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Another use for leftover turkey or chicken

Continuing on my new plan to cook from what is in the fridge, Tony ( mr kim chi maker ) came over for lunch and we had this leftover turkey from one of our turkey injection tests. We also had some bread from the weekend and cheddar cheese.

We tore the meat into pieces, and grilled them in a little oil and sprinkled some dried thyme on them.

When making grilled sandwiches, i don’t oil the bread, i pour some oil into the pan and swirl the bread into the oil, kinda spreading the oil around the whole piece of bread. I also don’t use a lot, maybe a teaspoon per side.I use a thick bottom pan or a cast iron pan/griddle

We also made a simple salad of greens and apples. yum.

A real decadent treat is to grill your sandwiches in olive oil. I also like to spread brown or deli mustard any grilled sandwich. Batampte is a big favorite of mine.

Batampte is a favorite of mine, hard to find outside of NYC

From a few things in the fridge we have a great lunch. What do you put together from your fridge? let us know below.

January 11, 2010
Super Fast Lasagna for a family dinner

I am in the midwest visiting my family, and its my nephew’s birthday this weekend. Instead of the whole family going out for dinner, we decided to save everyone money and have dinner at my sister’s house.

no boil noodles in this simple fast lasagna

On short notice, my sister whipped up a simple lasagna using no boil noodles and a jar of good pasta sauce from the store. Good jar of pasta sauce might sound like an oxymoron, but there are some that work fine for what they are, OK?

My sister used Barilla no boil lasagna noodles, and there is a recipe on the back of the box. nice. Some ricotta cheese, an egg, and we have a tray of lasagna in the oven.

For a quick simple dish that feeds everyone, this works great. Some foodie types might roll their eyes at this dish, but I like it and my family does too.

Simple Birthday Dinner is served

Do you have a simple quick meal you put together on short notice? Tell us below.

January 10, 2010
Install A Generator Transfer Switch, How to and How Not To

To safely use a generator to power your home, you can install a generator transfer switch. This can be done by a licensed professional or someone who has experience with breaker panels. We also have a generator transfer panel video and a post on how to pick a generator for home use.

NOTE: Be sure so follow local codes. We strongly suggest to hire an electrician. Use this information at your own risk.

Why You Should Install A Generator Transfer Switch

A manual generator transfer switch allows you to safely connect a generator to your circuit breaker panel. A transfer switch allow you to flip a few switches and manually disconnect your home breaker panel from the utility line power (the power coming into your house) and connect it to your generator. Hence the name, manual transfer switch.

If you don’t use a transfer switch, the power from the generator can feed back into the power line that serves your house. This is called Back-feed, and is incredibly dangerous for many reasons. The biggest being you can electrocute a line worker who may be working to restore your electric power.

Here is how the Columbia River Utility explains it:

Standby generators make life easier during power outages, but if used improperly, they can be deadly. During an outage, electricity from your generator can backfeed the power lines, killing or seriously injuring our line crews who are working to repair the lines.

A transfer switch stops backfeeding, and also makes using your generator much more convenient, allowing appliances to be operated much like when the power is turned on.

A transfer switch also protects your generator when your local utility restores power, it keeps that local power from feeding back into your generator and damaging it.

Do not fashion an extension cord to plug the generator into one of your electrical outlets. A neighbor had a friend do this for him, only problem was the guy hooked up the generator side of the cord to the 220 volt output of the generator. They plugged in this very un-smart idea into one of their 120 volt outlets and burned out all the TVs, microwave, etc in the house.

We installed a manual switch similar to these. Here is one of the better transfer switches you may want to purchase.

To Install A Generator Transfer Switch, Things to think about:

The first thing one must do is figure out how many watts and/or amps your home will require when running on generator power. Read our post on how to pick a generator here. When calculating this, figure out what essentials you need: furnace, well pump, lights, fridge, freezer. Your power needs determine how large a generator you need, and what size transfer panel you’ll need. Also pay attention to how many 220 volt and 110 volt items you have, because some transfer panels only have one 220 volt circuit breaker.

