Things I love Thursday: Dandelions

If you haven't figured it out by now, I love dandelions. I eat them and make them into things on a regular basis. Okay, on a springly basis. They're also very lovely to look at. And when they become little puff balls? ZOMG are they fun. I will spread those seeds like nobody's business.

Make a wish!

One thing we always do when dandelions come out is make wine of the petals. Mmm, by always I mean we have every year since we've lived in New Hampshire. (Dandelions don't really grow as abundantly in the lower parts of Florida).

Wine production of years past

In the four years we've been making it, and in the couple years before John moved to FL that he made it, we haven't yet found a perfect recipe. Mostly because we never remembered what we did the year before. We've tried at least 4 different recipes now. This year we decided to really buckle down and figure this out. Wine takes too long to to be so nonchalant about throwing it together. And while dandelion wine is relatively simple and since the main ingredient free, it's not an expensive wine,  it does take some work. After all, we have to pull all those tiny petals out of the bitter green calyx part. That takes time, baby!

Thems are some hot, manly hands... Oh! I mean, see what hard work that is?

Note the addition of tea cups to the process...

Especially when you consider how much of those petals you need.

This year, we made two separate batches, and I very carefully recorded all that we did for each one. One recipe called for six cups of dandelion petals, and one four cups. I'm pretty excited to taste and compare them.

But wine isn't all we make of dandelions. I've told you about pesto and fritters, which I repeated a few times again this year.

 There's also dandelion petal ice cream. The heavenly, light creamy confection that one friend of mine declared "tastes happy." It's true. This ice cream is happiness infused.

Unfortunately, I can't find where I wrote down the recipe, but I can gather from these two photos that I infused the petals into the milk and then pureed it all together. If you're adventurous, try it out. Make it up as you go or follow a vanilla bean ice cream and adapt.

 I think I may have strained it then, but I don't know. This one I haven't yet made this year because my freezer is currently too full to freeze the icecream maker bowl. If I do get a chance to make it, I'll post the recipe for sure.

You can also make a nice tea loaf out of the petals as I did one year.

I don't have the recipe I used way back then, but this one looks very similar. Try it out and be delighted by making something from your yard!

Dandelion potato soup is also a nice treat. Just follow a recipe for potato spinach soup (or even just potato soup) and put dandelions in instead of spinach. Puree and enjoy.

(If you haven't caught on to this yet, I'm using up as many past photos as I can find in relation to this topic. I meant to post most of these as their own thing, but as as per facts 4 and 5, this never happened.)

Two new things I've tried this year are dandelion tincture (extract) and dandelion vinegar.

Dandelion infused vodka, essentially

 Since I just started them a few weeks ago, and these things take a fair amount of time, I don't know how they turned out yet. But I'm excited. I may be able to add a lovely dandelion flavour to my desserts and dishes any time during the year!

So next time you think of trying to eradicate the dandelions in your yard, why not try eating them instead?

This is what happens when you put me in charge of the s'mores...

John and I and a group of friends planned a cook out for this last weekend; a bonfire on the beach with hot dogs and tin-foil wrapped potatoes smothered in the coals. And of course, s'mores. As far as I'm concerned, s'mores are essential to any fire-centered party being successful. Well, since I'm so adamant about marshmallows and chocolate melted between two slabs of sweet cinnamon-and-honey-crackery goodness, I found myself being placed in charge of the s'more round up.

I took my role very seriously. These would be the best danged s'mores of all time.

It started when I made marshmallows...

Last year I had learned to make the whipped sugary gelatin confections. They were scrum-diddly-umptious, bouncy and fluffy. More yummy than any store bought marshmallow could even imagine tasting. You don't even need corn syrup to make them.

 And the best part? You can flavour them. Any flavour you can imagine!!! ... Well, almost. I have a really vivid imagination when it comes to flavours and some pretty clever means of bringing them into existence...(though, I do say so myself. *cough*)

Of last year's production

Last year they were Earl Grey flavoured marshmallows. This year, inspired by pine edibilities, I made them...of course, Pine flavoured. But in case my very normal friends thought this to be too outrageous for their taste buds I made an alternate Vanilla Orange flavoured batch.

