6-27-11 Salsa

Today, in the kitchen we had to built shelves for the freezer to make room for storage. Then later today we  made a tomato salsa. Everyone helped to cut the tomatoes, onions, and the hot jalapanoes. When we cut the onions today, a few of us started to cry from them. We tried wearing sunglasses to protect my eyes, but it really didn't help. Making salsa is a lot of work, especially coring tomatoes. That took forever!We chopped 200 pounds of tomatoes and 20 pounds of onions. Still it was fun cutting veggies and we had a productive day.

Today was a easy but nice working day. We talked about what we were going to sell at the farmer market,what was in season for taste testing and we also did pickling today which went extremely better then yesterdays pickling. When we were talking about the farmers market we have great things in mind.Besides the pickling and brainstorming for the day we also worked on entrepreneurship and demand. When we were talking about demand we learned many different meanings to the word and how the increase in price the more product you can get and the decrease in the income means less product. So today was a pretty nice and simple day.

Freezer and Pickle Day

Today was a very cold day. We cleaned the freezer and had to re orgznize it by taking out food and making sure the same items were in the same place together. We ended up having more inventory then we thought and after awhile it began to get confusing .This afternoon we made pickles out of pickeling cucumbers .We cut them into spears, chopped fresh garlic and gathered together pickle spice,dill and salt seasonings and also water and vinegar so that the pickles can soak and become Dill pickles. The last and final thing that we had to do was clean and sanitize the kitchen.

Chickens, Entrepreneurship,& Processing Oh My!

Today we broke down chickens again, it was a lot easier than yesterday because they weren't frozen. We also talked about Entrepreneurship and different ideas and innovations. We were separated into groups of two and we had to brainstorm about new ideas and opportunities such as, a training camp to help prevent obesity for kids around the world. YMCA's could have free summer camps that could get kids involved in sports and eating healthy foods. There was a question that asked us what could be some good uses for an empty plastic detergent bottle. We came up with; a piggy bank, a water cooler, weights, and a gas container. We went back to the kitchen to strain our chicken broth that has been  simmering for two days. This will be used for a pan sauce for the chicken which we will saute on Thursday. Another thing we did was blanch and shock zucchini and squash after we chopped them up. We completed the process by packaging, labeling, and freezing them for later use.

Chicken Breakdown/Berry Picking

Yesterday we broke down chickens,for some of us it was the first time. We made chicken stock and learned about mire-poix. We also learned how to saute chicken. We practiced knife cuts on potatoes and then mashed them.





Today we visited Kurt Jane at their farm Braeutigam's Orchard. We learned about growing blue berries and got the chance to pick a pint of blue berries. They also let us feed their goats and cows.