A Different Kind of Weed Brownie

Last April, we said that it wasn't really spring until we had had our dandelion fix, which is an assertion we still stand by.  But what happens when we haven't fully scratched our itch, but Katie is tired of eating dandelion pancakes (or possibly just pancakes in general), and the dandelions are still blooming?  We've got to figure out other foods to put dandelions in.

We've been intrigued (and impressed) by desserts that feature vegetables: carrot cake (obviously), red velvet cake with beets, frosting colored with spinach or beets, and Katie even makes a pretty mean zucchini brownie.

So we thought, "Hey!  It seems like we can take a recipe for some kind of cake-type thing, add a bunch of shredded veggies (which would also be a good name for a band), and have a dessert for which it's easier to justify eating four or five pieces at once!"  Also, it was April 20 last week here in Colorado, which seemed to carry some sort of significance that we can't quite put our finger on...and so the concept of the dandelion brownie was born.

We started with about 3.5 cups of dandelion flowers, which gave us about 3 cups of petals

Then we started making a regular brownie recipe.

We added the dandelion petals at the same time as the flour and chocolate chips, but the batter was really dry so we also added a half cup of milk.

The milk brought the batter back to the right consistency, despite all the extra nutrition (also here) we packed in.

We spread the batter out into a greased pan...

And baked it!

Since the petals are so mildly-flavored, they hardly affect the rich chocolatey taste at all. The brownies taste just like brownies, but the petals are visible as little yellow streaks.  They're like little pieces of confetti for celebrating healthy desserts!

The recipe (based off brownies from Glorious Treats):
4 eggs
1.25 cups unsweetened cocoa powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 Tablespoon vanilla extract
1 cup butter
2.25 cups sugar
1.5 cups all purpose flour
1.5 cups (one 12-oz bag) semisweet chocolate chips
3 cups dandelion petals
0.5 cup milk

Beat together eggs and cocoa.  Melt butter, mix in salt, sugar, vanilla, and baking powder, then mix together with eggs and cocoa mix.  Add flour, chocolate chips, dandelion petals, and milk, mix well.  Smooth batter out into a 10" x 16" cookie sheet, and bake at 350 °F for 25 minutes, or until toothpick inserted into center comes out clean.



What types of vegetables do you put into your desserts?  What other dishes do you put dandelions in?  Let us know in the comments section below!

Original Easter Ham Strata!

Holy smokes, it's Easter time! (or at least, it was last weekend.)  That means that it's time to celebrate with that age-old treasure of the Waldo, WI Methodists: ham strata.  We eat seasonal stratas (what's the plural of strata?) at different times of the year, and are currently embarking on a journey to perfect one strata recipe per month.  But the month of April was easy, because it is the month in which the original strata (as far as we know) originated, and it's already perfected.  What follows below is the proper way to prepare the original Easter ham strata.

Start with a layer of bread in a 9" x 13" pan, then a layer of ham, and a layer (or two) of cheese. If Katie's not watching, you don't have to tear the bread into little pieces, and you can increase the cheese and ham as you see fit.  (The amounts given in the recipe are minimums.)  We used cheddar and swiss, but if you're feeling rebellious, other kinds of cheese work, too, as long as they can melt.  American cheese doesn't count because it's not really cheese.

Repeat the layers as necessary to fill the pan, ending with a layer of cheese(s) on top.

Then beat together 6 eggs and 3 cups milk, along with 0.5 teaspoon onion powder, 0.5 teaspoon garlic powder, 0.25 teaspoon salt, 0.5 teaspoon pepper, and 1 teaspoon mustard.  Pour it over the cheese/bread/ham mix, and let it soak/marinate/blossom overnight, or at least several hours.  Traditionally this is done Saturday afternoon or evening by a crew of hyperactive middle schoolers, but it can also be done satisfactorily by grown-ups.

