Bacon-Wrapped Dates and Low-Carb Cheesecake!

What do bacon-wrapped dates and low-carb cheesecake have in common?  They both feature homemade mascarpone cheese!  Bea's birthday falls just a couple of weeks after Valentine's Day, so we combined efforts to make two of our favorite treats to celebrate.

Side note: What happens when you have limited internet?  You have to find some time to upload your photos and videos from the free wifi at the library -- so this post is finally going up about a month after it was written!

First, you'll need to make the...

Mascarpone Cheese!

You need a few special supplies to make mascarpone, so make sure you round these up first:

• Double Boiler
• Thermometer
• Tartaric Acid
• Linen towel or heavy cheesecloth
• Quart of non-ultra-pasturized heavy cream

Don't use regular cheesecloth!

Use a linen towel!

We can just link to the recipe we used although we'll make a note that we learned the hard way that “HEAVY cheesecloth" means something about the texture and weave of a kitchen dish towel -- not the terrycloth kind but the plain linen variety.  We tried straining our cream through about 8 layers of regular cheesecloth first and ended up with a gloppy mess -- but then scooped it out, changed containers, and added a kitchen towel as our cheesecloth -- and the next day our cheese was salvaged and was the perfect consistency, ready to use!

Also note that the 12 hours of refrigeration means you should plan to make this well ahead of time.  Luckily we had factored in a couple extra days before Valentine's.  Phew!

Bacon-Wrapped Dates

One time a couple of years ago, Bea roped Chris into accompanying her to a friend's baby shower.  Despite the fact that this was billed as a coed event, Chris was really nervous that he would be the only guy in attendance.  Luckily, in addition to having plenty of male cohorts to interface with, the hostess (our awesome friend Bradley) served Chris's most favorite delicacy of all time: Bacon-Wrapped Dates!  These take a little work to assemble, but are totally worth it for a special occasion.  We've made them twice now and both times were a great hit.

Bea is happy we used “happy bacon"
so she can enjoy them too!

You'll need:

• x pitted dates
• x/3 strips of bacon, ideally from sustainably-raised happy pigs
• some mascarpone cheese
• toothpicks

The process is fairly simple, just a little time-consuming, especially if you're a cheapskate and start with whole dates that you pit yourself!

What to do:

Preheat oven to 450°F.

Cut the bacon into thirds crossways.

Slit each date down the side, remove pits if not already done, and splodge some cheese into the center.

Wrap a piece of bacon around the date, and secure it with a toothpick -- use the bacon to cover up the slit.  Place on baking sheet.

Bake these for 5 minutes and then flip them over and bake another 5 minutes, so the bacon is crispy all around.  Each person usually wants to eat about as many of these as possible, so it's best when you make at least 20 at once.  Usually made as appetizers for a crowd, but once in a lifetime it's probably OK to make these for Valentine's day, as a delicious prelude to a complete (and completely random!) dinner...

Bea made all Chris's favorite foods at once:

Egg drop soup & romantic glowing octopus lamp

Roasted parsnips & purple carrots we grew in DC

The roots were eaten like fondue dippers, coated in bagna cauda, an anchovy/garlic dip,
which was kept warm at the table in a tiny crock pot Bea found in a thrift store

 And for dessert, we had both high-carb and low-carb options:

Bea surprised Chris by making him a
WHOLE TRAY of cinnamon bread pudding! 

Chris helped Bea make these complicated
but delish Paleo coconut-date sandwich cookies

Needless to say, it was an excellent Valentine's dinner!  Then, a mere two weeks later, it was Bea's birthday and time for another fancy dinner!  This night, Chris was at his aikido class so Bea cooked up dinner on her own -- shrimp burgers with wasabi mayo.  Chris had already helped Bea make a birthday cake the night before.  Usually, Bea wants a cheesecake from her mom's recipe (she thinks it's the only one worth eating), but since it has too much sugar for her current eating restrictions, we decided to try out a low-carb version of a cheesecake recipe we found online.  It was pretty darn tasty!

Low-Carb Mascarpone Cheesecake

This recipe adapted from Low Carb Friends message board, which was adapted from The Food Network's Mascarpone Cheesecake with Almond Crust

Ingredients:

Crust:
1 cup almond meal
4 tablespoons Stevia-in-the-Raw (or other sugar substitute)
1 tablespoon unsalted butter, melted

Filling:
16 oz cream cheese, at room temperature
16 oz mascarpone cheese, at room temperature
1 1/4 cups
Stevia-in-the-Raw (or other sugar substitute)2 teaspoons fresh lemon juice
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
4 large eggs, at room temperature

Topping (optional):
1/2 cup chocolate-hazelnut spread (i.e., Nutella)
1/4 cup heavy cream

Directions

For the crust:

Preheat oven to 350°F.

