12 Days of Xmas in ’12! Day Two!

Happy friday, friends! At this time of year, a lot of people are making things.  Baking cookies.  Making wreaths.  DIY’ing their gifts for their friends and loved ones.  Me, I do a little of the above.  I make stollen with my dad and traditional family dips and cookies with my mom when I go home to St. Louis.  I make an annual xmas mixtape (duh doy).  I make some presents for Double S and my family.  But what I really like to do at this time of year is see what actual talented artistic people make and do.   Double S and I like to do this by hitting up some of the many holiday arts/crafts fairs that are in the Seattle area this time of year.

Last weekend, we went to the huge and scene-y Urban Craft Uprising and the smaller and scene-y Art Under $100 in South Park.  Both are great.  There was hip embroidery!  There were t-shirts and pillows with amazing screenprinting!  There was letterpress!  There were stamps, clothes, cards (tons of cards!), leatherwork, wallets made from the upholstery of old cars, woodwork, and so on! Think less grandma and Avon, and more tattooed folks who went to art school.  What we’re gonna do when most grandmothers are tattooed, I’ll leave that for you to figure out.  As I strolled around, I heard someone wail to their friend, “Oh man!  I don’t know how to do anything. “  Yeah, you and me both, sister! Here were some of my faves from those shows, you know, by people who know how to do things.

From Murmur Fremo

From Cellar Door Mercantile

I have this up at my house! From Irene Akio.

From Emily Rose in Portland.  I love this.

Also from Cellar Door Mercantile

Wow, I like art with animals.  You should see our dining room, which is filled with almost all animal art.

Yeah, so I felt like I couldn’t make anything either.  The stuff at these shows always a) bums me out that I suck at art, and/or b) inspires D0uble S and I to make tons of plans to make art.  Sometimes we follow through!  See the big decoupage explosion of 2007!  Some of our ideas remain lost to the ages or perhaps materialized as just a forgotten book of cool embroidery patterns bought on a whim on a trip to Whidbey Island.  True story.  We’ve got more ideas for next year.  Double S may finally take that pottery class!

So, it’s Christmastime to me when the crafts start being rolled out and the ideas start to flow, just as much as when I see trees and lights and sip my boozy nog.  Speaking of things that remind us that this is Christmas, here is a sweet little song, “This is Christmas,” by The Eastern Sea.

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I like this song.  Click above on that player (cuz I’m also super psyched that I just learned how to do that!) and hear them give a litany of christmas-y things.   Like this, “This is Christmas.  This is magic.  This is paper.  This is plastic.  This is last minute / shopping mall traffic. This is Christmas.   This is cold weather.  This is jackets.  This is sweaters. This is going /  home together.  This is Christmas.”

The Eastern Sea is from Austin, TX.  Which explains why they think of jackets and sweaters.  They don’t need no stinkin’ parkas!

And if you’re an Austinite, The Eastern Sea is doing an xmas show tomorrow night.  They also have released a full length Christmas album, The Eastern Sea’s First Christmas, with the likes of classics such as “Christmas Don’t Be Late, and “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” as well as the above song and a few more originals.  Check it out!

And hey, I know I said I can’t make anything, and I even told you yesterday that I wasn’t feeling like taking on many projects this year, but I actually still kinda did, now that I think about it.  I can do things!

Here’s what I made in my kitchen in 2012, besides the ramen, butter, and sourdough I already told you about here earlier in the year.

This is bagels!

This is pretzels!

This is homemade fries!

This is burgers /  I ground the meat myself!  Editor’s note: These were kinda the best burgers ever, amirite, growandresist?

This is amazing summer breakfast sandwiches/  that will change your life!

 

This is tomatoes and garlic we grew!

 

This is what we did with them!

This is Mexican style pickled carrots that I finally perfected!

This is pickled eggs.

The bonus part is, if I can continue on with this whole blogging thing when its not about xmas music, I can write about All These Things I Can Do® next year.

Have a great weekend everybody!

The Eastern Sea…This is Christmas

Buttermaking!

You know, if I won one of those megamillions giant lottery things that people were all getting in my way to line up for a few weeks back (in Seattle nonetheless!  Aren’t we above that, Seattle?  What with our soccer and our listen supported radio?),  I’d buy myself a few key things.  Definitely a tricked out Airstream so that Double S and I could take our already luxury camping asses to new extremes.  Perhaps a small bungalow in Kauai.  I’d likely pay top dollar to recreate the t shirt collection from my youth; yeah, I’m talking OP, Panama Jack, Vision, INXS Kick 1988 Tour, and so on.  And, after this month’s Grow It Cook It Can It challenge of making butter, I know I’d also buy grass fed local raw cream and make my own butter on the regular.  Or who am I kidding?  I’d probably have Jeeves make it.  All of this to say the following: grass fed local organic raw cream is expensive, yos!  Take it from the masters of 90s hip hop, the Wu Tang Clan and A Tribe Called Quest.   First, the Wu Tang Clan.  They were right, cash rules everything around me, cream get the money, dolla dolla bills y’all!  Cream does indeed get the money.  And I mean that literally!  Yep, I quoted the Wu Tang song “C.R.E.A.M.”

See what I did there?  Good cream is pricey, but you need it to make excellent butter.   Not no parkay, not no margarine.  Strictly butter baby, strictly butter.  See what I did there?  I finished my lengthy allusion to hip hop music.  I quoted a track aptly titled “Butter” from A Tribe Called Quest’s classic 1991 album The Low End Theory.  Yep, I did it, I gave you a DIY buttermaking overview using only hip songs from 1991-1994.  You’re welcome.

