Pickled Veggies, Chicken Stock & More | Canning At The Cabin

good morning everyone we have a bunch of stuff planned for today and tomorrow so we are just going to jump right in eric and i are first starting off this morning with making some chicken stock so we've got a bunch of chicken carcasses in our pressure canner that's how we're going to be making them it's kind of like an expedited or quicker version than doing it slowly you know on a pot for several hours this way we can get it done in about 90 minutes so in this pot here i have some little roosters these were roosters that we were not able to keep because we can't keep that many roosters earlier this year we had about 35 chickens hatch and half of them actually was 18 were boys so we made our final cuts the other day and now they will be used for us for food and for chicken stock which is just awesome it turns out really good i'm also going to be adding the feet this year usually we give these to the dogs they absolutely love them i give the heads all the organs except for the intestines to the dogs and the skin and the small intestines and the feathers actually go into our compost pile and those break down go right back into our garden so i'm excited to try the feet this year because i read that these have a lot of flavor other things we're going to be adding to the stock are some red onions that we have and little shallots got some garlic and we're going to add sage thyme oregano and tarragon and all of this is going to basically be smithereens when we're done we're going to strain it out so anything you put in now like celery carrots all of that it's just going to break down but it would add some really good flavor if you want to do that i want to show you guys these onions this is red bull that we grew last year and they are small but they lasted so long i don't even know how old these are i feel like these are solidly 10 month old onions and you can tell they are sprouting and so when we cut them up we just take out the outer skin because it is or the outer layer it does get a little bit squishy but they're still really good onions so if you're looking for a red onion that stores really well this is it okay guys because we are doing this in a pressure canner you want to make sure to leave some space on the top i believe our says to do it about two-thirds full so that's what we're doing we're gonna get the top on here get this going and while this is cooking we're going to head inside because like ariel said we have a bunch of stuff to do today our pressure canner is finally up to temperature it took a little while but we're going to cook this for about an hour and a half at 14 pounds now that we're back in the kitchen we are going to be cleaning some of the salmon roe that we have from the sock guy we harvested the other day we're going to be turning it into caviar we did it last year absolutely delicious i can't quite say it's really worth the time these are very difficult to clean the little individual eggs from the membrane we're just going to go ahead and jump right in it's probably going to take me some time and when we feel like we've got enough for our consumption we are going to be giving the rest of the chickens i absolutely love it so you can see these eggs are pretty tiny and there's a membrane that's holding them all together that's what we're after that we want to remove i don't have a very effective method but the best i've found is to kind of lightly press down and to kind of sweep them off of that membrane and you want to do it just gently try not to break too many eggs and not get that skin with it we finally finished getting some of this ro cleaned up and it is a total nightmare we were reminded why we probably won't be doing this in the future we're actually looking into maybe smoking them or curing them and smoking them for eating so now that i have these cleaned i'm going to go ahead and add them to some water i have a third of a cup kosher salt mixed with one quart of water and we're gonna let them brine for just two minutes last time we did four minutes and we found those to be a hair too salty so it's been two minutes we're gonna strain this i'm gonna run some cold water over these and then i'm gonna put them in our jar i think i just got about one jars worth right now and we're gonna be putting them in the fridge and eating them tomorrow and we will let you guys know how they taste uh okay guys the chicken broth cooked for an hour and a half and it's done now just waiting for it to stop steaming let it drop down all the way to zero before i pull the top off we're gonna bring it inside we're gonna pick out some of the bigger things and then we're gonna strain it smells really good it smells like a really good chicken soup so i'm gonna go ahead i'm just gonna pull out big chunks that i can you know the bones big chunks of meat the feet some of the stems of the herbs are in there so we've got most of the chicken and the herbs out of here we're going to go ahead and strain this so these were young roosters that we made this chicken broth out of and generally you want to let this cool down until the fat kind of solidifies up top and you want to skim that off before you can it there's really not a lot of fat in here so we're just going to go ahead and can it just like this today all right we're going to be canning the chicken stock in quart size jars today we're just wiping the lids with vinegar to get rid of any excess oil on the rim and then we're going to process them for 25 minutes at 11 pounds so with the remainder of the chicken stock we are actually going to be pulling out some of the breast meat for us eric and i gonna fry that up and eat that tonight and the rest of it is going to go to the dogs and i get a lot of questions about cooked bones um these are extremely cooked bones so they disintegrate they actually just crumble and that's how it's okay to feed them to our dogs because they're not gonna splinter they're just