Brewing in a Bag

 Jason and I seem to collect hobbies.  After the success of our cider at our wedding, we have decided to learn how to brew beer.  In a previous post I talked about making an American Amber Ale with help from the nice people at Ballast Point Brewery.  This time we went closer to home to the Mother Earth Brewery in Vista where they convinced us to take it up a notch and brew an all grain beer using a technique called brewing in a bag.  The people at Mother Earth helped us get the grains and hops necessary to make a cross between a Hefeweizen and a Pilsener.  Instead of using a malt, we kind of made our own malt using the grain.  I don't know all of the beer terms, so please bear with me if you are more of a beer expert.

Brewing in a bag!

We got about 15 pounds of grain from the brewery and first we had to let it steep in hot water for about an hour to get all of the sugars out.  The brewery recommended using a measuring cup to pour water over the grains for the last 15 minutes so that the interior grains could get purged.  We knew that it would be super heavy to hold for 15 minutes, so Jason in his ingenuity strung up a pulley to hold the grains above the pot.  It was crazy how sticky that grain tea was!!

Pouring hot water on the grains

 Pouring water on beer is tough work, so I had to quench my thirst with some of the American Amber ale from a month ago.  It turned out nice.  Jason thinks it will be even better after a few weeks in the bottle.

The next step was adding some hops and then boiling the beer tea for an hour.  We were making a concentrated batch so that we could use cold water to help chill it more quickly so that we could get it into the carboy.   We had a couple of issues with the beer.  First of all the sugar reading of the beer wasn't as high as we had wanted (probably because we didn't get all of the sugar out the grains while we were steeping it) so we didn't add as much water when it was done boiling.  So instead of 6 gallons, we got a little less than 5 gallons.

Jason is good at taking notes to remember all of the details of the process

 After a week percolating in the carboy, we transferred the beer to a new carboy and added more hops.  It has about another week to go before we can bottle it.  It's fun to learn new hobbies and the beer has certainly come in handy when I have needed bribes for other teachers to cover my classes or after school duties. 

The beer patiently waiting to be bottled and consumed

What to do with Leftover Fruit from School

So at our school everyday our students don't eat about a case of fruit everyday.  The district tells our school to get rid of all unused food (throw it away), but our intrepid custodian/lunch attendant puts the fruit in the teacher's lounge for teachers to much on.  Sometimes there's a lot of fruit, sometimes not much, but most times the fruit sits in the lounge until it starts to go bad. 

When I see that fruit just going to waste my heart just about breaks.  Earlier in the year I dehydrated some kiwi fruit (yummy but left a weird residue on the back of my throat) and I have taken oranges to juice.  At the end of the week today there were about 20 oranges, 40 kiwis, 30 bananas and 50 gala apples.  I couldn't let them go to waste.

These fruits aren't organic and don't have a ton of flavor, but I don't want to waste them either.  So here's my plan for the fruit, if you have other ideas, I would love to hear them.

1.  Freeze the bananas-I have a smoothie every day for breakfast and bananas give just the right hint of sweetness.
2.  Juice the oranges-last weekend we also got some Meyer lemons and grapefruit that I can juice as well.  Depending on the yield, I will either freeze the juice or leave it in the fridge.
3.  Make apple sauce-the apples don't have a ton of flavor so I will add some of the lemon juice and some spices to make it more tasty.  Depending on the yield I will either keep it in the fridge or can some of it.
4.  I am not sure what to do with the kiwis.  They tasted good dehydrated, so I may go there again.  I am not sure if they can be preserved in other ways.

What do you do with a bumper crop of sub-par fruit? 

A Weekend with Friends

So much has happened since last summer when I posted last.  Jason and I got married.  I got immersed in a new teaching job.  And although I still have been gardening, preserving, brewing cider and mead, I haven't had time to take pictures and write about it.

This weekend our good friends Kim and Don came down from the Los Angeles area for a visit.  They have had a bumper crop of chard so they brought us some, along with some grapefruits and Meyer lemons, YUM!  We put the chard to good use by making chard stem pickles following this recipe here.  Although it seemed like we had a TON of chard, we only yielded 5 pints of pickles-we doubled the brine in the recipe and had a bit left over.

