Sunday was an incredibly busy day for me.  Kyle was working one more day for his old boss to pay off his new cross-country ski boots (only had to work two days for some wicked nice boots) so I had some time to kill.  He didn't have to be at work until 10:00, so in the morning, we worked together on the new kitchen pantry that Kyle's been working on for the past week.  We're so close to being done, really only need the doors to be made and hung, but our quirky, old house is definitely making things difficult with the slightly slanted ceiling and floors.  Oh well, we're quirky, too, so it all works out.
After Kyle headed out I made myself a quick "to do" list (these things are the only way I can find to keep myself on track) and set a few old movies to play on my laptop while I worked away in the kitchen.

To Do:
Make Quiches
Make Bread Dough
Make Pasta?
Make Flour Tortillas (aka, wraps)
Do Dishes
Strip meat off chicken for dinner (we had roasted a week ago, then I made stock a few nights ago)

After a couple weeks of not selling eggs and not seeing any family/friends (therefore not giving away any eggs either) we found our fridge loaded down with too many full egg cartons.  So my first order of business for the day was to make a few quiches for the freezer.  To start things off, I made a double-batch of pie crust:

2.5 cups flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
2/3 cup shortening
enough cold water to just bring it all together with some work

You know the drill: cut in the shortening until you have little pea-sized pieces then carefully add water to bring it all together. 

I split the chunk of dough in half, rolled each piece out to about 1/8" thick, pressed them into a couple glass pie plates, and threw them in a 450 degree oven (covered in foil) for 8 minutes, then for another 5 minutes uncovered.

While the pie crust cooled I whipped up 16 eggs with about 2 cups of milk.  Then set 2 cups of chopped mushrooms, a tablespoon of butter, salt and pepper, and a teaspoon or so of dried thyme in a pan to saute.  When that was set I poured it into one crust, topped it with a couple handfuls of shredded mozzarella cheese, and covered the whole thing with about half of the egg mixture.

In the second crust I had about two cups of chopped spinach, and some quartered, canned artichokes that I had on hand.  After adding a handful or so of shredded mozzarella cheese and the rest of the egg mixture I tossed them both in the oven (at 325 degrees) for about an hour (just until a knife inserted in the center comes out clean).

These little beauties came out looking delicious, smelling amazing, and I set them on some wire racks to cool completely (after all, these were for later, last-minute meals, not for a day I had all the time in the world).  Once they cooled, I covered them in two layers of tin foil, then wrapped with plastic wrap before throwing them in the freezer (marked with the date and description of the quiche) with the last of our chickens and apple cider.

After quickly scrubbing all my used bowls, utensils, etc, I threw all the ingredients for my bread dough in the mixer and got it kneading away while I got to work on the rest of my list.

By the end of the day my 'to do' list looked like this:


Make Quiches
Make Bread Dough
Make Pasta
Make Flour Tortillas
Do Dishes
Strip meat off chicken for dinner

On top of that I made two apple turnovers for dessert with the leftover pie crust (there's ALWAYS a little leftover when I roll out my crusts) using just a diced up apple, a tiny bit of honey, and a splash of vanilla extract.  I was pretty happy with myself.  Though, I was a little bummed I didn't get to try making pasta, but seeing as I'd never made wraps before I was pretty psyched to have been able to try something new that day.  Wraps and english muffins are the only two bread products we buy anymore.  One down, one more to go.

Tomorrow I'll post how I made the tortillas- because they turned out AMAZING and weren't all that difficult.  I'm hoping to make another batch or two soon so we can have some stored in the freezer.  Have I mentioned how much I love our chest freezer?  Well, I do.

Hehe.  Ok, that sounds a little gross, but it was the best I could come up with- and you have to admit its a pretty whitty title for a post on making chicken stock, don't you think?  Ok ok, enough self-appreciation, moving along.

I am just so excited about our chickens, I just can't even express how awesome they are.  While our laying hens are pretty sweet and have started generating their own income through eggs, I am quite certainly talking about our broilers.  Yep, those gigantic birds that we dispatched this past fall that have been taking up residence in our freezer.  Probably once every week or two we pull one of these ladies (or gentlemen, we're equal-opportunity eaters here) out to thaw.  A couple days later she (or he, see above) is ready for a little garlic/rosemary/butter rub before heading in to the oven (I usually do 500 degrees for 40 minutes to an hour depending on the size of the particular bird).  Normally I'll just stick the bird on top of a bed of chopped carrots, onions, and celery in a baking dish.  Sometimes I'll put out a roasting pan if the chicken is big enough to warrant the extra cleaning.