While the strata is soaking, attend an Easter Sunday sunrise service.  Traditionally, the service is in Waldo, WI, but the Red Rocks amphitheater in Colorado is an acceptable substitute.

Well, lookey here!  It's a mule deer!  How would you like to be featured in our next strata, mule deer?

After the service, lightly crunch 3 cups corn flakes and mix them with 4 Tablespoons melted butter.

Apply the buttered corn flakes to the top of the strata...

...and bake at 375 °F for 50-60 minutes until it looks like this.

Cut into large pieces and move to a plate while still steaming hot and melted cheesey.  Look!  Layers!  (Just like an ogre!)

The recipe:
10 slices of bread (at least)
2 cups shredded cheddar cheese
2 cups shredded swiss cheese
3 cups ham, shredded
6 eggs
3 cups milk
0.5 teaspoon each of onion powder, garlic powder, and black pepper
0.25 teaspoon salt
3 cups corn flakes, lightly crushed
4 Tablespoons butter, melted

Layer the bread, ham, and cheese in a 9" x 13" pan, starting with bread and ending with cheese.  Beat together eggs, milk, onion powder, garlic powder, pepper, and salt.  Pour over mixture and set in fridge for at least 12 hours, preferably overnight.  Attend Easter sunrise service.  Mix together melted butter and corn flakes, spread over top of bread-ham-cheese layers.  Bake at 375 °F for 50-60 min, until corn flakes are more golden brown than they started.


How do you celebrate Easter?  How much ham strata does it involve?  Let us know in the comments section below!

Books Review: $50 and up Underground House Book, Earth-Sheltered Solar Greenhouse Book by Mike Oehler

First, a confession: we're huge fans of underground/earth-sheltered structures.  Cooler in the summer, warmer in the winter, virtually immune to tornadoes, nearly invisible to alien invaders...the list of perks goes on and on.  We're also cheap. (Pronounced frew-gull.)  As it turns out, Mike Oehler probably has similar tastes. 

Covers of the relevant books.  The drawing on the cover of the $50 and up book is one of the less spectacular designs in the book, but shows how underground structures can be built even on relatively flat ground.  The drawing on the cover of the greenhouse book shows many of the features of Oehler's design, namely a lower section for standing room, trapping cold air, and potentially sheltering rabbits; a back wall with thermal storage devices, and a roof with venting capability.  We found a copy of the $50 and up book here, and the greenhouse book here.

In the foreword to the greenhouse book, Rob Roy (another underground house expert with his own series of books) says,

"I've always prided myself on sharing information on low-cost green building techniques in my books, but Mike out-flanks me every which way from a Mexican Sunday: the guy builds cheap, dirt cheap, and I say this with begrudging admiration." [Mexican Sunday is another of Oehler's books.]

The books are an entertaining and immensely useful guide to earth-sheltered buildings. Oehler brilliantly mixes personal experiences of building underground structures on the cheap with curmudgeonly (to use Oehler's own words) but endearing political commentary. (How many other books have an entire chapter devoted to circumventing building codes and fooling building inspectors?)

While most other sources on underground buildings advocate the copious use of concrete and insulation materials, Oehler explains how to design and build stable, structurally sound earth-sheltered buildings (provided building codes are not viewed as gospel truth) with materials scrounged, sourced from the homestead, or readily available at the local hardware store: mainly wood and plastic sheeting.

The steps and principles of construction are simple:

1. Dig a hole, optimally on a ridge if a view of the surrounding area is desired, but optionally on a hillside or even on flat ground.
2. Construct a post-and-beam frame in the hole, making sure to place a layer of polyethylene between wood and dirt, e.g., in the holes for the posts.  Also make sure the frame is braced against itself to keep the force of the dirt that will be added outside the walls and on the roof from buckling the frame.  In the greenhouse book, Oehler also mentions that he now chars the bottom end of the posts in a campfire to further preserve the wood.
3. Add shoring on the outside of the frame in the form of lumber mill ends, scrounged boards, etc., again making sure that there is always plastic sheeting between the wood and the dirt.
4. Backfill around and on the structure with dirt, making sure to allow for proper drainage.

