Integrated Vertical Tube System

Heres a drawing and a photo of the integrated vertical tube aquaponics system we built. The photo shows the tubes in the planting/harvesting position; normally they are rotated 180 degrees so that the openings face the window.

Aquaponics Vertical grow

Aquaponics, ækw??p?n?ks, pisciponics

To make the grow tubes, I cut slots across with a hack saw and then heated the plastic with a heat gun to soften it. Once it was soft I pushed in a tapered wooden plug to hold it open until the plastic hardened again. I did this outside because the PVC gives off some fumes when you heat it. The second photo below shows a close up of one of the openings after the tube was filled with pea gravel.

Aquaponics Vertical grow

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So Many Restaurants Albuquerque Edition

Every Friday, The Albuquerque Journals arts and entertainment section publishes two restaurant reviews: one in Albuquerque and another in Santa Fe. The reviews reflect the wide variety of cuisines available in the Duke City and in the City Different. Many of these restaurants along with a couple of food-service companies (32 in Albuquerque and 29 in Santa Fe) are giving back to the community by participating in the annual Souper Bowl event that helps raise funds for the Food Depot and Roadrunner Food Bank. Both events will take place on Saturday, January 30, a week before the National Football Leagues Super Bowl 50. Read about hunger in Northern New Mexico and around the state.  Hunger is more than just statistics. Here are some people stories from Roadrunner Food Bank.

This post features the Roadrunner Food Bank fundraiser, which will take place at the food banks facility, 5840 Office Blvd NE (map), 11:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m.

How many of these restaurants below have you patronized? Raise your hands if you have dined at all 32 of these fine establishments? How about half of them? One quarter? Never mind. You have a chance to sample the fare of any or all of these restaurants on the last Saturday of January.  Scroll down for more details....

Yes, its RoadRunner Food Banks 2016 Souper Bowl.The annual event helps raise funds for our local food bank, which covers a large area of central and southern New Mexico.

If youve been to the event before, you know the drill.  Here is the information on how to get tickets.  Bon Appetit!

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Chicken Flavored Biochar

On Thursday we wrote about our brand-spankin new pocket rocket stove and how excited we were that it was working.  This weekend we put it to the test with a task wed been saving for a long time: turning the leftovers from chicken butchering (or more precisely, from chicken roasting and shredding so theyd all fit in our freezer) into calcium- and phosphorus-rich biochar.

Todays objective: get rid of this without throwing it in the trash or stinking up the neighborhood.  Katie says, "Youve been saving that since November?!  Eww!"  The smell is...less offensive than expected.  Theres also some bonus biomass to process, and fun colors, too!

Step 1: Get a roaring fire going in the pocket rocket on top of a good bed of coals.  Notice we added the concrete blocks around the sides for extra stability this time.

One foolproof way to see if the stove is drafting correctly is the old marshmallow test.  If you can roast a marshmallow above the chimney, its drafting correctly.  We recommend this test be performed during every burn.

Step 2: When the fire is burning really hot, add a little bit of the chicken waste.  Its hard to set a hard ratio of wood-to-chicken, but if you try it, youll get the hang of it pretty quickly.

Theres something oddly poetic and at the same time Terminator-esque about pyrolyzing chicken bones.

When things are burning well, theres no smoke.

If the fire gets too cold, say, from adding too much wet chicken material, the smoke is kind of white, but not really acrid like one might expect.  We found that adding a handful of loose, very dry leaves usually fixed this situation since the leaves would ignite and burn hot for a few seconds, which was enough to get the wood back on track.   Hopefully no one thinks theres a new pope--we kind of like this Francis guy.

After about five hours, the bucket was full enough of char and ashes that it became difficult to scrape the coals away from the chimney opening to keep it drafting properly.  We let it burn for a little while without adding any fuel, which allowed the chimney to cool down enough that we could pick it up with insulated leather gloves.  The top of the bucket came right with it.

Then we dumped the hot biochar into another steel bucket.  You can tell this ones different because it still has paint.  Then we started over with re-lighting the stove.  Probably we could have also scooped some of the hot coals from this bucket back into the first one to light the next fire and saved a few minutes.

And there you have it: chicken-flavored biochar.  You may use that as the name of your garage band, if you like.  After about 10 hours, we had all of the chicken waste taken care of, and got a little less than one five-gallon bucket worth of char and ashes.  That works out to about one chicken per hour at this scale. Also, a word of caution: even 24 hours later, combining the ashes into one bucket, they were still hot and had some glowing embers.  Dont store them too close to combustibles!

Some of the bones are just charred, others have had all the carbon burned out of them, leaving a fragile ash matrix.  Both will be very good for the garden.  None of the nearby houses started on fire, and none of the neighbors came over to complain (which would have certainly followed had we failed on the first goal), which means we went two-for-two on the day.  Success!

Have you made biochar before?  Whats your setup?  What do you do with chicken leftovers?  Let us know in the comments section below!

