I shredded four heads of cabbage on a vegetable slicer, and it came to 10 pounds, so I mixed six tablespoons of pickling salt into that.  I didn’t use caraway seeds this time; figured I’d leave it plain and see how it does.   After it sat a little while, I started packing it into quart canning jars.

Packing Salted Cabbage into Jars

The handle you can see in the picture is a ladle I packed it down with.  Anything with a blunt handle will do.  You just keep packing more in and smashing it down until the cabbage is about an inch from the top and the juices are coming up to cover it.

Filled Jars of Salted Cabbage

Then I just wiped off the rims and outsides to make sure they were clean, and put canning lids on.  They go on finger tight, not super tight, so when it starts fermenting, the gases can escape.  I got five quarts out of the ten pounds of cabbage.

Freshly Canned Red Sauerkraut

Aren’t they pretty?  Now they go into storage at room temperature, in some sort of container that can catch any liquid that overflows as they ferment.  I put them in a cabinet over the fridge that’s hard to use for anything else.

Kraut Fermenting

The tubs will catch any overflow.  They don’t need to be nearly that deep; they’re just what we had handy.  The two quarts on the right are kraut from ordinary green cabbage that I started a few weeks ago, so it could probably be eaten any time.  While I was making the red kraut, I could tell red cabbage is definitely tougher than green cabbage, so I suspect it’ll take longer to soften up, but we’ll see in a month or two.

This is probably already way more kraut than we need for the winter, but I’ll be making one more batch from green cabbage when the last of it is ready.

Arm Roast

Start with a roast that’s got a decent amount of marbling.  The roast above is an arm roast from a Jersey steer, probably 3 pounds or so.  A chuck roast also works very well.  Rub both sides with salt and pepper:

Coated with Salt and Pepper

Now get out your crock pot and layer the bottom with onions, celery, a couple bay leaves, and a smashed garlic clove or two.  You can leave the onion whole or in halves if you like to eat soft cooked onions.  If I’m using fresh celery, I put in a couple whole sticks.  This celery had been chopped up and frozen, because we never use a whole head of celery before it goes bad.

Vegetables for Flavor

Now pick out some herbs, fresh if available.  I picked rosemary, oregano, and thyme (top left to bottom right in the picture below), which made a nice combination.  Wash any dirt off them.  I leave them whole, so it’s easy to remove the stems later.  Some of the leaves will fall off during cooking, but that’s okay.

Herbs for Roast

Put your roast on top of the vegetables, then the herbs on top of the roast.  I think that’s the best way to layer them, since it’s easy to get the stemmy herbs out later, and the vegetables help keep the roast from overcooking against the bottom.

Ready to Cook

There’s no need to add any liquid; the juices from the vegetables and roast will make plenty.  Put the lid on and turn it on low.  If you had potatoes or some larger vegetables in there, it would probably take 8 hours or so, but without them ours gets done in about 6 hours.  Your crock pot may vary.

When it’s about finished, it’s time to get the beans started.  This method of roasting perks up the limp, thin beans you can get in the grocery stores in the winter.  It doesn’t do much for fresh ones that’s better than simple boiling or steaming, but we’re eating a lot of those these days, so we roasted these for a change of pace.

Cover a cookie sheet with aluminum foil (to save cleaning later), and wash your beans.

Foil-Lined Sheets for Beans

Washed and Trimmed Green Beans

The recipes I’ve found for roasting beans tell you to put them on the sheet and brush them with oil, but there’s an easier way.  Dry them off with a towel, then drizzle a couple tablespoons of olive oil in the bowl with them, and add some salt and pepper.  Roll the beans around with your hands to coat them all over.

Coated with Oil and Spices

Now spread them out on the foil fairly evenly.

Ready to Roast

Put them in the oven at 450 degrees.  After ten minutes, take it out and flip the beans over, then cook another ten minutes.  While that’s cooking, it’s time to get the roast ready and make the gravy.  Here’s the finished roast:

Finished Roast

Discard the herbs and transfer the roast to a plate.  This one cooked a little longer than it needed to, so it’s fairly dark, but it was still good.  It should pull apart with a fork.

Roast Ready to Eat

If you want to eat the onions and celery, scoop them out and put with the roast.  Put a cover over it to keep it warm.  Now you need to pour the broth off to make gravy.  Put a saucepan on the stove, and strain the broth from the crock pot into it.  I’m straining it with the lid here, but you can burn yourself that way, so you might want to use a sieve.  If you like pieces of vegetables in your gravy, go ahead and dump them in there too; just be sure to pick out the bay leaves.

Beef Broth for Gravy

I’ll be making a milk gravy here.  You could also replace the milk with water to keep the carbs lower.  Since our side dish was so low in carbs, I figured we could afford a few extra carbs in the gravy.  To a couple cups of milk (or a 1/2 cup, if you use water), stir in a tablespoon of cornstarch until there are no lumps.  That’s about 22 carbs for the milk and 7 for the cornstarch.

Cornstarch and Milk

With the broth boiling, drizzle the milk mixture into it while stirring constantly.

