberries, $1/pound.

They were so tasty! I made 5 half-pints of jam (my first attempt at jam, no pectin, using agave not sugar), and ate the rest of them.

They were so good, that we went back a few weeks later, and got 15 pounds! These had much more blueberry-ness, they were riper (some too ripe), and made sweeter, more jam-y jam (6 half-pints, I used honey to sweeten the jam, 1:5 honey to berry ratio). The rest of the berries I froze for the winter, for making smoothies. They are certainly cheaper, and much tastier that store-bought blueberries.

This year I also got free walnuts from someone Eric works with. They needed to be shelled, but they are very tasty, much more tender than store bought. We’re getting plums from the same friend, and I’m really excited. I tried doing some Urban Gleaning this year, but didn’t have enough buddies and only found a few cherry trees and a plum tree by my bus stop. The plums were bitter and didn’t pit well, so I couldn’t freeze or dehydrate them.

Next year, more urban gleaning, and maybe I’ll by an extra freezer to store more extra food.