Last night, Kyle and I got lazy and decided to just do sandwiches for dinner.  With the sweltering heat and humidity lately neither of us has had any inspiration to cook much.  We had thawed out one of our broilers so Kyle pulled it out to cut off the meat.  We were left with a couple, medium-sized chicken breasts that he graced with some salt and peppers and threw on the grill.  The rest of the chicken was cut up into chunks and placed into the crock pot with a couple cups of water to simmer on low for the evening.  There was no way I was going to get water boiling on the stove in almost 100 degree weather.  We'd use this for chicken tacos later this week, perhaps tonight, with some black beans and salsa.

Our dinner consisted of some homegrown chicken breast between a few slices of homemade bread (honey and butter bread, courtesy of my dear Mother) and some lettuce that we happily plucked from the garden.  The only thing not homemade was the stone ground mustard that I slathered on one of my slices of bread.  It was the most satisfying dinners we've had in a while.  We sat in our living room, in the relative coolness of our house, and enjoyed our sandwiches with a glass of sun tea.  After having such a hectic weekend and week it was a welcomed respite and I daydreamed about a homegrown BLT.  Soon my friends, soon.

Sorry I've been a little sporatic in my blog posts lately, things have just been super hectic at home the past few weeks and my laptop has officially kicked the bucket.  Kyle and I had to finish up our guest room (YES, it really is finished!!) before my father and step-mom came up for the holiday weekend.  We also had to clean up the house (which ended up taking way more time than I really thought it would) and semi-finish the upstairs bathroom.  On top of all this we, of course, have been working on barn stuff.  Kyle made me a milking stand a week ago which I took out for a test run with Chutney a couple days. 

I was planning on starting the bottle-feeding this past weekend, my hope had been that I'd milk a little bit every day up until then just for us to get the hang of it before we really got serious.  But unfortunately, I haven't been feeling well and trudging out to the barn twice a day to fight with a goat and her teats wasn't high on my priority list.  So I'm hoping to give it another go soon because the kids are getting pretty skittish.

Our pigs are growing fast.  Bricktop is definitely still the biggest out of the four boys but the other three really aren't that far behind.  Kyle and I are pretty sure we'll be able to have them all processed before fall, which would be great.  They haven't eaten any other chickens, as far as I have been able to tell, and I hope that our barracade that we created around the dividing gate will continue to be successful.

Speaking of chickens, our second experience of the Cornish crosses is nearing its end.  Our fifty (or so) meat birds are amazing.  Last year when we raised these birds it was too late to put them outside because the weather had turned too cold.  This year they've had free range of the pasture and all the tall grasses.  We started only feeding them for a short time in the morning, forcing them to forage for the rest of the day.  I am always amazed about how healthy they seem compared to our first batch.  These birds are active.  The most common thing you hear about this kind of bird is that they have heart and leg problems, they really can only walk from the feed dish to the water dish, and the rest of the time they have to sit down because of their massive weight.  We experienced exactly this last year and it caused us to think we'd never raise these birds again.  But what a difference a diet can make.  I'll be posting some pictures when I get a chance.

I really do have a bunch to catch you up on- I really would love to show you some before and afters of our guest room and bathroom.  Oh, and we started our garden a few weeks ago, still have a lot to plant, but we've got a beginning at least.  May is due in a few weeks, she started making her udder a week ago.  So much has been going on I can barely remember it all!  Please bear with me, friends, life has really been getting in the way of my blogging but I hope to make a full comeback soon.

Thanks for stopping by!!
Melissa

I had read, before we ever got our pigs, that they could be a problem with our chicken population.  When our four boys arrived we noticed a bit of interest and a couple idle bites in a chicken's direction here and there.  But the laying hens are fast, so the pigs never got more than a couple feathers out of the encounter.  We decided that between the damage they were doing to the floor in the barn, the potential snacking that would be at the chickens' expense, and the lovely smell, it would just be best to keep them in their own shed, in a seperate fenced-in pasture.  This didn't solve all our problems, unfortunately.

First off, I have to say that the damage to the barn has halted completely, minus the one time they got out into the other pasture, went into the barn, and ate all the grain we had.  Second, the smell is nowhere near as bad.  They keep their shed very clean and, thanks to the amount of space they have to move around in, only on occasion do I get an offensive odor wafted in my direction when out by their pasture.

The only thing we haven't been able to halt is the snacking.  Yes, the snacking at our chickens' expense.  There is one spot under a gate where the chickens can squeeze under and if they aren't smart enough to figure out how to get back they are, eventually, picked off.  So far not a single laying hen has been the victim, I'm not sure they could even fit under the gate, it has always been one of our almost two month old chickens.

Two or three times we have come home to find a carpet of feathers in the pigs' pasture.  They were like crop circles, once one showed up out of the blue another one did, then another one.  Then last night our neighbor's daughter stopped by to bring us some food scraps (for the pigs of course) and a few muffins (for us, yippy!) and as we were admiring the new baby goats she asked me if the pigs had a toy.  I wasn't really sure what she meant but as we neared the gate I saw the tell-tale feathers next to their water trough.

