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Wood Ash Chicken Dust Bath
Got Chickens?
Got a wood stove? or access to someone that is burning clean wood?
Make sure this is clean wood ash, no burning garbage or plastics or anything else in the fires. (and yes I do know people that will toss and burn things in their stoves)
While the ducks love to snow bath all winter long, the chickens do not really like snow and while its not a issue in terms of their health, winter time in the coop tends to be the worst time of the year for lice or mites and a free access ash dust bath can go a long way to reducing this possible issue.
Just get a box shape, whatever suits you, I used cardboard and fill it half full, don’t worry about sorting out any bits of charcoal, the birds will break it down and anything left when you go to dump the of it in the garden or compost pile, its just active bio char at that point..
In keeping with that, any ash they get out into the bedding is just going to sweeten and help your coming spring compost pile when you clean that coop floor.
Let the chickens do the rest of the wood, they will dust at will, shaking off any excess and as clean wood ash is edible for them as well, they will not hurt themselves in any way as they finish their pruning with beak etc.
Braised Duck in a Rich Peanut Sauce Recipe
This base of this recipe comes from “Asian” Cookbook Page 209.
Having said that I did make changes to it. I didn’t use beef, I used two Muscovy skinless duck breasts that had been well aged in the fridge (I did a full 3 day aging on them in my coldest part of the fridge)
I also did not have the annatto seeds nor the fish sauce and I used peanut butter, as I didn’t want to mess around with the peanuts/rice mixture. Given that was to help with giving that thicker sauce, I did that with around a tsp of corn starch/water blended to give that thicker sauce.
This all started because I had aged duck breast in the fridge and I have half a swede aka winter turnip that I wanted to use. The delightful dish above is the result lol. I didn’t have celeriac root, so I used a cup of regular celery instead. Last but not least, I added in 1 tsp of ginger..
I know, I know that is a number of changes but that is the joy of good recipe, you can make those kinds of changes or not and it will still be great. Bottom line, I would recommend this dish, yes it has a few steps but its smoothly done. I would like to try it again in the future with beef.
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Chocolate Mashed Potato Truffles – Ration Book Recipe No. 208
very interesting dessert/treat to say the least. while its carbs in regards to the potato, its quite low sugar for a dessert/treat.
i want to give it a try with fresh new baby potato just out of the garden later this year.
I feel like I’m rapidly morphing into some bizarre Cropleyesque ration book aficionado. My compulsions to experience strange wartime combinations in my kitchen seem stronger than ever and I often spend my evenings flicking through old wartime cookery books to get my next fix of weird.
This wartime recipe for Chocolate Truffles made with mashed potato was really quite up there with some of the stranger recipes created during the war. Don’t expect a chocolate truffle texture, the truffles were squidgy and much like a Japanese dish called “Mochi”. However, I really enjoyed gobbling all seven of them down in one sitting. So, actually, they tasted alright. For anyone who missed chocolate during the war, this would have filled that gap I feel!
Ingredients
- 4 tablespoons of mashed potato
- 2 tablespoons cocoa powder
- 2 tablespoons caster sugar
- A few drops of vanilla or almond essence
- Cocoa powder for dusting
Method
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Posted in Life moves on daily
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Fried Banana Peel Recipe
Fully admit it, I say a clip on Facebook on this one and went.. huh?? They called it mock bacon, and its not mock bacon to me at all. Pick your Banana, with the reading I did on this on the internet, it says that the full pure clean yellow peel is more starchy/with little to no sweetness, where the more ripe the banana, the more sweetness the skin will have.
As you can see below, I choose a med-ripe banana peel, lots of small brown spots, no black yet, I trimmed both ends off and I went with two large sides, lots of folks would have split these into two and made four “stripes” with this same amount of peel. I put a scant 1tsp of oil in the pan at med heat (number 6 on my stove) 
The ways its like bacon, its crispy and crunchy, with a great chew on it, just like bacon does. its got a nice fat mouth feel to it, and it can be picked up and eaten like a bacon slice can be.
Its important! to take a spoon and remove the white pith from the inside of the peel to get a nice flat smooth peel, I missed a tiny spot that I didn’t get clean and I didn’t like it at all..