totally dust at this point um and same thing with like the feet they just totally break down so i'm gonna go through this and give the rest to them and they are also going to be getting a really good meal tonight wow some good meat on this there you go see all right so we are back in the kitchen we have finished processing our chicken broth and it looks awesome we're gonna move on to making some kefir cheese that's what i call it i think it could be pronounced kefir i'm not quite sure but we have some kefir grains and milk that has turned over for about 24 hours so it's thickened up if you're not familiar with it it's like a sour drinkable fermented yogurt and it's really awesome eric and i have been drinking it for a few years and in fact we don't really drink the yogurt we use it in a lot of other ways overnight oats dressing we don't buy a lot of dairy products so this is kind of our dairy product for us and recently we discovered making cheese with it and what you get is a really soft ricotta type cheese it's awesome so we're gonna make it today and i have a little silver bowl a little strainer and some cheesecloth and what i'm gonna do is just pour this yogurt since it's thickened now into the cheesecloth and since i just emptied all the contents into this now i have to go fishing for the little grains and i'm just gonna wait until i you know scoop around here until i find some so these are the grains i'm going to put them in this jar for now and get them cleaned up and then we'll be putting them into a new batch of fresh milk so this is what the grains look like they kind of look like little tapioca um they are just soft and squishy and this is the yeast and the bacteria that is responsible for turning over the milk into the drink we know is keeper and so i'm just gonna plop them in there usually they drop down to the bottom and i usually rinse the top and put it back on and i just lightly screw the cap back on and i put it on our counter and it sits there for another 24 hours at room temperature and so that's how you make kefir but again we are making the cheese today if you guys aren't familiar with it it's an awesome drink i really like it we use it like i said again in so many different ways and it's really functional for us so i'm going to put this aside and we're going to wrap up our cheesecloth so i'm taking the cheesecloth and i'm just going to kind of twist it and i'm going to hang this somewhere we hang it over on our counter and then i leave a bowl underneath it because it's going to drip and so it usually takes probably good 12 hours to turn into the cheese and that's it you've got your cheese it's so simple it's awesome it can be you know spreadable it's a little bit crumbly we're going to add some salt and herbs tomorrow to it and most likely be eating it with the caviar i'm going to bring this over to where i hang it up and we're going to check on it tomorrow we're out in the garden collecting some herbs for a vinegar i'm going to make and we are also grabbing some flowers and a few leaves for some dried tea that we're also making so while we're out here i want to show you guys how the potatoes are doing this is how big they've gotten to this point and last year what happened is they eventually flopped over and just like took up this massive amount of space which i could tell they're going to do again this year so this is my little drying rack it's just a window screen we're gonna be making some fresh tea tonight but i'm also working on drying a mix for the winter last year i would do one in ingredient or one plant and separate them but i really like to mix them over the winter so i'm just kind of doing mixes for how i want them to be that stuff's been drying for a few days so we're going to add this stuff over here and we've got nasturtium nasturtium leaves i meant to grab i forgot we've got some yarrow and fireweed we have forage catnip and we have some chamomile as well one other thing i grabbed while we were outside is some mint i believe this is apple mint and it actually is a lot more potent once dried but we have so much of it right now i just figured i'd want to put it in it's one of our favorite things to have in tea while our water is boiling we are going to make our infused vinegar and it's really simple in fact i've never done it before i really like white wine vinegar you can use apple cider vinegar red wine vinegar i think you can even use normal vinegar but most people recommend not using that kind so again we're going to use white wine vinegar i just have a bottle here and we're going to be adding thyme some banana peppers these are garlic escapes we had that we picked earlier and we have chives so we make a lot of homemade dressings and that is how we're planning on using this um we're big vinegar fans and i saw this online and just thought it was a really cool idea so the the idea with it is that you're going to let this sit for about four weeks on a counter and preferably out of sunlight and just at room temperature and all of this stuff is going to infuse into that vinegar so you're going to end up with a really flavorful vinegar in a few weeks so our tea is boiling i'm going to get the water in all right to finish off this vinegar we're just going to pour the white wine vinegar in it smells awesome it smells like summer i'm really excited for this in fact summer will be over by the time this is done so we'll probably just end up using it on other things in the kitchen but that's okay um so i'm gonna get this cap pop down and i'm just gonna be letting this sit on our back counter that's well shaded eric and i are gonna have dinner and then we're gonna pick back up tomorrow in the garden we have quite a bit more canning to do i'm gonna tie the piece a little more yeah it is hey still got green fun we're picking back up this morning we harvested a bunch of greens and we're going to be blanching them and freezing them we've got lots of kales and swiss chard blanching them if you're