Don and Kim filling jars of chard stems

Filling the water bath canner-I love our outdoor burner!

Outdoor burner set up

On Saturday we also bottled some mead that had been fermenting since February (in a secondary fermentation bucket).

We used the rest of the chard as a topping for pizza (Saturday night) and in a fritata (Sunday morning).  Chard is yummy!

Paleo pizza crust (almond and coconut flour)

Pizza with lots of chard and other vegetable goodness!

Dinner!

On Sunday we decided to brew some beer since our carboy was empty.  We went to Homebrew Mart where the EXTREMELY helpful staff helped me picked out the grains and malts to make an American Amber ale.  We really need to get a wort chiller because it took about 4 hours for our beer to cool down enough to put into the carboy and we're still waiting for it to be 70 degrees so we can pitch the yeast.

Steeping the grain for the beer!

It's nice to have friends around who like to can and brew and eat good food.  Thanks Kim and Don!

While the Cat's Away...

Jason has been in Arizona for the last 10 days overseeing rehabilitation on a fire. He really enjoys the work and the overtime will be nice for our finances, but, to tell the truth, I have been feeling a little lonely. I have been spending lots of time working on both our house garden and the community garden. The green beans, cucumbers, and spaghetti squash are done and pulled out of the garden. In their place I planted watermelon, zucchini, and more pickling cucumbers. I am starting to get tomatoes-about 10 a week, enough to make salsa and spaghetti sauce for my meals, but not enough to can yet.

I also have done a little bit of canning. I took the last of the pickling cucumbers (they got huge while I was in DC) and made hamburger slice dills. I also decided to harvest some of the rhubarb that Jason planted this spring at the home garden and made rosemary rhubarb jam. It turned out a little runny, but I think that I will enjoy it with meats this winter.

Finally, I have been doing some sewing as well. We have lots of little babies coming into our lives and so I made a few swaddling blankets from Amy Butler's Little Stitches for Little Ones.

Swaddling blanket open

Swaddling Blanket Closed-it has a tie to keep it closed

I also decided to make the Teardrop Bag from her Style Stitches book. With both books, I wish that she had a few more diagrams to help make the directions more clear, but I think that the projects turned out cute. I had bought the bird fabric around Christmas time because it was so cute, but I didn't think it would be good as a shirt or skirt or something. It think that it works out well as a purse.

Dora (my dress form) looks good with a purse.

Close up of the bird fabric on the purse

Jason told me yesterday that he won't be home for at least a week. What other projects do you think I should try?

Sewing Again!

For Christmas my in-laws got me an Amy Butler book(Style Stitches) and an Amy Butler pattern (Liverpool Tunic). In January I made the Liverpool size medium and it was just a little bit too small so I gave it to a friend. When my mom came to visit in April, we went to Mood Fabric in Los Angeles ("Thank you Mood!") and I found some fun fabric and decided to start a Liverpool size large for myself. Then life started happening and between the garden, the end of the school year, getting laid off, and looking for, interviewing, and getting a new job-I somehow didn't have time for sewing. Well, after watering the garden today, I put the finishing touches on the shirt.

Originally I had a much longer shirt. The print on the cloth though was a little bit too busy for such a long shirt, so in the end I cut off 9 inches from the bottom and I think that it looks much better. I need to work on gathering sleeves. Every sleeve I make seems to poof a bit. I will keep practicing and hopefully get better.

My in-laws also got me a Sew-U book and I think that I will slowly work my way through the book and learn more about sewing that way. I also have lots of friends who are having babies, so I want to make some projects. I got Amy Butler's Little Stitches for Little Ones from the library and made a swaddling blanket for one friend. I wanted to try other projects so I also bought that book and hope to make some pajamas and other projects for all the new babies coming into my life. I hope to make sewing a priority, but I won't make any projects-I have a new job starting August 15 a wedding to plan for March 31 and lots to do between now and then.

