Just another Day on the Farm

Food Storage Friday-One month in..

Posted on October 28, 2011 by Just another day on the farm

Joining in the ranks of Canadian Doomer and others like Chile Chews, and Backyard Farm along with unprocessed real food month with its daily updates on idea’s and thoughts on how to use whole food in your diet, we are eating out of our pantry this month.

Well, this morning was the first true hard frost at the farm, its been a great fall for this, we had two or three cover nights in late Sept, and then we had an amazing oct in the gardens, so I certianly can’t say that its not time, still it was a little sad to see that the frost was hard enough to turn the pastures silver until 9am before the sun could burn off it off.. Its a sign that without cold frames and hoop houses or indoor growing, fresh greens and herbs are done for a couple months now.

This week has been a off-week for me, Dh had a cold, which he gave to me (no surprise there, we live in the same house) but like normal he was over it in no time flat and I am taking longer to get things back to normal.

I did pick up a few things this past week that were on sale to the point that I just could not walk away, example, 3 pd bags of provincally grown onions for 57 cents, I bought bags of them and have been filling the dryer with them and filling jars with dried onion for late winter and early spring use when my home grown are done and its to early for even little green onions to be popping their heads up.. They also had bags for 10 pd provincal carrots for 2.99, so I have chopped and dried 30 pds of carrots for late winter/early spring use, again choosing to eat my fresh, I wish I had a better carrot crop this year but we only got two rows in this year and so I needed to bulk up on them.

Its been a soup, stew week other then my birthday supper, when we had half plates filled with super sweet amazingly good fresh carrots and a big old beef steak with huges amounts of fresh fried mushrooms.. heavenly, I don’t know why but sometimes I just crave beef, and with the costs of beef, and the amount of lamb in my freezer, i don’t give in to it often but o my, that steak was heavenly, it was also the first real heavy meal I had for a number of days.

As this is the last week of the unprossesed challange, I decided to push a little harder on that one and given that it was a soup/stew week mostly, it was not hard to do, the only real thing made that didn’t cut it was DH’s one bowl chocolate cake, it was made with white flour, but hey, I didn’t have to make it, and it was awesome!

With it being fall and with christmas time sales coming on standard baking items, I will be building my storage for the coming year while rotating and using what I have in stock at this time, having said that I will be contining on with my food storage eating into Nov and perhaps even longer.

Now one of the interesting things that I am working on this week (which will also get its own post) is rendering lamb tallow, sheep tallow and making homemade soap, plus I want to make a one or two homemade lamb tallow candles.

My very expecting ewe who yesterday just started to bag up will have to be in on the plans, as I will hold off making my lamb tallow/fresh sheep milk soap until she has her little ones and is settled in and in full production. I should have just enough time to cure some small fancy little soaps for stocking stuffers.

So how is your eating of your pantry going? What interesting things did you make this week? Where you able to find some fall specials that where just to good to pass on?

Posted in Food Storage | Tagged Farm Life, Garden, Hobbies, personal care, sheep, Sheep Milk | Leave a comment

Butchering out a leg of lamb

Posted on October 27, 2011 by Just another day on the farm

Now when you buy a whole or half a lamb, the odds are good that you will get tradional cuts done by the butcher unless you ask for something different, and they just love to give you a whole leg of lamb, it will look something like this..

Now sometimes its great to cook a whole leg of lamb for a nice big fancy feast but lets face it, that is alot of really good meat and some excellent bone’s for broth sitting there, sometimes its much better to bone it out and self-butcher it into parts for many meals in the future..

So you need to follow the bone, remember you are not de-meating, you are deboning, so the tough silver skin and fats are in the upper left pile next to that still meaty wonderful for broth soup bone to be, you will have a pile of bits and three main peices of meat, now you can use those as little roasts or you can make steaks, stirfry meat stipes etc. Below is my most common breakdown. Sometimes I take one of the little roasts and cut them to make lamb jerky. You can also take your stew meat and quickly and easily make it ground lamb, which can then be used to make many different kinds of sausages.

On the fair right corner is stew meat, enough to make two stew pot full, on the bottom row, the far left is 1 inch thick Lamb steaks, the middle is two little round eyes, They could be cooked like little roasts but I will cut them into two, wrap in bacon and make them into amazing dinner steaks, the little two peices are also just as tender but will be rolled in bread crumbs/spices and fried up into lamb nuggets. On the far right bottom is lovely pre-sliced stir-fry or quick fry stripes.