Naturally, there are numerous details to each of those steps that Oehler outlines in the books, gleaned through his considerable experimentation with underground structures and experience in the construction industry.

Oehler walks readers through his methodology, which is arguably based on a series of questions:

1. What do I want out of the underground building?  
2. What is the simplest (and cheapest) way I can build a structure that gives me what I want out of the building?
3. What are the problems with the simplest structure, and what can I do solve them?
4. What are the problems with the improved form, and what can I do to further improve the building?
5. ...and so on

Not only is this approach an incredible time-saver for folks like us, who tend to follow the same protocol, but the fact that Oehler has resolved these problems to a sufficient degree to live in his self-built underground houses for decades and to harvest vegetables year-round from his underground greenhouse near the Idaho-Canada border speaks to the soundness of his approach.

Criticism of these books is hard for us to muster.  Oehler calls it like he sees it, which is mostly endearing.  For example, as implied above, we learn straight away that he has a strong disdain for authority in general and especially government involvement in the everyday matters of rural life.  However, one doesn't have to read very far between the lines to guess that Oehler might be a little bit vindictive, even if the vindication comes in the form of somewhat petty remarks in the figure captions of his books.  But the cumulative effect of these comments does very little to detract from overall excellent works.

In sum, we are very happy to have Oehler's experience to draw from when we have a need for some outbuildings on our own homestead and will very likely use some of his techniques.  We highly recommend these books!

Testing Old Seed Viability

Now that it's the time of year where we think about starting seeds for the garden, it's time to test the viability of the seeds we already have.  Normally that wouldn't be too much of a concern to us, but we got distracted last fall (we're very easily distracted), and left our seed collection out in the garage all winter (and exposed to all the freeze-thaw cycles that a Colorado winter entails).  Also, when we went through our beekeeping stuff (which had been in storage since 2010), we found a bag with another dozen seed packets or so, which in addition to this winter's cycle, were exposed to other varying amounts of winter-summer cycling in the upper midwest.

Through all of this, the seeds had no humidity control, no real protection from bugs, or mice, or even nanites, and some dated back as far as 2008!  Since temperature fluctuations and moisture content are critical parameters in how long seeds remain viable, we need a test to decide which seeds to keep and which to toss in the compost.  Yay, an excuse to do an experiment!

Quite a collection we've got here!  OK, seeds, which of you is going to grow when we plant you in the ground?

We took ten seeds from each packet (unless there were fewer than ten left).  We were going to put them in a paper towel, but we (Jake) couldn't find any around the house.  How about this miniature roll of paper towels from the bathroom?

We folded the ten seeds in the middle of the conveniently sectioned-off squares and wetted the paper with a squirt bottle.  (In hindsight, using this type of paper towel was a bad idea.  It was a nightmare to try to tease apart the wet layers to find the seeds and inspect them for germination.)  It's a good idea to get the paper as saturated as possible because some of the water will evaporate.  Having a uniform moisture level is an important control, and we were a little bit out of control on this parameter.

We grouped a bunch of like-feathered seeds into a flock and stacked them in a plastic bag.  We stacked the seed packets in the same order so we could keep track of which was which.  (In hindsight, stacking them together was also a bad idea because roots and shoots had no respect for boundaries between layers.  Sometimes, roots from the top layer would come out the other side, which was part of the reason it was so hard to pull apart the layers.  Individual plastic bags or something like wax paper between each variety would have helped.)

Some of the seeds thought they were partying on spring break.

We stacked all the bags in a white tub, and since the spring chickens don't need the heat lamp yet (they won't be born for another five weeks or so), we borrowed it to make one corner of the dining room a little hot pocket.  The lamp like this kept the temperature at about 85 °F.