The result?
Oh heavenly goodness. How could such lovely perfection be wasted with nasty, grody, waxy, fake "chocolate" as those hershey "smore sized" bars? No no! I would have GOOD chocolate with my marshmallows and that was that.

But the prices. Oooohhhhhhhh the prices. A bar of silky, cocoa-y, marvelous Ghiradelli chocolate was ever so expensive. They were being priced at more than NINE DOLLARS A POUND. Even the yucky Hershey chocolate was more expensive than I imagined it could be.

So you know what I did?

I went to the BAKING section! Ah ha! Two 12oz bags of Ghiradelli semi-sweet chocolate chips for $5! That's under four dollars a pound! (I think...) Who needs Ghiradelli to put their chocolate in bar shaped slabs for an extra five bucks a pound? I could do that myself!

And while I was at it I would sprinkle sea salt on them babies.

Noms.

Now that's chocolate. Better than any sub-par Hershey chocolate could ever imagine tasting.

Well, that settled it. If I was going to go "cheap" and gourmet at the same time (funny how those two coincide more often than many people might imagine) I'd simply have to make my own graham crackers too.

Yeah, I've done that before too. And they were fantastic. More delicious than any stale store graham cracker could even imagine tasting. So I did it again and they were the perfect top and bottom to my marvelous marshmallow masterpieces and my clever chocolaty concoction.

The cookout was amazing. Fire + food + frisbees = forever fun.. (I'm fond of alliterating, you know.) How could it go wrong? Okay, well it was on a New Hampshire beach in April, so yeah, it was cold too. But that just added to the adventure.

 And the s'mores?

 Yeah, you know it.

Absolutely amazing. Better than any combination of jet-puffed marshmallow, waxy Hershey chocolate and Nabisco graham crackers could have ever even imagined tasting. As far as I'm concerned, this is the only way to have s'mores.

Wish I had a photo of the final product, but my camera is not beach friendly.

Even my normal taste-budded friends were impressed. Please excuse me while I go and be smug.

In which I eat my friend's Christmas tree

I should have posted about this a couple months ago... Actually, I should have done this a couple months ago. But it happened that a couple months ago I was in Florida and don't forget that I'm a bit of a procrastinator. It's worth the wait, however, as its awesome. Like foraging from your living room!

My own Christmas tree

Next Christmas, if you find yourself feeling rather sad about paying money to cut down a tree to be a temporary decoration in your house and then feel sad about throwing it away a month later, then here is something you might want to consider:

Pine is edible.

And it's actually pretty yummy. It tastes a lot like it smells, on the astringent side, and with a dash of bitter. It may be an acquired taste, but I find myself liking a lot of strange-ish things.

If the taste doesn't suit you, here's something else to consider:

Pine is antiseptic, antibacterial, high in vitamin C and other nutritious minerals. You can use your Christmas tree to make health elixirs, cough and cold remedies or even as an excellent cleaner if nothing else interests you. I've read from Susun Weed that pine vinegar can even clear up a lung infection. This is some good stuff, folks. Seriously!

And if one doesn't suit your fancy, try another variety. The taste can really vary, so don't give up if you try one that isn't so yummy.

This year my friend* had a beautiful Christmas tree of a variety I had never seen before. It's needles were long and wide. They reminded me of rosemary. I asked her if I could taste it. Heh heh. Thankfully, my friend is used to me and my weird ways and told me to have a go if I really wanted.

Well I did, and it was actually quite pleasing to the palette. Up until now, the best tasting pine I've been able to find is White Pine. Her pine tree (and I might have this wrong but I think she said it was called a Scotch Balsam) was lemony, slightly minty, spicy and (of course) piney. It delighted me. I asked her if I could have it when she was done using it as her temporary decoration.

She happily obliged me, saying "I'm glad my super expensive Christmas tree is getting more uses than one!" And then I had a large bag of pine branches hanging about my  house for about a month before I finally got around to turning them into things.

Pine vinegar, pine simple syrup and a jar of pine needles

So far, what I've made is: Pine simple syrup, for flavoring beverages and maybe even making candy.. (I think it might be fun to make pine lemonade, though John thinks it'll taste like cleaner....) Pine vinegar, which I intend to use in cooking as one would use balsamic vinegar. And pine soda.