not familiar with that name is just putting the greens in water really hot water for you know a minute or so and then you take them out and drain them the reason you're doing it is because you want to preserve these and they'll preserve so much better that way not only does it clean it but it stops any sort of enzyme activity on the plant and it will make it so your kale holds up better during the freezing process okay so these are already done it's a real quick thing you can tell they're nice bright vivid green we're getting our next batch in and eric and i canned greens last year for the first time they were awesome in the winter with some soups and things like that but we also blanched kale and we found that we eat kale a lot more or the greens a lot more like that we prefer them that way frozen so we don't have a lot of freezer space we have to be really mindful of what we're freezing but we just like this way better it works for us do all right we finished harvesting from the garden we also blanched some collard greens and beet greens and they are ready now to be moved to the freezer all right guys we got our veggies all cleaned up and we're going to be making three different things today we are going to be making a kohlrabi relish we're going to make some pickled veggies just a mix of veggies then we're also going to make some fermented veggies some of the things we have out here is we have the kohlrabi we have turnips a bunch of peas we have some small beets and then these are the ribs from swiss chard and then these are the ribs from some beet greens we have some zucchini green onions a few different herbs and some cauliflower heads i'm going to put these kohlrabi aside along with a few turnips that we're going to use for the relish and then i'm going to start chopping these veggies up arrow's going to jump in here and she's going to start packing our jars for us shorter you think this would be a pickle i hope so i think well they're good you got some more flour you can drop it for me so we've added our herbs we did some thyme parsley and some dill and then i'm just going to add a little bit of salt to each one of these jars we're going to pause on the pickled and fermented veggies and we're going to be switching gears to the kohlrabi and turnip relish someone sent us this recipe and it's actually radish relish but our radishes this year a lot of them bolted and we just happened to have a lot of cool hobbies i figured it'd be a good substitute eric and i usually eat for robbie raw um in fact we're just having a discussion about it everything here is just entirely different this season is so condensed and all our food is just ready at once and believe it or not summer is going to be over practically is already almost over so it this is a really awesome vegetable to can because it holds up really well to the heat treatment and the pickling it stays really crispy and so does cauliflower those are really good you know vegetable items that hold up well to that see i was i'm more efficient huh i'm not as efficient but i was cutting them more thoroughly all of our karabi and our turnips are chopped up we are going to be adding some garlic scapes uh the recipe calls for garlic but we only have garlic scapes and we are adding five small red onions all right i'm going to get started on the brine for this kohlrabi relish i'm going to use four cups of apple cider vinegar and i'm going to put a little over a cup of sugar in there close to them you're close to beautiful but you're just not closing so that's good enough right it was a close a but it was actually just a beeple all right we've got our apple cider vinegar and our sugar in the pot we're gonna add two tablespoons of cumin seed we're gonna do coriander salt mustard seed and then we're gonna add about half a tablespoon of black pepper i'm getting the herbs chopped up that we're going to be using today i've got a bunch of cilantro we did a little bit of parsley and then we have winter savory we're going to be putting in there this brine just got to a boil so what we're going to do is we're going to add all of our ingredients that we haven't put in there yet which is our onion garlic scape our herbs kohlrabi and the turnip we're going to put it in there give it a stir and then we're going to let it boil for 10 minutes and at that point we're going to be ready to put it in our jars our relish is all done and boiled for 10 minutes we're going to put it into some pint jars and we're going to be water bathing this for 15 minutes we're getting started on the pickle brine for the pickled veggies and i'm gonna add two cups of water i'm gonna do a little under a cup of sugar and we're gonna do five cups of just regular white vinegar i'm gonna get this to a boil and then we're gonna add it to our jars i think we've got 19 jars to do i just pulled the radish relish out of the water bath canner looks like it turned out pretty good i'm gonna put these aside and our brine is boiling which means it's ready to be poured over our pickled veggies all right so i did exactly half of what we needed to do so i'm gonna have to mix up one more batch of brine but we got enough to start water bathrooms so we're gonna get the lids on these get them in i'm going to get another batch of brine boiling this one turns so red all right we finished water bathing our last batch of pickled vegetables and the last thing we have to do is make the brine for our vegetables that we're gonna be fermenting for the brine we're going to be using two tablespoons of kosher salt to four cups of water you can actually use a little bit more salt depending upon your preference but we generally like to do the two tablespoons to the four cups of water ratio now i'm just gonna give this a quick stir and get two more cups of water to add to this jar and it's just as simple as pouring it over and our brain didn't cover the vegetables so i need to make a little bit more of the brine to cover the vegetables that's the crucial