What crafting projects are you doing? How do you juggle all the priorities in your life?:

What happens when you go out of town for a week

Last week Jason and I went to the wedding of a good friend in Groveland, CA and then went backpacking for a 3 nights in Hetch Hetchy. It was super fun and exactly what I needed to de-stress from the most difficult teaching year I have had in my career. We saw a bear, he was about 50 yards away and didn't seem to notice us (we were down-wind) and he circled around us. We also saw a deer in the middle of a lake in Till Till Valley. Jason and I learned better how to deal with each other when frustrations run high (we spent 4 hours trying to find the trail one day and probably hiked an extra 4 miles and went up and down 400 hundred feet at least 8 times). We had good bonding time and talked about what we want our wedding to be like. It was a great trip.


On the way home we stopped at the Clovis Farmer's Market and got boysenberries, peaches, nectarines, apricots, green beans and pickling cucumbers so that we could start canning and freezing. We got home around midnight on Friday and first thing on Saturday we went to the community garden plot. I was nervous that all the plants would be droopy and sad, I had deeply watered the week before we left, but they had 10 days with no one watering them. Instead I found that everything seemed to have almost doubled in size! I picked every little zucchini the day before we left, yet we still had zuchinnis the size of my thigh in the garden. There are little peppers on most of the pepper plants and green tomatoes on most of the tomato plants. The sunflowers are at least 10 feet tall and just about to bloom. It's amazing to see what happens when you go away for a week. Maybe I just don't notice when I go every other day.


What do you have growing in your garden?

Organic Gardening Workshop

I spent this weekend getting inspired and informed with a great group of gardeners at Camp Stevens in Julian, CA. We had great food, great resources (print and a very knowledgeable trainer), and great beauty. It was a chilly weekend in the mountains. We started Friday night with a lovely dinner and then settled into our lodge. We were a small group so we each got our own room. Our lodge overlooked the orchard and there were tree covered mountains covered in fog and green meadows teeming with life in the distance. We saw deer, turkey, owls, and a myriad of song birds. It was the perfect place to unwind from a stressful normal existence.

On Friday we talked plant positive gardening and some basic assumptions that Ryan (the gardener and trainer) has about plants and ecological gardening. Ned taught us about using sketch-up to design garden plans and linking it to google earth. Joyce gave us kernals of wisdom from her garden guru. It was a fun night.

Saturday morning came early. We "hosted" breakfast so we got to help set the tables and serve the food. Ryan led grace with a quote from Tecumseh about being thankful. Then Ryan gave us lots of information about different kinds of crops in our lodge while we waited for the day to warm up. The we went out into the gardens where we learned about double digging and increasing soil fertility through compost and cover crops. We learned how to prepare a garden for planting and using a karate chop when planing to increase capillary action. Ryan also showed us how to prune tomatoes. I learned that last year I pruned my tomatoes completely wrong. That may be why I had huge plants and few tomatoes. After a yummy lunch we had a break where I got to relax and read and breathe the healing mountain air.

Legumes fix nitrogen in the soil

In the evening we learned how to set gopher traps (useful since the gophers at my new community garden have eaten 2 cauliflowers, 3 potato plants, and some garlic) and got to see the cobb greenhouse (I helped with the cobb more than a year ago) and learn about starting seeds and hardening them off. In the evening we went back to the lodge, drank some wine, and talked about our gardening dreams!


Today we woke up to mists and rain and cool weather. After a filling breakfast of pancakes and veggie sausage, we went out to the farm that Camp Stevens rents to grow the majority of their food. They have chickens!! I am so jealous! I got to learn about their coop and run.

Their nifty-moveable chicken coop

Happy-healthy chickens

We also harvested some salad greens, spinach, and onions for lunch. After learning about irrigation, we made a yummy lunch of beans, garlic scapes, eggs, tortillas, and salad, along with some organic wine. It was tough to leave and go home. Thanks to Camp Stevens for renewing me spiritually and giving me inspiration and knowledge for my garden.