Freshly Ground Flour

I’ve been grinding my own flour for several years now. Up until last week I was using a hand-me-down KitchenAid Grain Mill Attachment. It’s a oldie, and has been passed around through many hands. My dad’s cousin bought it back a long time ago and after she quit using it she gave it to my mom who used it for a while. My sister borrowed it and used it until she bought a NutriMill Grain Mill. Back to my mom it went. She used it for grinding up lentils and other grains to make her own dog food, but never used it for homemade flour. When I bought some grain with my sister, I borrowed it from my mom and started using it to make flour for baking. I had an old Kitchenaid that I attached it to and that one finally died, so it was time to upgrade to a real mill.

After doing a lot of research, I decided to purchase a Komo Grain mill, or a Tribest Grain Mill. I chose this one because of it’s quality, it’s made in Germany, has a powerful motor and ceramic grinding stones. It’s housed in a beautiful beech wood case, not plastic like most grain mills. It’s powerful, quiet and very quick.


After making a few loaves of bread, a few batch of pancakes and a few batches of scones, I must say I’m very impressed with the quality of flour this mill creates. It’s very fine and very evenly ground, unlike the Kitchenaid grinder which produced a very uneven grind that contained fine flour with lots of large flakes of bran in it. My scones are so delicious, you can’t even tell they’re made with 100% whole grain flour. Grinding the flour fresh means that there’s no bitterness with the whole grain as there often is with preground whole grains.

I’m quite excited, especially since I also just received my copy of Peter Reinhart’s Whole Grain Breads: New Techniques, Extraordinary Flavor. I made the basic bread yesterday and was very impressed with the texture and flavor of the bread. I have never been able to get the right level of gluten development with my 100% whole grain bread to get the kind of crumb I wanted. Yesterday my dough passed the windowpane test perfectly and it baked up into the most beautiful loaf of 100% whole grain sourdough sandwich bread!

I’ve been using three different kinds of wheat for my baked goods, soft white, hard red winter, and white winter wheat. I’m looking forward to experimenting with other kinds of grains as well, like barley, spelt, buckwheat, millet and more. I found a local farm that grows wheat and a few other grains, hopefully it’s good for bread. I’m looking forward to making my diet a little more local and healthy with my new grain mill!

Are you a whole grain bread person, or do you prefer white?

Making Organic Bone Meal at Home

I blogged about this over at Not Dabbling earlier this week and figured any of you who don’t read that blog as well would appreciate the info as well. I’m always trying to find ways to make things instead of purchasing them. I sometimes buy bone meal for the garden. I like to use it when I plant garlic, onions and other bulbing plants. I don’t like to buy the stuff at the store, because I know it comes from animals that have lived in CAFO’s and have been fed antibiotics and hormones. Since I buy my chickens at the local farm, they’re pastured and happy and healthy as can be. I try to make the best use of them when I buy them, they are expensive and I don’t like to waste anything. When we get done eating a chicken, this is what we have left.

Usually I bury these bones somewhere in the garden, or put them in the compost pile (even though they tell you not to). They do take a while to break down, so I thought I could make my own bone meal instead. I dried the bones on the counter for a few days and whenever I baked something I’d throw them in after I turned off the oven. Then I put the bones in a blender and pulsed 10-15 times and I had bone meal. Not quite as fine as the stuff you buy, but much healthier for my garden. I do have a heavy duty blender (the older version of this).

I feel good knowing that nothing is going to waste and the bone meal I’m using in my garden is the best quality.

What do you do with your chicken bones? Have you ever made your own bone meal?

Building Hoop Houses out of Electrical Conduit

I’ve been getting a lot of questions about our hoop houses that we have over our raised beds here at Chiot’s Run. They show up in a lot of photos. They sure come in handy for covering with frost blankets, netting to keep insects/birds out, supporting peas, as well as for winter garden protection. The first year I overwintered some spinach I didn’t have these hoops over the garden. I simply bent some bamboo poles and floated a row cover over them. This did a fabulous job protecting my spinach crop throughout the winter (we live in a zone 5).

The next spring we decided to build more permanent and sturdier structures for overwintering crops. We didn’t have enough space for a big greenhouse or a big hoop house, so the next best thing was to make small hoop houses over each raised bed. I researched a little and found that a lot of people use irrigation tubing or PVC, which is plastic and pliable. You drive some stakes or rods into the soil leaving 8-12 inches sticking out of the soil or make a base with holes in it to insert the tubing into. I found these photos on Flicker to give you an idea of other options (thanks to oceandesetoiles for these two images)


We decided we’d rather use electrical conduit because of it’s rigidity, we get a lot of heavy wet snows here and didn’t think the tubing would hold up as well. This conduit is very inexpensive as well and we figured it would outlast the irrigation tubing as well. The conduit was $2.19 each length of pipe and we used 4 per raised bed (our beds are 4×10).

Now I’ll have to warn you that pipe bending is not the easiest thing in the world. Mr Chiots and I worked together and our hoops are fairly nice. Not perfect, but not too bad either. I’d recommend buying an extra piece of conduit for a practice piece. The first thing we did to help with even bending was to mark the conduit 21 inches in from each end and then in 2 inch increments in between these two marks.