It was a horrifying sight.  Two of them had legs hanging out the sides of their mouths as they gnawed through the bones.  The other two had something as well, I tried not to look long enough to identify the body part.  I apologized to the neighbor who was probably sorry that she stopped by on her way back home, although she seemed relatively unphased.

That night Kyle and I discussed the impending downsizing of our pig herd.  We are looking forward to sending Bricktop off to our local animal processer more and more as the days wear on.  He is large enough and he gets the majority of the food.  Hopefully once he is gone we'll be able to focus on the other three, so they will grow faster.  Honestly, this is a great experience but I'm just not sure we want to get pigs again.  There are plenty of people who raise pigs, and I'd rather buy pork from a local co-op than deal with these guys again.  Chickens are so much quieter, they don't eat as much, they don't tear up your land, and they taste delicious.  I love chicken.  But then I think of bacon...oh bacon...

Well, I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

Ok, time for part two of my Sunday Kitchen-Extravaganza!

I don't know about you, but Kyle and I really enjoy a good, wrapped sandwich.  Whether it be a burrito, curried fish and rice, or even some quesadillas, we really enjoy using wraps.  Ok, I know that traditionally with Mexican food we should be using corn tortillas, but I really like whole wheat, so thats what we use.  Anyways, so as I mentioned yesterday, these wraps are one of the two last bread products we still buy.  But as of yesterday we've stricken it from the grocery list.

Just a quick note that on Sunday I made wraps using KAF Unbleached All Purpose White flour, not whole wheat, just because that was the recipe I came across in my King Arthur Flour Bakers Companion book that I recently bought.  I'm going to try it out with some whole wheat flour next time, I'll let you know how it goes.

Ok, so here we go.  Start off with 1.25 cups of water on the stove and get it boiling.  Once its bubbling away pour it into two cups of your flour.  Mix it all together pretty well with a spoon and then set it aside, covered, for about half an hour (until it cools).

While that's sitting get the rest of your ingredients mixed together:
1 cup of flour
1/4 cup potato flour (or 1/2 cup potato flakes- which I happened to have in the back of the cupboard)
1 1/4 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons oil (the recipe called for veggie oil, we only have EV olive oil at our house...tasted fine to me)

In a small bowl I mixed together 1 teaspoon of active dry yeast with about a quarter cup of warm water.  I let it sit for the thirty minutes while the water/flour mixture cooled.  The recipe actually called for instant yeast, in which case you can just mix it in with the potato flour, salt, etc, but I don't have instant yeast at the house so we use what we've got, right?

Ok, moving on.

Once the flour/water mixture is cool, add the rest of the ingredients to it, stirring it as well as you can, but trust me, you'll have to get in there with your hands to really get it all incorporated.  It'll seem a little hopeless at first, but you'll get there.  After kneading it for a few minutes, form it into a ball, cover it lightly and let it rise in a greased bowl for an hour.  Oh, and I guess its important to use as little flour as possible while kneading, KAF actually recommends using a little bit of oil to keep it from sticking to everything as opposed to flour.  But I didn't read that far ahead so I used flour (not alot, I'm a frugal lady), and trust me, they turned out just fine.

After the initial rising has finished, break the dough up into smaller pieces (I made them a little bigger than a golf ball, which yielded 12 smaller portions), and then let these rest, covered, for another 15-30 minutes.  This is when things start to get a little hectic.

Its hectic because these suckers only take 1-2 minutes per side to fry (over medium/medium-high heat), and this just happens to be the exact about of time it takes for me to roll them out.  I rolled them out to be pretty big, and really thin (we're talking about 9" in diameter and about 1/16" to 1/8" thick).  Once it is all rolled out, carefully pick it up by the edges and lay it down in a dry frying pan (no oil, no butter, nothing). 

Frying them is interesting in that huge bubbles form causing the wrap to balloon-up while you're trying to cook it.  Personally, I popped the bigger bubbles with the tine of a fork to try to get them to cook more evenly (if you go this route BE CAREFUL, hot steam escapes which continually singed my fingers if I wasn't careful).

After each one was done cooking I placed it on a wire rack, stacking them all up to keep them soft until they were all done.  I let them sit for an hour or two until I was ready to finish my day up by making some chicken/bean burritos.  Kyle and I each had two burritos (after baking all day I realized I hadn't had any lunch!) and decided that these home-made wraps were awesome!  After dinner we were left with eight wraps that I bagged and put in the fridge to eat for lunch the next couple of days.

And looky here: I found an online recipe at the King Arthur Flour website for this, so you can print out the recipe and try it yourself!  Let me know how it goes!