A week later, we took out the paper and counted how many seeds of each had germinated.  We should have done this step sooner, since some of the fast-sprouting seeds, like cucumbers and swiss chard, had taken over the paper, and had preliminary designs for how to break through the plastic bag already drawn up.

The good ones we planted in dirt to see how they'd do.  (After one day in dirt, most look healthy!)

...and here's the data!  An Excel file with numbers for each variety can be downloaded here, but the graphs show the different 'classes' of veggies grouped together.   If there was more than one variety, the bar represents the average (generally different varieties of the same group performed similarly, the exceptions being beans and radishes).  A couple of notes: the pumpkins were from 2008, and there were only nine seeds in the packet.  One of the carrot seed packets was from 1997!  The swiss chard was so unruly that it was impossible to tell which plants came from which seeds.  We tested 30 seeds and ended up with 45 sprouts that readily detached from the seed, so we just assumed all of them worked (it seemed fair). 

Some of the variation here could be due to differing moisture levels--some of the paper was fairly dry when we opened it up, and those seeds appeared less viable (the driest ones were the carrots, lettuce, peppers, and tomatoes).  It's also possible that some of the seeds needed more time to germinate, but since we could see cucumber roots after only 24 hours, we didn't want to let it go too long.  Having an easier way to check on the seeds after a certain amount of time would have been helpful.

The seeds that had less than 70% germination rate went in the compost, so they'll have one last chance to prove us wrong.  In any case, it'll be some fresh tomato and pepper seeds for us this spring!

How do you test your seeds for viability?  If you save your seeds, how do you make sure they remain viable through the winter?  Let us know in the comments section below!

O'Strata

Our meal planning around St. Patrick's day is usually something like this: corned beast, cabbage, and potatoes O'Brien the day of (and bread pudding for dessert), leftover cabbage and potatoes with Reuben sandwiches for 3+ meals/day for one week after, and then back to our regularly scheduled programming of not Irish food.  Actually, a fair bit of our normal cooking comes out resembling some kind of Irish dish, e.g., colcannon, but it's mostly coincidence.  (Also, it's funny that Wikipedia's list of traditional Irish alcoholic beverages is half as long as the list of traditional Irish foods!)

But this year, we came up with a dish that is distinctly Irish to follow up on our annual Reuben gorge.  We combined the Irish staples of corned beast hash (kind of--see below), potatoes O'Brien, and cabbage into that wonderful layered casserole known as strata!  Here's what we did:

We started by browning some ground venison and frying some potatoes with onions.  We seasoned the meat with the same seasonings we use for cooking a corned beast, except instead of whole ones (e.g., coriander), we used ground, and we added about a tablespoon of dried parsley.  (We ground them up with a mortar and pestle!)

When the frying pan was freed up, we sauteed some cabbage and red peppers.  We would have added green peppers, too, if we had any.  These are seasoned with a bit of salt and pepper.

Katie made a loaf of bread, then tore it into little pieces and made a layer (or stratum, if you will) in the bottom of a 9 x 13" pan.  (Katie has a similar reaction to a fresh loaf of bread as a puppy has to a new chew toy, but she has the good sense to put the pieces in a baking dish instead of scattering them across the living room floor.) 

Next we added layers of potatoes/onions, cabbage, corned ground beast, cheese and peppers, then another layer of bread.  The order of the layers isn't important, just as long as they're collated (go through all the types of layers before repeating the bread layer), and cheese is on top.

When the baking dish was full, we poured over it a mixture of six eggs beaten with  enough milk to make three cups total volume.  We didn't season the egg mixture this time, but in the future, we'll probably add some spices to the mixture like we normally do for a strata.

On the top, we added a layer of crushed corn flakes rolled in melted butter.  It's the Irish version of a cherry on top.

