Trimming Root Vegetables Do We Really Have To

We made a big pan of roasted root veggies last night.  Potatoes, carrots, and onions.  Yum.  In the middle of judiciously cutting off all the green parts of the skins and all the eyes out of the potatoes, we started to wonder how much of this tedious prep work was really necessary.  Everyone knows that green potatoes will murder you in your sleep if you eat them, right?  And green-shouldered carrots are probably just as bad?  Green-shouldered onions will probably make you cry while they do it.

But what if these silent killers were just getting a bad rap?  As it turns out, some are, some, maybe not.  Read on--the Homestead Laboratory investigates!

For potatoes, the green color comes from chlorophyll, but these guys (the glycoalkaloids solanine and chalconine) are the toxic part.  Plants in the nightshade family use them as a defense mechanism, and they ramp up production in response to stress or light.  Also in response to light, they ramp up chlorophyll production, which is why the green color is associated with the toxicity.  Strictly speaking, however, the green color is not required for high glycoalkaloid content. The glycoalkaloids are also bitter, though, so we can still tell when there is a lot of them without having to have any analytical equipment fancier than a tongue.

Next, is there enough of the glycoalkaloids to actually do any damage?  The dose commonly cited to cause toxic effects for solanine is 2 mg/kg body weight, or 140 mg for a 70 kg person.  The half life in the body for humans is 1-2 months, which works out to a total steady-state body burden of 50 mg if the intake of solanine is 1 mg/day.  How many potatoes would you have to eat to take in 1 mg/day of solanine?  Normal solanine contents of potato tubers are about 7.5 mg/100 g fresh weight (varying widely across samples).  The green parts can have more than 200 mg solanine/100 g fresh weight.  For reference, the four potatoes in the picture cumulatively weigh 211 g, and the stripes on the cutting board are 1" wide.  So, it wouldnt take much if you ate taters every day.    Looks like well definitely continue to trim the green parts, and probably space out our potato eating a little more, too. 

On the other hand, most researchers seem to consider the eyes as part of the tuber, so if they arent sprouting, it seems theres no need for us to worry about additional solanine coming from the untrimmed eyes.  Looks like we can save ourselves a lot of time on eye-trimming.  However, if the eyes are sprouting at all, the solanine content in the tuber can go up, down, or stay the same, depending on the variety.  One thing is clear, though--the sprouts have the most solanine of all, so well be staying away from them!  In that case, well definitely trim more liberally, and probably make a bit of effort to ease off on our potato intake for a while once that dish is gone.

Also, some solace for french fry and potato chip lovers--the frying process doubles as a high-temperature extraction (reducing the content of the solanine in the fries) because the glycoalkaloids are somewhat oil-soluble.  Probably still would be good to not eat the green ones.

Carrots get some green on their shoulders from the sunlight, too, but arent in the nightshade family.  So, while the green color still comes from chlorophyll, the glycoalkaloids dont come along with it.  The green color does still bring some bitterness, but the molecules that cause it have not been identified (or at least, they hadnt as of 2007, and we couldnt find any more recent papers).  Its known that some types of molecules, including terpenoids, can result in a bitter flavor, even in non-greened carrots , but apparently in the green parts, these are not the terpenoids were looking for.  One would think theyd also have looked for glycoalkaloids.  But the whole carrot plant, including the top, is edible, so the green parts of the carrot roots might be unpalatable, but not likely dangerous.  Similarly for onions, the greening that happens on the shoulders of the bulb when exposed to sunlight is due to chlorophyll, but not likely dangerous.  It might even be beneficial due to concomitant flavonoid formation!  Maybe the carrots are also making flavonoids.

Of course, if the green parts of the carrots and onions end up being too bitter for us, chicken taste buds might handle them better.  Guten apetit!

What do you do with the green parts of your root veggies?