Sunday was an incredibly busy day for me.  Kyle was working one more day for his old boss to pay off his new cross-country ski boots (only had to work two days for some wicked nice boots) so I had some time to kill.  He didn't have to be at work until 10:00, so in the morning, we worked together on the new kitchen pantry that Kyle's been working on for the past week.  We're so close to being done, really only need the doors to be made and hung, but our quirky, old house is definitely making things difficult with the slightly slanted ceiling and floors.  Oh well, we're quirky, too, so it all works out.
After Kyle headed out I made myself a quick "to do" list (these things are the only way I can find to keep myself on track) and set a few old movies to play on my laptop while I worked away in the kitchen.

To Do:
Make Quiches
Make Bread Dough
Make Pasta?
Make Flour Tortillas (aka, wraps)
Do Dishes
Strip meat off chicken for dinner (we had roasted a week ago, then I made stock a few nights ago)

After a couple weeks of not selling eggs and not seeing any family/friends (therefore not giving away any eggs either) we found our fridge loaded down with too many full egg cartons.  So my first order of business for the day was to make a few quiches for the freezer.  To start things off, I made a double-batch of pie crust:

2.5 cups flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
2/3 cup shortening
enough cold water to just bring it all together with some work

You know the drill: cut in the shortening until you have little pea-sized pieces then carefully add water to bring it all together. 

I split the chunk of dough in half, rolled each piece out to about 1/8" thick, pressed them into a couple glass pie plates, and threw them in a 450 degree oven (covered in foil) for 8 minutes, then for another 5 minutes uncovered.

While the pie crust cooled I whipped up 16 eggs with about 2 cups of milk.  Then set 2 cups of chopped mushrooms, a tablespoon of butter, salt and pepper, and a teaspoon or so of dried thyme in a pan to saute.  When that was set I poured it into one crust, topped it with a couple handfuls of shredded mozzarella cheese, and covered the whole thing with about half of the egg mixture.

In the second crust I had about two cups of chopped spinach, and some quartered, canned artichokes that I had on hand.  After adding a handful or so of shredded mozzarella cheese and the rest of the egg mixture I tossed them both in the oven (at 325 degrees) for about an hour (just until a knife inserted in the center comes out clean).

These little beauties came out looking delicious, smelling amazing, and I set them on some wire racks to cool completely (after all, these were for later, last-minute meals, not for a day I had all the time in the world).  Once they cooled, I covered them in two layers of tin foil, then wrapped with plastic wrap before throwing them in the freezer (marked with the date and description of the quiche) with the last of our chickens and apple cider.

After quickly scrubbing all my used bowls, utensils, etc, I threw all the ingredients for my bread dough in the mixer and got it kneading away while I got to work on the rest of my list.

By the end of the day my 'to do' list looked like this:


Make Quiches
Make Bread Dough
Make Pasta
Make Flour Tortillas
Do Dishes
Strip meat off chicken for dinner

On top of that I made two apple turnovers for dessert with the leftover pie crust (there's ALWAYS a little leftover when I roll out my crusts) using just a diced up apple, a tiny bit of honey, and a splash of vanilla extract.  I was pretty happy with myself.  Though, I was a little bummed I didn't get to try making pasta, but seeing as I'd never made wraps before I was pretty psyched to have been able to try something new that day.  Wraps and english muffins are the only two bread products we buy anymore.  One down, one more to go.

Tomorrow I'll post how I made the tortillas- because they turned out AMAZING and weren't all that difficult.  I'm hoping to make another batch or two soon so we can have some stored in the freezer.  Have I mentioned how much I love our chest freezer?  Well, I do.

Last night I got home from work and fully intended on laying on the couch for the rest of the evening.  My cold has finally taken over and I've been dragging a bit the past couple days.  But I had delusions of grandeur that I would make some bread to go with some soup for dinner, so I quickly whipped up the dough and set it in the living room to rise (its much warmer in the living room compared to our poorly-insulated kitchen).  As I was finishing up I noticed Kyle moving the brew pail that has been hanging on to almost six gallons of cider into the kitchen.

We'd been concerned about our first attempt at brewing hard cider.  There was spotty action in the airlock, where with beer we're used to a decent amount of bubbling, we saw hardly any with the cider since we started it back in the beginning of December.  Apparently Kyle was sick of waiting so we pulled out the hydrometer and set it in the cider.  When we measured it at the start we had a potential alcohol content of 13%, by the time the hydrometer sinks all the way to 0-1 the cider is done converting the sugars into alcohol.  Last night we watched as it bobbed a few times before settling in, and sure enough it was telling us that it was done.  I couldn't believe it.

We syphoned off the cider into a glass carboy, where it will continue to clear and become (hopefully) even more delicious.  We did take a quick taste of what we had so far and it wouldn't win any awards but it wasn't vinegar so I was pretty happy.  The stuff we let ferment in a wine bottle (letting it do its thing with its own, wild yeast) was actually even tastier I thought, a little less dry, but it might not be finished converting the sugars yet- we couldn't put the hydrometer in the wine bottle for fear of never getting it back out.

After a thorough cleaning we moved the next batch into the 'ale pail' to get it going.  Kyle is thinking of adding some sugar to this batch, so we'll see what we'll end up with after that.