A transfer switch swaps out line power for generator power on the circuit breaker level. When selecting what circuits to be connected to the transfer panel, you need to balance the generator load. There are two meters on the transfer panel, and you want the load on each side of the transfer panel to be relatively equal. An example is you should put the furnace on one side of the panel, and the fridge on the other side. The instructions that come with the panel will go into detail about this.

Why do you need to balance the power load? The fields in the generator – those coils of wire that generate the electricity – work best when the north and south coils have equal loads.

Think about where you plan to locate the generator outdoors. Your weather proof generator plug has to be nearby. This may mean running electric cable through the basement or garage. NEVER run a generator inside a garage or basement, you will die.

To install a generator transfer switch involves working inside your circuit breaker panel. If you don’t feel comfortable doing this, don’t.

Be sure to turn off the main circuit breaker before opening up the panel. Pay close attention to the directions that come with the transfer panel, many come with a video. Watch it, you’ll learn. Again, if you don’t know your way around a circuit breaker box, don’t do this. Hire an electrician.

I think the hardest part of all this is getting the bx cable from the transfer panel to connect with the breaker box. This silver armored flex cable that contains all the transfer panel wires has to go through a hole in the breaker box. Most boxes have a number of holes pre-punched, but they can still be hard to punch out. I use a cold chisel, but there are real electrician tools to open up these holes.

This whole process requires some thought and planning. Before you go out and buy a generator, calculate how much power – amps – you need. Here is a post about how to calculate the power load and buy a generator for home use.

Again, I’m not the expert here, but wanted to share some of my experiences with generators and transfer panels. Please be careful, and hire a professional if the job requires it.

Here is a video we did talking about our generator transfer panel installation

Hook Up A Generator To Your House – GF Video

January 8, 2010
Toilet Paper: Green your Bathroom

I was recently contacted by Seventh Generation about a new product they are coming out with, and they are going to send us some. we’ll see what it is. This reminded me of our Green Your Bathroom : Toilet Paper episode of Real World Green.

Once our site redesign is complete, we’ll fully integrate the Real World Green video series into the Gardenfork site, for now you can watch them all on the RWG page here.

January 5, 2010
Add Walnuts after the flour in the banana bread recipe

I was working on a one-bowl banana bread recipe today, trying to simplify an already simple recipe. ( here is the final recipe )

Surfing the web, I found there are a lot of complicated recipes for banana bread: using cake mixes, Bisquic, all sorts of odd stuff. Why does is have to be?

I did succeed in making a one bowl banana bread that tastes real good. At least I think so.

But, I learned a great lesson in the process.

I had tossed in the walnuts into the ‘wet’ mix, not thinking about what would happen afterward, and then when I added the flour, I found out what would happen.

The flour coats the walnuts. not good.

After you bake the bread, you get little pockets of white flour around the nooks of the walnuts.

Another lesson learned here on Gardenfork for me.

what have you learned in baking or life lately? tell us in the comments below:

add walnuts after the flour…

December 31, 2009
How to inoculate logs with mushroom spore – thanks to Cooking Up A Story

On my to do list is to learn more about propogating mushrooms. I want to learn how to grow mushrooms, and here is a great video by Ashley Terry of the blog Cooking Up A Story. Ashley went to Oregon to learn about inoculating birch logs with oyster mushroom spore. Check out Cooking Up A Story for more cool info.

WWOOF USA: Elm Oyster Inoculation from Ashley Terry on Vimeo.

December 29, 2009
Tatsoi, Greens to grow in the Winter

We just shot a Gardenfork episode about gardening in winter. We shot it on Christmas Day, and I had neglected to pull out my portable cold frame – watch our how to make a cold frame video here – and I did not cover my raised beds with black plastic before the beds froze solid and snow piled on top of them. So I pulled off the snow and put on the plastic.

In the show we talk about Eliot Coleman’s book The Four Season Gardener, and one of the greens you can grow in winter is Tatsoi . I saw some great Tatsoi in the Park Slope Food Coop last week, so I had to take a picture and share it with you all.

