Grinding beef, using boy-power!

We recently butchered our bull. In preparation for processing our home-grown meat, we had purchased a small but (supposedly) good quality electric meat grinder. Sadly, the third time we used it, grinding the meat from the bull into hamburger, the machine broke. So, Allen looked around in Gracias, and found a manual meat grinder in one of the hardware stores, for around $40.

Today we pulled out a large bag of the meat that we'd intended to grind (meat that we hadn't been able to grind, because of our broken machine), and had Josiah and Ben put it through the manual grinder. Because this meat was previously frozen, it has to be cooked before it can be frozen again. We're seasoning this meat to use in tacos. It will be nice to have some "convenience food" in the freezer for future use!

Today we ground, seasoned, and cooked about 15 pounds of meat for tacos. We're thinking of other things to cook in bulk when we do future batches of grinding - perhaps sausage, or meatballs! Yum!

Meanwhile, Allen, Bethany and Gus are cutting strips of beef to use as jerky. Jerky is totally a treat for us, and we're looking forward to having it around the house . . . for a week or so, LOL. Then it will all be eaten! 

Another day of pouring concrete . . .

. . . which also means another day I prepare lunch for a crowd! Today the meal will involve about a dozen people. I'm planning to make fried egg sandwiches. Pray for me! (Maybe pray for those who will be eating, as well.) LOL

Sadness involving me and cooking

Here's a fact about me. I have no sense of smell at all. As a result, I can only taste those tastes which can be detected by the taste-buds on my tongue - sweet, salty, bitter, and sour.

Strawberry - sour, occasionally slightly sweet
Banana - usually slightly sweet
Apple - sweet or sour, depending on the variety
Chocolate - bitter and sweet
Chips, pretzels, etc - salty
Cheese - salty
Rice, potatoes, pasta, milk - nothing
Unseasoned meats - nothing
All vegetables - nothing

You get the idea.

I'm upset today, because I'm tired of having the responsibility of doing a job - cooking - in which I can never feel confident that I will have an adequate outcome. I had to make lunch today for a crew of guys who work on our house construction. I went for safe and easy - I made boxed macaroni and cheese. Did you even know that it's possible to screw up boxed macaroni and cheese?

I don't know if perhaps the milk was off, or the margarine, or even the packets of cheese powder, but everyone agreed the meal was strange and nasty, and almost all of the food I prepared went to the dogs (who, by the way, were delighted with it).

For a moment I'd like you to pretend that you're me.

• First of all, you have the responsibility for making sure that your family and occasionally those outside of your family are fed. You'd like the eating to be a pleasant experience.
• Second - you can only work with foods you've never tasted before. This will be hard for most of you to even imagine, since you are used to tasting foods. Perhaps you can pretend that you're cooking in some foreign country where they use ingredients you're completely unfamiliar with.
• Third - you can't taste anything at all before, during or after the preparation of the food, including the "adjust seasonings" part of the venture. To most fully experience what it means to be Trish, you should really find a way to avoid smelling any of the foods you work with, as well.
• Fourth - you can use a recipe! But, assume that two or more of the ingredients are unavailable where you live, so you have to make substitutions with items which aren't quite the same and are likely inferior to those listed in the recipe (canned peas or spinach in place of frozen, for instance).
• Fifth - as a wild card, assume that at any moment one or more of the foods you have to work with may be tainted or just taste bad. Good news for you - you can see if the food is moldy. Other than that, you'll probably not know that you've served your family nasty rotten food until they mention it. They will mention it. 

Now, do this faithfully, several times each day, over the course of years. Work hard to improve your skills. Try to think of ways to fail-safe against the potential pitfalls. Deal with the fact that everyone else you know is trying to incorporate healthier foods into their family's diets, while you're increasing the processed foods, as a way to avoid inedible results. Try not to notice as your family picks at their food, or how excited and happy they are when someone else does the cooking. Keep going even when they politely say: "Oh it's fine, Mom" when you cook . . . but say: "WOW this is really great!!!" when someone else cooks.

Teach your daughter to cook. Find that your family enjoys eating again. Cook less and less yourself, thereby forgetting some of the lessons you've learned along the way. Have daughter grow up and move out.