I didn't manage to make any bread, instead I just let it rise before sticking the dough in the fridge for later.  I did, however, manage to make a soup for dinner while Kyle was dealing with our brewing projects.  Pork meatballs with onions, potatos, celery, and carrots in some rich, chicken stock.  I thought it sounded like good 'feel better' soup.  I guess thats what we super-homesteader-women do, right?  We just keep plugging along even when we'd rather be curled up in bed with a cup of tea, a box of tissues, and a bag of herbal throat lozenges.

On another note: its snowing again.  I guess we're not out of the woods yet.

Hehe.  Ok, that sounds a little gross, but it was the best I could come up with- and you have to admit its a pretty whitty title for a post on making chicken stock, don't you think?  Ok ok, enough self-appreciation, moving along.

I am just so excited about our chickens, I just can't even express how awesome they are.  While our laying hens are pretty sweet and have started generating their own income through eggs, I am quite certainly talking about our broilers.  Yep, those gigantic birds that we dispatched this past fall that have been taking up residence in our freezer.  Probably once every week or two we pull one of these ladies (or gentlemen, we're equal-opportunity eaters here) out to thaw.  A couple days later she (or he, see above) is ready for a little garlic/rosemary/butter rub before heading in to the oven (I usually do 500 degrees for 40 minutes to an hour depending on the size of the particular bird).  Normally I'll just stick the bird on top of a bed of chopped carrots, onions, and celery in a baking dish.  Sometimes I'll put out a roasting pan if the chicken is big enough to warrant the extra cleaning.

Kyle and I are a little picky when it comes to our roast chicken.  Most of the time we'll only eat the breast meat and the tenders.  This may sound wasteful to some, but hey, remember my superly-awesome title for this little baby?  Thats right, we don't toss the rest, or feed it to the dogs even (sorry Shyla and Ollie).  Sometimes the chicken gets tossed into the fridge for a day or two because, lets be honest, who really wants to get finished with dinner just to start cooking again?  Sometimes I do it this way- after carving off the meat for dinner, toss it all into a stock pot- but only when I feel like super-homesteader-woman.

So the next day (or right off if I'm feeling like SHW as I said just now) I'll toss a couple chopped onions, a few ribs of celery, and a few carrots into a stock pot with some olive oil, garlic, and some thyme.  After they get softened up a bit I'll add the chicken as well as the veggies that are in the pan with it (skin, bones, fat and all).  Fill the pot up to cover everything and get that puppy boiling.  Once it starts boiling, lower the temp so it just sort of simmers and let it go until the bones are pretty much all seperated (in other words; if you pull out the bones you shouldn't see the perfect skeleton of a chicken, just a bunch of bones).

If it tastes like chicken stock, sweet; pour that sucker through a colander into another pot or a bowl to catch the stock.  Now this is where you can go a couple different routes.  What I normally do is pour about half a gallon of the stock into jars to save for later use.  Sometimes I'll can all the broth like this and deal with the meat seperately, this works if you want to make something out of the chicken meat like sandwiches, enchiladas, or just put it on salads.

Pick through the contents of the colander, pulling out as much meat as possible.  I usually shred it up a bit before putting it aside.  If I'm going to make soup, or chicken pot pie, I'll also go through the veggies for any that are still fairly solid after all that boiling.  (If I'm not making soup or pot pie, the veggies go with the bones into the compost.)

At this point you have the makings for whatever you want.  If you'd like chicken noodle soup, toss that meat, veggies, and broth back into the stock pot and get cooking!  Pot pie?  Then mix some flour into melted butter, add some stock, the chicken, veggies, salt and pepper if you'd like, and walla!  You have pot pie filling (if you add a bit of milk or cream at this point it is super delicious as well)!  Sometimes I'll make a bunch of this (depending on how much meat I can get off the chicken) so I can store a couple meals of it in our freezer.  Make your favorite pie crust (even better, make a double batch so you can freeze some of that for later, too!), cover the filling in a pie pan, and toss that sucker into the oven!

Man, I'm hungry...

My apologies for taking a whole week to update the blog.  With all the last-minute shopping things sort of fell by the wayside.  But I'm back!  And BOY do I have some stuff to update you on!  Ok, so in reality nothing really got done on the house until this weekend, but heck, it WAS a national holiday and you have to admit that even the die-hardiest of home renovators need a break here and there for egg nog, cookies, and such.

Saturday probably would have been saved as a 'recovery' day from all the Christmas festivities that we had participated the past two days, but no, something had to be done.  After a quick breakfast of bacon and eggs, we started off in our guest bedroom putting up more of the drywall.  There were still just a few sections around one of the windows that needed to be covered before we could get started on the wall that creates the closet.  About halfway through those few pieces, my Father-in-law, Guy, arrived to help Kyle with the washer and dryer.