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Chickens Final Stats

On Sunday, we put our fall batch of chickens in the freezer, and now that weve had a chance to crunch the numbers and see how we came out in terms of yields and costs, we wanted to get the data out there for peer review.  First, a few general comments.  It was definitely worth it, for the meat, the experience, and the fertilizer that will go on the garden next year.  We raised almost 90 lbs of chicken in ten weeks, 60 of which went in the chicken tote Sunday morning.  That means Katie is even stronger than we thought!  The red ranger broilers had a 100% survival rate (at our elevation of 5600 feet), other than an incident with the new neighbor dog last Tuesday.*  We might try a batch of Cornish crosses in the spring, side by side with the red rangers for a direct comparison.  Wood chips worked well as a bedding, which, considering we can get them for free, and shavings are $6.99/bag, is good to know.  The chips are dustier, dont look quite as clean as the shavings, and wont break down in the compost as fast, but in our opinion, still come out ahead (chickens are inherently dusty anyway).  We just have to watch out for chips that might have cedar in them, since cedar can cause respiratory problems for the chickens.  Katie says she doesnt like that theyre also harder to spread than the shavings.

We had the eight-week weigh in a couple weeks back, which was a good comparison for how we were doing at the ten-week mark.  Next time, well track their weights through the whole cycle.

Comparison of each chickens weight at eight weeks, ten weeks, and dressed.

The graph shows a lot of interesting (to us, at least) info.  The first is that the chickens gained 15-20% of their final weight in the last two weeks.  The gimpy one, at the far left, gained almost 30%.  That is to say, it did much better once we were able to put it back with the rest of the flock.  If we could have let them go another week or maybe two weeks, they might have done even better.  For meat breeds other than Cornish crosses, a ten week butcher is pretty early.  Still, a number of the roosters were over the 6-lb mark, and the dressed weight came out to 66% of the final live weight, which is a pretty good yield ratio.  All of the birds made it into the traditional chicken weight classes, with the gray one and the gimpy one in the squab broiler class, the rest of the hens as fryers, and the roosters as roasters.  And, we can say from our initial impressions of the roasted meat and rendered stock, the flavor is awesome.

We had about a quarter bag left of our seventh 40-lb bag of feed, which means these 17 chickens consumed about 270 lbs of feed in total.  That works out to a feed conversion ratio of 3.09 for feed-to-final-live-weight and 4.67 for feed-to-dressed-weight.  Not Cornish cross-type numbers, but decent. 

The price per pound worked out to $7.05. (!!)  Kind of spendy compared to commercial-scale organic whole chickens, but again, these arent Cornish crosses.  Plus, we get complimentary garden fertilizer in the deal.  The pie chart below shows that by far the biggest expense is the (organic) feed, which at $34 per 40 lb bag adds up quickly.  Heck, thats almost as expensive as the organic oats we eat for breakfast, and thats people food!  Next round well experiment with buying feed in bulk or mixing, maybe even growing, our own grains.  In any case, if you want to know why organic meat is so expensive, there you have it!

Expenses associated with raising our fall chickens.  Electricity is from the heat lamp we ran while the chicks were very young and on cold nights.

Fresh in the cooler!

Ooh, that looks good.   Katie says, "No drooling on the camera!"

*We discovered the hard way that the fence around our yard was not completely dog-proof, and lost six chickens in the melee, including the little gray one.  Since the chickens were so close to butcher, we decided to see how badly damaged the meat was, and we were pleased to see that it was no more mangled than the meat we bring home on hunting trips.  So, we decided to put the birds in the freezer.  The warnings against eating the dog-killed meat are generally that 1. The dogs mouth might have bacteria or dirt or something that would contaminate the meat and 2. The chickens werent properly killed and bled out, so the meat wont be as high-quality as it would have been.  However, our take is that well be cleaning the carcass well and cooking it to well-done anyway, so bacteria and dirt dont worry us too much.  Also, to return to the hunting analogy, game animals are rarely killed in the way that chickens are butchered (but rather much more like the dog-killed chickens, with puncture wounds and laying in the dirt), and we consider game meat to be of sufficiently high quality to earn freezer space.  Plus, we met the dog and it seems healthy, other than an obsession with killing feathered things.  So, were comfortable putting those birds in the freezer and not wasting 35% of our chickens.  If we were selling them, it would be a different story.