The Tatsoi in the Food Coop was huge compared to how it grows in my garden, mine does not get nearly as big. I’m wondering if I’m not growing it right, or buying the seed of a minature version.

Tatsoi is an Asian Mustard, and it is cold hardy down to 15F. You can buy Tatsoi seed from Fedco Seeds .

Jessica from the Food Mayhem blog suggests that you can use it as a substitute in any recipe that calls for Bok Choy. I use it in salads, and you can treat it like most hardy greens such as kale and other mustards and saute it with olive oil and garlic. I don’t know the nutrional content of Tatsoi, but its green so its good, i think.

Have you all grown Tatsoi or used it in cooking? Let us know below:

December 27, 2009
Eric’s Waffle Recipe post Christmas, + cornmeal

Its the day after Christmas and I decide that I want to make Waffles. No one in my house, besides me and the Labradors, likes waffles, but I do, so I make them. This time I modified my waffle recipe – watch the how to make waffles video here – with cornmeal. Neat.

I use a cast iron waffle iron I bought online from Camping R US http://www.a1camping.com/, but you can use an electric one. I like the cast iron waffle iron because it is easy to clean, and i don’t have to wrangle an electric cord.

The Cornmeal Yogurt pancakes came out great. Here is the recipe I modified from the original waffle recipe we posted here.

Eric’s Waffle Recipe

1 1/2 cups buttermilk [to substitute milk here, put 1 1/2 tablespoons of vinegar in 1 1/2 cups of milk, let stand for 5 minutes, then add to recipe ]

or

1 cup of milk + 1/2 cup plain yogurt

1 cup all purpose flour

1/2 cup cornmeal – i like the coarse ground, but use whatever you like.

2 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/4 cup canola oil

3 eggs, yolks separated from whites.

Preheat your waffle griddle.

Combine the egg yolks with the buttermilk. add dry ingredients and just mix till mixed, don’t over mix.

Then add oil.

Using a whisk or electric mixer, beat the egg whites until they form peaks,

Then turn the whites into the batter. Do this gently, you do not want to overmix this.

Spray the waffle griddle with vegetable oil or non-stick cooking spray. Pour about 3/4 cup of batter onto the griddle, spread it around a bit.

Close the griddle and sit tight. after 3-4 minutes, gently lift the lid and check the bottom for done-ness, if its nicely browned, flip the waffle griddle to cook the other side. Cook for a few minutes more until nicely browned.

Serve with Maple Syrup and butter, you can also dust with confectioners sugar.

©2008 eric rochow

December 26, 2009
Alphabet Sugar Cookies for my birthday

A good friend of mine stopped by the house and laid out this birthday message for me. What Fun! Making words with cookies.

These are Alphabet Cookies cutters and two cookie batters, one a plain sugar cookie the other a fudge sugar cookie. You roll out the dough, cut the squares, then use the alphabet cookie cutters to cut out the letters. You take the white letter and drop it into the corresponding chocolate letter space. Then take the chocolate letter and drop it into the white sugar cookie with the same letter.

One place you can buy cookie cutters is The Cookie Cutter Shop

We also used the letter from the birthday message to spell out a nickname we have for Charlie Pup:

Do you have any fun cookie cutters or have you made some interesting cookies? Tell us below:

December 23, 2009
The Screened Bottom Board, leave open or closed in winter?

Both our hives have a plastic screened bottom board. I think screened bottom boards are a must for controlling varroa mites.

Varroa mites are a big problem for bees, and with a screened bottom board, mites that fall off bees fall thru the screen and out of the hive. You can have even more mites fall thru the screened bottom board if you dust your bees with powdered sugar. – Here’s a video we did on that.

But I’ve been wondering about the screened bottom board being wide open in the winter. There are different opinions on this, some bottom boards have a wood slide that goes in to close off the screen.

Our bottom boards do not have a slide to close the screen. So I decided to make one out of thin plywood and a foam gasket.