As you may have read in previous posts, we decided it was time we got the dryer out of the kitchen, and the washer out of the dining room.  Now that all the hoses and wiring were in place we were ready for the next step.  I had finished all that I could do on my own in the guest room so I headed downstairs to start lunch and do some dishes.  Kyle and Guy headed into the basement to hook up the water for the washer.  Next thing I knew they were hauling the washer upstairs and then the dryer.  It took less that half an hour and I went upstairs to see the progress.  Miraculously enough we had JUST enough room for the washer and dryer in the nook next to the shower.  Pretty amazing, since this was not in our original plan.

After helping Kyle move the washer and dryer into the bathroom, and fixing a wicked tricky wiring problem with our front porch light, Guy was headed out- no doubt to enjoy a little downtime at home with his wife after the onslaught of company from the day before.

Kyle and I had lunch, some homemade chicken and rice soup from one of our lovingly-home-grown broilers that I had roasted for dinner a few days before.  I'm always excited that I can get at least half a gallon of chicken stock out of those birds on top of enough soup to last us four meals (at the very least).  But anyways, after eating lunch we headed to the local hardware store for a couple things that we needed for the final steps in hooking up the washer and dryer (a gasket or two, a new outlet for the dryer...I can't remember what else).

We got home and went right to the upstairs bathroom.  After Kyle installed the new outlet for the dryer (the one we got before didn't actually work with the plug) and I attached the hoses for the washer.  We secured the dryer vent and slid the dryer in place next to the washer (ok, so it took quite a bit of lifting, pushing, grunting, and probably would have helped if we had some Vaseline on hand...but they're in place).  After a week of not being able to do laundry, we threw some clothes into the washer and started the old girl up.  I did my happy dance as I listened to the sweet sweet sound of the wash being done.  And let me tell you, it is freaking awesome to no longer need to trudge up and down the stairs to do laundry- and its even more awesome to have a proper vent for the dryer again.  Woo hoo!

Before the end of the day my darling husband decided that the current door for the closet in the guest room was in a stupid place and we should move it afterall.  I was too tired to care, so he took his reciprocating saw and cut a new opening for the door.  With that we called it a day and retired to our living room for some cold beverages and a few episodes of The Office.  We had a big day ahead for Sunday, starting off with the best trip to Lowes EVER.  But I'll get into that tomorrow.

So Kyle was thrilled with his brewing kit that his lovely wife (yours truly) gave to him for his birthday a couple days ago.  Unfortunately we couldn't get started right away because all of that great cider that we made was all hibernating in the freezer.  So, first thing Wednesday morning, after Kyle opened his presents, we took out six gallons of frozen cider to start thawing in the sink.

I filled the sink a couple inches up the sides of the jars with cool water and we decided to go out to breakfast.  While I was getting ready, little did I know, someone got a little impatient and decided to put some HOT water into the sink as well- to help speed things along.  Upon our return from Jeffersonville we walked into the kitchen to see something rather distressing; one of the jars was cracked and leaking precious cider into the sink!  Crap- so we removed it from the sink and put it into a bowl so it could leak cider into something where we could save it.  We looked again- another was broken!  So we moved that one to a bowl as well.  Then we saw another!  Oh shoot, this is so not-good!

Word to the wise: jars act just like pipes, if they freeze do not try to thaw them too quickly or they can and will burst.  In Kyle's defense, he hadn't had any coffee yet that morning so I'm not sure the cobwebs had really been cleared out yet.

All in all I think four or five of the twelve jars broke- along with one of the two gallon jars that is still in the freezer (we're not entirely sure what happened with this one- it might have cracked during the freezing stage as it looks like it might have been a little overfilled- oops!).  But we moved all the cider into the sterilized fermenting bucket to finish thawing.  Yesterday afternoon, Kyle added some stuff that will kill off the wild yeast that could be lurking in the cider.  While we could try to use this to make our hard cider we just don't know if it will turn out delicious or completely unpalatable- its kind of a crap-shoot and I am not a gambler.  So we decided not to risk it for six gallons of cider.

So tonight we'll get started- thank goodness.  We'll check the potential alcohol content with the hydrometer and decide if we want to add sugar to up that reading.  Then we'll add some yeast and close the fermenter back up and away we go!  We've got yeast to make an apple wine so we can use up those wine bottles we've been saving all summer and fall- we'll need about 30 bottles to take care of the six gallons of cider.  It is going to take a while before we are ready to move it into the carboy for finishing...probably a really long time because our thermostat is almost always set for 50-55 degrees, unless we're having a chilly night and then we'll up it to 65 until we go to bed.  And when it comes to fermenting, heat is a good thing.

So thats the plan!  On another note: we collected a dozen eggs from the girls yesterday!  That makes 42 eggs currently in our fridge.  I think I'll make a couple quiche's tomorrow- one for lunch, and another to freeze for later.

I'm so excited!  We got our first measurable snowfall at our house a couple days ago.  Just a few inches, but its great!  The goats don't seem to care about it either way, although I did find Chutney curled up on a bunch of straw in the barn when I got home from work yesterday.  The chickens had obviously ventured out as I could see plenty of little chicken tracks scattered around the barn.  I wonder how they'll like it when we get a few feet instead of just a few inches.  We'll be snowblowing around the doors to the barn so they can come and go without having to swim through the snow, so it shouldn't be too bad for them.