Now if I had cooked it as a leg of lamb, it would have given us a big meal (2 meals), leftover meat for second meal(2 meals) and then I would have cut off the meat and made stew (8 meals), so that leg of lamb would give 12 meals, not bad.. but break it down into parts and now we are being frugal!

Scrapes and Bone, will make about 6 pints of broth for canning,
Plus I will cool it and defat it and then render the fat for later use in the kitchen.
Enough stew meat to make two pots of stews at 8 meals per pot- Total meals 16
4 lamb steaks -Total meals 4
little rounds- Cut into 6 round steaks -Total meals 6
Lamb nuggets-Total meals 2
Pre-cut stripes for stirfry- enough for 2 dinners -Total 4 meals

So that would mean instead of 12 meals, we are now up to 32 meals, now to be clear I am counting a meal as one full dinner for a adult, with the stews portion being counted as a full bowl of stew.( our small bowls hold a cup and half, but our stew bowls hold three cups)

So if you were doing this, what would your final products look like?

This is a Homestead Preparedness Challange, in the Sustainable Living Section

Posted in Food Production and Recipes, Lamb Recipes | Tagged Food Production and Recipes, freezer camp, Frugal, Lamb Recipes | 4 Comments

Canadian Long Gun Registery- going, Going! Soon to be GONE!

Posted on October 27, 2011 by Just another day on the farm

Having been raised in alberta, I was raised with a huge sense of pride in our past, our familes and a real make do attitude, most of the men and few of us ladies in our family hunt, within my own family, we were raised as children not only having hunting in the family with wild game filling the freezer and many jars in the cellar but with my family involved in the Alberta Black Powder Club

Fast forward many years and my dad still has his own range on his farm, and last time I was home, I got woke up in the early morning to get to try out his new rifles, and let me tell ya, he has some sweet ones.. I don’t show very many photos of my family on the blog, and when I do, I tend to take out our faces but this is one of my favorite photos I took of my dad on my last visit home.

I remember being so excited at the age of eight to get to go the local gun club for the children long gun training, and I spent many, many hours with “my” 22, weekends dressed into homemade dress’s with sack cloth apron and bobbin head gear, knife throwing contests, ax throwing contests, just for us ladies.. Cast Iron pan throwing contests, some of my best memories was not just getting to shoot but the whole get togethers and family time, pot lucks in the evenings, running wild in the bush or in the badlands, fishing at the local rivers, learning how to help set up the TP’s, one of the children’s games that was done with a parent, in my case, it was dad, was we were given a can, and an egg and matches, and you had to run for the water, gatherer the material, start the fire, get the water to boil and eat the egg.. Poor daddy, that egg was never hard boiled when he glupped it down, runny at best LOL

But really while that was good clean fun, its not my favorite memories as a child, they would be sitting and visting in the building that dad did his bullet making, hours of skimming lead, and making our own bullets, hours spent on our own personal range on the farm, it was quiet and we had to be careful but we were not coddled either, the rumble of the shell cleaner, the hiss of the propane going that melted the lead and that special metal smell and the never lost it amazement when a perfect one came out of the bullet molds.

Now my dad has been active before this law passed trying to stop it, he has driven across the province attending the big gatherings and meetings, I remember watching one of alberta’s biggest rallies to stop the Long Gun registery and there in the front row was my dad on the evening news!

I have also been active over the years in a number of different ways letting those in power know that I want it GONE!, on the vote last year (that lost by a meer sliver) I phone every parties member in my country, all the parties in the province, contacted both by letter, email and phone all the parties on a national level, I even contacted the offices of those across this country of mine that were on the fence, wanting to vote against their party line..

And to be honest, I was a little pissed that as soon as I said I was a farmer, one of the BIG parties, sighed and said, we know “farmers” want it removed, but the city folks all want it.. Really that is what you tell someone that call’s you to express their concerns, one of them said to me, there are more voters in the populated area’s that want the control, then there are in the country.. Thankfully the other three parties listened to me, without judging based on my livelyhood.

