As its a piggy post, just seems fitting that I got a cute photo of Miss Rooten Tooten with hay head happening this morning, I did get a awesome photo today of the piglets but I am saving it for wordless weds 🙂
So as someone else noticed, along with myself that while we had three different good size black feeder bins, which worked just fine for chow, when it came time for real food, the piglets where overrunning it and themselves, which means that the strong are pushing the smaller females out of the way a bit, so it was time to build a longer piglet style trough, I like the width of the bottom but can already see that the side height that the book said, must be for wee piglets because we will need to take it apart in the next week or two and add in another two or four inches in height, once we split them off, we will need to troughs, my book says one foot of length per piglet and two feet per adult pig, so for the piglets we need eight feed of trough..
As I am splitting them up into two groups and because it mean that the feeder troughs can be used in other ways later for other critters, I had him make them into four foot lengths, helping control weight, fitting though doors, carrying an fitting on pen walls etc.
If you want to see the first introduced on the piglets to it, here is the video, what I can’t figure out is how come if I take a picture in the barn it comes out so dark I can’t use it, even with fiddling with the lighting but if I can a video I get ok footage.. very odd, might have to crack out the booklet and see if I can figure out how to adjust the settings somehow..
Ps, the front half of the video is working but the back half is glitch on my computer, sorry about that, I will see if I can figure out why, it worked perfect when it went up..
So lets start with the meat first, this dish would work with Lamb, Moose or Elk or a lovely grass-fed beef stew meat.. Ideally, you should thaw your meat in the fridge, then trim off any white skin, fat bits, removing the fat will make a huge difference in reducing the “game” flavour of the meat while leaving you with lots of flavour from the meat.
This is not a fast recipe but each stage is fairly quick in and off itself, so the first thing to do is either make or buy spruce beer, now if you don’t have Spruce beer, instead of switching to a ale or mead type beer, consider making Spruce Syrup, just cut the sugar down to one cup for each four cups of heavily steeped Spruce tea. You can also use honey instead of sugar, I would cut that to 3/4th of a cup and see if that works for you.
So in either the oven or the crock pot, place your pd of prepared stewing meat (You could brown but for this dish, I choose not to) along with two large onions roughly diced, and 2 cups of Spruce Tip Bear or Spruce Syrup over the meat and allow to cook till tender but not folk fall apart tender, in my case about two hours at 350, at which point, I cut up two very large carrots, 4 large potatoes, 1/2 a cup of diced turnip. I seasoned with salt, pepper, turmaic, keens mustard, garlic powder and some grown cinnaomon, an a pinch of allspice
All those are washed, peeled, and cut into bite size peices, and then I used another full cup of the beer to just cover the veggies and the meat and back into the over till the veggies are cooked and the meat is now fork tender, the sauce is rich, full bodied and just lightly spicy..
At this point, make a single batch of Baking Powder Bisquits aka Bannock.. if you are not eating glutten, then could be topped with a layer of whipped mashed with top.. or you could do a nice light layer of puff pastry.. If you are using the Bannock, then roll out or flatten down to about a two inch start and lay over the top, leaving a edge around the outside the baking dish, place the whole stew back into the oven and bake until golden brown and a toothpick comes out clean in the middle
Allow to sit for five min before serving.. heavenly!! I serve this for a get together lunch and everyone gave rave reviews but the fact that the two teenage boys went back for seconds and then finished the dish with 3rds speaks volumes..
Well, the piglets are doing well, and as hard as it is to believe, it will only be a short time before they are weaned off momma and will be split into grow out groups, I still have a bit of a slower growth happening with Beaker, but he is holding his own.
I can tell that it is getting close to weaning time with Miss Piggy, not because she is not willing to give them a nurse X amount of times a day but because she is starting to drive them away from her own personal feed bin and sending them running to their own bowls, for the first couples weeks she seemed to almost show them what to eat, now she is “go get your own”, second the piglets are getting quite bold, 99 percent of the time this week, they have been over in their own pen sleeping in the barrel nests, with only beaker still choosing to sleep next to his momma most of the time.
So here is there video of them enjoy cooked beets and carrots for their breakfast this morning..
Now I figure I need to put this out into the mindset, I am planning on taking one of these guys as a suckling pig for our farm use over the next couple weeks, I promise that I will use every single part and I will share lots of info on process, curing, smoking and recipes but as we have all been in the Aw!! they are so cute mode, I wanted to put it out there that while we can do the “so sweet”, somewhere in the back of mind.. just put that.. someone is going to be harvested soon enough..