Get frustrated and unhappy all over again.

Sigh. This is me being sad. I'll get over it and be all salamanders and puppies and basement-happiness tomorrow. Today I'm wallowing. Don't show up for dinner - you've been warned!

Today was a good day:

We had cherry, blueberry and apple pies, plus a monster chicken pot pie! Thanks for all the hard work, Rachel!

Baking with Blackstrap Molasses

Our family loves molasses cookies! It's hard to find molasses in Honduras, however, and when you do find it, you pay dearly for it. Last year Allen was able to put a number of jars of molasses on our annual shipping container. Since molasses doesn't go bad on the pantry shelf, this is a nice item to have stockpiled.

Some of the jars Allen bought contained the golden molasses I'm used to using, but some said they were "Blackstrap Molasses." Since Rachel and I aren't used to using this variety of molasses, I did a bit of internet research, and found that blackstrap molasses has a stronger taste, and can be a bit more bitter than regular molasses.

Rachel was baking molasses cookies this week, so I asked her to make two separate batches, using the regular molasses in one batch, and then using the blackstrap molasses (very carefully) in the other batch, so that she could figure how much of each was needed to acquire the same (or similar) taste in a recipe that was otherwise exactly the same.

Her results? She used 3/4 cup of regular molasses in one batch, and 1/2 cup of blackstrap molasses in the other batch, to get the tastes to match fairly closely. She did not adjust any of the other ingredients. The two batches of cookies looked slightly different. The ones using golden molasses had a bit of a golden color to them, while the blackstrap variety had a darker, grayish tint. The flavor was also slightly different. My taste testers inform me that the blackstrap cookies have a bit more of a "bite" to them, but that it's a "good bite." So, now you know.

Oh, and this post was supposed to include pictures of the cookies . . . but when I went to take a picture, they were all gone! Sorry about that!

Here's what you've been waiting to see . . .

Nahhh, not yet. I know you're waiting to see pictures of the Rottweiler puppies, and I'll post them next (oh, if you're on Facebook, Rachel has already put some up on the Sowers4pastors page there). But first, I wanted to show you what we had for lunch today:

These are white flour biscuits - they just have a slight brownish tinge because Rachel used our homemade lard in them, and also put in some of the cracklins. In case you're not familiar with cracklins, they are a byproduct of lard production. They taste sort of like bacon, except they aren't salty (unless, of course, you salt them).

The biscuits were super yummy. We're likin' lard.

Here are some of the quart jars of lard in our kitchen, from Rachel's lard-making event:

Next up: PUPPY PICTURES!!!!!!!

Some canning "firsts" this week

Recently, Rachel tried making apple butter for the first time. It came out so well, she decided to make a big batch and can it, so we'd have a supply of apple butter in our pantry.

As it happens, we've only canned using the pressure method so far, and apple butter only needs to be water bath canned. We used the same pot for this, but found that water bath canning is much faster and easier. Boo and Rachel worked together peeling, coring, and grating up all those apples.

Rachel spiced the apples and cooked and cooked and cooked until eventually the mixture was relatively smooth. We don't worry about getting it extremely smooth, as we don't mind chunky apple butter.

We ended up with 16 pints of apple butter. That should keep us for a while!

When Rachel and I went grocery shopping this week, we discovered that the local berries, known as "Mora" are in season right now. We really enjoy these berries cooked up as a cobbler, but the berries are only available for a few weeks each year. So, we decided to try canning up some of these berries.

This was another first for us, as we had to do some guesswork/adapting to come up with a recipe for canning these. We're new to canning, and we're still most comfortable following a recipe and set of directions to a "T", but we had to wing it this time, as there aren't any directions available for canning mora berries!

Boo and David sorted through the berries, to pull out the bad ones and make sure no stems or leaves made it into the canning jars. Then Rachel canned up 14 quarts of berries. Off season cobbler for us!

We're needing to can some more chicken, as we've used up our supply, but I don't supposed we'll be getting to that anytime soon - we're all pretty tired of canning at the moment. At the same time, we're feeling pretty proud of our canning accomplishments, and especially of our recently acquired skills in new areas!

Some photos from around the place this week

Yummmmm - here's the bread from that new recipe!