Have you raised red rangers before?  How did your numbers compare to ours?  How did you cut down on feed costs?  Let us know in the comments section below!

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HOW MANY FISH IN A TANK

 HOW MANY FISH AM I ALLOWED TO HAVE IN A TANK?

Aquaponics, ækw??p?n?ks, pisciponics

Again this will depend on whether the system is a commercial or backyard system, with the commercial systems requiring the correct amount of fish and plants for optimum production. The more fish there are in a system, the more nutrients there are for the plants to consume, but if there are not enough plants to consume these nutrients, the excess build up in the water can cause the fish to suffer. As a general rule, backyard systems can stock between 10 - 30 kg of fish per 1000 litres of water.

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Join Us at Parish Social Ministry Conference Next Saturday

"Sowing Seeds of Love in Action" is a conference for anyone interested in the social mission of the church including parish social ministers, teachers, youth ministers, young adults, catechists, St. Vincent de Paul volunteers (Vincentians), outreach volunteers, Deacons, JustFaith grads and more!

Please spread the word and help us to make this Archdiocesan conference! Registration is now open on line and is accessible on the Archdiocese of Santa Fe Web site on the Social Justice and Respect Life page. The direct link to registration is here . On this link, you will find the schedule for the day.
 
Conference Objectives: · Build capacity in the Archdiocese of Santa Fe for the social mission of the church · Increase knowledge, skills and abilities of parish social ministers in all outreach ministries · Inspire social ministry—charity and justice as “love in action”

Workshop topics include Global solidarity, the new Encyclical, Laudato Si, keeping your spiritual center, life and dignity of the human person: respecting life from womb to tomb, using media and technology for social mission, engaging youth and young adults in solidarity, exploring Communities of Salt and Light, how to be a voice of the poor, immigration and migration, Catholic social teaching, how to form a social concerns committee, and more!

Workshops offered in Spanish and simultaneous translation offered.

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Kimberly Burges Television Interview in Cincinnati

On the birthday of my friend and author Kimberly Burge, I post this video of her television interview on WKRC-TV in Cincinnati, which was aired when she was visiting her hometown of Cincinnati back in October. I finally finished reading The Born Frees, and I totally enjoyed reading the stories from the young ladies in Gugulethu and their interactions with Kimberly. If you havent picked up a copy of the book, I highly recommend it. (Your independent book store can special-order it for you. Or if you must use the big box commercial retailers, online and otherwise, you can also get the book that way. Kimberly is going around the country promoting the book. We hope to bring her to Albuquerque next year. Below the video are links to her recent promotional trip to the San Francisco Bay area.

San Francisco Trip

The Forum, Grace Cathedral  (November 1)
A series of stimulating conversations about faith and ethics in relation to the issues of our day.  Hosted by the clergy of Grace Cathedral, we invite leading public figures, musicians, theologians, artists and writers to bring the most innovative and interesting thinking to our public space, engaging our minds and hearts to think in new ways about the world.

San Francisco Theological Seminary  (November 5)

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Mount Venstuvius

They say that when life gives you lemons, you should make lemonade.  But what about when life (in the form of your parents) give you a bag full of delicious homegrown onions and multi-color potatoes?  Katie says you should make venison stew in bread bowls!  And she is correct.

She started with four small venison chops, chopped.  Or cut into dice-sized cubes.  Proper chefs probably have different definitions for each of those sizes.  Katie picked her favorite size, and seared them up in a frying pan.

Then she found some top-notch veggies.  (Thanks, Mom and Dad!)

She chopped those up, too, and then found a couple carrots and celery stalks, which received similar treatment.  She added everything to a big ol crock pot with a pint of chicken stock and added water to cover the rest.  She also seasoned the whole deal with salt, pepper, brown sugar, garlic powder, "a few shakes of hot sauce," and thyme so the house would smell awesome all day.

Then she set about making bread bowls.  The recipe for the dough is below.  One regular loaf makes four good-sized bread bowls.