Yup! Pine flavoured soda. It's kinda wild tasting. I carbonated it using a fermented wild yeast starter that I learned to make here at Learning Herbs. Instead of flavoring my soda with blueberries, as in the linked recipe, I made a sugary pine decoction and turned that into soda. Good stuff!

I also stripped most of the left over branches of their needles and intend to use them as an herb in cooking, the way one uses rosemary. But I could also put it in tea and blend it with other flavors. I'm thinking of chopping up the remaining needle-less branches and slow steeping them in olive oil for some piney oil. Which has many uses in and of itself! Salves, salads, wood polish...

I love that I can eat my cleaners and skin care. No toxins here!

For the simple syrup, I combined 2 cups sugar and 1 cup water in a pot. I added a bunch up pine needles and some of the smaller branches and stirred and let simmer under a lid for about 15 minutes. I probably could have let it go longer. The more pine you use, the more piney it will taste, (obviously). I thought mine was a little too sweet and not as piney as I hoped. I was following the Simple Syrup recipe in Joy of Cooking, but next time I think I'll use less sugar and more pine.

For the vinegar, take a glass jar and pack it with pine needles and branches then fill the jar with apple cider vinegar. Put the lid on (if it's a metal lid, place something like wax paper or several layers of plastic between the jar and lid because vinegar really corrodes metal) label it with the date and wait 4-6 weeks. Then you can strain it (or not) and use as you please, on food, or your toilet! You might want to make two jars, one for each, you know, so nothing cross-contaminates, eh...

So next time you have a Christmas tree, or someone you know does, try it out. Not all of them taste as good as others, but they're all edible and useful in so many ways. I was particularly delighted to find a tree that tasted so dern yummy, but there's loads to do with even the not-so-yummy varieties. You can even just go out to your closest woods and bring home some pine today if you can't wait till Christmas. Go ahead and try it!

I wonder if pine ice cream would be any good...

* I didn't actually get to use my own Christmas tree this year for a couple reasons - it was not nearly as tasty as my friend's and I didn't want a pine overload in my house, and we actually forgot to water it most of the time we had it, so by the time we got to taking it down there wasn't much left to it.  Don't let this happen to you!

I made yogurt

You'd better believe it, bucko.

In my recycled storage container. Resourceful, eh?

 Isn't it beautiful?

And it's yummy too. And cheap! Now I can eat yogurt on a more regular basis and not feel guilty at how much money I'm currently eating.
You see, I buy (or used, to, hehehe) Stonyfield's delicious whole organic yogurt. I love that they are organic (and honestly, I don't buy a lot of organic because it's very pricey, but this was one of my few exceptions) They have live cultures and are delicious. But at $3.69 a quart, they were one of the most expensive things on my receipts every shopping trip (unless I happened to buy meat, that time 'round). A gallon of (non-organic) milk is $2.49. So.... a gallon of milk can make me 4 quarts of yogurt for 2.49. That's a lot cheaper! I might even be able to justify buying organic milk for my yogurt making processes at a price like that! But we'll see about that.

You know, we're kinda trying to save money to buy a house right now.

I'm not going to go into super detail about how I made it, because there's quite a few picture by picture directions on the internet. The one I followed is here, with a few back up researches just to make sure I had everything in a row. But it was so easy and successful I could explain it to you in, like, three sentences.

Ready? Here goes.

Take yer milk (and you wanna go whole, because it's the best, you know? I heart fat) put it in your crock pot, heat on low for 2.5 hours. Turn your crock pot off and let sit 2-3 hours. (The directions say 3, I did 2, because I was impatient, I think you mainly want it warm but not TOO warm) Add a little yogurt (I read the ratio was generally 2 tablespoons of yogurt per cup of milk) stir it up, replace the lid on your crockpot and cover with a towel to keep things warm. Let it sit for 8-12 hours. I went to sleep and in the morning: amazing! Yogurt!

Well, maybe that was a few more than 3 sentences, I wanted to put my own spin on it, you see?

I also chilled mine before stirring it or disturbing it at all, because I read that it can help make it thicker. Not sure if this is true or not, though, because I never tried not doing it. But it's only my first batch, so maybe we'll try some right away and see if this is so...

