Muscadine Grape Jelly

This weekend we were looking for something to do while waiting for our daughter to finish up feeding the horses at the barn where she rides. We drove past a place where we had previously picked grapes on Highway 90: Windy Hill Vineyard. They grow a Florida grape known as muscadines. These are large grapes with a particular flavor and large seeds.

Not yet ripe grapes growing on the vine.

 They had many rows of muscadine grapes. Pick your own were about $1.30 per pound, and you could buy pre-picked muscadines for $1.80/pound. They only take cash or check, so make sure you bring one or the other. They told us a full bucket would cost about $15.

Great social distancing activity, we were the only people in our row.

 We drove down to an area where they told us we could find both the red/purple muscadines and the golden scuppernongs and tried to keep our total under $20 (which was all the cash we had). We wanted to make jelly and from past experience, each of the varieties makes their very own beautiful color of jelly. The scuppernongs tend to have a sweeter flavor.

We picked both the purple muscadines and the scuppernong (gold) variety.

We ended up with about four pounds of each. Not enough for a full batch, but I did find this small-batch recipe: Small Batch Muscadine Jelly I used 2.5 pounds of each type to get the 2.5 cups of juice required (I had to add 1/2 cup water though because I couldn't squeeze more juice out, perhaps 3 pounds would be better). I got to use the frozen lemon juice I had from my Meyers lemons last winter. I estimated 2 tablespoons of lemon juice for the "juice of one lemon". I ended up getting four 8oz jars from each variety. The smaller batches work well because I have had had to toss jelly that didn't get eaten within 18 months before.

Garnet and Gold Muscadine Grape Jelly

We still have some muscadines left to eat fresh, although I have seen muscadine pie recipes as well. I love the flavor of muscadine grapes, they even are used in my favorite wines from Lake Ridge Winery Southern White, Southern Red, and Sunblush. I can usually find the white and red varieties at Publix.

Gator Sausage Sliders

So in my last post I mentioned that we had got some alligator sausage through the Red Hills Online Farmers Market. I found a recipe for alligator sausage sliders with roasted red pepper remoulade that also had instructions for refrigerator pickles. My husband made it and it was delicious. We didn't plan well or we could have had a nice vegetable side. This dish could have been more local by using local or homegrown cucumbers for the pickles.

We chose to eat alligator because I am allergic to mammalian meat and it is nice to have another option besides poultry, fish, or vegetarian dishes. Gator has an interesting flavor, I saw it described as a cross between chicken and pork. It is really tasty. And while alligators were once on the endangered species list, conservation efforts have brought their populations back. They are now managed by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission that regulates their harvest by hunters, licenses trappers of nuisance gators (gators that have lost fear of humans and are a risk to people and pets), and regulates gator farming.  

The alligator meat that we purchased was from our local nuisance wildlife trapper who also runs an alligator farm: Vaughan Gators We hope to buy different types of alligator meat from them in the future to try some other recipes.

Recipe found here

Pandemic Pickled Okra

So it has been about two years since my last blog post. I have been busy working on a PhD in Biological Oceanography. However, with the pandemic of 2020 I started worrying again about food supply chains and well, with being home for the last four months I have had some time. I also took a break from dissertation writing (because working from home while having kids at home and even trying to school them did not mix with my PhD work).

So both my husband and I have been working in the garden and things are growing. We both love pickled okra (the kids, not so much). But it's pricey (approximately 3.50 per 16 oz jar, sometimes more depending on brand). However, my six okra plants have only started producing (we were a little late in planting) so I bought a pound of okra from the Red Hills Online Market . I also grabbed some gator sausage there because a couple years ago I got a tick bite that makes me allergic to all mammalian meat and it's nice to have something other than poultry or fish). I also got farm fresh eggs since my new group of chickens are not laying yet (also a pandemic food supply scare purchase after having been chicken free for over a year due to a run down coop that needed fixing to be predator proof).