Kyle's away at his class tonight so that means I get to keep myself busy with house stuff.  His 'away' nights have become my official 'clean the house' night.  Laundry, dusting, sweeping- you name it!- anything that has been building up during the week that I just can't stand to look at anymore.  There's nothing I like less than spending ANY of my weekend cleaning the house- ugh.

For once we didn't have a mountain of laundry to do so I found myself with a little spare time.  I'm making a double-batch of vegetable stock in preparation of all the soups I'm going to be making over the next week or two.  I don't know why I got into the habit of buying pre-made vegetable stock but I decided to finally snap out of it, especially when all it takes is a few onions, carrots, celery, peppercorns, bay leaves, and garlic (well, in our case alot of garlic).  I'm sure that not only will it be cheaper and healthier, but tastier as well.  It just makes me look forward to growing simple things like carrots, celery, and onions in our garden next year.  Look at me, winter has only just begun and I'm looking forward to spring already!  Maybe I'll start some herbs up in the windows...

Here is the recipe for the stock:
2 large yellow onions, peeled and quartered
2 stalks celery, trimmed and quartered
2 carrots, trimmed and quartered
1 cup mushrooms, including stems (I prefer baby portabella mushrooms)
6 parsley sprigs
2 bay leaves
6 peppercorns
at least 2 cloves garlic, peeled (I add a whole bulb when I double this recipe)
3 quarts water
(Note: I didn't have any mushrooms or parsley, but it came out tasty regardless.  Potato water in place of water from the tap is a great addition if you've got it, also if you've got any tomatos or turnips those are great additions as well- stock is my excuse to clean out the fridge when we've got some stuff a little past their prime.)

Combine all ingredients in a stock pot and bring to a boil.  Once it starts boiling reduce the heat to low/medium-low and let it simmer, covered, for two hours.  Strain all the solids out and let cool in jars or your preferred storage container.  I usually freeze ours, just for added peace of mind, but since I'll be using these soon I'm just keeping it in our refridgerator.

If you saute the vegetables a bit before putting in the water it really helps sweeten the stock- I like doing it this way most of the time- but if I'm in a rush I just throw it all in the pot and let it do its thing.

On another note, Kyle's birthday is tomorrow.  I'm so excited to give him his present, I tried to give it to him early this past weekend!  Hah!  But he resisted...amazingly.  I can't wait; I bought him a complete brewing kit so we can start making our own beer, wine, and best of all: HARD CIDER!!  We'll be able to start converting most of that great, home-made, frozen apple cider into some awesome, bottled, hard cider- I can almost taste it now.  I mentioned to Kyle as he was heading out the door that maybe we should just stay up until midnight tonight so I can give him his present as soon as his birthday begins!  I guess we'll see.  Regardless I should take out five gallons of cider to let it thaw out so we can get started right away.  Oh, and I supposed I'd better do some wrapping...hopefully I can find the tape.

What a gorgeous weekend!!!  We had a nice little heatwave on Saturday and I spent the whole day clad in a tee-shirt and burying our new in-ground dog fence with Kyle.  We learned in the past that it was not wise to leave it above ground for very long so we were extra excited when we got it finished and loop indicator didn't scream at us saying that all our work was for nothing.

As soon as we finished the rain began and the wind started picking up- perfect timing.  We retreated to the comfort of the house and I started dinner while Kyle hopped down the road to pick us up a bottle of wine.  I took a chunk of the dough I had made almost a week ago and began stretching it out to make a pizza.  I have seriously fallen in love with the no-knead dough that I found in Mother Earth News months ago.  All week we've enjoyed fresh-baked bread with dinner and lunch the following day.

I wasn't sure how the pizza crust would turn out, I mean, how can one dough be so versatile?  But I spread it out on a cookie sheet (my favorite; Williams Sonoma Goldtouch nonstick brand...NOTHING sticks to this sucker) and covered it with a bit of sauce, some mushrooms, peppers, sun-dried tomatos, and some great chevre (we like to switch it up from the same old mozzarella) that is made locally.  Hopefully next summer we'll be making our own chevre when May starts milking.

After just a few minutes in the 500 degree oven we slid the pizza off the cookie sheet and onto the wooden cutting board.  The crust was perfect; thin and crispy.  We ate the entire pizza that night and I still could have had more- I love chevre pizza.

Sunday was our official apple cider day!  We had two huge boxes of apples that had been sitting on our porch from weeks ago and it had taken on a lovely caramel-apple smell but it was time for them to go.  We had borrowed a home-made cider press from Kyle's employer and it made quick work of the apples.  I, personally, love the look of old-style cider presses but let me tell you they take forever to make much cider.  This loud, metal monstrosity took away alot of the romance...but produced fast and delicious results.