The Recipe:
1 loaf bread, sliced or gleefully ripped to croutons
1 lb. ground venison, browned and seasoned with ground pepper, mustard, cloves, coriander, bay leaves, and parsley
1.25 lb. shredded cheese (we used Swiss and mozzarella)
3 c. sauerkraut or chopped and sauteed cabbage
1 red pepper, diced and sauteed
2 large potatoes, cubed and fried
1 large onion, cubed and sauteed
6 eggs, beaten
3 c. milk, minus the juice from the sauerkraut
0.5 t. garlic powder
0.5 t. onion powder
0.5 t. ground black pepper
0.5 t. ground cloves
1.5 t. salt
0.5 t. ground mustard

Layer bread, cabbage corned beast, potatoes/onions, red pepper, and Swiss cheese in a 9" x 13" x 3" pan (or equivalent pan volume).  Mix eggs, milk, and spices together, pour evenly into pan.  Spices may fall to bottom of mixture, so re-mix frequently.  Chill overnight, or at least 2 hours.  Bake at 375 °F for 50-60 min until egg mixture is set (toothpick inserted in center comes out clean).




What did (do) you do with your St. Patrick's Day leftovers?  What other Irish foods do you eat this time of year?  Let us know in the comments section below!

Garden Protection Plan

When we moved to our new place last August, we had just enough time to put in a small fall garden and get a few meals of kale from the 9' x 3' bed.  We also had enough time to raise a few meat chickens, and we're planning on scaling up both endeavors considerably this spring.  Although it was a little painful through the fall to not have a full-size garden with tomatoes, chard, etc., it was nice that we had a chance to realize just how brazen and shameless the squirrels and raccoons in our neighborhood are.

So, now that we're planning our garden for this coming summer, we know that we're going to need a multi-pronged squirrel-deterrent system in order to bring our crops to harvest.  We also know, having studied squirrel behavior for many years, that simply testing their tiny rodent brains with increasingly complex challenges is unlikely to keep them out completely, but would definitely make gardening harder for us.  Instead, we need solutions that are more...permanent.  Here's what we came up with.

Our place is surrounded by dogs, so our primary line of defense (after the fences around the yard) will be a series of squirrel launchers that send the furry vegetable pirates into the neighbors' yards.  Not that we want to make the squirrels our neighbors' problem, but they've all got dogs who will quite enjoy helping us out.  (And both permaculturalists and ninjas recognize the principle of working within one's surroundings.)  The second line of defense will be a squirrel pit trap.  What awaits the squirrels at the bottom of the pit trap is still a matter of debate.  A snapping turtle?  Punji sticks made from sharpened toothbrushes?  A tunnel that leads to Texas?  (Let us know your vote in the comments section.)  The last line of defense will be a marauding honey badger, discussed at length below.

We've done a lot of thinking about it, and the more YouTube videos we watch, the more it seems like a (trained) honey badger would be an awesome livestock/produce protection plan.  They hunt both day and night, and have no fear of large predators.  They eat anything from grubs to snakes to raccoon-sized rodents.  They can even climb trees to get to the raccoons, which gives them a leg up on canine-type marauders.  They can be socialized and trained, which might even mean that after a few generations in domestication, they could be deterred from chickens and bees.  They're also excellent diggers, so they can help with soil preparation and root crop harvesting.

The only legitimate downside is that tame or trained honey badgers aren't currently available to the general public.  Unfortunately, we're also explicitly forbidden from owning a badger in our neighborhood.  But while the honey badger vernacular seems to consist mostly of hissing and snarling, if we could teach it to bark, we might be able to convince an animal control officer it's a weird-looking dog.

In any case, we think there is a legitimate business opportunity here for anyone with experience in importing (or smuggling), breeding, and training exotic and dangerous wild animals, influencing policy decisions regarding what counts as a pet, and marketing progressive ideas to typically conservative crowds.  Let us know if you want to partner up on this venture! (We don't bring any of those skills to the table, though.)