The gate on our driveway - the one that's kept closed, to keep the cows in, and must be opened if I'm to drive in.

The steep driveway, leading up to that gate.

See Gus in the rafters? Wanna guess what he's doing with that broom wrapped in a rag? Well, if you guessed "knocking down termite parts" you can congratulate yourself on your amazing guessing skills. Now, wanna guess what I'm cleaning up all over the lower regions of my house again? Yup. Sigh.

What's Cookin'?

Recently we tried a new whole wheat bread recipe. I found the recipe here, and tried it specifically because we wanted a bread which would successfully hold together when sliced and used for sandwiches. This is the one! Although the bread isn't especially flavorful, it's a nice, simple sandwich bread. The only adjustment we made to the recipe was to change the ratio of white to whole wheat flour. We used about 2 cups of white and 6 cups of whole wheat, instead of 5 cups of white and 3 cups of whole wheat - and it still worked out great.

I'm quite excited with this find, so I wanted to share the recipe with any of you who might be looking for something like this!

The Ham Report

Yes indeedy, we ate home-grown, home-butchered, home-cured ham for Easter dinner! And the results?

It was good.

There is room for improvement, as we cure the three other hams-to-be in the freezer, but we definitely enjoyed the ham we created this time!

Now, here's how we did it:

I pulled the cut of meat (from the rump of the pig) out of the freezer on Monday morning, to start the thawing process. We weighed the meat, using our not-so-very-accurate bathroom scale, and came up with about 9 - 10 pounds (including the bone).

I used the recipe on this site for our home cure. The pink salt (instacure #1) was the only ingredient I didn't have in the house. I was able to order a package of this salt on Amazon, and Josiah brought it to us in his suitcase last Sunday.

On Monday afternoon I mixed up a double batch of the water, brown sugar, kosher salt, and instacure. Allen found a perfectly sized tupperware amongst our plastics, and this container held the meat and the liquid with no room to spare - so that the meat was completely submerged. We put this into a cooler, and added several 3-liter bottles of ice, to keep it cold. You can, of course, just put the meat in the fridge, but since we had just had a trip to San Pedro Sula (where we stocked up on some special grocery items) and had also received some edible goodies from Josiah's mom (thanks Johanna!), our fridge was pretty full. The cooler with ice bottles - changed for fresh ice every day - worked just fine.

Late Sunday morning we removed the meat from the cooler and from the liquid cure, washed it, plopped it into a baking pan, and started baking our ham in the oven at 350 degrees. Oh, I also took a couple of strips of pig skin with attached fat (which have been in the freezer since the butchering) and draped those over the top of the ham. I did this because a store-bought ham normally has the skin (and the fat under the skin) left on one side, and ham cooking directions generally say to cook the ham "skin side up." Our ham was completely skinned, so I hoped this would help keep the meat moist during the long baking process.

There are some things I'll do differently next time:

Although I followed the directions which said to cure the meat one day for each two pounds of meat, our meat wasn't quite cured all the way through. A few spots deep inside the meat, while perfectly edible good pork, weren't ham. The fact that I started off with a frozen ham might be a factor. Next time, I'll thaw the meat for at least a day before starting the cure, and I'll give the curing process a couple more days.

We'd have liked the ham a bit saltier. I might add more salt to my next brine, or I might just see if the additional curing time adds to the saltiness of the end product.

A small amount of the meat had a bit of a chalky texture. I'm not sure why this was - and as we were eating the ham at a family holiday dinner, I didn't take the time to examine if this was meat from any particular area of the ham. I suppose this could have been caused by the cure, or the baking process, or even the diet of the pigs - I just don't know. I'll need to do some research about this, and see if I can improve the texture for next time.

At any rate, we've definitely achieved ham! I'm happy, and with three more hogs in the pigpen (one of those belongs to Russell), I'm thinking we'll have a lot more ham dinners in our future!

Bacon . . . HOMEMADE Bacon!!!!!!!

Sunday morning we had bacon and eggs for breakfast. We don't currently have chickens, so we didn't produce the eggs, but . . . amazingly enough . . . it was homemade bacon!!!!! Oh, and our apologies for the poor photos in this post - we've been teasing Boo that she was so distracted by the bacon she was unable to concentrate on her photography!