Its also does not (at least to me) taste banana either, its a blank canvas, I did one mine with West Coast Lemon Salt. and one with Maple Bacon seasoning salt. I like the Lemon Salt one better personally.
Cook 3 to 4 minute’s each side till crisp brown as above, drain on paper towel and let cool for 30 seconds to a min to set up that crunch. You want that bottom ones look, I didn’t quite get the top one cleaned enough and it effected its overall crisp/crunch plus I like the plain salted better.
These can be eaten directly on your plate or I expect they could be cut up into stripes and used in salads or anywhere else you wanted a crunch added it.
The bonus on this is that if you eat banana at breakfast, this is a amazing way to get a low cost (very low cost price wise) of mock “bacon”. I mean lets face it, I had never heard of eating the Banana Skin till two days ago, where my reading says that lots of vegans already know this and have a host of recipes using it for mock bacon or in stews and so on.
Now the hmmm/warning for me is this. Banana’s are sprayed alot! So I would eat regular Banana Peels as a treat once an awhile, and if possable use Organic banana peel, its not like (or most of us) in my neck of the woods can grow them fresh and no spray.
The little video I watched showed them putting the peels in 3 tsp of soy sauce, 2 tsp maple syrup, some garlic powder and Paprika powder and then soaking the peels in that for 10 min before frying. If you want to try it flavoured, do try it this way.
So would you try it? Have you eaten it before? If you try it, come back and tell me what you think?
No Buy Feb 2023 Week One
Its crazy to me that I am already on my first one week overview already. The first short week of Feb has flown by and then some.
We have been eating well, really well! I really liked this duck breast Stir-fry, I took the basics from reading three or four beef and broccoli recipes and used them as the guide for flavor and sauce, I sliced two skinless duck hen breasts in place of the beef. Normally you can switch our Muscovy duck breast meat for beef with no issues at all.
This way of making it let that fine ducky flavor come out more. You knew you were eating duck, mild and tasty but with a deeper flavour and more chew then normal for beef in this recipe. I also added in some celery and onion which worked for me, as Broccoli is quite costly right now an this allowed me to cut the overall cost of this dish down by doing so.
We have lots of salad greens/reasonable amount of fresh veggies and a ton of oranges and some banana’s at this point. Fresh eggs are coming in daily from the hens, I am taking in right around a gallon a week of raw milk, so not huge amounts but certainly enough for our household needs. The rest of the meals are rounded out from the freezers, dry and canning pantry’s.
We had company this weekend, I had family who needed a photography session done for their teen and it went very well. Which is your favorite look/style.
The Sweet Girl Next Door
Perhaps the 80’s style
perhaps the long LONG lean art look
Otherwise its been a quiet steady week and overall went very well.
No Buy Spending Report Week One
- Farm Related -$23 Remmi broke his heavy duty break away collar and it had to be replaced.
- Household Related-0
- Reno Related-0
- Fresh fruit/veggies/salad greens- $87
Monthly spend report total to date $110
How has your spending been this past week? Did you find anything to fix? or mend? Did you do anything to bring in a little extra income? Did you have something break that had to be replaced?
Steak with Spaghetti Squash Recipe
I have given a lot of thought to how I wanted to share in a casual way on No Buy Feb and March Pantry Challenge. I want to give myself loads of flexibility and yet at the same time have a connecting note .
What I decided on was Recipes using food from the freezer, pantry and or cellars (be that fall stored fresh or canned) Ideally a lot of these will also be using up something left over in the fridge, making it into a different mwal idea or way of serving.
In this case I took two of my local (support local if you can) minute steaks along with onion, our own garlic from the cellar, Green pepper and half a quart jar of homemade pasta sauce from the canning cellar and half a left over Spaghetti Squash that I had roasted the day before and we used one half but not the other.
In a cast iron pot place about 1 to 2 tbsp of your choice of fat, add in your onion, garlic, pepper and steaks. Let the steaks cook till you have some crisping, then flip over, stir the rest so it cooks evenly, once you have browned your meat, add your sauce and use it to deglaze the pan, making sure to get all those bits off the brown and into the sauce. This will take 3 to 5 minutes of cook time before you add the sauce at med heat. Adjust to taste for salt and pepper. In my case with my homemade pasta sauce nothing else was needed to be added.