Now that we've got our anti-squirrel system figured out, we just have to decide what to plant in the garden!  That's a nice position to be in.


How do you protect your garden from mammalian intruders?  Do you have any ideas for improving our system?  Let us know in the comments section below!

Economics of Growing Greens by Artificial Light

We had a thought the other day about growing greens like lettuce, spinach, swiss chard, and kale inside during the winter months.  What would it cost us to do that, in the limiting case that the greens would get no natural light through our windows?  (That's actually not too far from the truth--most of our windows face north or are shaded for all but a few hours a day.)

We went back to take a look at our aquaponics setup, which makes use of four 4-foot-long T8 fluorescent light bulbs, and which we used to grow some swiss chard, thyme, basil and dandelion greens at our old place (there were other plants, too, but those were the four that grew fast enough to give appreciable yields).  We were pretty satisfied with the amount of greens we were able to produce from that little 48" x 24" area, but we never actually crunched the numbers on the economics.  So, today we decided to do a quick calculation to see how much it was costing us to grow all those greens, at least as a ballpark figure.

A picture of the working aquaponics grow bed at a young age.  Later it would look much bushier.

The lighting system uses four 32-Watt bulbs, and our electricity rate is about $0.13/kWh. That is, it costs us thirteen cents to consume 1,000 Watts for one hour.  Watts are actually a rate of energy consumption--Joules per second--but total energy consumed is what gets billed.  So instead of doing the logical thing and using Joules as a standard unit, utility companies use the convoluted unit of kilowatt-hours.  Add that to the list of science-business conventions that don't make sense.  But at least it's based on the metric system!

So, when the four bulbs are all lit up, we're consuming 128 Watts (or 0.128 kilowatts).  If we run the lights for 10 hours a day, we consume 1.28 kWh of energy, which costs us $0.17. (Differences in rates for peak hours, sales tax, and all the other junk the utility company charges for are included in that number.)  Seventeen cents per day doesn't sound too bad.

In the aquaponic system pictured above, we had four swiss chard plants among the other stuff, and were harvesting about 0.1 lbs of chard /week total based on our records, which works out to about 1 lb from those four plants over a 60 day period, or $9.97/lb. (!!)  Not nearly up to expectations, but keep in mind that chard wasn't the only thing in the bed (so the whole cost of the light can't be attributed just to chard), and since our fish were stubbornly refusing to grow, these plants were extremely nutrient limited.  Fortunately, the thyme and basil that we grew at the same time cost a lot more at the store than chard, so it might all even out.  

 But, just for kicks, what would the cost be if we filled the grow-bed with dirt, planted all chard, and it grew a little closer to expectations?


We can assume that ten swiss chard plants will fit in the grow-bed since we had four plants in less than half the space.  A generally-accepted representative time-to-harvest for swiss chard is 60 days, although it's usually possible to start selectively eating the leaves well before that (which we did).  But if we take a 60-day baseline, and equate one plant to one 'bunch' that you'd find at the grocery store, we'd have 10 bunches in 60 days.  So, the calculation then becomes $0.17 per day, times 60 days, divided by 10 plants to give $1.00 per plant (or bunch).  Considering that we currently find it for around $1.99/bunch at the grocery store, that seems like a much more reasonable deal.

Generalized equation to figure out the cost of growing a plant under artificial lights, assuming the artificial light is the only cost.  For "C," use the inverse of the number of plants in the bed (e.g., if you had 10 plants in one bed, use 1/10).  Similarly for "G," if you got, e.g., 8 pounds from 10 plants, use 10/8.

Looks like it might be worth giving it another shot at growing some winter greens indoors!  Next time we'll use real dirt, and won't count on a few anorexic minnows to provide all the fertilizer.  And now that spring is on its way, we probably won't get to this experiment again until the fall, but hang tight!  We won't forget!


Do you grow your own greens indoors during the winter?  How cost effective is it for you?  Let us know in the comments section below!