Of course, this was meat from our recent pig butchering. I found a recipe for making bacon, which didn't require any ingredients I don't have. Here is the recipe, along with detailed instructions.

There was a bit of trial and error involved here. I followed the instructions on the website, except that we had already removed the skin from the pieces of meat. Oh yes, and the website said to trim the meat to a nice rectangular shape. No way - I'm not wasting any potential bacon in order to have my meat look tidy. Every bit of our meat became bacon, and the slices are . . . rustic . . . in shape. Fine with us; we'll call this "Artisanal Bacon" and pretend we paid more for the trendiness of it. LOL

I halved the recipe, and still had lots of the mixture left over, after I had coated the meat with it. Then the meat sat in the fridge from Monday until Saturday, soaking up the "cure." On Saturday morning we baked the bacon in the oven for several hours at a low temperature (as directed on the website).

Here's what the meat looked like after it was baked, and before it was sliced (this is one of the two pieces). Please notice the artisanal, non-rectangular shape. LOL

After the baking, Rachel sliced some of it up, and we fried a few pieces. They were toooooooo salty! Oh my, almost inedible. Turns out, five days was much too long to let the meat soak up the cure - probably because my pieces of meat were small (because we butchered a small hog).

However, the next morning, I pulled out more of the meat, and I soaked some of the slices in water for 20 minutes before frying them. These were perfect!

And so, we had delicious bacon and eggs for breakfast!

Later, we used some of the bacon to flavor a yummy bean soup Rachel concocted for dinner. The soup also contained home grown miniature tomatoes.



I'm not sure any of my new homestead-y skills impresses me quite as much as having achieved homemade bacon. I'm mighty pleased!

Next week, however, we're going to make our first attempt at homemade ham, and will possibly have that ham for our Easter dinner. I'll let you know.

Soft Pretzels!

Good stuff has been happening in my kitchen lately.

Rachel used a copycat recipe we found on the internet. Since we've never eaten "Auntie Anne's" soft pretzels, we don't know if these are like that brand, but they were good eating!


Just for fun, Ben helped make lots of pretzel bits.


We don't recommend trying to keep these pretzels to eat later, as they are much better when fresh and warm. We did successfully toast some a day later, and they were very acceptable, but there's just nothing like a fresh, hot, soft pretzel!

No rice for dinner - until MAY!

Allen grew up in Southeast Asia, as his parents were missionaries. Presumably he ate a lot of rice during his childhood. When we married, he was very fond of rice, and wanted rice-based meals pretty frequently. As a family, we usually eat a good number of rice meals each week, since we like rice, and it's relatively inexpensive.

Now, however, Allen doesn't want me to cook rice. At all.

This has to do with the big bridge project in Las Flores. Allen, Russell, and our paid crew are fed a cooked lunch every work day. This is paid for by the local government, as part of the whole bridge deal. And every day, they have rice. This is not to say they aren't getting a good meal. There's a nice piece of meat, from a variety of meats. There might or might not be beans, and some sort of salad-ish side dish will generally be served. And of course, there are tortillas. It's not a meal without tortillas, and many of the men on our crew use tortillas in place of forks, as that's the generally accepted etiquette in the rural villages around here. But there is always, always rice, as the main starch of the meal.

After only a few weeks of these meals, Allen was riced-out. He doesn't want to eat rice at dinnertime, after having it so very regularly at lunch. I'm trying to comply, but I'm feeling a bit limited by the no-rice edict. I cycle through pasta, potatoes, and breads. Then I cycle through them again. And again.

I'm taking this as a bit of a challenge. We don't use yuca (casava) much, because it's not that different from potatoes, and potatoes are cheaper. Maybe I can find some interesting and unique yuca recipe? What about the wheat berries I grind for bread? Could I find a way to cook the grains for a meal - and a way that my family will like, and not just feel that it was something different? Also, how about different versions of potatoes? We boil, fry, mash and hash potatoes. I could bake them, but usually not in the evenings, when we're trying to conserve power (because baked potatoes take a long time in the oven). Or different types of breads: biscuits, rolls, dumplings, savory pie crusts, etc. What else?

Suggestions are welcome! But please, don't suggest rice - at least not until the bridge project is over in MAY!

