Line Drying

I should put "line" in quotes.  I don't own a clothesline.  I do, however, have a couple of drying racks.  One is a rickety small device someone left with me 20 years ago.  At this point I think it's safe to say it's never going to be reclaimed.  The other one is a massive wood contraption I got from Lehman's. It's four feet wide and about six feet high and collapses into a fairly compact size, accordion-style.  It has ten usable horizontal bars for hanging, though to keep clothes separated for air circulation, not all of the real estate on the bars can be filled at the same time in all cases.  The other rack has many more horizontal bars, but they are so closely spaced they aren't very practical.  There's no way to use all of them at once.  Something like the big wood rack could be built for less money than it costs to buy, but with my woodworking skills the opportunity cost would be worth way more than $100.

It could be used outdoors, but I keep mine inside.  I discovered, after a few tries, that I'm one of apparently not many people that does not like the smell of sun-dried clothes at all.  I decided to try using the rack indoors and it works fine.  I put it in the living room with the ceiling fan on and jeans dry in a day.

They would dry somewhat faster outside, but something about the drying/sun baking/UV saturation process leaves them smelling to me like they do when they need to go into the laundry hamper, not when they are ready to be put back in the closet.  Drying indoors does not lead to the same issues.  Up north in the winter or when it's raining drying indoors makes more sense even for those who like drying outside.

To dry the clothes, I space them out as shown (the rack in the picture has seven pairs of jeans, with room for a couple more without too much trouble) and flip them a few times as they dry to hasten the process.

Some things will be wrinkled when air-dried.  For jeans it doesn't matter as much, but for shirts it'd be more obvious.  One thing that would probably be better for shirts is putting them on a hanger with a single horizontal bar--I wouldn't necessarily want to do that with this rack because that would be putting a lot of point stress on the horizontal bars and it might cause problems.

The texture of line-dried clothes is not as soft as those that are tumble-dried.  Jeans are noticeably more stiff at first, but they soon loosen up when wearing them.  For towels the difference is even more dramatic.  Line- or rack-dried towels are not only stiffer; the pile is clumped together and the towels don't fluff up at all.  In the picture, the bottom two towels were tumble-dried and the four on top were rack-dried.  In practice, the rack-dried towels work okay, but tumbled towels are definitely superior in ways that are more apparent than when considering jeans dried the two ways.  I haven't air-dried towels enough times to know if they'll become matted permanently by doing this or not.

So the obvious question is:  why do this?  There are a couple of reasons.  If you don't have a clothes dryer, there's an obvious need.  Even if you do, it can make sense to air-dry at least some clothes.  Jeans take a long time in the dryer.  I often pull most or all of them out of a load of dark-colored clothes so that the load that goes into the dryer finishes faster.  That cuts electricity usage somewhat (although if the energy savings are being used to justify the cost of a rack it'll take a while).  A big load of towels can take a while, too.  In the winter, most houses have issues with low humidity (and out west, it can be a problem year-round).  If it is relatively dry inside, the clothes will air-dry faster and help humidify the room slightly while doing so.

It may be worth thinking about.

Pickled Asparagus

I first tried pickled asparagus a few years ago.  It's pretty good and is more or less readily available in grocery stores.  Although I'm not yet growing my own asparagus--hopefully I'll get some crowns in the ground next spring--I wanted to try making my own so gave it a try.  The Ball Blue Book, NCHFP, and Pickyourown.org have essentially the same recipe, which, as I have noted before about other foods, calls for a density per jar that I can't match.  I get about one pound per jar.  The first time I pickled asparagus, I got way more than I could pack into eight quarts and ended up binging on it for the next few days to use up the excess (I usually try to avoid multiple canner runs back-to-back).

Here's what works for me--for 8 quarts:

8 lb. asparagus
2/3 cup canning salt
8 quarts water
8 quarts vinegar
8 teaspoons dill seed (1 per quart jar)
About 16 cloves of garlic (nominally, 2 per quart jar, but I also will just use one if it's huge as shown in the picture below).

This recipe is very easily scaled up and down, and of course can be used for pint jars, as well.  There are also 12-ounce jars that are taller than normal that can be used for asparagus, but I don't have any.

