lavender – Eat – Drink

When I called the butcher to discuss what cuts of meat I wanted from my lamb, I asked for everything but the head.* I specified all bones and fat trimmings. Imagine my delight when I picked up my bounty, neatly labeled and vacuum sealed, save for the untied 20 gallon trash bag of frozen trimmings–the bag that occupied the bottom drawer of my stand up freezer for 4 years, with the odd bone pulled our here and there to make stock.

Between working the farmers market stall next to Marjie, the soap making class I took with the MI Folk School, and the power of the internet, I was sure I could make my own soap. While this meant rendering the tallow, I had participated hands on, once, and people have been making soap for thousands of years! And I had a recipe!

Y’all. I lost the recipe. I had it squirreled away somewhere, but four years is a long time for me to keep track of two pieces of paper. In retrospect, the class didn’t use tallow in it’s recipe and I would have had to change it anyway. It is unlikely I would have recognized this though and probably would have used the recipe as written. Instead, using a lye calculator and betting on average, I was ready to begin. I melted the tallow on the stove, got it too hot and had to wait an hour for it to cool enough, then I was ready. Caustic chemicals are super scary, so I fully dressed for the occasion.

This experiment was the perfect use for these massive stainless steel bowls I bought through an online auction of a defunct secondhand commercial kitchen mart.

Stir, stir, stir… the first warning that something was wrong with my calculations was that the soap took three times as long to get to the “trace” stage than it was supposed to.

But it did. I was dancing around my backyard, literally jumping with joy. At this stage, I added lavender essential oil I bought from a company in Kalamazoo. Everything local! Using an old Tupperware that I generally use to mix potting soil in for a mold, the soap was covered, swaddled with a towel and let to rest over night. The directions I settled on said to unmold and cut after 24 hours and place on a wooden rack to cool. I choose the closest thing I had.

The second time I knew I had done something wrong was when I attempted to unmold and cut the soap. I chose not to “superfat” the soap and maybe this was my mistake. I imagined something much more pliable than my result, like a hard fudge. What I got instead was more like fudge that you forgot about and let sit out on the counter for a few weeks.

Here we are. The rack of soap is currently curing in a closet. In about three weeks I will report back on the efficacy. It’s so crumbly, I may end up using the majority for laundry soap. For now, at least, it is acting like a lovely air freshener for the first story of the house.

If you’ve any experience with soap making (or not) and have any troubleshooting tips to offer up, I’d be much obliged. I used roughly 1/3 of the tallow I rendered to leave room for improvement.

*It should be noted the butcher I chose took this to heart. I was concerned when I saw something black in the bag of trimmings. Had my freezer gone out and some point and it molded? Nope. Feet. Black, fuzzy feet.

This was another long-awaited cooking bucket list item. I’ve wanted to make lavender caramels since 2012. I have a huge bag of dried lavender that I bought off eBay (of all places) to make peach lavender jam last year. The jam has become an annual canning staple, but that is a post for warmer days.

I anticipated a few hours from start to finish, but my expectations were far exceeded. From gathering ingredients to what you see above took over four (active) hours–this is not including the hour I let the caramel cool in the fridge. While the escapade was an eventual success, it is one I will be unlikely to repeat.

I followed this recipe, as suggested in the original article. It does not specify the type of milk, but we are making candy so I assumed whole would be the choice. We only have 2% in the house, but I bulked up the fat content by replacing some of the called for “milk” with extra heavy cream.

I used twice the lavender because I have so much and I did not want to risk losing the flavor due to the age of the dried lavender. I ended up swapping some of the honey for sugar; not by choice, I did not have enough on hand. Were I to ever choose to make caramels again, I would use even less. The final product tastes more like honey caramels than lavender caramels. Not terrible, but defeating in the face of the effort.

As this was my first foray into candy making with my fancy new thermometer, I was fascinated by the process and transformation of the ingredients.

At the onset, the honey is the predominant colorant. I had more lavender milk than I was supposed to begin with, so I spoiled myself with a mini honey-lavender cafe au lait.

Watch what happens as we turn up the heat!

(not really, the caramel is cooked over a relatively low heat for an excruciatingly long time)

While this was the longest part of the process, it was the easiest.

The process above took the most effort. The caramel was completely adhered to the paper and each piece had to been individually pared or peeled. Wrapping was a misery due to the excessive fat content–these adorable cubes were greasy. Very greasy.

But they taste good! And I’ve wanted to make them for eight years. This also afforded me the opportunity to shower my friends with gifts. I danced around the kitchen warbling, “Share what you’ve got!” which has become my new summer anthem.

Four care packages were delivered with various salad greens, herbs (chives, chinese flowering leeks, mint, thyme, parsley, catnip), a bottle of strawberry booch, caramels, and two adopted SCOBYs.