A "Cooking in Honduras" Question for you to guess

Let's see who knows or can guess:

When cooking spaghetti Honduran style, how do you judge when the spaghetti noodles are done?

We learned this bit of spaghetti cooking trivia from Russell's wife, Iris, who is a guaranteed authentic Honduran cook. Have fun guessing!

Why Can Food in the Tropics?

That was the question I asked myself, when I thought about taking on home canning. Here are a few of the answers.

Although one might think that since we live in the tropics we can just stick our hands out the window and grab a banana or mango any day of the year - well that's not quite the case. We have seasons here (rainy and dry), and seasonal foods as well. We are able to benefit by purchasing these foods when the price is best, and storing them for other times of the year. Canning is a super way to do this.

Also, we have a limited amount of freezer space. Currently, we're just running the little freezer on top of our refrigerator, because we don't have enough power to run the chest freezer. By canning some vegetables and meats, we have some extra food stored beyond what our freezer can hold. Plus, there is always the possibility of losing power, and thereby losing all the frozen food. I'd love to be able to say "that can't happen to us, since we're using solar energy" - but it only took a couple of lightning strikes to teach me that we're vulnerable to power outages, too.

We've experienced few major disasters in Honduras since my family has lived here (nothing even close to the significance of Hurricane Mitch). Even so, there have been times when bridges have washed out, and landslides have closed roads - it actually happens quite frequently here in the mountains. Honduras doesn't have lots of roads. If the major arteries are shut, food and fuel and other supplies just can't get through. The unions use this fact to their advantage, by holding their strikes on the major roads. Usually they get the attention of the government very quickly, as traffic rapidly piles up in both directions. Allen and several of the children were caught in a huelga (a strike blocking a road) a few years ago, and they were stuck in traffic for a couple of days! So, I say all that to make a case for having some extra food around the place - enough so that our family won't be in trouble if we can't get to where food is being sold, or if the food can't get to our part of the country. Last year, during the curfews related to the political situation - which sometimes lasted for several days without a break - we were relieved to have some stored foods in our pantry!

One final advantage to canning has been the ability to create "convenience foods." We don't have many options for quick and easy meal preparation available to us here, and the options we have are generally imported - and therefore expensive - items. The ability to pre-cook a large amount of meat (or beans, or veggies) and have that item ready to heat-and-serve is an unparalleled luxury for us!

So far, we've successfully canned chopped chicken, ground chicken, green beans, red beans, orange slices, and tomatoes. We're quite pleased with the results!

Canning chicken

Today we canned 7 quarts of chicken meat, with broth. Here's how we do this:

We started with five frozen chickens, purchased from town. Five chickens gives us seven full quarts of chicken. We'd previously canned up four chickens into seven quart jars, and those quarts had less chicken and more broth. Seven quarts is the magic number, by the way, because that's how many quart jars my pressure canner can hold at one time.



There are different ways to can chicken, including putting the meat into the jars raw. We've chosen to roast our chickens first. We end up with lovely roast chickens, and lots of grease and drippings in the pans.



We don't want to waste anything here, so we collect all of the grease and drippings, and save them for making gravy. I put 1/4 cup grease, 1 cup of drippings, and 1 cup of water into a freezer container. I generally get enough to put the makings for three or four batches of gravy in the freezer. Then, whenever I want to make chicken gravy in the future, I'm all set!



The meat is pulled off the bones, and set aside in a big bowl.




As each carcass is picked clean, we dump the bones and skin into a pot of water boiling on the stove. Eventually this will be the broth that we put in with the chicken.



In the midst of the canning we had to fix supper. Since I had more grease and drippings than I could fit into my freezer, we decided to use gravy in tonights supper, so Rachel whipped up a quick batch of biscuits for biscuits and gravy. It was nice to be eating chicken and gravy on the same day that we canned chicken, as the smell of the chicken cooking makes everyone want to eat it now!



We didn't have quite enough chicken broth, so we filled the jars the rest of the way up with hot water.



I won't go into the details of all the steps involved in making sure that the food will be sealed safely into the jars, but rest assured that we are carefully following all the directions. Once the chicken is in the jars, and the hot broth is poured over the meat, we pop the jars into the canner for processing.