I got two buff orpingtons, two easter eggers, and two noir marans from Woodville Ace Hardware. They are supposed to be sexed pullets, but surprise! We ended up with a rooster (10% error rate) who will be going off to freezer camp later. 

I picked up my market bag from Espositos (one of their hubs) on Thursday but I didn't have the rest of what I needed and that had to wait until the weekend. I didn't have mustard or dill seeds on hand, and not enough apple cidar vinegar.

Ingredients include 1 lb okra (plus one I got from my garden), 6 garlic cloves, and apple cider vinegar, dill seed, mustard seed, crushed pepper flakes, and salt and sugar for the brine.

The brine is mostly vinegar and my 9 year old came in after I was done to tell me the kitchen smells terrible. Sorry kid.

Here is the end product. We are waiting for all the lids to pop. I think there should be more than 1 pound for the six jars I got (per the recipe) because they didn't all pack well.  I also need to be careful to pick them at just the right size, I had to cut some in half to fit in my jars.

My okra plants look promising, they have the coolest flowers, so hopefully, I will get to make some more in the future. Perhaps a spicy variety using dried peppers.

This batch of pickled okra was not cheaper than store bought (I estimated $2.47 for a 8oz jar) but now that I have some of the main ingredients (dill and mustard seed) it will be cheaper in the future, especially if my gardens starts producing more okra. Best of all I got to dust off my grandma's canning pot.

Lionfish, it's what's for dinner

In April I received a bite from a lonestar tick.  I didn't think much of it (other than watching the spot for signs of the Lyme's disease rash) but in the next few weeks I started having some weird allergic reactions.  Red watery eyes, runny nose, various rashes.  I kept thinking I was getting a cold or having a reaction to poison ivy or nutmeg (a known allergy).  One night after having hamburgers for dinner I woke up sick with a terrible stomach ache and was up the rest of the night.  By morning I had starting thinking about a recent news article I had read about a tick bite that makes you allergic to red meat.  After googling my symptoms I thought this could be what I had.  I called my doctor and they got me in for testing and sure enough, I had developed an Alpha-gal or Mammalian Meat Allergy

I am lucky to have been diagnosed so quickly, many people go for years without being diagnosed.  My husband (our main menu planner and cook) had to change our diet pretty quickly from beef and pork to poultry and seafood.  We had been hearing that lionfish was available at Whole Foods so my husband picked some up.  We were excited about this as we both work in the conservation field and the consumption of invasive and exotic lionfish is a great way to eat sustainable seafood.  You can learn more about it on the FWC website.

You can purchase the lionfish whole and they will tell you how to safely clean it (avoiding the venomous spines).  Other people have told me that Whole Foods will clean it for you.  It was about $8 per pound and cheaper than the grouper and snapper at the store. 

Two whole lionfish purchased from Whole Foods

My husband had done a search for Lionfish recipes and found one that had an avocado salsa on top of it.  It was absolutely delicious.  We will definitely be adding this into our regular meal rotation. 

Lionfish with avocado salsa with squash and snap peas on the side

My husband also picked up some Sea Cow Milk Stout from Saltwater Brewery that is located in Delray Beach, Florida.  They developed a cool edible six pack for their beers to decrease the amount of plastics in the ocean. 

Sea Cow Milk Stout from Saltwater Brewery in Delray Beach

Our meal was good for the ocean in more ways than one!

This morning I was also excited to see the first signs of chanterelle season in the woods around my house.  Looking forward to some more local eating.

Chanterelle mushroom

When life gives you lemons, make lemonade, and lemon juice, and lemon curd and.....

I bought my daughter a Meyer lemon tree a few years ago and planted it in the front yard.  Last year was the first year we got a few lemons, but they didn't last long.  This year it has been loaded, and from friends and other locals it sounds like that is pretty common this year.

This was the remaining 30+ lemons after we had already juiced at least ten.

My kids and I went out to pick the lemons today and we must have gotten over 40 off a 7 foot tall tree (I forgot to count until we already started juicing, so this is an estimation).  We made a big pitcher of lemonade and froze two ice cube trays of juice for future use.