Tightly wrap the outside of a 9-inch diameter springform pan with 2 layers of foil. It will be sitting in water, so make sure to wrap it EXTRA tightly!

Mix almond flour and stevia. Add the melted butter and mix until moist crumbs form. Press the almond mixture onto the bottom of the prepared pan (don't try and spread it up onto the sides of the pan). Bake the crust until it is set and beginning to brown, about 12 minutes. Cool on a wire rack.

Decrease the oven temperature to 325°F.

For the filling:

Using an electric mixer, beat the cream cheese, mascarpone cheese, and stevia in a large bowl until smooth, occasionally scraping down the sides of the bowl with a rubber spatula. Beat in the lemon juice and vanilla. Add the eggs, 1 at a time, beating just until blended after each addition. (Be careful not to overbeat!)

Pour the cheese mixture over the crust in the pan. Place the springform pan in a large roasting pan. Pour enough hot water into the roasting pan to come halfway up the sides of the springform pan. Bake until the center of the cheesecake moves slightly when the pan is gently shaken, about 1 hour 15 minutes (the cake will become firm when it is cold). Transfer the cake to a rack; cool for an hour. Refrigerate until the cheesecake is cold, at least 8 hours before serving.

For the topping:

Combine the chocolate-hazelnut spread and cream in a small bowl. Heat in the microwave until warm, stopping to stir every 20 seconds to blend, about 1 minute total.

To serve:

Cut the cake into wedges. Drizzle the chocolate sauce over the wedges and serve.

This cake was a hit with both carb-lovers and low-carb eaters!

It also glows beautifully when presented with candles!

AND if that's not enough, this cake provides at least a couple minutes of amusement while you prepare to take it out of the springform pan!

Preparing new garden beds: real-world math problems

We have about half a dozen buckets of wood ash

Now that winter's almost over, Bea's been reviewing some old gardening notes about which are the best organic sources of nutrients to use as soil amendments, and she came across a note that hardwood ash is high in potassium.  That's great news, because Chris has made quite a stash of 5-gallon buckets of stove ashes!  The caveat here is that our starting pH is so low (5.4) that our soil test analysis already recommended adding 13 lbs of limestone per 100 square feet -- so since wood ash is alkaline, we can cut back a bit of the limestone and use the ash as a potassium source without worrying that it will adversely affect our pH.  However, if your pH is where you want it or slightly high, use wood ash sparingly or not at all.

Chris raking in the soil amendments

By now, we have half the beds dug up in the hoophouse and last week (before this most recent round of snow) we were out there prepping our soil and planting our first spring crops!  Since it was helpful to us to review the math that goes into soil amending, we'll go over it here in case it helps anyone else who's ever wondered what those 3 dashed numbers on the bags of fertilizers were for!






1.  Get a soil test!

DON'T bake your soil to make it dry faster,
but old cookie sheets make great drying racks
for soil samples!

This is critical to having a successful garden, but lots of new gardeners skip it, thinking it's difficult or expensive.  You can test your own soil with a basic kit from a hardware store, or send it off to a lab for around $10 to get way more finely-tuned and detailed results.  Historically, we've sent ours to UMass because they were the cheapest, but now that Bea's a Master Gardener through Virginia Tech, we should really encourage use of their soil-testing services!

In true Fixettwell fashion, Bea brought a trowel and handful of ziplock bags to our 2nd appointment to view this farmhouse, stalled Chris from leaving until after our realtor pulled out of the driveway, and then started digging up the lawn in various places to take soil samples!  Oh, and it was pouring down rain.  Luckily, we didn't meet any of the neighbors that day; we would have been such a sight!  The sodden soil she collected took a long while to dry out, so it turned out we had already made an offer on the house by the time we got our results back.  Luckily, they showed no lead or other major issues of concern.  Just good ol' acidic Virginia red clay, as expected.

2.  Interpret your results

If you send your soil samples off to a lab, usually you've specified a crop code of what you intend to grow in each area that was tested so the lab can give you custom-tailored results about what nutrients to add to achieve ideal growing conditions for your selected crop.

In our case, the lab has drawn us a helpful graph to easily visualize what we need and what's already present in sufficient concentration in our soil.

Furthermore, we specified that we want to grow Mixed Home Vegetables so they've adjusted our recommendations accordingly, and tailored our recommendation for “per 100 square feet" as opposed to “per acre".  Be sure to read your results carefully so you're amending with the proper proportions!