Kyle and I are a little picky when it comes to our roast chicken.  Most of the time we'll only eat the breast meat and the tenders.  This may sound wasteful to some, but hey, remember my superly-awesome title for this little baby?  Thats right, we don't toss the rest, or feed it to the dogs even (sorry Shyla and Ollie).  Sometimes the chicken gets tossed into the fridge for a day or two because, lets be honest, who really wants to get finished with dinner just to start cooking again?  Sometimes I do it this way- after carving off the meat for dinner, toss it all into a stock pot- but only when I feel like super-homesteader-woman.

So the next day (or right off if I'm feeling like SHW as I said just now) I'll toss a couple chopped onions, a few ribs of celery, and a few carrots into a stock pot with some olive oil, garlic, and some thyme.  After they get softened up a bit I'll add the chicken as well as the veggies that are in the pan with it (skin, bones, fat and all).  Fill the pot up to cover everything and get that puppy boiling.  Once it starts boiling, lower the temp so it just sort of simmers and let it go until the bones are pretty much all seperated (in other words; if you pull out the bones you shouldn't see the perfect skeleton of a chicken, just a bunch of bones).

If it tastes like chicken stock, sweet; pour that sucker through a colander into another pot or a bowl to catch the stock.  Now this is where you can go a couple different routes.  What I normally do is pour about half a gallon of the stock into jars to save for later use.  Sometimes I'll can all the broth like this and deal with the meat seperately, this works if you want to make something out of the chicken meat like sandwiches, enchiladas, or just put it on salads.

Pick through the contents of the colander, pulling out as much meat as possible.  I usually shred it up a bit before putting it aside.  If I'm going to make soup, or chicken pot pie, I'll also go through the veggies for any that are still fairly solid after all that boiling.  (If I'm not making soup or pot pie, the veggies go with the bones into the compost.)

At this point you have the makings for whatever you want.  If you'd like chicken noodle soup, toss that meat, veggies, and broth back into the stock pot and get cooking!  Pot pie?  Then mix some flour into melted butter, add some stock, the chicken, veggies, salt and pepper if you'd like, and walla!  You have pot pie filling (if you add a bit of milk or cream at this point it is super delicious as well)!  Sometimes I'll make a bunch of this (depending on how much meat I can get off the chicken) so I can store a couple meals of it in our freezer.  Make your favorite pie crust (even better, make a double batch so you can freeze some of that for later, too!), cover the filling in a pie pan, and toss that sucker into the oven!

Man, I'm hungry...

So Kyle was thrilled with his brewing kit that his lovely wife (yours truly) gave to him for his birthday a couple days ago.  Unfortunately we couldn't get started right away because all of that great cider that we made was all hibernating in the freezer.  So, first thing Wednesday morning, after Kyle opened his presents, we took out six gallons of frozen cider to start thawing in the sink.

I filled the sink a couple inches up the sides of the jars with cool water and we decided to go out to breakfast.  While I was getting ready, little did I know, someone got a little impatient and decided to put some HOT water into the sink as well- to help speed things along.  Upon our return from Jeffersonville we walked into the kitchen to see something rather distressing; one of the jars was cracked and leaking precious cider into the sink!  Crap- so we removed it from the sink and put it into a bowl so it could leak cider into something where we could save it.  We looked again- another was broken!  So we moved that one to a bowl as well.  Then we saw another!  Oh shoot, this is so not-good!

Word to the wise: jars act just like pipes, if they freeze do not try to thaw them too quickly or they can and will burst.  In Kyle's defense, he hadn't had any coffee yet that morning so I'm not sure the cobwebs had really been cleared out yet.

All in all I think four or five of the twelve jars broke- along with one of the two gallon jars that is still in the freezer (we're not entirely sure what happened with this one- it might have cracked during the freezing stage as it looks like it might have been a little overfilled- oops!).  But we moved all the cider into the sterilized fermenting bucket to finish thawing.  Yesterday afternoon, Kyle added some stuff that will kill off the wild yeast that could be lurking in the cider.  While we could try to use this to make our hard cider we just don't know if it will turn out delicious or completely unpalatable- its kind of a crap-shoot and I am not a gambler.  So we decided not to risk it for six gallons of cider.

