Dad’s B-Day Gift – Crushed Red Pepper Flakes and Seeded Rye Crackers

 

For my Dad’s birthday this year I put together a jar of my homegrown crushed cayenne peppers and these seeded rye crackers with amaranth, sunflower seeds and fennel from the garden. 

 

My dad like’s spicy food, so I figured he could get some use out of my peppers!  Here is my post about drying the peppers, and then I simply crushed the dried peppers up a mortar and pestle until they were nothing more than seeds and pepper flakes.  So good!

 


This was my first time making crackers.  I didn’t have much wheat flour left, but I had a whole thing of rye flour.  I followed this recipe as my base and added seeds and more rye flour.  My adjusted recipe goes as follows:

½ CUP plus 2 TBSP rice milk
3 TBSP olive oil
1 CUP whole wheat flour
1 CUP rye flour
½ TSP baking powder
1 TSP garlic salt
2 TSP amaranth seeds
¼ CUP sunflower seeds
1 TBSP fennel seeds

 

Mix the milk and oil together.

Add the rest of the ingredients and mix until dough is formed.

Roll out on a floured surface and cut into cracker shapes (either into squares or use a cookie cutter).  I flattened the dough to about 1 cm, but you could make thicker crackers too, just cook a little longer.

 

Place the crackers on parchment paper lined baking sheets and cook for 18 minutes at 350°F, rotating about half way through.

 

They taste great!  My dad will love them.  I put my goods in glass jars and made a couple personal labels using sticker paper and permanent markers.

(I grew Joe's Long Cayenne Pepper's; I crossed the "E" in Joe's out and put a "Y" above to spell my name, Joy :) )

Drying Herbs

Many of our herbs are starting to flower. I wanted to start drying bunches so we can use them all winter long.  Today I harvested a few different types: spicy globe basil, purple shisho, greek oregano, summer savory and some of our hopi red dye amaranth that was knocked over by our gourds!  First I washed all the leaves as best as I could (except for the amaranth, it’s too fragile) and let them dry off.

For hardier herbs like oregano, savory, rosemary, etc you can simply air dry them out of direct sunlight.  Just gather them in bunches from the stems, tie together and hang.  I always have lots of dust, dirt and animal hair in my house so I prefer to be safe and put a brown paper bag around the herb bunches.  I took some scrap fabric strips and tied the herb bunches tightly together. 

 

Then I placed the herbs in brown paper bags, cut a small hole in the bag and inserted the fabric strips through the hole. 

I tied the strips tightly around the outside of the bag, and tied an additional loop with the excess fabric so I could hang the bag. 

Worked out pretty well!  I hung them under a shelf that doesn’t get much sun.

For herbs with delicate, soft leaves like basils or mints you have to dry them quickly.  So you can use a dehydrator, which I do not have, or your oven.  I just spread my basil and shisho out on a cookie sheet, turned my oven to the lowest setting, and checked on the herbs frequently, flipping them over here and there.  It took about 3 hours until they were completely dried.  Then I pulled the leaves off the stems and stored them in air tight containers out of sunlight.

Three Sisters Beds

I just wanted to share how awesome our corn, beans, gourds and amaranth are doing!  Our yard is already filled with a garden where we have herbs, greens, tomatoes, peppers, fruit trees, cucumbers, onions and so on… But not much space for corn.  Luckily a friend down the street has a huge sunny backyard, so we dug a couple beds, mixed a little manure and compost in and planted away.  Everything looks amazing.  The smaller bed was planted about 2 weeks after the first one.  Here is what we planted and where we got our seeds:

Ohio Blue Clarage Corn (Southern Exposure)

Black Iroquois Sweet Corn (Southern Exposure)

Purple Podded Pole Bean (Baker Creek)

Provider Bush Green Bean (Fedco)

Blue Bush Lake 274 Green Bean (Fedco)

Bushel Basket Gourd (Baker Creek)

Opopeo Amaranth (Baker Creek)

Hopi Red Dye Amaranth (Fedco)

I’ve only had the space to do a Three Sisters garden once, and I had to move out before harvesting, so I’m excited to see how these beds do!  Everything can be eaten except the gourds.  I’m not so into squash, so I figured something useful could replace it, like a gourd you can make bowls out of!  The Ohio Blue Corn can be eaten as sweet corn when it’s young, but we plan on trying to make corn meal with it once it’s mature.  You can eat the amaranth greens in salads and whatnot, use the seeds in breads and I definitely plan on experimenting with dying fabric using the Hopi amaranth.

Gardening is so exciting!  And since these are new beds the bugs are pretty minimal. Way different from out house garden, which has been full of plants and bugs for years.  If only we could get some rain!