So you can imagine just how happy I am to hear this week that goverment has tabled a bill to remove not only the long gun registery but also that they are planning on destroying the data bases so that the database will not be able to be taken over and redone into provincal long gun databases, interestingly, only one single province is even thinking of doing so, and the rest have no plans at this time.

Here are a few facts, “they” say that we have three unregistered long guns for each one that is registered.. so if almost 8 million are, that means that if their guess is right that we have about 32 million long guns in canada, so as we are to have about 33 million peaple in canada, that’s a gun per person.. not even looking at hand guns.

Firearms registered (as of September 2011): 7,865,994

Non-restricted firearms: 7,137,386
Restricted firearms: 528,323
Prohibited firearms: 200,285

Firearms per 100,000 population: 24,882 (Prince Edward Island has the lowest rate, at 18,029, and Yukon has the highest, 87,278

Having lived in the NWT, and Nunavut, I can honestly say that yes, almost everyone has long guns and rightly so, who would want to go on the land without them! Interesting that the Yukon has the highest number..

During those years, the cost of establishing the registry was more than $1 billion. The Harper government campaigned on getting rid of the long-gun registry and now it says it also intends to destroy all the information about long-gun owners that has been collected.

Headed for the Trash Heap: The federal gun registry had amassed more than 6.6-million records on non-restricted firearms by March 31, 2009. These data will be destroyed, the Conservatives said, rather than leave the door open for a new registry. “We will not assist provinces to set up a back-door registry,” a government spokesman said.

Now I know that I have readers from many different backgrounds and I do understand that not everyone is going to agree with my views on the right to own a rifle for personal use, as always comments are welcome, all that are polite will be posted on though. (you would be amazed at some of the PETA type rants about me raising critters or butchering that don’t get put though)

Posted in Family, wild foods | 11 Comments

Ducks Breasts with Cherry Sauce Recipe

Posted on October 25, 2011 by Just another day on the farm

I really enjoy my big ducks, when using them, you only want one duck’s worth of breasts for this recipe, same if you were using hunted Canadian Goose, if you are using regular size ducks, I would think you would need four duck breasts, this recipes is perfect for when you are skinning your birds and breasting them out, using the legs/thighs for a different recipes and the bones/extra’s for broth making.

Take your skinned, boneless duck or goose breast halves, and heat your oven to 375, Heat your cast iron fry pan till very hot, season your duck or goose breasts on both sides with salt/pepper, add a swirl of your best olive oil and let it get hot, then add the beasts, reduce your heat to med and do a nice browning on both sides about 2 min each side, and then put your whole pan into the oven for another 5 to 8 min, (5 min for med-rare, 8 min for medium), Take the breasts out and cover them with tinfoil and let them rest.

Some folks like to take off the fat, but I only do so if there is alot, otherwise I leave a little in the pan, heat it on the stove on a med heat and add 1 tbsp of butter, add in finely diced green onion or shallot, or garlic scrapes, or fresh horseradish leaves, Cook till softened about a min or so, then add 3/4 cup of any good sherry, 1/2 cup of homemade cherry jam or homemade cherry pie filling or Dried Pitted Sweet Cherries or Sour Cherries, and 2 tbsp of balsamic vinegar, simmer till its as thick or thin as you would like.

Slice your duck or goose breasts and top with the sauce, excellent when served with baby oven roasted veggies, a mix of onion, garlic, turnips, carrots, parsnips and potato’s round out this meal.

Posted in Food Production and Recipes | Tagged Ducks, Food Production and Recipes | 4 Comments

Wanted to share a few of my new treasures.

Posted on October 24, 2011 by Just another day on the farm

Well as the regular’s know, Its farmgal Birthday time around here and thank you so much for those of you that sent me wishes, as I know I got my big present from DH last week and have been using it every since.

However I also got some really great fun and useful things from my family, I hope you won’t mind me sharing some of them with you and to send a big thank you to my family that read’s the blog.. your wishes, cards and gifts are wonderful!

This is just such a wonderful little Knick-Knack, just love it..

Just lovely hand dyed, Wool/Alpaca blend for making something amazingly warm and pretty over the winter, two full sets of the same dye set. What a great color combo.