We fed the apples into the ginder, powered by some kind of small engine, and pulp shot out the bottom into my canning pot.  (Kyle walked away covered from the waste down with apple pulp.)  We, piled the ground up apples between layers of cheesecloth and plastic trays; three layers of apples and three layers of trays at a time.  Kyle pumped the hydraulic jack which squeezed the juice out of the layers of pulp as I held the hose over my stock pot which was covered in another few layers of cheesecloth.  Each batch provided about 3 gallons of cider, sometimes as many as five.  Pouring the cider from the stock pot into the jars proved to be a little difficult and we inevitably spilled what probably amounts to a couple gallons of cider in all.  But, between all the spilling and the taste-tests we ended up with about 25 gallons of fresh, unpasturized cider. 

So last weekend was not only our big APPLE weekend, it was also when we had scheduled to butcher our fifteen broilers that we'd been raising.  This was more of my husband's project as I wasn't sure how ready I was to really actually kill anything.  So, for fear of becoming attached to them as I have with my laying hens (I use that term lightly as they haven't actually started laying yet), Kyle was in charge of the feeding and watering of these chicks during their time with us. 

They arrived and were little balls of fluff, cute and peeping, but after a month they were already the size of our 5-month old hens in the side yard.  We knew this type of bird was bred to grow fast and grow fast they certainly did.  Of course, they required an immense amount of food and water to support their amazing metabolism so I'm not sure that we had saved any money in raising our own chicken for food.  The point, though, was not to raise our own broilers to save money, it was to be responsible consumers.  This was our own little boycott on big commercial poultry organizations that claim to sell free-range birds but in reality keep them crammed in pens above eachother with just a small door allowing a few of them at a time into a slightly larger yard.  No, I did not feel good supporting that.

So the time had come.  Thanks to the hard work we had done with the apples the day before I was able to sleep through the night.  Otherwise I probably would have tossed and turned thinking about the chickens and their fate.  Sunday we woke up to a cool and cloudy morning and got to work.

Kyle created a workbench from some old wooden boards we salvaged from the part of our barn we had to tear down which I wrapped in some plastic wrap to try to keep things a little more sanitary.  He cut a hole into one of our 5-gallon buckets we had kicking around as sort of a make-shift "killing cone" and attached it to the tree next to the bench.  Much to my relief Kyle's brother, Sean, arrived who was going to be helping us with our task.  He is a hunter so we decided his experience and input would be invaluable.  He showed up with his very own home-made, McGyver-estque chicken plucker.  We all looked at it, basically a hand-held drill with a bit made out of a piece of PVC pipe with some pieces of rubber bungee cords attached to it, with a little bit of humor and went on with the preparations.

After some hot coffee (or tea in my case) Kyle and I began bringing the birds outside to keep them in our chicken run that we created for our chicks back in July.  Perhaps it sounds a little silly but I said a quiet 'thank you' to all them as they went outside.  It was an extremely poignant feeling as I looked at our birds for the last time as they laid calmly on the grass.  We had raised these birds from two-day old chicks, tending to their every need to be sure they were healthy and comfortable.  Now they would nuture us in return.

The boys grabbed the first bird and I stood by.  I was not ready to take a hand in the killing, but I wanted to be respectful to the lives that were being taken, so I stood there as a witness.  There were no axes, just a sharp knife and a quick hand.  I watched as the silent bird slowly drifted off into a hazy sleep with a few tears in my eyes.  This was going to be tough.  Just in time, my brother and sister-in-law arrived to help as this was going to be a long process.  My sister-in-law, Viola, is almost always up for a new experience and I think she was, frankly, a little excited to be involved in the cleaning that would come later.  She's a tough gal, that one, and I love her for it.

When the time came for cleaning the chickens we had quite the group- Kyle, Sean, and Viola standing by donning disposable gloves and my brother and I standing by trying to help with the instructions.  No one had any experience in this, all we had was Storey's Guide to Raising Chickens that was lent to me by a co-worker just a couple days before.  But as I am better with visuals I sought after some kind of video.  To my rescue I found the Featherman website which is a company who not only makes some great poulty-processing equipment (too rich for my blood, we were doing this old-school) they also provide links to a few videos on Youtube that are amazingly informative on how to process your birds.  So I brought the laptop out to show to the crew and they got to work.

Oh, and I forgot to mention, that little home-made chicken-plucker worked like a charm!  After scalding the birds in hot water, Sean put his contraption to the feathers and they literally flew off.  It wasn't perfect, mind you, there were still feathers here and there that had to be pulled out by hand, but it was alot quicker, cleaner, and easier than doing it all manually.



At this point my dear mother arrived to help with more of the apples (she wanted NOTHING to do with the chicken activities of the day) so after watching and trying to give pointers (having dissected animals in college during my brief stint as an animal science major) I adjourned to the comforts of the house to help peel and and slice some fruit.

