It's Easy Being Green

Looking to make your own green alternative to the chemical-laden window cleaners? This DIY window cleaner smells as good as it cleans. I think cleaning windows might be more like an aroma-therapy session thanks to these natural fragrances.

Lemon-Mint Window Wash

Ingredients:
Juice from 1 lemon
2 cups club soda
1/2 tsp peppermint essential oil
1 tsp cornstarch

Mix all ingredients. Pour into plastic spray bottle, and enjoy sparkling clean windows with a heavenly fresh scent! Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 17% [?]

Are you faced with a cooking dilemma this Valentine’s Day? If you’re planning a home-cooked  meal but you have a funny Gluten-Free Valentine, you might be wondering what you could possibly make for dessert. In my humble opinion, it is often easy avoiding the pitfalls of flour and gluten with wholesome, made from scratch main dishes, but not so easy when it comes to the finishing touch that will satisfy your sweetheart’s sweet tooth. Homestead Hottie has a huge sweet tooth and this recipe has been nothing but magical when she gets a craving that can’t be remedied by some store-bought “Gluten Bomb”.

Enter the Chocolate Lava Cake for two made without nary a drop of flour. The ingredient list contains nothing exotic and takes only 10 minutes to prepare, another 10 to bake. How does that work you ask? It rises and bakes like an egg soufflé but with all the chocolatey goodness of a warm, moist cake. If you want that molten chocolate center, make sure to pull your ramekins a minute or so early. If you let it go to the timer, you’ll end up with less chocolate lava in the center. Don’t fret if you do because both ways are delish!

These single serving Chocolate Lava Cakes should satisfy any chocolate lover whether they're GF or not.

Gluten-Free Chocolate Lava Cake for Two

• 1/2 stick butter
• 2 oz. (1/4 c.) semi-sweet chocolate chips
• 1 egg
• 1 egg yolk
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 1/4 tsp. vanilla

Here’s to hoping you and your Gluten-Free Valentine have a very happy day!

Popularity: 25% [?]

We were stoked to be in the path of the Christmas Day blizzard that socked the Half-Acre Homestead with Old Man Winter’s one-two punch. Stiff winds helped pelt the house with sleet most of Christmas night until it finally turned into snow sometime in the early morning. When we woke up, we were greeted to a winter wonderland of snow…8-inches to be exact!

Our flock of chickens has refused to budge from their coop, instead laying about and basking under the glow of their heat lamp while the flakes cover their yard. I can’t say as I blame them. Who would want to strut around in the snow without any giant woolen socks or insulated snow boots?

The weather outside might be frightful but that doesn’t mean there isn’t time to enjoy some indoor pursuits. Homestead Hottie picked up a great Christmas gift this year, one that’s as nice to look at as it is functional. I was lucky enough to receive a 15 liter fermentation crock made by TSM Products.

If you read my blog frequently, you already know I like to homebrew and bake my own breads (other processes of fermentation). With Talina’s gut healing journey, we’ve learned the benefits of all those micro-organisms that so often get eliminated from our gut with today’s modern diet and convenience foods.

Sure, we eat a lot of yogurt and drink a lot of kefir and coffee but what about kombucha, kraut and the myriad of other fermented delicacies consumed around the world? Each live, unpasteurized, fermented food acts as a delivery vehicle, dropping all those strains of beneficial bacteria into our gut where they can flourish and aid digestion.

Last spring, we were gifted with several large heads of cabbage from another local gardener. They were gorgeous demonstrations of her decades of gardening experience but what is one to do with 4 bowling ball sized heads of the stuff? We made cabbage rolls, apples with cabbage and every other type of cabbage dish imaginable until it finally dawned on us: sauerkraut.

Thank goodness we found Sandorkraut (a.k.a Sandor Katz) to show us the fermentation process is not hard or scary. His book Wild Fermentation: The Flavor, Nutrition, and Craft of Live-Culture Foods is a trend-bucking bible of time-tested fermentable foods. The more than 180 page book is packed with just under 100 recipes that will keep your kitchen bubbling with beneficial bacteria and some truly tasty fermented treats to nourish your belly.

Back to the kraut, we didn’t have a giant crock to ferment this cabbage in but Katz taught us that something as simple as a crockpot can be used as a fermenter. Weighed down with a bag of brine solution, our kraut bubbled and boiled for about three weeks in the corner of our Half-Acre Homestead kitchen. The sharp tang and amazing taste of living sauerkraut was astonishing. Those cans of crap from the grocery store have nothing on homemade kraut!