So tonight we'll get started- thank goodness.  We'll check the potential alcohol content with the hydrometer and decide if we want to add sugar to up that reading.  Then we'll add some yeast and close the fermenter back up and away we go!  We've got yeast to make an apple wine so we can use up those wine bottles we've been saving all summer and fall- we'll need about 30 bottles to take care of the six gallons of cider.  It is going to take a while before we are ready to move it into the carboy for finishing...probably a really long time because our thermostat is almost always set for 50-55 degrees, unless we're having a chilly night and then we'll up it to 65 until we go to bed.  And when it comes to fermenting, heat is a good thing.

So thats the plan!  On another note: we collected a dozen eggs from the girls yesterday!  That makes 42 eggs currently in our fridge.  I think I'll make a couple quiche's tomorrow- one for lunch, and another to freeze for later.

What a gorgeous weekend!!!  We had a nice little heatwave on Saturday and I spent the whole day clad in a tee-shirt and burying our new in-ground dog fence with Kyle.  We learned in the past that it was not wise to leave it above ground for very long so we were extra excited when we got it finished and loop indicator didn't scream at us saying that all our work was for nothing.

As soon as we finished the rain began and the wind started picking up- perfect timing.  We retreated to the comfort of the house and I started dinner while Kyle hopped down the road to pick us up a bottle of wine.  I took a chunk of the dough I had made almost a week ago and began stretching it out to make a pizza.  I have seriously fallen in love with the no-knead dough that I found in Mother Earth News months ago.  All week we've enjoyed fresh-baked bread with dinner and lunch the following day.

I wasn't sure how the pizza crust would turn out, I mean, how can one dough be so versatile?  But I spread it out on a cookie sheet (my favorite; Williams Sonoma Goldtouch nonstick brand...NOTHING sticks to this sucker) and covered it with a bit of sauce, some mushrooms, peppers, sun-dried tomatos, and some great chevre (we like to switch it up from the same old mozzarella) that is made locally.  Hopefully next summer we'll be making our own chevre when May starts milking.

After just a few minutes in the 500 degree oven we slid the pizza off the cookie sheet and onto the wooden cutting board.  The crust was perfect; thin and crispy.  We ate the entire pizza that night and I still could have had more- I love chevre pizza.

Sunday was our official apple cider day!  We had two huge boxes of apples that had been sitting on our porch from weeks ago and it had taken on a lovely caramel-apple smell but it was time for them to go.  We had borrowed a home-made cider press from Kyle's employer and it made quick work of the apples.  I, personally, love the look of old-style cider presses but let me tell you they take forever to make much cider.  This loud, metal monstrosity took away alot of the romance...but produced fast and delicious results.

We fed the apples into the ginder, powered by some kind of small engine, and pulp shot out the bottom into my canning pot.  (Kyle walked away covered from the waste down with apple pulp.)  We, piled the ground up apples between layers of cheesecloth and plastic trays; three layers of apples and three layers of trays at a time.  Kyle pumped the hydraulic jack which squeezed the juice out of the layers of pulp as I held the hose over my stock pot which was covered in another few layers of cheesecloth.  Each batch provided about 3 gallons of cider, sometimes as many as five.  Pouring the cider from the stock pot into the jars proved to be a little difficult and we inevitably spilled what probably amounts to a couple gallons of cider in all.  But, between all the spilling and the taste-tests we ended up with about 25 gallons of fresh, unpasturized cider. 

As soon as we arrived we immediately set in to getting to work.  Two pots cooking apples for applesauce and the canning pot were set on the stove while we peeled, cored, and sliced apples to freeze for treats to be baked later during the chill of winter.  My dear friend, Ali, arrived to help us with our monumental task.  While we processed the apples I turned on the grill (maybe for the last time this year) to cook the burgers for dinner; black bean burgers for Ali and I, and regular beef burgers for Mom and Kyle (although I think Kyle had one of each, he loves those black bean burgers so much).  After our break for food, Ali started working on four loaves of apple bread which I think turned out deliciously!

By the end of the day we had finished off a good chunk of the apples from the back of the truck.  We managed to freeze six gallons of apples and can about twelve quarts of apple sauce.  It was a great day, full of good friends, good food, and lots of laughs.  Thanks to everyone who made a beautiful day even more special.