cheryl fillekes

Liv Smith wrote:Now I have to ask: how do you guys eat the lard or tallow?

Tamales are traditionally made with lard.

You basically mix 2# cornmeal with a tablespoon of baking soda and a teaspoon of salt, the mix in half a # of lard, smear the dough onto a corn husk soaked in water, put some cooked pulled spiced pork* in the middle, wrap up the tamale with a strip of corn husk & tie it, then steam them all on a rack in a pan w/water in the bottom & covered for about an hour.

They freeze well. To thaw/reheat steam them just like you were cooking them the first time, but not as long.

When I lived in South Austin, it seemed like every local family would make up a massive amount of these just before Christmas, and sell them frozen door-to-door.  

I suppose the timing of the making of the tamales is when you slaughter & render a hog, and harvest the corn. So you already have the stove going to keep the house warm as well.

*the stuffings range from spiced pork, beans, onions & chopped peppers of various varieties, whole corn, salsa...range from super-spicy to super-mild.  You can also not put any stuffing in at all.  

the rinds sound terribly unhealthful, but in truth they're very high in collagen.

and delicious.

I was wondering the same thing. For the seeds, we hang the heads & dry them like we would dry onions or garlic: out of direct sun but in a warm dry well-aired space.  Our place came with a couple of spaces built for the purpose off the end of the three sided barn and another off the side of the main barn.  

But how to hull them?  Hulling highly recommended before pressing into oil or sprouting to put in a salad or grinding to add to bread dough.

I ran across this unit, manufactured in Turkey: https://akyurekltd.com/en/Impact-Dehuller---Small-Scale-171s.html -- got a quote for $2500 USD.  Hoping he didn't leave off a zero.  Wondering if you could run it off your tractor's PTO like you can some cold oil presses.

If you had enough acreage in sunflowers, I suppose it would be worth the investment.  I think it can hull buckwheat, barley, spelt as well.  Might be worthwhile seeing what your neighbors might be interested in growing if only there were a place nearby to process their crop, or just sell it to.  Fields of sunflower may be combined with the right settings dialed in.

May be worth funding a small processing plant co-operatively with them. There are small nut-processing plants around, some of them co-operatively run, but haven't found one that will do sunflower seeds yet.

As it stands, we've been using our dried sunflower heads to feed our chickens. We basically turn them into eggs.  But I like eating sunflower seeds, sunflower seed sprouts, using the oil in cooking and adding the sprouted seed to bread.

We have (had!) a lot of asian eggplants to preserve.  Also cherry tomatoes, onions, garlic, peppers, zucchini, basil and mushrooms.

At first I thought I'd make a big pot of ratatouille and then pressure-can it all.  It would have come to 12 pints.  What a palaver! What a mess!

Then I checked out how to dehydrate all the ingredients.  Asian eggplants they recommend blanching whole before slicing 1/4" thick.  Tomatoes I cut in half and dry cut-side up.

Made short work of thin-slicing the zucchini with a mandolin.  Mushrooms, sliced. garlic, peppers & onions chopped coarsely.  

Laid out each ingredient on a separate tray of the dehydrator at 125 degrees F.  The tomatoes took the longest.  As each ingredient was dried, put it in a separate pint jar.

But then when it was all done, layered the dried ingredients in pint jars.  Only 4 pints, and a lot less mess than pressure-canning!

Considering reconstituting as a test right away -- thinking I should pour boiling water over them in a bowl so they just plump up, drain the excess water & save, then sautee the whole lot in olive oil, adding the excess water as needed.  

Would do it, but we have a few tubs of ratatouille from vege harvested earlier in the season, in the freezer!!