Just a wonderful collection of preserving books along with cook books, including one with 40 recipes to use carrots, and I like the little one filled with herb bread recipes. The art of preserving is interesting mix of Canning book, Recipe book, and art coffee table book, the photos are amazing, lets hope that the recipes are as good as the photo’s are!

This second hand wicker basket is stuff with padding inside and on the top, with a perfecty fitting big 12 cup tea pot, its got to one of the prettest versions of a hay box, I have seen!

Last but by no means least, came a set of gifts one for me, one for DH.. I am sure you can figure which one belongs to who.. Way, way to cute..

Posted in Family | 4 Comments

Waste Food.. What’s your average percent?

Posted on October 23, 2011 by Just another day on the farm

As I sit here sniffing with a mug of hot herbal tea from local raw honey along with a bowlful of dried apple slices, I know just how lucky I am, Not just eating food that will provide enough calories to get me though or even eating food that tastes good but was mass produced.. No I am eating and drinking organicly raised, all local within five miles of me high quality food..

I was reading that roughly a third of food is wasted, according to new statistis from the united Nation’s Food and Agiculture, they say they think its around 1.3 Billion! tons per year..

Now in the developing world, they are said to lose over 40 percent after harvest time, they lose it while in storage and or transpotion, or while processing and packing.. while in the 1st world nations, they say that we also have more then 40 percent losses but our loss’s occur as a result of retailers and consumers discarding unwanted but perfectly edible food.

Now the article I was reading was all about, getting the 1st world countries to give more food to those in need and about finding ways to provide equipment and storage so that there is less loss in the developing world.. its a noble cause, one I personally think is doomed to failure but that is a different post..

It got me to thinking about a number of post that canadian Doomer has done on her weekly trips out to the farm and that she has been filling her jars and families tummies with seconds.

A qoute that really got me thinking was ” Farmer L saying along the lines of I should pay you to take this” C.D. has been talking about working with seconds and the real food that comes with working in the garden, check out her posts, they are excellent..

Over the past six weeks, I have often thought, boy do I wish that I had a Doomer to come out and take these little carrots, those wierd shaped green peppers,those extra tomato’s that I am not getting to fast enough, now I do give almost everything extra to my critters which reduces their feed cost’s during that time and so in a way its fair to say I will eat my scrapes or leftover’s in the future in the form of meat.

Having said that I decided to try and get a grip on just how much percent of food do I “throw out” for the critters, I can only do rough amounts, I did things like peel the head of cabbage, cut the core and weight one, and then x it to how many I have or did, so its a rough guess folks, I just don’t have time to do each and every single one.. but what I have figured out is that I believc I lose about 10 percent as direct throwout from the garden on most things, on others more.

These are things I pick, that go directly into the slop pail for critter use, that includes things like perfect fine tomato’s that have one slug hole in them, I figured I threw out at least a hundred pds of tomato’s alone, so at least 25% of my tomato harvest when to the waste bucket, or perhaps a better way to state it on my home, is that 25% of the harvest went to the critters, with only 3/4 of the harvest meeting my personal requirements for peaple use..

Now on most other things, it was between 5 to 10 percent that went, So figure 15% crop loss to pests, now given that we harvested and brought in just over a ton of food, that means I lost around 314 pds of possable food harvested directly in the garden.

Then comes the food into the house, now my DH works off the farm about 12 hours a day four to five days a week, and he helps alot! but most of the time when it comes to peserving food it comes down to me, I have been tracking, I figure I am cut off and throwing away at least a min of 10% once the food itself is in the house.. so that would be around another 210 pds of wasted food that if I had gotten to in time or taken the time to save it that could be processed into peaple food.

So that means that this harvest year we moved around 25% of food produced from the human plates to the critter feed pails, which means that we “lost 524 pds” worth of food into what would be considered Food waste, having said that, because we are small mixed farm, all that food was in fact eaten, and will come back to us by animal protein.

What does these numbers look like to folks that have large gardens but don’t have the critters, are they composting this? is it ending up partly in landfill’s, do they do a better job of processing, do those that use chemical’s in the gardens that there for have less pest damage, do they have a higher amount coming in the house.

While we can look at the number on a large scale, I don’t think that home gardener’s fit that model to well, compared to 40% percent loss’s, clearly my 25% percent loss can be seen as doing well, but I look at it and think, I lost 25% of my hard work in the end, I lost over 500 pds! worth of food that could have been in my pantry or cellar..