Note that the lab hasn't told us specifically which products we should add to achieve desired results, they've told us which nutrients are deficient and what we need to do to adjust our pH.  This is where the decisions and the math come in!

3.  Decide which soil amendments to use
Since we're gardening organically despite not having to worry about certifications, we're limiting our choices to products approved for use in organic farming.  Some common organic sources of major and minor nutrients include:

• pH adjustment – dolomitic limestone – raises pH, also contains calcium and magnesium
• Nitrogen – finished compost, composted manure, alfalfa meal, dried blood
• Phosphorus – bone meal, rock phosphate, soft rock (colloidal rock phosphate)
• Potassium – wood ashes, greensand, azomite
• Micronutrients – individual nutrients, kelp meal, azomite

Look at that smile!  Truckaroni is happy
to be running and put to work again!

Last month, Bea looked in our shed and took stock of which amendments we had left over from previous years gardening.  She then took the truck up to Southern States to buy what we still needed, including 400 lbs of limestone.  This turned out to be a total disaster because you go in and tell the clerk you want limestone and they ring you up, then you take the receipt out to the warehouse where they load you up.  Well, it was raining and Bea decided to act like a Southern girl and stay warm & dry in the truck while the guys loaded it, so she got home with 400 lbs of what turned out to be a type of chemically-treated limestone that's apparently meant for water filtration, definitely NOT for organic gardening!  Luckily she realized this before unloading the truck.  Still, it sat there for a couple of weeks with us being too embarrassed to go exchange such a large order.  Then we got over ourselves and went back to beg forgiveness and get an exchange, so the poor warehouse guys had to unload 400 lbs of one type of lime and reload 400 lbs of the correct type.  The warehouse guy only had one bag explode on him during the process.  Somehow Chris also managed to lock the keys in the truck (a first!) so we had to sit around the parking lot for 2 hours waiting on AAA to come bail us out.  Certainly not our best day in history, but we survived.  Luckily there are 3 Southern States within the same radius of us so we don't have to show our faces there again!

Anyway, based on our analysis and on what we have available, we decided to add limestone, bone meal, and wood ash, plus of course plenty of compost to boost nitrogen and organic matter.

4.  Do the math!

Any fertilizer (organic or conventional) will have an “analysis” shown somewhere on the bag (these are the 3 numbers with dashes between them).  The numbers stand for the percentages of N-P-K (Nitrogen, Phosphorus, Potassium) contained in the fertilizer.  For example, our 10 lb bag of bone meal has an analysis of 4-12-0, which means that 4% of the 10 lbs or 0.4 lb of pure N, 12% of 10 lbs, or 1.2 lbs of pure Phosphorus, and 0% of 10 lbs, or 0 lbs of pure potassium are contained in the bag.

Since our soil test analysis recommends adding ¼ lb of phosphorus per 100 square feet, we need 0.25 lbs of pure phosphorus from our source – in this case the bone meal. We just calculated that in the full 10 lb bag we have 1.2 lbs of pure phosphorus, so simple division shows us that in each pound of bone meal we have 0.12 lbs of pure phosphorus. We then need to apply about two pounds of bone meal to get the recommended ¼ lb of pure phosphorus (0.25/0.12 = 2.0833333 lbs, but we're rounding for simplicity).

Since we don't have a scale set up in the hoophouse, we convert this weight to volume.  Rather than come up with a ratio of weight-to-volume, we just used our handy kitchen scale to weigh a clean yogurt-tub (quart) full of each amendment.  In the case of bone meal, the yogurt tub weighed 2 lbs -- so we need to apply 1 yogurt-tub-full of bone meal to each 100 square feet of garden area in the hoophouse!

We did similar math for our wood ash, although since it's in 5 lb buckets and obviously wasn't labeled with any analysis, we googled the analysis (0-1-4) and just weighed the yogurt-tub full to figure out how much we'd need to get our recommended application rate of 0.1 lbs of potassium per 100 square feet.

5.  Prepare your beds

Remove sod

Add compost

Dig the beds deeply

Soil amending should be the last thing you do right before you plant so your plants/seeds get the maximum benefit.  In our case, we had to remove sod, add piles of compost, dig that deep down into the beds, and then rake everything smooth (removing quite a lot of small rocks and breaking up chunks of clay in the process).  We treat compost as a necessity to be added every year, and then add other amendments near the surface as recommended on the soil test.

6.  Spread your amendments

When applying amendments, you want to sprinkle the recommended amount of fertilizer as evenly as possible over the full 100 square feet.  Then take a rake and lightly sift the amendments into the top 3 inches of the garden bed. 

7.  Plant your seeds!
Once your beds are prepped and ready, you're ready to plant!

Newly prepped and planted beds of root crops, onions, & spring greens

Then we just had to repeat the process on the other half of the hoophouse!