I cut the top part of the spears to 5.5" for quarts and 4" for pints, then either leave the rest intact or further cut it into smaller pieces to facilitate jar packing.  The ends of the spears are often tough; usually, they're white if so (although sometimes white ends are tender).  Each quart jar gets a teaspoon of dill seed in the bottom, then is packed with cut spears, then receives a couple of cloves of garlic late in the process, and last is filled with brine, leaving 1/4" headspace.

The 50/50 mix of vinegar and water yields a pH of about 3.0; it's the same as is used for dilly beans and other vegetable pickles.

The filled jars get canned in a boiling water bath for 15 minutes.

My recipe above yielded almost exactly eight quarts with very little excess of any ingredient: I used up all but about a cup of brine and had maybe a quarter of a pint of cut pieces left that I couldn't get into a jar.  I'll eat them fresh.  And I have had no failures to seal since I went back to single-use lids exclusively.

The picture below shows the jars after coming out of the canner (along with the aforementioned gargantuan garlic clove).  So far, I have had no bad results with pickling asparagus, but this was only my third attempt.  One batch a year is enough for now; I don't go through all that much.

As with most canning, labor excluded, doing it at home is cheaper.  A quick glance online shows pickled asparagus for about $4.50 per pint; I canned the equivalent of 16 pints for under $22 (vinegar $2, asparagus $16, dill seed < $1, lids $2, canning salt $0.20).  This is one of few canning exercises where it's a decent tradeoff even considering the labor involved: total time start to finish was only about 2.5 hours.

 

Onion Pie

I recently tried this recipe from James Townsend & Son's YouTube channel.  One modification is that I left out the hard-boiled eggs.  I had someone eating it with me who doesn't like eggs.  I also omitted the mace; I don't have any.

Even without the eggs, it turned out to be pretty heavy-duty.  I was able to mound the ingredients in the center of the pie; it didn't boil over and is fairly dry--I added water, as instructed--and the ingredients did collapse a bit as it baked.

I used heavy whole wheat crusts.  I used half whole wheat, half white flour.  Sunflower oil was the fat--I wasn't trying to make it flaky.

The ingredients I included were a layer of thin-sliced potatoes, followed by Granny Smith apples (actually just one large apple), then onion, then a few more potato slices.   The spices were salt, pepper, and nutmeg.  I baked it at 375 for 70 minutes.

The nutmeg was a little disagreeable by itself, but overall the pie turned out okay. The tart Granny Smith apples made an interesting contrast.  I might try it again using Italian seasoning.  That would be different but might work out well.

One slice (1/8 of the pie) was substantial; two slices made a very filling meal.  It was a bit messy to make, but much of that was due to the pie crusts.  I've learned that I really hate making pie crust.  I have yet to have one turn out well, but I have managed to get something passable most of the time.  Only rarely have I had to dump a first attempt and start over.

This has potential, but I'm still evaluating it.

Dehydrated Refried Beans Shelf Life

Dehydrated refried beans are not believed to have a very long storage life.  Some sites suggest they may last as long as 15-20 or  25 years, but other suggest as little as 5 years.  It makes sense that refried beans, which have been cooked then dried, would not last as long as intact beans, which are estimated to last about 30 years.

I have a case of dehydrated refried beans that I have been meaning to rotate, but I haven't gotten around to it.  One #10 can, once opened, lasts a long time.  I finally decided to haul one out and see how it was holding up.  It was canned in February, 2009, so eight years ago.

It's fine.  There's no detectable loss in quality.  This despite the fact that my house gets warm in the summer, as I have noted before, up to the low 80s during the day.  So my conditions are far from ideal.

I'm still going to work on rotating them.  If I use up all six cans and replace them with more I'll be eating a lot of beans.  But I fully expect that what I have will be good for a few more years (or more).

Dehydrated refried beans have a few issues.  Although good dry (someone recommended adding them to salads like bacon bits...an intriguing concept), more conventionally they will be rehydrated.  They're rather salty, at least to my palate, but as I have noted before, I don't use a lot of salt on my own and may be unduly sensitive.  The saltiness is more apparent when they are hydrated than when they are dry.

They're good: They're largely fat free and can be had fairly cheaply.  They last longer and are less costly than normal refried beans (by far, actually: some brands of refried beans cost $1.00 or even more for a single one-pound can vs. $12 or less for the equivalent of about 20-30 cans' worth [depending on brand]).  Worth a look...