Now you may or may not depending on when you started reading the blog, me talking about all those amazing things you can do with fresh young spruce tips, I found a note book from my time when I worked at The Office in yellowknife (which has no website that I could find but if you ever get the chance to eat there, go! the food is amazing, and they try and have alot of northern foods or northern flare) and found a couple more recipes that we used the tips in, so watch for versions of those coming soon..
But don’t think that you can’t use the older spruce needles at certain times or in certain ways, I think its most common to find references of using the older needles in terms of the wilderness guides in regards to making Spruce Tea
But I want to make a nice Spruce Beer which is not really going to a Beer, as I don’t drink beer but it will in fact be more like a ginger or root beer, and here is the basic recipe I will be using.. I want this lovely beer to use in two recipes I want to make later this week, both northern inspired, if you can buy a good spruce beer at the local beer store it will be workable between the two..
So the first thing I did was go collect the late fall spruce needles, (remember to take from different places, moving from tree to tree and that even at this time of the year, the younger tree’s will have longer, softer brighter needles then the older tree’s or older needles will be). Now I have read where it says to just put them in like that, please don’t, take the time to stripe or cut off the needles, if you put in the little branches, you will get a very ughhh undertaste and bitterness that is NOT going to rock your taste buds..
When you are done, you should have a cup of these lovely’s, its possable that you might like it stronger but give it a try with this amount, you can always add more later.. I went with a cup of cut cleaned needles to four cups of water, at a slow simmer for a full half hour before letting them sit for another half hour to cool before straining and measuring out what I was left with..
does that not look so much like rosemary? Until they taste it, it can fool folks.. It will be ready in a couple days and at that point I will be able to make the rest of the planned meal, which will use a number of my homemade different spruce tip or needle recipes
This photos is a great example at just how hard it is to get a good still photo of a horse in motion.. so if you want to see Brandy in Motion, here is a great video of her reacting to the horses and riders going by her pasture..
She sure can move when she wants to and I love the sounds of her hoofs hitting the ground, you can just hear them in the video but in real life if the windows are open, I can hear her coming from all around the farm..
This recipe is perfect for late summer/early fall when the spring ducklings are fat and ready to be butchered, the last of the tender grape leaves are available and the summer crop of elderberries is hanging low on their branches..
So take young smaller duck breasts, that have been allowed to rest at least 24 hours in the fridge (ideally in a salt bath), give them a rinse, then salt and pepper them on both sides, lay on your big fresh stemmed out grape leaf, and place two stripes of bacon on top, or a pat of butter with a fresh sage leaf or two, and wrap them into a fairly tight package, Warning this takes practice, so bring in a few extra leaves and work with them till you get it figured out with a breast before doing the the final wrap up.
Preheat a cast iron pan on the stove with a bit of coconut oil or olive oil, med-heat, preheat the over to 350, Brown the packages, then remove them and add in a large diced onion, just let them soften and then add 1/2 cup of chicken or veggie broth, bring to simmer and then add the wrapped duck breasts and then cover the pan in tinfoil and into the oven for around 25 to 30 min.
When cooked add half a cup of cream and half a cup of elderberry juice or fresh or frozen berries or half a cup of grape jelly or Black Choke Cherry or Black Choke Berries Juice or Jelly..
Allow the sauce to simmer and bubble for at least a couple min whisking to blend it together, if using the fresh or frozen berries, make sure its will simmered, if its the jellies, then you can just simmer as thick or thin as you like your sauces to be..
One Breast per person, split open the grape leave and drizzle over the sauce and place the extra in a dish for those that like a bit more..
While I played around with the style of meat and a few other things, the idea for this recipe was from Forgotten Skills of Cooking
Well, its warm out, and we even had blue sky on one side of us, lots of wind and we had no rain over night or most of the early morning, the rain just hit us in the last ten min but it does not look like it will last at all.
Our Preps have held so far and everyone is good, just a few down branches, lots and lots of corn bits/leaves everywhere from the fields around us, I will see what I can do about getting a photo of it, as its been caught and filled at least the bottom 3rd or more of my fence lines, its kinda pretty in a way..
The critters are all fine so far, but Brandy is a big suck, she wanted extra cuddles and time this morning, we seem to have a ring of power outs around us in, but so far we still have power.. so how did you make the night?
Just another Day on the Farm 