Well, now the Half-Acre Homestead has another fermenting vessel proudly working away in our kitchen, just a few feet from my 5 gallon beer fermenter. The TSM fermentation crock looks stately sitting on display by our front window but few people probably realize the treat that is slowly converting inside. Another 5 pounds of cabbage are fermenting away and with the innovative water seal, you can’t smell a thing. I do like to lift the lid every few days and take a whiff though, reminding me the food inside is very much alive and the age old process is working just as it should.

Popularity: 30% [?]

I’ve been told if you get bucked off a horse, you’re supposed to dust yourself off and jump right back on again. The idea I suppose is to help you conquer any initial fear about a repeat performance that might build up inside if you let any great amount of time slip by. When it comes to one of my favorite hobbies, homebrewing, I’ve let far too much time slip by before jumping back on the “brew horse”.

I knew nothing of the hobby until a friend and co-worker of mine introduced the idea. Of all places, I think the inspiration came from an episode of The Simpsons. Have you ever seen the one where Homer tries to make bathtub beer? Needless to say I wasn’t immediately sold on the idea but decided to give it a shot. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, right?

At first it almost felt like we were wading into illegal territory. A run to a local brew shop just blocks from the Arizona State University campus made it seem even more lascivious. I undeniably enjoyed drinking alcohol so the prospect of creating it with my own two hands seemed pretty damn amazing. An hour or so later, the friendly brewer had helped us assemble a kit complete with everything we needed to brew our first batch of beer.

The process proved to be nothing short of great mystery and intrigue. Were we following the instructions right? Did we put the hops in at the right time? Did we aerate the wort enough? Was it the right temperature before we pitched the yeast? Was everything sanitized properly? We’d have to wait a long four weeks before getting it into bottles and then another couple weeks beyond that before we could relish our first taste of that liquid bread we’d toiled over what seemed like ages ago.

As it turns out, our first batch was a hit and then I guess you could say we had both been officially bitten by the brew bug. Like a religious ritual, every four to six weeks we gathered around a stainless steel brew pot and assembled the next beer of the month while sipping down a few cold ones from the previous batch. This tradition carried on for a handful of years until life took my brew buddy and me in two different directions. Since it was a 50/50 investment, we opted to split the brew setup down the middle. Half going with me and half going with my brew buddy made the split seem like an awkward breakup, deflating the sails of this once jovial pastime.

I packed my apartment with Homestead Hottie and made the long trek up the mountain to Flagstaff, Arizona where we planned to launch a new chapter of our lives together. Talina must have sensed my depression creeping in over the loss of my hobby because that Christmas she bought me everything I needed to complete the one half of the brew rig I painfully hauled up to the high country.

Flagstaff had a pretty exciting craft brew scene cooking along with a well-stocked homebrew shop, something I have now come to realize was pretty remarkable for a town of just 50,000 people (most of them crunchy in some sort of way). I brewed off and on and even found a new friend and co-worker that was also into homebrewing. Sometimes, having a brew buddy is just the perfect motivation to punching out some extra energy and getting a batch made. It also helps when several of your friends and coworkers really seem to enjoy chugging down the fruits of your labor. I was in a brewing groove for our 5 years in Flagstaff but when it came time to pack the brew rig up again, I was feeling defeated again.

Our nomadic lifestyle took Homestead Hottie and I to where we still are today: southwestern Indiana. The last three years has proved busy without a doubt and felt like we’ve been moving at warp speed ever since our vintage RV limped us on into town. A new job, the birth of our first child, a layoff, another new job and then the birth of our second child last August seemed to all happen in a flash. The powder keg of life just happens and then you get over it.

Needless to say I haven’t had much time to brew, let alone the toddler-free space to tuck a 5-gallon glass jug full of fermenting beer away for a few weeks. Thanks to the gift of another batch of brew ingredients from Talina, I’m finally jumping back on the brew horse again. I’m breaking myself in with an Irish Red Ale kit and am once again sweating the small stuff while I wait. Was my yeast alive when it pitched? Was the fermentation enough even though it seemed dead? Was the wort exposed to too much oxygen?

I just finished racking my Irish Red Ale over to the secondary fermenter and will bottle in another two weeks. Only then will I know for sure if I’m going to be able to fully get my brew mojo back and ferment some wicked ales. Time to sip a cold one and wait.