step to fermenting them is we need them to stay submerged underneath the liquid so i'm going to add about one more cup of water and i'm going to do one tablespoon again of kosher salt and i know you may be thinking that's not the right ratio the truth is one to three tablespoons of salt per quart of water is really the right ratio so you can use a little bit less and you can use a little bit more because there's quite a bit of vegetables in here i'm just gonna err on the side of having it a little bit saltier that's kind of crucial to keeping that the bad bacteria away when you're doing the fermenting now all i have to do is close this lid and let this sit at room temperature for a few weeks we usually like to let it sit for a minimum of a week um it really takes a few days for the fermenting to start and it just continues the longer you let it sit some people like to let it sit for even a few months and since i have a lid that actually is sealing i will need to just open it up every once in a while to release the air you're gonna see some bubbling and things like that that's all normal we just don't want it to expand too much and not have anywhere for it to release the air and again one of the most important things when you're fermenting is just to make sure everything stays beneath the brine because you don't want it to get above the brine you'll start to see some mold develop on anything that comes above that brine and you can pretty much ferment anything you want as far as the vegetables go we just have a random mixture of i think we have zucchini the turnips the swiss chard and cauliflower lots of different things in there and some herbs but anything you find good we've done this with carrots beets it all turns out really awesome and we generally just eat through it while it's fermenting and if you find that you're not eating through it fast enough and it's getting a little too tangy for you you can just put it in a colder place and that's going to slow down the process and make it last a little longer to eat we're going to head outside and put those greens that we froze earlier away we like to store our grains in just a a bag it works really well a paper bag um we did this last year and it was really easy for us to come in here and just grab them out of the bag as we wanted um you could definitely use you know plastic too we're just trying to stay away from that because of the disposable aspect of it so this works really well for us and the kale has frozen you know not all together but we're able to get each leaf kind of apart from each other and usually the way i like to do it is to have a bag that's big enough to fold over i don't have one right now i'm going to have to go searching for another one to see if i have more for this but this way it works really well we really like it one thing i forgot to mention was that we did try drying greens last season and although it was okay it definitely worked we we air dried them we didn't really eat them as much as we ate the frozen one so we just found that frozen for us was the best compared to canned and dried all right guys it's the next morning and we did not forget about our kefir cheese in fact i went ahead and made another batch this is the kefir cheese from the other day but i wanted to show you guys what it looks like once it's done you know straining and it can take anywhere from like six to 12 hours and you can let it go longer and what's just gonna happen is you're gonna get a thicker thicker cheese and so you can see it's a lot like ricotta so i'm going to be adding it to our other cheese and we're going to add some dill chives and salt to it because it's very mild it doesn't even taste sour it's just a really mild light cheese so i've got about all i can get out of here and i'm going to rinse this and put this aside and save it for next time all right it's time to do a taste test so we salted this last this time and i kind of pre-tried it i think it's about where we like it tastes like seaweed like really good salty seaweed really good the dill's good on there okay so this time around do you like how salty it is salt level on this is pretty much spot on i think we'll definitely do it for two minutes next time and i think my overall review of caviar is pretty good it's really hard to make um but like i said i could just have one little jar like this this season would probably be enough for me as far as the kefir cheese is great i love the kefir cheese i think we've been eating it like we've pretty much just been making cheese out of our keep for now it's really awesome to have cheese again absolutely the kefir cheese is like a substitute for so many other things for us and the caviar is more like a novelty food it's really good to try i mean i do really like it pink salmon that we're going to be fishing for later have a lot bigger eggs easier to work with so we're looking forward to that thank you guys as always for watching what we've been up to the last few days and if you try to do any of these recipes yourself let us know how they turn out for you we'll see you next time all over our kuabi all of our kohlrabi okay coal coal it's kohlrabi kohlrabi call robbie okay i'm good i'm good i'm good okay oliver crop colorado stop all of our all of our kohlrabi all of our kohlrabi a little more cool okay

Channel: Simple Living Alaska

Views: 650,648

Rating: 4.9584365 out of 5

Keywords: off grid living, living in alaska, homestead alaska, off grid cabin, day in the life off grid, sustainable living alaska, homestead off grid, summer in alaska, daylight alaska, gardening alaska, high tunnel garden, chickens alaska, vegetable garden, canning chicken stock, making chicken stock, chicken stock recipe, pickling vegetables, canning pickled vegetables, kefir cheese, make kefir cheese, fermenting vegetables, how to ferment, blanching greens, water bath canning

Id: D6goN92exsA

Length: 30min 15sec (1815 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 31 2020