Some good things to remember:
*save a half a cup or so of your yogurt so that you can use your homemade kind to start your next batch. *I've read that it lasts 7-10 days in your refrigerator, so only make as much as you can eat at a time. I have a feeling it will probably last longer, and if I find out, I'll let you know. But just in case, I only made 3 pints. One of which is already gone....and I just finished it yesterday!

Even though I now have a method that works, I'm kind of curious to know the how behind it all. Why heat it up and let it sit? Why not just heat to the temp you need first and then add your yogurt? What happens in the milk that makes this step necessary? I'm kind of food-scientist in this area. I love just doing things that work, but I really love knowing why it works. Then I can change things all I want, so long as I know the rules.'

So if I find out, I'll post about it!

I also bottled my first batch of komboucha a few days ago.  Sometime around lunch I'm going to break one open and taste it. I'm SO excited about it. I'll update you on that too, sometime soon.

tehe, love the empty vodka bottle.

Meantime, I want to give a little shout-out to one of my favourite blogger's new blogs. Even though she has no idea who I am (I'm not much of a commenter, see?), I've been a pretty regular reader of Kathleen's previous blog for about a year now. She just launched a new one that sounds sooooo interesting. So check it out at Becoming Peculiar. If you're interested in Christianity, being kind of radical, or just like reading new ideas or new spins on old ideas, you'll probably find something that catches your fancy. I'm eating it up right now.

Happy 2012! and some cool but unposted projects from 2011

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!! 9 days in but that's definitely still new!

Well, I've been away for a couple months but that's no surprise, right?

I guess Nanowrimo really used up my writing juices for awhile. But I'm getting back into it, updating my journal, finally responding to my letters and last but...probably not...well, maybe it is, least...this blog! It occurred to me that I did a lotta stuff last year that I totally intended to do a full on post about and never quite did. My apologies, you're missing out and it's all my fault.

Let me know if you would like a more detailed post of any of the following, and I'll be happy to oblige.

I made a nifty thrifty little purse using half a cloth place mat and a long length of ribbon. Easy-peasy.

Love the colours. And the adorable clasp.

Foodwise, I made my first (and second) turkey in 2011. It was delish and now I feel all empowered with this new ability. I'd recommend always brining one's turkeys. Unless you're going to deep fry it, now that I'd like to try next. Noms.

Not the greatest photo, but the only one I have.

 I also made second place winning apple cinnamon rolls! Complete with whole wheat flour and deliciousness!

 And a first prize winning Pumpkin Pear trifle, my own recipe. This photograph is terrible but it's better than the other terrible photo I took. We were in a hurry to get to the baking contest at the church and a rushed photo is generally never all that great.

Crochet wise, I made a scarf and two cutie beret-style hats, which I unfortunately haven't taken pictures of. The scarf I already gave away as a Christmas present, foolish me. But I also made this awesome tea cozy, isn't it great!? I didn't have a pattern but it was pretty simple and it really works to keep my tea hot for longer!

Herbalism adventures included making tons of extracts for using in cooking and a couple medicinal ones, the ones I can remember off the top of my head include Earl Grey tea, jasmine green tea, peppermint, rose, lavender, ginger, vanilla (duh, haha), yarrow and st. Johns wort.

And herb vinegars too! A fire vinegar with ginger, garlic, thyme and cayenne pepper will knock the socks off of any cold or flu, and I made a pine vinegar which is tasty on salads and I'm considering doubling it's use as a cleaner...Blackberry and tarragon vinegars made it into my stock as well, this year. And herb infused olive oils have been very handy for making salves, salad dressings and deodorants!

oils

fresh poured salves

Making fire vinegar

The round up

 I've been trying my hand at making earrings too. Here's a couple photos of some of them. I made these with the intention to sell them, but only ended up selling one pair. I'm considering an etsy account, but maybe not just yet. What do you think of this style?

Blue and Gold

The pair I sold

Wedding earrings, get it? white lace, pearl and blue.

Well there's a lot more but time and space should be limiting me now.

Here's to a happy new year filled with even more awesome projects and good food. Got any big plans this year?