To get this closer board up against the screen, i used cedar wedges to lift the board up to touch the screen.

Whether this is a good thing to keep the hive warmer in the winter, or not as good a thing because some mites that fall off the cluster of bees may be able to climb up into the hive again.

Beekeepers, what are your thoughts here? Do you have a type of bottom board you like? The plastic bottom board will not rot, but I don’t like the entrance reducer it uses, very clunky.

Update: I now believe in areas with winter, one should close up the screened bottom board in winter. See our complete winter beehive prep video here.

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December 22, 2009
Mixer Meltdown into the Chocolate Chip Cookies

I volunteered to bake chocolate chip cookies for the barn’s xmas party. Not brain surgery, I can do this.

I pulled out my mixer, which i bought at a tag sale a while back. I invisioned the cream and butter creaming really nicely in the bowl, just like on TV. I added the 2 sticks of butter, but I didn’t cut them up, I just dumped them in. The butter wrapped around the blades of the beaters. I added the sugar and then the eggs, but most of the mix stayed stuck inside the beaters.

Adding the dry ingredients helped, and I cranked up the mixer to power thru the dry ingredients. This worked great for a few seconds, then there was this mechanical gear grinding noise and the blades stopped moving.

I turned off the mixer and unplugged it to find one of the beaters had bent itself around the other beater. Not Fun. I got most of the batter out of the beaters, and finished the job by hand.

I was on the last cookie sheet of cookies when I realized that a small piece of the broken beater was missing. The small nylon washer that is at the end of the one beater to move along the bowl was gone from the beater.

And that missing piece was probably somewhere in one of the cookies. We carefully examined each cookie, but could not find the broken piece. We couldn’t bring these cookies to the barn party.

We drove down to our local bakery, which is run out of the walk in basement of Wendy’s house. Wendy has great cookies, and we bought a pound of sugar cookies with dried cranberries in them. Off to the party the cookies went.

Later on, a friend was over, we were in the kitchen, and he noticed Charlie Pup had something in her mouth. He fished it out of her mouth, and there was the missing nylon piece from the mixer.

Now I have a nice batch of chocolate chip cookies in the freezer, ready for the long holiday weekend. Have you ever had something like this happen? Let us know below in the comments.

December 20, 2009
Mayonnaise Recipe Yum! How to make Mayonnaise

We were out of mayonnaise up at the house, and we wanted to make turkey sandwiches, which must have mayonnaise!

Check out how Eric makes mayonnaise, and learn how you can too. Its a simple mayonaise recipe and easy to do.

If you add anything to this mayonnaise, it becomes and aoli. You could add curry, garlic, herbs, and then we can call this an aoli recipe as well.

Eric’s Mayonnaise Recipe

1 egg or 2 egg yolks

1 cup of olive oil or vegetable oil

1 tsp salt

4-5 teaspoons of white vinegar or lemon juice

few teaspoons of mustard or dry mustard

1 tblspoon hot water.

put the egg or egg yolks in a blender with salt, mustard and vinegar.

turn blender on medium and slowly drizzle in the oil. it will churn into mayonnaise.

you can add herbs, garlic, or other aromatics to make this a great spread.

this keeps about a week in the fridge.

December 19, 2009
Fedco Seeds, my favorite seed supplier

OK, right now is dumping snow outside. I just helped my friend Bill switch out generators up at the camp ( where the Labs swim ).We had about 5 inches of snow yesterday, and I realize I forgot to cover my raised beds with black plastic before the snow dumped on them.

Can I still put the plastic on top of the snow? or maybe shovel the now off the beds…

Fedco Seeds

All the while, I am thinking of spring. What I will do different, better, what I wont do.

To help this planning, I have the Fedco Seeds catalog. Fedco Seeds is a seed cooperative, a pretty rare entity in this world of corporate consolidation. I was introduced to them when I joined a community garden in Brooklyn, and have stuck with them.

