This is my wheat right before I ground it in to flour yesterday

Sunday night for dinner we had potato pancakes and fruit salad. I grated a few big Yellow Finn Potatoes and added 4 eggs, salt and pepper. I scooped them out of the bowl into a hot frying pan and cooked them like pancakes. They were a little runny (you're supposed to use flour for thickening) but the held together pretty well and tasted great with apple butter and sour cream.

I also made a fruit salad with yogurt, a Comice pear, a few pluots, the rest of the figs, and a bit of honey. Even Johnny, who doesn't usually like fruit salad loved it.

Before bed I checked the yogurt and gave up completely on it ever being edible. Bummer. It was just totally curdled and gross. The sour cream looked good, and I left it in the cooler for the night.

Breakfast on Monday was the last of the yogurt with 2 pluots. Breakfast is harder now that there's no peaches! For lunch I heated up left over potatoes from Saturday night with tomato sauce and my cheese.

Directly after work I started working on the wheat again. I sat on the front porch for about 45 minutes picking the wheat from the chaff. I did the best job I could, but I still wasn't too happy with the results. Some of the wheat berries were just too stuck in their hulls. I finally decided to call it good enough to grind.

It took me a while to figure out the flour mill attachment for the Champion Juicer. This is what it looked like when I finally got it all assembled. It took forever to grind - about 1 cup every 5 minutes. I got about 8 cups total, so it was on for a while.

I was immediately disappointed with the flour. There was a lot of chaff still in it, and it didn't grind up! Little bits of inedible cellulose mixed in with the flour. I decided the only thing to get it out would be a flour sifter. We don't have one, so again the project was put on hold till the next day. I did sift about a half a cup with a sieve. It took a while, but it worked.







For dinner Johnny made hamburgers and I made fried green tomatoes. I had tomato and grilled onion on my burgers and wrapped them in lettuce leaves instead of buns. Definitely a low carb burger! I sliced the green tomatoes and dipped them in egg and then flour and fried them in butter. They had a wonderful tang - almost like catchup. How cool to finally eat a little of my flour!

After dinner I attempted yogurt again, with a store bought starter. I was totally demoralized when it curdled like the last batch. I was almost ready to just give up.

Breakfast today was a Comice pear, a pluot, honey and sour cream since I had no yogurt. It tasted delicious, although I couldn't really justify eating sour cream every morning for breakfast. Lunch was 2 left over fried green tomatoes, a fresh red tomato, basil, and the remainder of the cheese I made this weekend.

After work today I bought a flour sifter. I also bought a Crane melon from Willow Creek and a block of Mozzarella cheese from Ferndale - I didn't realize there was a local mozzarella! I also scored a large bag of super ripe heirloom tomatoes, an Italian Sweet Pepper, and 4 or 5 yellow Corno di Toro peppers.

I started the tomatoes cooking right when I got home. This is a picture of one of them - an Annanas Noir. I sauteed a Walla-Walla onion, the Italian Sweet pepper, two of the Corno di Toros, basil and a head of garlic and added half to the sauce. The other half I set aside while I was cooking the rest of the ground beef. I added the veggies back in with the beef and then the remainder of the left over tomato sauce from three nights ago. I layered this thick tomato meat sauce with sliced potatoes and mozzarella cheese and baked it for about an hour. Most of the tomatoes I got today were still simmering on the stove. I think I'll let them cook overnight into a super thick sauce.

While it was baking I sifted my flour. It worked like a charm! I got about 7 1/2 cups when all was said and done. It's nice looking flour! Now I just have to figure out what to use it for - there's not too much, so I don't want to waste it!

I still had time while dinner was baking, so I started my final yogurt attempt. I decided that my problem was that I didn't let it cool down enough before I added the starter culture. I heated it up and then forgot about it while we ate dinner. After dinner I deemed it cool enough and added the culture. It worked I think! At least it didn't curdle. I put it in jars in the cooler to let me culture over night.

That's it. I am finding myself looking forward to the end of the month. This is so much work! I haven't had any time to sit down today until right now - boy will it be nice to just come home from work and go out to eat if I'm tired!