Then cover the pot with the lid to the side to let moisture leave and turn your heat down to 4 and let it simmer for 5 min with the odd stirring on the sides. At the same time, get out your cold cooked in my case oven roasted Spaghetti Squash and scrape out the flesh at the 5 min mark, take your steaks out for just a moment and add your squash, gently stir it though and add your steaks back in. Simmer for 5 more minutes of cooking time to heat though.
Serve with a bit of parmesan cheese on the pasta side and enjoy. This meal used meat from the bulk whole beef gotten from the farmer down the road, fresh items from my local food box as well as from our storage pantry from our own harvests, homemade pasta sauce from the canning pantry and leftover from the fridge. By my guess, my cost per plate was 3.75
Bird Gifted Native Fruit Bushes or Trees Frugal Ways
Over the years I have been Bird Gifted a host of different native/local fruit producing canes, bushes or trees. My favorite among them all is my hawthorn cluster. I mean look at those blooms, and then all fruit that follows. 
Some of the other ones that have been bird gifts is my nanny berry bushes, we often check the power lines in ditches for Black Choke Berry Babies or Elderberry or other fruit bushes, with ditched tending in our country being cut, not sprayed we can often rescue wee babies and bring them back before they get cut down.
However a friend posted this page from a book on one of my very close garden groups for me, as she knows I am buying for the new acre size park garden and lets be fair, while I am a buying bulk though the county, the cost of the fruit trees/bushes and so on is spendy! and there is so much room to be be filled in yet.
Well, this is just so smart for anyone who has a larger land and they are looking to boost their local native fruit producing trees or bushes or cane fruits.
I am waiting to hear back from my friend on what book and auther this is from and as soon as I know I will come back and give full credit, if you know, please let me know in the comments and I will add credit. Clearly they are a Canadian writer 🙂 Its out of “A garden of birds” by Andre Dion
I love this idea so much, clearly I do not want any invasive’s and will most certainly not be keeping any buckthorns, which we have had bird gifted and I do like the bush itself as do the birds, bees and butterflies but given its considered so invasive I have with regret in many ways removed it from the yard and food forest.
I am going to do a line of this in the more open field area for birds that like that wide open view and then I am going to do one or two smaller two pole/wire seating in the food forests, a few other spots, I am thinking I might go a little more natural, I am going to take a branch off the downed tree with a good study limb with some nice perches on it, and clean it up and then dig the end in and clear the ground around it, it would be a small natural perch and I can see what they come up with in terms of plants.
I know some of my birds like to sit up high, some like to be in brush more, and some like the wide open spots, I also know that these different birds prefer to feed on different things and so while I will of course be surprised overall, I do think that I can encourage certain eating and pooping habits.
Man I tell you, the place across me is for sale, and if the new owners are the least bit homestead inclined and watch for it, they will have so many bird gifted in on the tree hedge rows between the tall trees on their yards edge because so often when the birds finish feeding here, that is where they go to roost, liking those big old maple trees. This will be the 3rd time the place across from me will have different owners, the first was the one that built it, then the second have been around coming into their 6th year.
I am a little nervous about who will be buying, time will tell.
So what do you think? would you create a bird gifted native or copy’s of your own planted fruit canes, bushes or trees nursery? What is your favorite bird gifted plant or tree in your yard? if you decided to do this, come back and show me some photos, if you blog about it, link back and or comment to me so I can see what you did!. I am also going to check on all my fence lines in the gardens to see if i have been gifted anything last year that could be coming up this spring.. Keep you posted!
Saskatoon Compote Recipe
Ah, the Saskatoon Bush (Amelanchier alnifolia) and its delightful berries. The Saskatoon bush is a native Shrub that within canada grows from Western Ontario, thoughtout canada to the West Coast B.C. and up into the north as far as the yukon.
It would be very fair to say that for many peaple in the history of canada, that this was one of the most common eaten and preserved berry. Depending on what tribe lived were would have slightly different uses, the one I am most familiar with having grown up in alberta is using it as the dried fruit that is then crushed to be added to dried, pounded meat fibers mixed with fat to create energy balls that was then stored for both trips and winter food use.