It was a busy day.  I gave the birds a final wash in the sink, packed them in zip-lock freezer bags and tucked them away into our chest freezer.  While I had planned to roast the first-to-go to feed the group in thanks for their help, no one was really up for eating any chicken that day.  While the experience was relatively positive, let me tell you: these birds don't exactly smell like a bunch of flowers.  When I saw my sister-in-law last night at a little birthday dinner for yours-truly she mentioned that she still wasn't really ready to eat chicken, the smell had been that bad.

The "thank-you" chicken we sent home with Sean was the first to be consumed.  His wife, Andrea, cooked it rotisserie-style and they said it was delicious.  Zach and Viola's chicken is still in our freezer until they have room to house it themselves; we have more than enough room.  Mom didn't want one.  We have yet to cook one of ours but with this cold and rainy weather we're looking at for the next few days I might just have to pull one out of the freezer to try it out.

We're already making plans to raise our own turkey next year- probably a heritage breed after reading a blog on Antiquity Oaks- and we're going to raise another group of dual-purpose birds for slaughter next fall.  I would not recommend the Cornish x Rock broilers, they grow too fast for their own good.  I'm thinking of getting a straight-run of Sussex to add to the Dominiques, Black Australorps, and Easter-eggers that are in residence currently.  With this plan we should be able to dispatch the roosters (to keep peace with the neighbors) and whatever older birds that are no longer laying well in the years to come.

This was a difficult experience for me being such an animal-lover.  But I feel good knowing that we gave these birds the best life we could.  We could have brought the birds to a professional to be butchered, there is one just in the next town over, but we are thriving for self-sufficiency; the more we can do ourselves the better.

How you do you feel about raising animals to feed your family?  Have you had any experiences with raising your own food?  If not, do you think you ever could?  Let me know what your thoughts are on this, its nice to hear back from you.  Thanks for stopping in- take care!

As soon as we arrived we immediately set in to getting to work.  Two pots cooking apples for applesauce and the canning pot were set on the stove while we peeled, cored, and sliced apples to freeze for treats to be baked later during the chill of winter.  My dear friend, Ali, arrived to help us with our monumental task.  While we processed the apples I turned on the grill (maybe for the last time this year) to cook the burgers for dinner; black bean burgers for Ali and I, and regular beef burgers for Mom and Kyle (although I think Kyle had one of each, he loves those black bean burgers so much).  After our break for food, Ali started working on four loaves of apple bread which I think turned out deliciously!

By the end of the day we had finished off a good chunk of the apples from the back of the truck.  We managed to freeze six gallons of apples and can about twelve quarts of apple sauce.  It was a great day, full of good friends, good food, and lots of laughs.  Thanks to everyone who made a beautiful day even more special.

Last night I got home and immediately set in to making dinner, it was just one of those days where I needed to keep busy.  I had bought a little broiler at the grocery store earlier this week to roast and make chicken soup from.  It is to be, hopefully, the last chicken we will ever buy from a store as we are set to butcher our fifteen broilers this weekend.

As a recently converted ex-vegetarian this was the first time in a LONG time since I had handled a whole dead chicken, so I had a little trouble remembering how this all worked.  I seasoned it all over with salt and pepper and rubbed it down with a little bit of butter mixed with six cloves of chopped garlic and some rosemary.  I set it in the pot on top of a few chopped carrots and onions and threw it all in the oven for the next 50 minutes.  I set myself to starting the massive amount of dishes that were sitting on the counter when Kyle got home from work.  The wonderful man had not only brought home a bottle of wine but he had in hand a little bouquet of yellow lilies for me.  I do love him so much.  I'd been upset all week about our poor cat, Elvis, who has been suffering from an acute urinary tract infection.  So this little thoughtfulness was very much appreciated.

My darling husband took over doing the dishes while I went upstairs to feed the cats and give Elvis his pills which is getting increasingly more difficult as he is really getting sick of it.  But, we managed and both cats set in to happily eating their new vet-approved cat food.  I headed back downstairs and cleaned up the dining room table which unfortunately ends up being the catch-all for whatever we happen to have in our hands when we walk in the front door.  By the time I had finished I had just enough time to make some garlic mashed potatos to go with our dinner.

I took the chicken out of the oven and it looked beautiful.  Only one thing was wrong; I had put it in the pot upside down.  So instead of the skin covering the breasts being nice and golden and crispy, it was regretably the skin on the back of the chicken that looked so appealing.  Sure enough, I turned it over to carve it and the skin on the breast was cooked, yes, but soft and kind of gross looking.  We never buy chicken with the skin on, so we haven't eaten chicken skin in a long time...so whatever, but it was still a little disappointing.

The chicken turned out beautifully otherwise, it was moist and smelled delicious.  As soon as we had finished carving it up I plopped the chicken carcass into a big pot with salt and water and a few chopped potatos and began my chicken soup (I hate to waste anything).  So now we've got three containers of chicken stock and a big thing of chicken soup in the freezer.  And by the end of the weekend we'll have fifteen fresh, new chickens in our chest freezer...I'll let you know how THAT goes.