Homemade Radish Pickles

Well folks, I have been away from the blogging keyboard for awhile.   I am not sure if I will try to make this a regularly scheduled even again or not, as my goals have shifted a good bit after arriving here in Kentucky.  Those last few weeks in Tucson were just an absolute trial.  I felt like the house was literally sucking the energy out of me, so I let a lot of things go that I really enjoyed, including this blog.

However, going back to that period is not really that much fun.  So instead, I will just do a quick share of something fun.

As I mentioned a bit earlier today on our Facebook page, we had some leftover pickle brine and we tossed some radishes into it, which turned out to be amazing.  It was leftover bread and butter pickle brine, so the sweet brine worked out great with the slightly spicy radishes.  We just took the radishes that were too small for our dinner salad, sliced em in half, and chucked em in.  48 hours later, they were delicious.

Well, today when we went out to the garden, we had an incredible bounty of radishes waiting for us.  They are all coming to the finish at the same time.  So we went through and picked a ton of them while they were a bit smaller, because they are less spicy that way.  I didn’t think to take a picture of the radishes before we cut them, but here are the tops.  It was a bunch.

Radish Tops

So rather than simply using leftover brine again, we decided to make our own radish brine.  So I can actually expand on my 13skills goal, and work on homemade pickling and lactofermentation, despite forgetting about it for a few months.

So here is the Ayers family pickled radish recipe   We tasted the brine after we were done, and it was absolutely amazing, I will let you know how the radishes taste when they are done.  Anyone else know a good pickled radish recipe  Share it with us, and I will share it with our Facebook page and give you the credit to your blog or site if you have one.

Ayers Pickled Radishes:

Apple Cider Vinegar (splash)

White Vinegar

Honey (1 Tsp)

Dill (Dried or Fresh)

Black Peppercorns

Minced Garlic (1 tsp)

Kosher Salt

The finished products

Take all the above ingredients and mix together at the bottom of a canning jar.  I didn’t include a lot of measurements, because we didn’t measure much.  You can taste brine, so season to taste.  If you want sweeter, add more honey.  More sour, more vinegar.  Etc.  Once that’s all in place, stir it up really well.  Then toss in your radishes, fill the empty space with water, put the lid on and pop it in your fridge.  Start tasting after a few days and see how they are turning out.  The longer they sit, the more the flavor will change, so don’t hesitate to taste every so often.

Enjoy!

 

February Skills Update

As some of you know, I have been using the 13skills website to help guide me in learning new skills in 2013.  Since today is a cold and rainy introspective kind of day here in Tucson, it seemed like a good time to refocus on my progress.  Admittadely, I have done a fairly bad job in the last few weeks about keep skills foremost in my mind.  All of the stress of getting ready to move has taken quite a bit of my brain power away from where it belongs.

Pickling –

Some sad news on this one at least.  I knew that I was doing it wrong, and I was right.  So granted, I have no one to blame but myself, but I didn’t really put enough thought into setting myself up for success the first time.  As I chronicled in my earlier pieces, I was trying to make some lacto-fermented sauerkraut.  Unfortunately, I didn’t use enough salt, and to top it off, I didn’t weight down the sauerkraut inside the jar.  So little pieces of it kept floating to the top.  Long story short, it started to mold, and not in the good way.  I did learn thought that in addition to being able to use rocks of some sort, you can fill bags up with water and set them on top of the veggies.  That will keep them below the water line.

I have to say, so far I didn’t like the taste of what I was fermenting, to which I conclude I was doing it wrong.  I think next time in addition to the salt, I will use a bit of either yogurt water, or vinager with “Mother” in it to start the fermentation.  Since I don’t have a garden right now, I can’t count on using natural veggies that haven’t been cleaned to get that starter bacteria.  I might try this one more time before we move, if we get some tasty veggies to play with.

Writing – This one I actually completed, which is excellent.  My goal as to make at least $1 from writing, and I have done almost 5X that good with the launch of my book.  So I marked it off as complete.

Moving – My goal was to execute the sale of our home by April 1st, and be gone.  This one is still a bit up in the air, but largely under control.  We did have the one showing of our house, and not a single one since then.  One made an appointment and cancelled.  Then we had one yesterday that called us at 8:30am on a Sunday, to show that morning.  Really?!  We were still sleeping, so we said screw it.  Little tip realtors, if you do your work sometime other than last minute, more stuff might happen.  Regardless, we are looking forward to going up there and exploring.

Sadly, many of my other goals rely on having already moved, so there is some inherent demotivation involved in starting something new.  I want to do everything on my list still, but it seems foolish to get heavily invested in something that I will just have to tear down in a couple months.

So my next goal to achieve is meditation.  I am a naturally high stress individual, so I think meditation will be good for me.  I tend to get a pain in my side when I am too stressed, and I am hoping that by meditating I can keep that stress level under control and hurt less overall.  I am a born again Christian, so I don’t ascribe to some of the more mystical aspects of meditation, but I think the very act of introspection and thought is good for all of us.  There is something to be said for calming the stormy tempest of your mind before you cast out from your safe harbour of the home.  It will allow me to take the world more in stride.

So, officially, my goal is to meditate for 10 minutes a day, preferably in the morning before work.  I think this will help my health overall, and allow me to be calmer.  I will keep you posted.

Follow up on feed and fermentation

Well, for some reason today my mental wheels were just sliding all over the road, and I was having trouble putting a coherent thought together on paper.  That happens to everyone some days I guess.  So instead of trying to force out what would undoubtedly be a disjointed narrative, I figured I would just do some quick follow up from some experiments we started in the last few weeks.

The first, the chicken feed experiment is working out great.  The girls are loving their food.  In fact we got a little behind with making it, and ran out of it for a few days.  The girls were loud and strident in letting us know that was not OK.  Our feeding routine of one show box a day supplemented with other stuff for the nutrients is doing quite well.  The best part of all is that the girls are starting to put on some weight.  They had been so skinny up until recently, it was actually kind of worrying.  Now they are finally growing up, and filling in.  This should make the remaining cold a lot easier to handle for them.  Jenn and I went to Costco yesterday and got 50lbs of dry ingredients for them for about $30.  Which will of course be much more than 50lbs once cooked.  So far, a great way for hens to go.

The second, is my lacto fermentation experiment.  The good news is that it is fermenting.  I waited about 4 days to taste the mixture, and it was considerably tangier than just cabbage, water and salt should account for, so it is working.  The bad news is that I don’t really like the taste yet.  It’s not something I would just dive right into willingly, but I could eat it as medicine if I had to.  It’s a first experiment, so I consider it a victory that I was able to get it to ferment at all.  Taste can be fine tuned later.

I do know for sure that I didn’t use enough salt.  Having more salt in the mixture might solve the flavor issue by itself, but the cabbage still isn’t releasing its juice as fast as they say it should.  The other issue is that I used canning jars to store it in, but I just used paper towels to cover, not lids.  This means my liquid keeps evaporating and I have to refill it.  Not the end of the world, but its probably not doing wonders for the fermentation process.

So one experiment is a clear victory, and one is working, but not as well as I hoped.  Pretty good record.  Hopefully I will be back at 100% tomorrow, and I will try to lay out something more informational.