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Katie Made Hummus! And its pretty good!

Guess what!  Katies learning to be a magician.  Her first trick involved dried chickpeas!  Now we have a tasty dip for all our veggies!  Check it out:

She started with some regular ol dried chickpeas.

Then soaked them overnight in the crockpot. The next day, she turned the crockpot on and cooked them for another 12 hours or so until they looked like this.  She saved some of the liquid to alter the consistency of the hummus if necessary.

Then she added about two cups to the food processor thing, along with three cloves of garlic.  One clove she crunched in the garlic press, then she realized that it was going to get chopped up in the food processor anyway, so using a hard-to-clean tool was silly.

Then she chopped up everything in the food processor until it looked like this, adding a couple tablespoons of chickpea water to get the consistency she wanted.

Then she added the rest of the ingredients: salt (~1 teaspoon), pepper (~0.5 teaspoon), hot sauce (4 squirts), and olive oil (3-4 tablespoons).  Not pictured: lemon juice (2-3 tablespoons).  Go easy on the lemon juice at first, because it can easily overpower everything and make the hummus not taste right.

Then she added about a third of a cup of sunflower flour.  Last time she ground up the sunflower seeds with a mortar and pestle.  This time she used a coffee grinder.  Most recipes call for tahini (sesame seed paste) since the hummus is actually short for hummus bi tahina, or chickpeas with tahini in Arabic.  We had sunflower seeds and not sesame seeds, so consider this hummus bi abed-i-shems.

Taste testing is an integral part of this process.  First she tasted the isolated hummus using a model vegetable.

Then she tested with a real vegetable.  It passed both tests.

Then she put it in a jar and set it in the fridge.  Shes not sure how long it keeps because weve always outcompeted the bacteria for it!

The Recipe:
2 cups cooked chickpeas
3 cloves garlic
0.5 teaspoon pepper
1 teaspoon salt
4 squirts hot sauce
2-3 tablespoons lemon juice
3-4 tablespoons olive oil
1/3 cup ground sunflower meats
1 finger for testing
1 vegetable stick for testing

Soak overnight, then cook chickpeas, reserving water.  In food processor, puree chickpeas and garlic, then blend in remaining ingredients except finger and vegetable stick.  Use finger to test flavor and consistency, adjust as necessary by adding water or more chickpeas.  When hummus passes finger test, use vegetable stick for further testing.  When flavor is satisfactory on both accounts, transfer hummus to canning jar and store in fridge.


Do you make your own hummus?  Whats your recipe?  Let us know in the comments section below!

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Aquaculture sees surge in worldwide production

A new report by an international team of researchers, published September 07 in the online edition of The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), states that Aquaculture now accounts for 50 percent of the fish consumed globally.

Once considered to be a fledgling industry not so long ago, "Aquaculture is set to reach a landmark in 2009, supplying half of the total fish and shellfish for human consumption," the authors wrote.

Way back when, 20 or so years ago, I entered the field of aquaculture after witnessing first hand the ever increasing year to year decline in the traditional fishing industry. Back then we all felt to be on the verge of something new and big, today we can look back and see just how far the industry has come. The growth has been tremendous but it has certainly not been without challenges.

The report states that between 1995 and 2007, global production of farmed fish nearly tripled in volume, in part because of rising consumer demand for long-chain omega-3 fatty acids. Oily fish, such as salmon, are a major source of these omega-3s, which are effective in reducing the risk of cardiovascular disease, according to the National Institutes of Health.

This growth has placed ever increasing pressure on marine resources due to the need for large amounts of feed made from wild fish harvested from the sea. "The huge expansion is being driven by demand," said lead author Rosamond L. Naylor, a professor of environmental Earth system science at Stanford University and director of the Stanford Program on Food Security and the Environment. "As long as we are a health-conscious population trying to get our most healthy oils from fish, we are going to be demanding more of aquaculture and putting a lot of pressure on marine fisheries to meet that need." Sourcing sustainable feed ingredients is one of the largest challenges faced by the industry today.

One way to make salmon farming more environmentally sustainable is to simply lower the amount of fish oil in the salmons diet. According to the authors, a mere 4 percent reduction in fish oil would significantly reduce the amount of wild fish needed to produce 1 pound of salmon from 5 pounds to just 3.9 pounds. In contrast, reducing fishmeal use by 4 percent would have very little environmental impact, they said.

"Reducing the amount of fish oil in the salmons diet definitely gets you a lot more bang for the buck than reducing the amount of fishmeal," Naylor said. "Our thirst for long-chain omega-3 oils will continue to put a lot of strain on marine ecosystems, unless we develop commercially viable alternatives soon."

Naylor and her co-authors pointed to several fish-feed substitutes currently being investigated, including protein made from grain and livestock byproducts, and long-chain omega-3 oils extracted from single-cell microorganisms and genetically modified land plants. "With appropriate economic and regulatory incentives, the transition toward alternative feedstuffs could accelerate, paving the way for a consensus that aquaculture is aiding the ocean, not depleting it," the authors wrote.