Popularity: 7% [?]

Photo by Greg Bagley

Are you looking for a cheap, easy way to create several nesting boxes for your laying hens at once? I saw this fantastic setup over at McMurray Hatchery’s Homesteading Chores Ideas and Contraptions Contest that just ended a couple of weeks ago.

It’s basically a wooden rack that holds two stories of 5 gallon buckets that look to make excellent nesting boxes. The plus with Greg Bagley’s design is that the buckets are secured so they won’t move but are also easily removed for cleaning. Click the link above to see more photos and read Greg’s assembly instructions.

Our coop is way to small for this setup here at the Half-Acre Homestead but I hope to keep this idea in the noggin for future use. Do you have a unique nesting box setup? Leave a comment below and let us know!

Popularity: 6% [?]

Now is the time that Arizona citrus is reaching its peak harvest season. When I lived down in the valley, there used to be citrus everywhere you looked. In the area of old Scottsdale where I lived, the home subdivisions were actually carved out of citrus groves in the 1950’s post-war building boom. The developers did a nice thing and tried to leave as many citrus trees as possible while they were building.

The neighborhood I grew up in used to be a grapefruit grove. So consequently at the high point of my childhood home we had 12 grapefruit trees surrounding us. It was a daunting task trying to figure out what to do with so much fruit. As a kid I used to sell brown paper bags full of grapefruit for $5.00 and the best days to sell were days when you knew there were a lot of tourists in town (Fiesta Bowl, Super Bowl, Parada del Sol, etc.)

We definitely couldn’t eat the fruit of 12 trees and there wasn’t much inspiration surrounding grapefruit either. Sure we would end up eating a few as a “breakfast treat” or at least that’s what my dad would try and convince us of the supremely sour fruit. I do miss the intoxicating scent of all the citrus blossoms in the spring though and the sight of hundreds of bright fruits adorning trees in your own yard. Now that I’m older, I do have to say that I’m a fan of citrus and miss the plethora of the harvest sometimes. And, since I’m on my quest for sustainability I’ve also discovered a lot of different uses for the warm weather fruit.

The December issue of Sunset magazine had a great recipe for homemade Rosemary Limoncello. Limoncello is an intensely flavored liqueur typically served as an after dinner drink on Italy’s Amalfi Coast and adjoining Sorrento Peninsula. This is the perfect time of the year to make this homemade liqueur in the desert southwest because of the availability of lemons. If you don’t happen to have good access to lemons in your neck of the woods, you can order direct from some citrus orchards out here. The recipe recommends using Meyer lemons because of their fragrance. But you can also achieve excellent results using Eureka lemons. A local Arizona citrus orchard is McClendon’s Select. The Limoneira Orchard in Southern California offers Meyer lemons through their mail order business. Ojai Citrus also does mail order with mixed boxes containing a variety of citrus choices. You could also get a nice variety of swing-top glass bottles to put your limoncello in for giving out to friends and family once it’s matured. To me, it sounds like a great and different way to enjoy this year’s citrus harvest. If you have a favorite recipe using the refreshing flavors of citrus, let us know about it!

Rosemary Limoncello

Courtesy: Sunset Magazine, December 2007 edition

You will need:

18 lemons (washed and dried)

one 4-inch rosemary sprig (washed and dried)

2 bottles of 100 proof vodka (750ml bottles of Stoli or Smirnoff)

4 1/2 cups sugar

1) Peel lemons with a sharp vegetable peeler, taking only the zest (top layer) and avoiding any white pith. Put rosemary in a 1 gallon glass or ceramic container with a tight seal. Add zest to jar.

2) Pour 750ml. vodka over rosemary and zest; seal container. Let sit undisturbed in a cool dark place for about 40-days.

3) On 40th day, in a saucepan, bring 5 cups of water to a boil and add sugar. Cook, stirring, until sugar has dissolved. Let sugar syrup cool to room temperature, about 1 hour.

4) Pour syrup and remaining 750ml. vodka over lemon-vodka mixture, stir and seal container. Let sit in a cool, dark place for another 40 days.

5) Pour limoncello through cheesecloth into a large spouted pitcher and divide among gift bottles. Limoncello will keep indefinitely in the freezer. Recipe makes 10 2/3 cups and will fill ten 8.5 oz. bottles.