Thickening Gravy

Continue to boil and stir for a minute, then turn it down to a simmer and see how thick it’s getting.  It’ll usually be thicker at the table when it cools somewhat, so this takes some practice.  If it’s not thick enough yet, you can add some more cornstarch, just always stir it into a little water first.  (Check the instructions on the cornstarch box.)  If it’s too thick, add some water or milk to thin it.  I like the bubbles to plump up on top just a bit before settling back down.

Milk Gravy

When your beans and gravy are both ready, it’s time to eat.  I like the beans to just start getting almost-burnt spots on them, but you may like them a little more or less done.

Roasted Beans

Now everything’s ready to eat!  Here it is plated up, with and without gravy.

Roast with Gravy and Beans

Without Gravy

Carb-wise, a serving of gravy like that in the picture has about 5 carbs, and a cup of green beans has 5-6, so the whole thing comes in at about 10, which is my limit.  This is a great low-carb meal.

I’m baffled.  For a few weeks now, every time I use our outdoor water hose, the water is soapy.  I can smell it, and it makes suds if I spray it into something.  The first time it happened, I figured I must have gotten soap in the spray nozzle when I was washing the dog or my truck, so I let it run for a couple minutes until it ran clean.  But the next time I used it, there was the soap again.

Finally I let it run for about half an hour in the garden, figuring that would get it well cleaned out.  Nope—still soapy every time I use it, until it runs for a minute or two.  Maybe the neighbors are sneaking over here at night and putting soap in the hose to try to poison our rooster.  If so, it won’t work—I’ve been giving them rain water.  I really don’t think that’s it, but I’m stumped for another explanation.

I finally got the last piece of roof metal trimmed and tacked down on the chicken house, after temporarily fixing it on there when I got rained out last weekend.  The old nail holes are now caulked, so the girls should be high and dry in there from now on.  Unfortunately, the new roof didn’t keep the rooster from crowing like I’d hoped.  Enough light still gets in through the ventilation spaces to tell him when it’s daytime, so if anything, he got worse.

So now we have a new routine.  Every night, I go grab him from wherever he’s sleeping and put him in a cardboard box with the top loosely closed.  I cut some other air holes and made sure it’s big enough that he’s not cramped in there.  He doesn’t really care; he’s sleeping then anyway.  It keeps him in the dark enough that he doesn’t crow much until we let him out; and if he does, the box muffles it quite a bit.  The rest of the day, he’s like a barky dog: he crows when he thinks there’s danger, like someone walking by the pen, but then he quits.  It’s only early in the morning that he just crows over and over for no reason.

I made a really excellent beef roast tonight, if I do say so myself.  I didn’t think to take pictures, so I can’t do a full-blown recipe post, but here’s the short version.  Take a chuck or arm roast, one of the cuts that has plenty of fat and marbling, and put it in the crock pot on low about 8 hours before dinner.  Add half an onion, a stick of celery, and a couple cloves of garlic, all chopped into quarters or so.  Add fresh rosemary, thyme, and oregano from the garden and a couple of bay leaves.  Forget to rub salt and pepper into the roast, then sprinkle them over the top of everything.

When you’re about ready to eat, drain all the liquid into a saucepan.  If you like chunks of onion and celery in your gravy, pluck those out of the pot and put in there too.  If you like more of a milk gravy, add a cup of cream or milk.  While bringing that to a boil, stir a couple teaspoons of corn starch into a quarter cup of cold water.  Drizzle that into the boiling broth while stirring constantly, and continue stirring for a minute or so.  It should start to thicken up, then it’s time to eat.

The corn starch is high in carbs, of course; but at 7g/tablespoon, I can usually thicken a batch of gravy for less than 3g/serving.  The exact amount you need varies, depending on how much liquid you’re starting with and how thick you like your gravy.  If you add milk, that may get it up around 6-7g.  That’s still not a problem, as long as you don’t have carby side dishes.  In this case, the side dish was green beans (the last of the ones we froze from our garden last year) in butter, so it worked out fine.

I wrote a while back about making sauerkraut. Well, it’s been over a month since I made it, so I decided to try it and see how it was coming along.

I got out a package of Cajun bratwurst from Kabricks’ that I had thawed out. They are excellent, by the way: nice heat but not too much and plenty of flavor. I simmered them in a little lard until they were browned and crisping up a little on the outside. Then I dumped a serving of kraut over top of them, put a lid on it, and let it simmer for a while. I stirred it once or twice, to make sure it didn’t run out of liquid, and to let the kraut pick up the spices from the brats. Once the brats were 160° inside, I was ready to eat.

The kraut tasted excellent, but it was still pretty crunchy. It really needs another month or two before it will have the softer consistency I like. Since I only made two quarts, it may not last that long! It goes extremely well with spicy brats, picking up a little of their heat but also balancing it.

All the recipes I post here will be low-carb, so I looked up the nutritional info. I probably had a cup of kraut, which has 6 grams of carb, 4 of which are fiber, so it was a very low-carb meal: two grams from the kraut and maybe one from the seasoning in the brats. Since this is homemade kraut, it wasn’t pasteurized or irradiated or any of that nonsense, so it’s full of probiotics and other goodness. And the brats were from my dad’s hogs, which are raised outdoors pretty healthily. Great stuff.