First Grain Share Pick-Up

As you could probably gather from the title, today was the first pick-up for my grain share. 40 pounds of grains to be exact (this is less than half of the total ~150 lbs I will be getting!). 30 pounds of wheat and 10 pounds of spelt. If anyone knows of any good recipes using spelt, I'd be happy to hear them. Spell check doesn't even recognize the word and I have certainly never used it before! I hear it makes good pizza dough though, I guess I'll have to give that a try. I also need to buy a flour mill. Like this one that I used today:

Well, you can't see much from that view and apparently I neglected to get a better shot of it. But it is a small, relatively quiet table top mill. The grain all aligned itself to march down into the flaker. Take that entropy!

When the grain came out of the flaker it looked like this:

Flour on left, flaked wheat on right.

The flour is to the left, the flakes on the right. The small flaker machine also grinds flour, but since there were so many of us there to grind some of our flour we used this beast:

It was totally bad-ass. It's on/off switch was pulling the power cord out of the outlet. It worked great but I'm pretty sure my housemates wouldn't be okay with one of them in our kitchen. Sad.

We also took a little tour of the farm in the form of a tractor-pulled hay ride. It was out in Western MA and it was a beautiful day so we lucked out.

Farmer Adam driving the tractor

I am not entirely sure what I'm in for now that I have all of this grain. I hope I'm not in over my head with this one. It seems like a good idea in theory....

While we were out in Western MA, I also stopped in at my FAVORITE bar ever/The Greatest Place on Earth and had a couple beers.

The Moan and Dove aka Heaven

This place has not changed at all since I was in school and visiting this place on weekends (and maybe a couple weekdays). I have so many great memories here. I wish I lived closer!!

OK, the art has changed.

All in all, pretty much a perfect Sunday. I don't think I would have changed a single thing.

This also happened this weekend:

Grape jam

I spent pretty much my entire Saturday afternoon making grape jam, and I only got these 4 little jars out of all that work. I am pretty sure I will never do that again.

It started with picking the grapes off of my old house's grape vine. This involved a ladder and a good amount of time in and of itself. Next you have to separate the skins from the pulp. This took a tremendous amount of time as well. I mean, just think about it: "Skinning grapes", it pretty much sounds like a torture method.

Skinning grapes: hours of my life I'll never get back.

Then I had to cook the pulp and skins, strain out the seeds, combine the pulp and skins and cook down until it runs off a spoon in sheets. This means that the jam will set properly and not just be juice. I'm not sure mine would have ever gotten to that stage because I'm pretty sure I didn't have enough unripe fruit (which contains more pectin, the stuff that makes it gel) to properly set my jam. I also didn't have any pectin so I called it good after about an hour and a half or so. Meanwhile, I was preparing the cans and lids. Then spooning it into the jars and boiling them for 10 minutes.The jam I scraped out of the pan with a spoon is super tasty, but these days you can buy great jam at the store/farmer's market that won't take an entire day out of your life.

Jam boiling away my Saturday!

Good weekend, looking forward to using my flour and flakes in something awesome this week!