Fedco has a great catalog chock full of great descriptions of neat vegetables and flowers, its not written in catalog-speak, its written by the people who grow the seeds out. Their seeds are untreated, and many are organic and/or heirloom. Many of their seeds have great stories about how a particular seed came to be, what family brought it from Russia, or how it sprouted out of a compost pile.

What is equally cool is what Fedco also offers. They have several departments, Seeds, Moose Tubers, Organic Growers Supply, Fedco Bulbs, and Fedco Trees. Each one has a downloadable catalog.

Moose Tubers has all kinds of potatoes and garlic.

Organic Growers Supply is just that. Stuff I’ve never heard of, plus old standbys. I use their red ball spheres with Tanglefoot and a pheremone trap to keep bugs off my apple trees. And my apples look pretty good. No sprays, nothing more than a few easy solutions from these guys.

Fedco Trees is cool, their big mantra is not big trees, but good root systems, and I can attest to the healthy robust plants they send you. All wrapped in plastic and paper mulch. I’ve bought many raspberries from Fedco Trees. They have a ton of antique or heirloom apple trees, all with great descriptions.

Their website is simple, not full of a ton of pictures, but that’s not their thing. Their catalogs are downloadable, saving trees you know, so check them out.

What are your favorite seed catalogs? tell us below:

December 13, 2009
How to make pizza dough and bake pizza

Wondering how to make pizza at home, or need a good pizza dough recipe? Here we go. Using the Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day dough as a base, we create some super great and fun pizzas here. You’re best off with a bread – pizza stone to make these.

Watch the How To Make Pizza episode and share with us your pizza recipes.

Check out another Gardenfork episode we did making bread based on the Artisan Bread book here.

This pizza dough recipe is adapted from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day, see their site for info on buying their great books.

This works best with a clear 6 quart plastic container with a lid that can be slightly ajar, not super tight on the top of the container.

Take 3 cups of warm water, add to it 2 packets of active yeast, 2 tablespoons of salt and 2 or 3 glugs of Olive Oil.

Add 6 cups of all purpose flour to this and allow to rise for a few hours.

When the dough has about doubled, put it in the fridge.

You can use the dough right away, but its best to leave it overnight in the fridge.

cut off a a hunk about 4″ in diameter, and roll it into a ball, turning the outside into the inside as shown in the video.

lay out on a floured board and roll out to desired diameter.

bake on a preheated baking stone in a 500F oven until bubbly and crisp.

November 29, 2009
The Chicken Tractor : a new & improved version

I ran across this today, and there has been a lot of talk on our viewer forum about raising chickens.

Handcrafted Coops offers affordable, portable chicken coops for the backyard chicken farmer. All chicken coops are made with sustainable, renewable timber and come flat-packed for easy assembly. Our mission: A chicken coop in every backyard!

I can’t keep chickens because I’m not home every night to take care of them, but I’m hoping some of my neighbors get some, I suggested some heirloom varieties.

I’ve seen all sorts of chicken coops, almost all of them hand made from various found materials. i like this coop because of its simplicity.

What do you chicken experts think? Check out the video and pics

November 5, 2009
Eric and the Labs check out the Ford Escape Hybrid. neat!

While my Ford Fiesta was on the CBS News, Ford Motor loaned me a new Ford Escape Hybrid. So, we piled the Labradors into the Escape and went up to the house. Here’s my video review of the Ford Escape Hyrbrid, and of course, shots of the Labradors

October 24, 2009
Balsamic Vinegar Reduction, make the cheap stuff taste like the good stuff

I’m calling this the Balsamic Vinegar Hack, or cheat. Chris Kimball of Cook’s Illustrated and America’s Test Kitchen posted about making grocery store balsamic vinegar taste like the expensive kind, so I wanted to try it and see. So check out our balsamic vinegar recipe video here and let us know what you think.

Here’s what happened:

October 8, 2009
How to bake bread with Tracy

My sister is the bread baker in the family, so we do what she says. Just watch here and you’ll see.

here is the link to the bread recipe: http://www.breadworld.com/Recipe.aspx?id=463

October 8, 2009