When theyre done cooking, they have a similar color to a seasoned stoneware cookie sheet, but taste a lot better.

Then Katie cut out a plug of bread from the top and scooped out most of the inside with a spoon, so it looks like the top of a dormant volcano.

But its not dormant!  Its about to explode with venison stew and cheese!  Look out, Pompeii! Ahhhhhh!

The Recipe:
0.5-1 lb package of venison chops, cubed (or diced, or whatever)
5 medium sized potatoes, cut like the venison
1 large onion, cut the same
2 carrots, cut...you get the idea
2 stalks celery, whole! (just checking to see if you were paying attention.  Chop the celery like everything else)
1 pint chicken stock
Water to cover
Seasonings to taste: salt, pepper, brown sugar, garlic powder, hot sauce, and thyme
Flour to thicken


Sear the meat in a frying pan.  While its cooking, chop vegetables and add to crock pot, along with chicken stock.  Set crock pot to high, and add seared meat when its done, along with water to cover and seasonings.  Cook 5-6 hours on high setting, or until vegetables are tender. Adjust seasonings and add four to thicken.  We ended up using about a tablespoon each of salt, pepper, and brown sugar, and two tablespoons each of garlic powder and thyme, and about three squirts of hot sauce.  About a quarter-cup of flour was enough to thicken it to our preference.  Scoop out bread bowls, fill with stew, and top with shredded cheese.  Eat delicious volcano.

Bread bowls:
2 cups warm water (~105 °F)
0.25 cup sugar
1 t salt
4 tablespoons oil or butter
4 teaspoons active dry yeast
2 cups bread flour
3.5-4 cups whole wheat flour

Add yeast and sugar to water, allow to proof for five minutes or so.  Add oil, flour, and salt (salt last).  Mix well and knead for 10-15 minutes.  Allow to rise in warm place for 45 minutes, then punch down, form into eight bread bowls, and set on greased cookie sheet.  Cover with a towel and let rise for another 45 minutes.  Bake at 350 °F for 18-20 minutes, or until a hard crust has formed.

What do you do when life gives you potatoes and onions?  Do you have a favorite venison stew recipe?  Which of your suppers do you pretend are actually volcanoes?  Let us know in the comments section below!

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Historical Lye Making Part 1

One thing thats not done as much anymore as it should be is making lye on the homestead.  A major contributor to this phenomenon is likely the abundant scary stories and mystique of danger surrounding lye because of some horrible accidents in the past and a general fear of the unfamiliar.  This isnt to say that lye isnt dangerous--it certainly deserves a healthy respect and some reasonable precautions--but, like most things, having an awareness of the properties and dangers is a better approach than running away screaming or cowering in the corner like a congressman.

Ok so, newly emboldened about the utility of lye, lets take a look at why you would want to make your own.  Other than not having to buy an ingredient for your soap-making days, starting with a potassium-based lye instead of a sodium-based one (typically whats available commercially) makes it easier to recycle the soap as part of your graywater scheme since you dont have to worry about sodium buildup.  (Plants need more potassium than sodium.)   In addition to soapmaking, youll save on ingredients for your homemade drain cleaner, biodiesel (if you get really good at making lye), and lutefisk recipes.

Back in the olden days, when soap making was a standard activity on the homestead, the source of lye was normally wood ashes.  (Even back then, folks knew that grass ashes (e.g., from corn cobs) gave more lye than wood ashes, but no one burned grass in significant quantities.)  The goal was to leach the soluble lye, mostly potassium hydroxide (KOH) in this case, out of the wood ashes, leaving the insoluble parts behind and obtaining a concentrated lye solution.  More generally, however, wood ashes were leached to collect potash: an umbrella term for soluble potassium salts, which could contain potassium hydroxide (KOH), potassium carbonate (K₂CO₃), potassium chloride (KCl), etc.  The potash was commonly evaporated to dryness and sold as fertilizer when it wasnt used to make lye for applications around the homestead.  And, as with most old homesteading practices, there is an interesting confluence (to us, anyway) of chemistry and history around the lye-leaching process.