Then I started looking for recipes to use.  I found a pretty simple one for a lemon curd and had the other ingredients on hand (eggs from my backyard chickens, sugar, and some butter).  It took two lemons to get the rind and juice needed and took about ten minutes to cook.

Lemon curd in a Pyrex fridgie

I found these recipes that we might try this week.  

Pork Meatballs with Lemon and Thyme

Lemon Braised Chicken and Beans with Mint Pesto

I am sure we will share with coworkers and neighbors as well.

Dinner from the Backyard

This summer I have been lazy about gardening (again) but had a large squash vine volunteer plant growing in my garden area.  I figured out it was a Seminole pumpkin (I have grown them in the past, it must have come from the compost).  I grabbed a couple of ripe pumpkins off of it a few weeks ago and there are more growing. 

Today I was thinking about the pumpkin and how I was going to cook it and I started thinking about stuffed acorn squash.  I have some chanterelles that grow in my backyard (as well as the neighborhood green spaces) so I checked the area to see if any were growing with all our recent rain.  Sure enough, there they were. 

It ended up being easier to cook each separately.  I make a creamy sauce out of the chanterelles (with onion) and put it over orzo pasta.  I cooked the squash separately in the microwave with a little butter.  We mixed the two together and it was pretty good.  I would like to come up with a stuffed Seminole pumpkin recipe for smaller pumpkins in the future.

Figs!

Several years ago we got an Alma fig from Just Fruits and Exotics.  I chose it because the fruits are a greenish color (with light purple tint) when ripe, fooling the birds into thinking they are unripe.  Since I am not very good at protecting my garden, I thought it was a good choice for us.  They started producing fruit a couple of years ago, and this year was looking to be a good crop.  I had been checking the fruits daily and the ones I was looking at were unripe.  Until today, all of a sudden I noticed several ripe figs, some were even starting to leak fluid, ready to burst at the seams.

My Alma Figs

I found this recipe for Roasted Figs with Honey and Rosemary.  I was in luck, we had recently extracted honey from our bees and my rosemary plant could use a nice trim.  You could probably be really local and use a cheese from Sweet Grass Dairy or another local cheese producer but all I had on hand was a feta and some whole wheat ritz crackers.  It still tasted delicious.

 

Magical Beauty Berry Jelly

We have long had beauty berry bushes in our yard.  They are a native species to Florida and pretty easy to grow.  Callicarpa americana is their scientific name.

 I knew they were not poisonous and a year or so ago I saw friends mentioning on facebook that they were making jelly from them.  This year lots of people on my Florida Urban Homesteading facebook group were making jelly from them so I decided to give it a try.

  

It is pretty easy to spot the clusters of bright purple berries.

My chickens love to eat them so as I was gathering them they followed me around, catching the berries I dropped.  I have also observed them jumping up to get the berries from the lower branches themselves.

I used one of the recipes from this book:  Florida's Incredible Edibles by Richard Deuerling that I had purchased for my daughter last summer.  She took a wilderness survival camp at the Tallahassee Natural History Museum and wanted to learn more about wild edible plants.

The recipe called for one and half quart of washed berries.  I was able to gather that quickly from just three of our bushes.

 Here are the beauty berries ready to be boiled down to make the extraction for the jam.

But as you boil them something happens, they turn this brown color.

The extraction looks like tea when you are done with it and you really wonder how this jelly will turn out.

Then something magical starts to happen when you mix in the sugar and pectin.

It turns a pinkish purple color.

And you end up with a very attractive jelly.

It tastes pretty good too (it does remind me of Mayhaw Jelly).  Looking forward to enjoying my beauty berry jelly.

Honey Extraction

 

The first time we tried beekeeping we had the hive for about a year and a half and got no honey.  We tried again this year and purchased two nucleus colonies in April.  As luck would have it this is a great year for honey and we have already extracted honey twice (for a total of 47 pounds) and are expecting to be extracting more soon.

