4 Home - Rendered Fats

Top white fat is pork, far right is from chicken soup, bottom is chicken fat, left is duck. They have a refrigerated life of about 1 month so I freeze it till I need it. I also have some goat fat in the freezer from my recent goat braise.

Spring Garden in New England

Ingredients for the first salad of Spring:
Claytonia,
Shredded Red Sauerkraut and
Horseradish Condiment made with
homemade herbal kombucha vinegar


Claytonia in the Over-winter cold frame


This week begins the section on “From The Garden”. The snow is almost gone, still a few patches in the woods and in the shade. We’ve had our first salad consisting of Claytonia also known as Miner’s Lettuce.



This week’s video First Spring Salad, shows a thick row of Claytonia/Miner’s Lettuce grown in the over-winter cold frame. It germinates easily in the fall and is thick by March. We start thinning it out by cutting some leaves and using them for salad. I mixed some Horseradish Condiment and Shredded Red Sauerkraut into the salad and topped it off with Olive Oil. I love the spring because we get that first burst of enzymes from the garden! The salad was fresh and potent and full of flavor!



There is also a page, Spring Garden showing photos of the new greens already up in our New England garden.



Future pages will include descriptive photos and videos on the growth cycles of Walking Onions and Green Garlic which are very easy to grow and require minimal work.

The First Signs of Spring

Hi All,

Hope you are getting glimpses of Spring as the snow recedes. Today we started raking the leaves off the beds and I saw shoots from my Walking Onion beds, Green Garlic Beds, and Horseradish Beds.

We’ve also overwintered some rutabagas by leaving them in the ground in the hopes of getting salad greens from them in early Spring. There are little nubs of green! In our overwinter cold frame we have a thick crop of Miner’s Lettuce, a goodly amount of Mache’ and some small Swiss Chard plants. These were all planted last fall. The Miner’s Lettuce needs some thinning so we will have our first salad this week!

Can’t wait to ingest these potent greens!

I finally finished up 2 new videos for my video course site:
Kombucha Cultures and Fruit Infused Water Kefir. Kombucha Cultures is a short video contrasting a young, smooth culture with a mature, gnarly culture.

Fruit Infused Water Kefir is about turning your extra finished water kefir into a fruit drink using seasonal fresh fruit. These drinks quench thirsts in the heat of summer. They are delicate-tasting and give us those great probiotics and enzymes that keep us running smoothly.

These videos expand the Kombucha and Water Kefir section. Another Kombucha video on Kombucha Marinades for meat and fish is in the works.

Hope the videos are helpful.
Best,
sharon

Medicinal Kombucha

While experimenting with natural remedies I found an excellent concoction that breaks up congestion. It uses Kombucha Tea or Kombucha Vinegar as a base with the addition of Lemon, Horseradish Root and Ginger Root. You can download the recipe and view my video on how to make it here:
Medicinal Kombucha

Kombucha Tea