Seriously though, to make butter, first get your hands on some good cream.  You need cash to buy said good cream, Wu tang style.  If you’re just gonna use regular old pasteurized homogenized cream from the store, why bother?  I used some beautiful grass fed Cow’s Cream from Sea Breeze Farm on Vashon Island.  Check out your local farmer’s markets or food co-ops for some local raw goodness.  Well, unless you can’t legally buy raw dairy products.  Check it out here to see if retail sales of raw milk are legal in your state.

Sea Breeze Farm at the U District Farmer's Market

The friendly Sea Breeze vendor at my local farmer’s market told me that their cows have been munching on new spring grass lately so I should get some nice yellow butter. Excellent!

Nice and yellow.

Making butter is easy!    I really put it off because I had to go to the aforementioned farmer’s market to get cream, and it’s not in my nabe, and it rains a lot here.  Then when it’s not raining its too nice to be out driving to farmer’s markets or inside making your KitchenAid get all hot and bothered.  And then there was something else.  Yep,  a little bundle of joy and poop smells came into our lives here at the homestead this week.  A two pound, eight week old, highly adorable black kitten.  Prepare to SQUEAL.

It'd hard to get a clear picture of a two month old kitten. Here's good ol' no face!

Unless she's sleeping whilst cuddled in blankets. Awww.

Oh and how about a pic of her helping in the kitchen with the task at hand?  In your face, bloggers with your pics of your kids holding chickens, hugging goats, turning compost, and helping you stir in the kitchen!

New Kitten (name TBD) checks out the cream before I make butter. If this were a cartoon and I was an old lady, I would have put a dish of it out for her. Then that hapless putty tat Sylvester would have come around and all hell would have broken loose. Did I mention I loved Looney Tunes when I was a kid?

Once you have good cream, then you have some options.  You can put it in your KitchenAid mixer.  You can use a hand held mixer.  You can use a whisk.  You can put the cream in a jar and shake it.  But for me, it was a sunny April Saturday in Seattle.  We don’t get a lot of these, people.  So I put the cream in my KitchenAid, used the whisk-looking attachment, and let ‘er rip.

I split my quart of cream into two batches of butter, two cups of cream per batch.  Mainly because I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with the butter, but also because in case I effed everything up and the cream turned into an old shoe or something, I’d still have more cream for a second go round.  Not needed, I made regular old unsalted butter and a compound butter I made by adding sea salt and green garlic.  More about that later.

Blend, whisk, shake a jar all Laura Ingalls style, or just stand there staring at your KitchenAid mixer and contemplating your navel until the cream starts to thicken.  I had my mixer going at medium speed then upped the speed a bit as it started to thicken.  Scrape the sides of the bowl as needed.  First, you’ll think nothing is happening.  Don’t fret my pet!

It thickens up fairly quickly. Put your mixer on medium speed. This is about 3 minutes into the process.

Now we're getting somewhere!

Eventually the cream will thicken into whipped cream, then the curds from the cream/now almost butter will start to separate. Turn you mixer down at that point or buttermilk will splash everywhere.

Eureka! The curds are separating from the buttermilk!

Keep it going until it appears that all the liquid has been removed from the now butter.

Butter, baby!

You can, at this point, put the whole shebang through a strainer, further separating out the buttermilk.  Put the butter back in the mixer if it needs to further thicken or if it appears that more water must be squeezed out.

I then rinsed my finished butter.  I put the clump of new butter into very cold ice water.  Knead the butter a little bit in the water.  Change the water and do it again.  Then do it again until the water is clear after you’ve kneaded the butter.  Apparently this extra step makes the butter last longer in the fridge and not get a sour taste.  Why not, friends?

As I said, I separated the quart of cream into two batches of butter.  The first batch I left completely plain.  I didn’t even add salt, which is kinda unheard of for me.  For my second batch knew I wanted to make a compound butter with herbs that we’d use around the homestead.  We love garlic.  Then, at the farmer’s market on my way out, I spotted green garlic.

Ah, green garlic. Always a harbinger of spring in these parts.  Green garlic is garlic harvested before the cloves are allowed to mature into the big bulbs we all covert.  Oh yeah, big bulbs!  Amirite fellas?!  No?  Ok.  Green garlic’s bulbs are tiny and both the mini bulb and most of the green parts are edible and mild.  Perfect for salads and stir fries, and prolly also for a compound butter, I figured as I bought them from the friendly folks at Whistling Train Farm.

I covet the garlic we grow here at the homestead too much to cut my own green garlic at home.  Did I tell you about my garlic last year?  It was a success!  So much so that we blew through it too fast.  We planted a lot more this year.

2011 garlic harvest! We went through this very quickly.

I got a good haul from the farmer’s market.  We had a spring feast.

Coho salmon, green garlic, and lion's mane mushrooms. This is what spring looks like at a Seattle area farmer's market.

For my compound butter, I scrubbed about 5 pieces of green garlic and very finely chopped them.  I then added the garlic and about 1/4 of a teaspoon (plus an extra pinch) of good sea salt to the butter.  I mashed it for awhile with a fork.

At the end of the day, I had these beauties to show for my not too intense labor.

Very impressive!  No Jeeves needed!  We had some of the plain butter on some fresh bread from Bakery Nouveau with our dinner that night. Amahzing.  Speaking of amahzing, did you watch Happy Endings this season?  Recommended.

So that was kinda easy! Maybe now I’ll make the cheese I’ve been putting off making, even after a two night cheesemaking class.  And now I’m left with almost 3 cups of buttermilk.  I’m thinking buttermilk pancakes.  Or fried chicken?  Check back to see what I did with the buttermilk.  Don’t throw it away!