Here is a photo of our two hives, the bottom super holds the queen and larvae and the top medium supers hold the honey.  We got the bees out of the honey supers by placing a fume board on the top to drive them out.  My husband then collected the frames of capped honey and brought them into our garage.

Here is a frame that is greater than 90% capped honey.  This is important because it ensures that the honey will be of the right moisture content (around 17-18%) that won't ferment.  The bees know when it is dry enough and cap it off.

 

We then uncapped the honey using an uncapping tool over a bucket.  These can be purchased at Full Moon Apiary at their store in Tupelo's Bakery in Monticello (every time I go there to get new bee supplies I also get a treat from the bakery, yum).

The frames are then placed into the extractor.  We rented this extractor from the Apalachee Beekeeping Association .  Members can rent it for only $10 a day (with a $25 cleaning deposit).  This is perfect for a small operation like ours.

 

When that honey started to drip then pour out of the extractor it was so exciting!  Below it we have a second bucket with filters to filter out dead hive beetles and bees along with any wax (I am trying to figure out what to do with all my wax now!)

 And eventually the bucket had over 20 pounds of honey.

 

This is from our first batch.  Our second batch had even more.  My husband is hoping to make some mead (he is a home brewer) with the large quart jar holding three pounds of honey.

Pickles!

My cucumbers have been doing pretty well and I wanted to try canning pickles instead of just the fridge pickles I have been making.  I like the instructions on the Pick Your Own site.

They suggest to use a canning mix.  The recipes all call for 8-11 pounds of pickles.  That canner used to belong to my late Grandma Anna, it makes me happy to be able to use it and think of her.

I had been collecting pickles for a few days though and only had about three pounds.  So I had to do some math and hope that it works.

My husband wanted some dill pickles so I started with those.

 

I cut off the ends (the blossom ends contain an enzyme that make the pickles mushy) and cut them into spears.  Apparently putting grape leaves in with them make them more crunchy.  Luckily I have four muscadine grape vines in my garden.

 

And here they are waiting to go into the water bath for processing.  Can't wait to try them.

My bees have been very busy (we are planning to do a honey extraction next week) and I am hoping to have some more cucumbers to pickle in the near future.

Pick Your Own Blueberries

Today we took the kids to Green Meadows Farm in Monticello to pick blueberries.

We have done this several years now but the last few years they had been picked out.  Not this year, they have a ton of berries and they told us that the day before they had had 1200 people there. 

We were able to find plenty of berries.  They kids seemed to enjoy it.

You had to keep an eye on the three year old and remind him to pick the purple berries, not the green.

 

 

We picked three pounds.  I don't have enough for jam so I think we will make some blueberry ice cream.  The owner of the farm, Delores Green, has the best recipe and she sells a cook book for $10 at the farm.  They also sell the ice cream, but they were all out.

Today's Harvest

Today's Harvest

 

I hope I have enough cucumbers to make canned dill pickles.  I like some of the recipes on this website and find their directions helpful:  Pick Your Own

Dining from the Garden

Usually I don't get much from my garden.  But this year I am starting to see success.

 

I finally got some carrots to grow in my raised beds.  The trick is to thin mercilessly and to make sure the soil is loose.  They didn't grow very long because they are in raised beds.

 

 

This morning I noticed a huge cucumber on my vines.  I had seen one blossom early on but figured nothing would come of it.  Then I happened to see it this morning while my husband was out checking the beehives.  It weighed in at 14 ounces.  My husband claims that I bought one at Publix to stick in my garden.  I was as surprised to see it there as he was.  There are a lot more blossoms on the vines now, so I am hoping that we will see more in the near future.

I made refrigerator pickles out of it.  They taste pretty good.  They are on the menu for tonight with roasted carrots (in butter) along with BBQ chicken (no, not the ones in our backyard) and some corn I did buy at Publix.  Should be a delicious summer meal.