We used a hand pipe bender and practiced on one or two pieces to learn how much force was needed for a small bend each 2 inch increment along the length of the pipe. We over bent the pipes a bit, so they did not look like a hoop when we were finished. Ours looked more like teardrops since we left the ends straight, then we stretched them back out a bit to put them over the beds.

I will once again warn that this isn’t the easiest thing to do to get these things nicely rounded (read through the comments on this post I wrote about it last year). Mr Chiots and I are adventurous and willing to try to do anything ourselves though, so we were not daunted by the task. We were also OK with less than perfect hoops. We joke that ours have character since they were made by local artisans.

You can now buy a special tool just for bending garden hoop houses from Johnny’s Selected Seeds. They came out with it the year after we made ours. It’s a little pricey at $69, but if you want to make a lot of hoops or have someone to share the cost with it would be a worthwhile investment.

We attached the hoops to the raised beds with two pipe clamps, one up top and one at the bottom. They’re very sturdy and will last a long time. I do love these because they come in handy for so many things. We use them to hold up netting over the strawberries to keep the birds out. We throw row covers over them to keep the deer out of the peas. We also throw blankets over them to protect from late spring frosts. I ordered some greenhouse plastic this week and I’m hoping to use them as mini greenhouses this winter. I’ll be using a floating row cover on short wickets inside these hoops (you can be sure I’ll blog about it this fall). They also have come in handy to steady myself if I lose my balance or when I’m reaching in to the middle of the bed.

What measures do you use in the garden for extending the season and protecting crops?

Finishing Off our Maple Syrup

Sugaring season is just about over here in Ohio. We had a warm snap that ended it about a week earlier than last year. Although a short season, it was still successful. We ended up with over a gallon of golden goodness straight from our back yard! Next year we’re hoping to tap even more trees so we can, hopefully, get a few gallons of syrup, then we could give some away (perhaps a jar to a lucky reader). But with only one gallon this year, we’ll probably give some to my parents and we’ll keep the rest.

The hardest part of making maple syrup is the finishing. You have to heat it to a certain temperature; not below or it might spoil, not over or it will crystallize. Everywhere you read you get different information about the temperature or method for finishing your syrup properly. I read this article and used their method, which worked beautifully. I figured the experts at the Ohio State University would know what they were talking about!

After heating to the proper temperature, you’re supposed to strain your maple syrup through a felt filter, some use wool, some use synthetic. Since I’m more of an all-natural kind of person, I bought some organic wool felt from Syrendell at Etsy.com to make my own filter. I figured I could make my own much cheaper. Unfortunately I bought the felt a little too late and it didn’t get here in time, but I’ll have the filters sown up and ready to go for next year.

We ended up filtering ours through a few layers of cheesecloth. We filtered once before finishing the syrup, we poured the hot syrup that was almost finished through cheesecloth to get most of the sugar sand out. Then we finished the syrup and strained again, through some fresh layers of cheesecloth. This did a remarkably wonderful job of straining the syrup. It’s beautifully clear, with hardly any maple sand in it (I’ve read maple sand can make the syrup bitter during storage, which is why it’s recommended to strain it out).

I took some of our finished maple syrup outside yesterday morning to get a few shots, it’s so beautiful! I love these little Weck jars I got to store it in, they should be the perfect size for 2 meals. You can see the two different colors of syrup we got from our two batches. It’s so delicious, hard to believe we made it at home. One thing is for certain, not a drop of this will go to waste! When you take such a hands on approach to making your own food you really appreciate it because you know the effort that goes into it.

What do you recommend for our first meal to enjoy our homemade syrup on:
pancakes, french toast, fried mush, ______________?

Some Like it HOT

I’m a big fan of hot food, and by hot I mean spicy hot. You’ll find me adding crushed red pepper to just about everything I eat. Because I like it so much I decided to grow some in the garden last summer. I ended up with quite a bounty thanks to the full sun conditions in my mom’s garden and the few plants I had here at Chiot’s Run as well. I dried the ripe cayenne peppers and have them stored in a big jar in the basement pantry.

Every so often I add a few to my spice grinder (which is a coffee mill only used for grinding spices, who wants spicy coffee?). I grind them a few seconds for freshly ground red pepper flakes. I’m sure enjoying my homegrown cayenne, it’s much hotter than the red pepper you buy in the store and has a great fresh flavor. BEWARE – don’t inhale too deeply when you open the grinder, you’ll end up in coughing fits!

I’m glad I like cayenne pepper because it’s health benefits are quite numerous, see references below. There’s even an entire book about it The Health Benefits of Cayenne, I must get this from the library.

I love spices because they make your food taste so much better and they really up the nutritional content by adding all kinds of vitamins, minerals and trace elements. They’re a great way to layer on the flavor and the health!

So what about you – are you a hot & spicy kind of person, or do you have a more sensitive palate?

read more about the health benefits of cayenne pepper:
Organic Facts
The Worlds Healthiest Foods
The Health Benefits of Cayenne Pepper