Link to Full Story

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Merry Christmas from THL!

Wishing you and yours a warm, cozy holiday season!

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More Fun With Crab Apples 3 The Juice

We continue our crab apple-themed posts (the original, part 1, and part 2 here) with some ideas for what to do with the juice part--the water the crab apples were boiled in, after straining out the apple solids.  Lets get to it!

Idea #1: Liquid pectin.  Its just the aforementioned liquid fraction. Boiling solublizes the pectin, so its essentially a hot water extraction of the crab apples.  Pretty easy!  Check if its strong enough by adding one teaspoon liquid pectin to one tablespoon high-proof alcohol (91% rubbing alcohol (isopropanol) or 95% ethanol), and waiting a minute.  If the gelatinous mass can be picked up with a fork (example in fourth photo here), its strong enough.  If not, boil the liquid pectin down some more and try again.  To use in jam, take one cup liquid pectin per four cups fruit pulp and five cups sugar.  Mix pectin and fruit pulp, bring to a boil, mix in sugar, return to full rolling boil.  Boil one minute, pour into hot, clean jars, and process in a hot water bath or pressure canner, or by whatever method you prefer.

Idea #2: Crab apple-ade.  We take the liquid, dilute it by half with water, and add a teaspoon of sugar per cup to sweeten it.  Sweet-tart and refreshing!

Idea #3: Crab apple wine.  There are a few recipes here and here, but were usually a little more cavalier about the process.  Well post more details on our home wine-making adventures in the future, but our general process is this: Measure the specific gravity of the juice (left), add enough sugar so that the yeast will make enough ethanol to kill themselves...

...add the yeast to a half cup of the sweetened juice and let it sit for a few minutes to proof...

...then put everything in a stainless steel pot with a bungee cord-secured towel to keep out fruit flies. (Or primary fermentation vessel if you want to sound legit.)  It stays here for about a week, then gets transferred to a carboy (or jug) with an airlock and left for several months while the yeast finish their magic.  When fermentation stops and the specific gravity shows sufficient alcohol to kill the yeast, we check the flavor and bottle it up! (Again, more details in a future post.)

Idea #4: Powdered pectin.  Remember the test to see if the liquid pectin solution is strong enough? Commercial powdered pectin is made by a similar process.  We tried to recreate that process on a kitchen scale.  We took one cup of the liquid pectin plus a half cup of 190 proof ethanol.  That precipitates a lot of the pectin as a gel...

...that can be filtered out of the liquid.  Dont throw away that liquid!  That would make for some very expensive pectin!  Instead, mix it with some Celestial Seasonings tea, and youll have a Colorado Iced Tea.  Whats up now, Long Island? (Note: the liquid has a very high alcohol content, so you dont need much to make a very potent drink.)

The filtered pectin gel can be collected...

...dried like fruit leather...

...baked at 150 °F until crispy, frozen, and ground with a mortar and pestle into a powdered pectin product. (In retrospect, it might be possible to skip the food dehydrator and freezing steps.) Our pectin is darker than the store-bought powdered stuff probably because we didnt do any of the washing steps that the commercial producers do before they dry and grind. This was a lot of work for a little pile of powder, but we were able to make it using only things we already had on hand.  It would also store longer and in less space than the liquid stuff, if we didnt have to use this whole batch right away to answer the critical question: does it work for jam?

 

We took some raspberries out of the freezer and made a mini-batch. (The sure-jell recipe called for one packet of pectin powder (about 0.25 cup) for 5 cups fruit and 7 cups sugar.  We ended up with about two teaspoons of our powder, so we cut the recipe to 1/6 scale.)  We also ran a control (without pectin; jar and toast on left in photo) to see if the jam would set on its own just from the sugar.  While both batches set, the one containing pectin is noticeably firmer (but still spreads easily). So, our powdered pectin made a difference! Yay!

Idea #5 (bonus!): Crab apple molasses.  In our first attempt to make powdered pectin, we tried just drying down the liquid pectin to a solid.  But instead of a light-colored substance to grind, we ended up with this dark-colored, gummy stuff.  So we tasted it.  Its good!  A lot like molasses, but with an apple flavor.  Time to make some crab apple molasses cookies!

We took our favorite molasses cookie recipe (thanks, Grandma!) and swapped regular molasses for crab apple molasses straight up. A couple things we found out: our crab apple molasses is a lot harder than regular molasses, and doesnt mix with the cookie dough very well.  We heated it up, and that helped some, but there were still chunks.  Thats why it looks like we made craisin cookies in the photo.  In fact, Katie thought they were craisins at first! The chunks are chewy and sweet-tart, so it really is hard to tell a difference.  So far, 100% of household correspondents have concluded that the cookies are tasty.

What do you do with your crab apples?  Let us know in the comments section below!

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