From what I can see having harvested a good number of fruits, the saskatoon fruit is a ideal drying fruit as it tends to have a good thick meaty bite to it, a lot less moisture then others and yet it is round enough (its not truly round, its a touch flatter) that you can easily shake your drying basket with no need to flip or turn each one.
I planted Saskatoon Bushes the first spring I arrived on the farm, and was a bit surprised to find that the local store called them bird food. I have planted a number of them since and plan to add them to the pack garden as well. I remember picking this fruit with family and friends for many many years in my childhood and youth.. I love a good Saskatoon Pie, I think most folks who have tried it does 🙂
However in my family, most often it was put up into Saskatoon/Rhubarb fruit in the jars, this was a trick from my grandmother and my mother that allowed them to Stretch out small fruits flavour by combining it with a easy to grow/harvest and help fill up that jar of rhubarb fruit. This is still a great idea if you have a large family or are looking for a way to try rhubarb in new ways. Start with 50/50 but depending on the fruit you can go as low as small fruit at 25% to 75% rhubarb.
I noticed I had one small bag of our own grown and picked Saskatoon berries in the freezer door, the reason for this is that it was not enough on that picking to make a batch with, it was about a cups worth from the final picking and I had planned to use in mixed fruit batch that I never got to. Now as it happens I had cooked a large venison roast to med-rare and was making different meals out of it.
Saskatoon Compote 2 Servings (can easily double or triple this)
- 1 cup saskatoons
- 2 TBS of water
- 2 TBS of Sugar or Honey or monkfruit sugar replacement
- 1 tsp fresh grated ginger or minced ginger
- 1 TBS rice wine vinegar (or any other wine vinegar)
- 1 tsp of butter
- pinch of salt and pepper
In a small pot on med heat, add your fruit, sweetner an water, simmer gently as the fruit cooks, once it starts to soften, you are welcome to mash a bit of it up on the side of your pot to help some of them release their juice more. This will take about 6 to 10 min depending on the amount of fruit you are cooking and the size of it, anyone who has picked saskatoons will understand, sometimes they are tiny and sometimes they are huge.
Once you have your fruit cooked, then add your ginger, wine vinegar, butter and salt and pepper to taste, then drop your heat and simmer it down to your desired thickness. Be care to not burn it as it gets thicker, stir often, spoon over the meat and serve hot.
Don’t have access to saskatoon fruit? This could easily be made with Saskatoon Jam, Add Jam, ginger, vinegar, salt and pepper to taste and warm it up and then simmer it down to your desired thickness and spoon hot over your meat. This was delightful on Venison but would also be O so good on moose or duck, I expect it would be very good with grass fed beef as well.
Do you have saskatoons in your garden, food forest, hedge row or wild down the lane. What is your favorite way to use them? While they do best if they can get eight or more hours of daylight, they do very well as intermixed bush with half sun and half shade. They tend to produce smaller drier fruits on hot years unless watered but they will still produce and they are a very long lived bush, normally living between 30 to 50 years and they will sucker well meaning that you can replenish your plantings from your favorite flavored bushes into the next generations.
Eating for Health
While I am beyond grateful for getting some answers in regards to my health, one of the things that came out of it was that I needed to work harder to clean up my eating habits and slowly but surely lose some weight.
Beef Taco night but the bowl is made with heated till crunchy cheese bowl. This was very good!
Now something are just awesome with the way we already are, I mean we already eat home raised grass feed meat, lean wild meat, and farm fresh eggs and so on. Above is a lovely grass fed steak with veggie/mushroom side
We also are coming into year 20 this spring on the farm.. Can you believe we have had the farm for 20 years! wow.. and so we have a large amount of beyond organic hard and soft fruits and gardens of veggies growing on land that has never seen any spays or chemicals.
We need to be even more careful this year to grow, put up and eat as cleanly as possable in terms of chemcials and so on. In the salad above, I am trying to add more nuts/seeds to our salads with a bit of dried cranberries or currents
I thought you might like to see a sample of meals made over the past week. Gearing up for showing off meals made in No Buy Feb. I wish I could say that I have had time to get out fish locally, I mean I have the river right there but the salmon and the haddock were bought. I am hoping to get a few fishing trips done this year where I will max out my daily limit (I hope) and get some extra local caught into the freezer.
Just another Day on the Farm 