Still More on Pinto Beans

As I have noted before, my recipe for beans is very easy, has wide tolerances, and usually produces good results.  Variations are possible; fresh onion and garlic can be swapped out for their dehydrated counterparts, and there are substitutions for the bacon, too--turkey bacon works okay, although not great, and even veggie pseudo bacon will produce serviceable results.  The person who taught me how to do beans long ago used fat back.

I mentioned in the previous posts that I had some bad experiences with old beans cooked at normal pressure in a covered pot.  Al dente beans are not that good.  They also had a bitter aftertaste. Extra garlic and bacon help with impaired beans, even when pressure cooked.  However...

...In addition to old beans, I made a pot a couple of months ago with old bacon.  I had frozen it and lost track of it in the freezer; when I found it I decided to give it a try. I don't think it was bad, necessarily, but it had aged to the point that it smelled off.  It did not improve when boiled with everything else.  I ended up throwing most of that pot out, alas.

My most recent pot went fine.  A win after a flop is helpful.  One bad culinary experience can imprint a memory that lasts for years (or more).  After I tried to use an excess of barbecue sauce to make a cooked jackrabbit edible (it didn't work), I had a negative association with barbecue sauce for a long time.  Foodborne illness after a mall food court gyro made me leave that food item behind forever.  So I don't want to have a string of failures with beans, one of my favorite dishes.

This pot was the basic two onions, about five mostly big garlic cloves, and six ounces of bacon.  Pressure cooked for 12 minutes, and it took about 23 minutes for the pressure to drop after removing from the heat so I could eat them.  Total time from starting prep to being ready to serve was about an hour and fifteen minutes.  I was using cranberry beans this time.  I'll do some pintos soon.

Freeze Aftermath

As feared, last week there were a couple of very cold nights:  The first night, the temp dropped down to about 25.5 or so and stayed below 28 for 5 hours.  The second night was similar.  For comparison, I'm reposting the pictures from a week and a half ago, before the freeze:

I definitely had losses to my blueberries, but it's not all bad.  If there's no more killing-cold weather, I might get  a crop that's 30%-50% of normal (then again, maybe not: some of the blooms that look like they might be okay may not be).  South Georgia fared worse; for whatever reason some of the blueberry regions were colder than north Georgia--as low as 22.  The rabbiteye farmers had total losses in many cases (rabbiteyes are what I grow, as well).  Georgia won't lead the country in blueberry production this year...

Bread: Thrill of Victory, Agony of Defeat

My two most recent loaves of bread have been among my best and worst.  First, the best.  I made another 100% whole wheat loaf (plus added vital wheat gluten), and it turned out very well.

As you can see, the crumb is very dense, as is the norm for whole wheat, with no big bubbles.  But the loaf raised (rose?) well and I'm happy.  It's red whole wheat, so does have that strong tannin-tinged flavor, but it's nice.  I used 3 3/4 c whole wheat flour, 1/2 cup of vital wheat gluten, 1/2 tsp of salt, 1/4 cup of sourdough starter, and about 2 1/4 cups of water.  I mixed it and let it rise for a little over 12 hours, then formed the loaf from the dough, let it rise another 20 minutes while the oven was heating up, and baked it at 30 min. @ 475 followed by 17 min. @ 450 with the Romertopf casserole dish open.

I followed a similar procedure the previous week with a rye loaf that didn't go as well.  I used 2 cups of rye flour, 1 3/4 cups of white (bread flour), 1/2 tsp of salt, 1/4 cup of sourdough starter and 2 cups of water.  This time it only rose for about 8 or 9 hours on the first leg, and the final result was this oval loaf.

I managed to get almost a week's worth of sandwiches out of it, but the crust (as you can see) broke away from the rest of the loaf, and the interior was a gummy mess. It slimed the bread knife every time I cut a slice. Not good.  I think the short initial rise was the source of the trouble.

The seam of flour in the middle is from where I folded it over when forming the dough for the second rise; I dusted the top and sides with dry flour to prevent sticking (or at least reduce it; there's always some sticking with rye).

When even the disasters are at least partly salvageable, that's not too bad.  Onward.