Traditional lore says that lye should be leached from hardwood ashes, especially hickory. The reason hardwoods, and especially hickory, should be the best has puzzled us for a long time, since modern methods suggest that softwoods contain no less potassium than hardwoods, at least inherently.  However, old sources also show some data confirming that indeed, less potash is obtained from softwood ashes than hardwood ashes.  Why should that be the case?  We can think of two possible (but contradicting) explanations, neither of which we can find confirmation for.

First, many sources assert that softwoods contain more resins (although we havent been able to find any quantitative measurements), and thus burn hotter than hardwoods.  The modern source linked above shows that ashes from wood combusted at temperatures above 900 °C lose a significant amount of potassium to evaporation.   Thus, if softwoods burn at 950 °C and hardwoods at 700 °C, softwood ash would likely contain less potassium than hardwood ash.  However, 900 °C is a very high temperature, especially for the open-air fires common before the turn of the last century.

We think its more likely that softwoods dont burn as cleanly, and more of the inherent potassium remains locked up in the incompletely burned remains.  Some experimental evidence from the period suggests that leach-resistant potassium can indeed be found in incompletely burned softwoods.  (On the other hand, that may mean that softwood biochar is more beneficial for the garden than hardwood biochar as a slow-release potassium fertilizer.)

In any case, it seems legitimate that hardwood ashes are preferable to softwood ashes for making lye, and a clean-burning, fairly hot fire (but less than 900 °C) is the best way to get those ashes.

Also, some old lye recipes call for adding lime or slaked lime to the ash-leaching barrel.  The reason for this addition is clear:  in water, lime (calcium oxide, CaO) becomes slaked lime (calcium hydroxide, Ca(OH)₂), which reacts with potassium salts, such as potassium carbonate (K₂CO₃) to form calcium carbonate (CaCO₃) and potassium hydroxide (KOH, the lye we want!).  Depending on conditions, however, the majority of potassium may be leached as the hydroxide anyway, so the lime may only give an incremental increase in lye yield.  Many lye makers dont bother with the lime and still make fine soap, so it seems that the lime must be optional.  For fancy-pants lye making only, if you will.

Additionally, lye leached in traditional ways often times comes out transparent-ish, but very brown-colored.  The reason is that the layers in a lye-leaching bucket normally included a layer of sticks, a layer of straw, and then the ashes.  The lye leached from the ashes can start to decompose the straw and/or sticks, which yield the brown-colored compounds (primarily from solubilized lignin components).  Leaching the lye through a different material, like a tightly-woven t-shirt (multiple layers), or leaching through the straw so many times that all the brown parts are dissolved, would probably yield a clear lye solution.

Finally, many sources indicate that lye should be leached from ashes using distilled (or rain, or soft) water.  For leaching lye per se, water hardness shouldnt make much difference (see paragraph above about adding lime), but if you plan to make soap from the lye down the road, it will be beneficial to not have the hardness in the water.  The cations in hard water are divalent (+2 charge), which means they will take on two soap molecules, become essentially nonpolar, and precipitate out of the aqueous solution, almost exactly like a Dementor eating someones soul (if one soul = two soap molecules).

The setup for a lye-dripping (leaching) trough, as described in several old books.  It could also be a barrel with a plug in it.  Dont forget to put a bucket under the arrow, or your lye will run out onto the ground.  For other setups, see here, here, and here.

 After leaching the lye, it should be tested for strength.  There were a number of traditional methods, including floating eggs or potatoes, dissolving feathers, and making sure it tastes incredibly bitter.  (Dont try the last one).  Modern techniques include testing the pH and/or measuring the density (the latter being an updated version of the egg or potato test). 

Since this post is already very long, well wrap it up here.  Check back on Sunday for Part 2, featuring lots of pretty colors!

In the meantime, have you dripped your own lye from ashes?  What did your setup look like?  Do you have a better idea why hardwoods are better than softwoods for making lye from the ashes?  Let us know in the comments section below!

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