Newsflash: Woodstove yields “free" source of steam!

Our farmhouse came with an “extra" room that we've dubbed the Cozytorium.  We say extra because we already have a living room, dining room, and kitchen, so this room is basically a bonus on the main floor, with 3 doorways converging through it so we often use it as a cut-through from upstairs to downstairs.  The main feature of this room is the Hearthstone Woodstove, and we've spent practically every evening and snow-day all winter hanging out in this room.  We furnished it with some tacky but comfortable furnishings (aka a giant bean bag & papasan), and it's easy to get drawn into a book or movie or conversation or just staring at the fire.  Also this room has become the cats' bedroom since they wake up way earlier than we do so they're not allowed to sleep with us any more.  They're pretty thrilled that we got them such a luscious bean bag bed and papasan lounge which they somehow manage to occupy constantly -- not that we'd ever want to sit on our own furniture or anything!

So all winter, Chris has trudged through all kinds of weather to bring wood up to the porch to fire our woodstove.  Bea found him a $15 log-hauling cart at a thrift store that makes this job quite a bit easier, but still not EASY.  We store our wood under an overhanging roof alongside the store, a good 50' from the house.  In most weather, this is a handful of steps away but in a foot of snow and negative windchills (i.e., when the wood is most desperately needed), this is definitely a labor of love!

Neither of us has ever lived with a woodstove before now, and it's pretty fantastic.  We have an electric heat pump as well, but that costs a whole lot of money, so throughout the winter we have kept the woodstove running most days and almost every night to keep our house warm.  The heat pump kicks in as supplemental heat on really cold nights, but costs a whole lot less than if we had it running all the time.  The woodstove was especially necessary before we had one of the dampers on our heating system replaced because NO heat was reaching our dining room or Cozytorium through those ducts at all.

Quite a stash of wood (maybe half a cord) conveyed with the farmhouse, but still we had to order another cord in early February after such a cold start to 2014.  Both of us joined our firewood guy in throwing logs off his trailer, creating this enormous pile.  We then had only about 2 hours of daylight remaining to stack it all neatly before a huge rainstorm came through.  It was a mad dash but we got it all safely under the overhang, just-in-time!


Despite all the rain & snow we've had this winter, our house has stayed remarkably dry and has caused one of our cats to develop some respiratory challenges (i.e., he blows huge snot bubbles!).  Brother/-in-law Jonathan gave us a really cool cast-iron dragon humidifier to sit on the stove.  Sadly though, the soapstone stove top doesn't conduct heat well enough to make steam come out the dragon's nostrils.  In fact, the soapstone is so good an insulator that the water inside the dragon would barely evaporate at all, much less humidify our house.  However, it continues to look awesome and scare away any potential stove burglars.

The dragon also inspired Chris to conduct some ongoing experiments in homemade wood stove humidifiers.  At first, we had some paper towels draped over a hose reel/hang-all (although at the time we had no idea what it was -- just that Bea's grandma had given us 15 of them).  The towels dipped down into a cast iron pot full of water and would wick the water up where it would evaporate into the air.

Next came a series of fans hung zip tied to our vent cover in the hallway to help distribute the air (even shorty Bea had to duck to walk through that doorway).  First we had a box fan, then window fan, then a table-top fan hung upside-down; one was too loud, one was too big, one was not powerful enough...  This system worked okay, but like Goldilocks, Chris just wasn't satisfied with any of them!  The water from the iron pot evaporated too fast and needed to be refilled more often than he wanted to get up and carry a hot cast-iron pot into the kitchen.  So he added an upside-down wine bottle (filled with water) to the system, which needed a zip tie to hold it up off the bottom of the pot so water would trickle down to refill the pot as needed at the same rate as evaporation.  Eventually the paper towels tore to shreds (the cats may have had something to do with that!) and the wine bottle got off balance and smashed down to the floor one too many times for Bea's nerves, so Chris got to work creating a new system.

Using a cookie sheet as a base, Chris covered it with wet paper towels. The shovel from our fireplace set makes a temporary brace to turn a quart mason jar filled with water upside down for an exciting steamy hissing show as water escapes and hits the top of the stove while the jar is being slammed down onto the cookie sheet, aiming for as little water loss as possible.  Humidification is an exciting event in Fixettwell Farmhouse!  With this setup, the water absorbs down into the paper towels and the jar is far more stable than that precarious wine bottle.  This still needs to be refilled every couple of hours and isn't a perfect system (as noted by the slightly charred paper towels) but it works for now.

Chris vows to invent a better system before next winter sets in.  Designs & suggestions welcome!