We have to set the pressure on our canner slightly higher than the general directions, because of our elevation.



And there's the result of all this work - cooked chicken, ready for seven future family meals.

I was going to explain how we figure the benefits of the canning in this post, but it has gotten kind of long, so I'll save that for next time.

Home Canning in the Tropics

I've been doing some research lately, on home canning. As our family adjusts to our new, rural lifestyle, I've had to figure out what new activities we should incorporate. Canning wasn't something I was certain would be of benefit to us, for several reasons.

First, I figured that people living in the north (not northern Honduras - I mean like in the US and Canada) store foods through canning because they only have appropriate weather for gardening during a small portion of the year. By canning seasonal foods, people in colder climates have a way to save their home-grown produce, or produce purchased at a low price when a certain food is in season, for use during the winter months. Here in the mountains of western Honduras, our climate is fairly consistent all year long. We have months when we receive more or less rain during the year, but our temperatures only range from highs in the mid-90's down to around 40 degrees (Fahrenheit, of course). So, theoretically, the climate in our area should make it possible to grow some vegetables and fruits pretty much year around. Additionally, our family doesn't depend on our own gardening for our food - we currently purchase almost all of our fruits and vegetables. Although we hope to change this, it will be a gradual process, as I learn (likely through a good bit of trial and error) how to successfully garden here. So, I wasn't sure that there was a good reason for me to do any canning at all.

Second, there are costs related to the process of canning. There is the purchase of a pressure canner, jars, and lids, plus the cost of gas or electricity used during the canning process. The amount of time involved also must be factored into the equation. I wasn't sure if these costs would be offset by a significant enough benefit to the family.

The more research I did, however, the more I became convinced that canning foods would be a useful tool in my family's repertoire of cooking skills. Last Christmas I gave myself a canner and a small collection of canning jars as a present. The equipment arrived in our shipping container, along with the Gifts for Gracias donations. It took us months to dig our house out from the arrival of the container, and it wasn't until that was mostly under control that I found the time and motivation to actually start experimenting with canning.

Now that we're in a comparatively quiet time of the year, we've begun. So far, we've canned green beans (14 quarts), chicken in broth (also 14 quarts) and orange sections in light juice (7 pints). It's barely a start, but I have to say that we've found some significant benefits for us, even here in tropical Honduras!

I'll expand on this in the next post.

Show Off Your Smarts re: Honduran Food

Who can name either (or both) of these typical Western Honduran foods? I have no idea if they are typical in other parts of Honduras - I never saw either of these when we lived on Guanaja.

I didn't cook these, by the way - they were bought from a lady who comes around at noon every day. She also sells those wonderful bags of spiced green mango slices. We buy those quite regularly!

Sucanat - I'm sooo in the know!

I hang out in an internet homeschooling forum. While a number of other missionary moms from around the world participate, the majority of the members live and homeschool in the US. So, I hear about things - things I have not encountered, but which I learn about by listening in to the conversations of people who shop in US grocery stores and health food stores.

For instance, lots of people are trying to avoid processed sugar, and are looking for healthier choices. I usually pay only slight attention to this kind of conversation, as I don't have access to the up-to-the-minute health foods you can purchase in the US. Stevia? Agave nector? Sucanat? I don't even know what these things are!

But one day, someone asked the question, "So what is this 'sucanat' you guys are talking about?" and the explanation was: SUgar CAne NATural = Sucanat.

Hey! I can get that here! In fact, I already had some in my kitchen at that very moment! I felt so very in-the-game - something I rarely get to feel these days!

So, in honor of this healthy sweetener choice which I can actually purchase in the market here in Gracias, I present a photo essay on the production of Sucanat.

I buy these cones of sugar at the market, and grate them. I can use the sugar in place of brown sugar in some recipes, although the flavor is pretty distinctive, so the family has to get used to it.

I'll bet my sucanat is cheaper than your sucanat! ;-D

Communion Bread

Since Rachel gave such loving attention to the baking of communion bread for the final session of the Bible Training School this week, I thought I should share a picture of her efforts.

After the celebration of communion, the visiting gringo pastors admitted they wanted to pig out on the rest of the bread!