So how much food wasting goes on in your garden and your house when in the middle of harvest season?

This is a Homestead Barn Hop Post, for lots of Homesteading thoughts and idea’s, follow the link up.

Posted in Food Production and Recipes, Food Storage | Tagged 100 mile food challange, Canning, compost, Frugal, Garden, Goals | 6 Comments

The Good, the bad and the What?

Posted on October 22, 2011 by Just another day on the farm

The Good: I like my new toy, and I have dried Baby Spinach, Banana’s, Green Pea’s and whole heads of purple cabbage, I am very impressed, but it had a added side bonus that I was not expecting, it makes my living room warm like I have a heater on in it.. Awesome, it was really starting to get chilly in the house, needed to add more socks and sweaters, but with the dryer going, suddenly I am comfortable back in my bare feet in my flip flops.

The Bad: Dh went to make oatmeal cookies to night, he followed a company’s coming recipe and they are truly bad!, I barely got one down and then had to wash my mouth out, they would be dog food to be honest but he added in a whole heap of raisins, so now its not dog safe, It was so greasy and so sweet and bland all at the same time, that’s what I get for having spent the past years cutting down on the fat, the sugar and adding in either fruit purree or veggie mush to everything.. I finally looked at the recipe and about fell over, it called for a cup of oil, a freakin cup of oil! for a typical batch size of cookies, no wonder they are so greasy.. Needless to say, I was looking forward to a cookie or two with my night tea, and I won’t be eating these, I will however make a different batch tomorrow, and I have added a note to that recipe that say’s Don’t make again..

Now for the what?, I had a duckling born last weekend, he or she is growing, eating and moving successful from place to place but when moving, it tends to go in circles or half circles, now its siblings are normal and it’s not being picked on.. but I figured when it did the circle thing that it was not born normal, and would just pass but wanting to give it a chance as we did have one turkey that we called crooked neck that had baby issues and did just fine till she was old enough to butcher, and this little guy is doing fine, moving from place to place, momma duck likes him and has been seen eating and drinking and going to the bathroom normally, but anyway you cut it, that need or urge it has to go round, and round and round it a HUH to me..

Anyone ever had a newborn duckling that likes to go in a circle? If so, what happened in the end, did it outgrow it? Did it reach adult size?

Update on the circle duckling, it passed away naturally at around one week of age, its siblings are all normal and thriving.

Posted in Life moves on daily | 4 Comments

Food Storage Friday Roundup- Week 3

Posted on October 21, 2011 by Just another day on the farm

Wow, three weeks already, the time has just flown by, this week has been a good week in regards to food storage, I am still processing food from the garden into the storage itself, I am still getting fresh fruit in the form of rasberries and high bush Cranberries, along with greens and horseradish. Now that the cool weather is coming, its time to wrap up the garden and get into butcher mode.

Well this week has been a good one on the eat out of your pantry week, we have been enjoying meals like Lamb Stew with Dumplings, Chili with fresh homemade buns , Dippy Eggs with Baked oven fries, Winter Sqaush Soup with cabbage salad, Homemade Scallop Potatos with lamb meat scramble, Fresh Roasted baby carrots with fresh mint and local drizzle of honey. Desserts, Puddings with fresh fruit, Homemade Fruit Jello, Apple-Peach Sauce.

On the baking front, I have made a wonderful Pumpkin Walnut Loaf, Fresh bread, Flax ground red wheat bread, Cornbread, Chocolate Almond Cranberry Cookies.

Drinks have included Apple Cider, Elderberry Juice, Grape Juice, Chokeberry Juice, Hot Tea’s and hot chocolate, all homemade, and most home canned.

Speaking of Canning, I had set myself a goal of a min of 1200 Jars to can this year and I made the goal this week, so far this year I have canned a total of 1234 Jars.. Can’t wait to see what my final year total will be..

On the unprocessed front, we have done well on most of it, the main gives have been my unbleached white flour, and my one Cookies and Cream Pudding Mix as a dessert one night, but I wanted a treat for my Dh.I don’t know if I feel better or not, the weather is cool and wet, DH had a cold this past weekend, it was a little one but it was there and I so don’t want it to develop into anything for me.

Well that’s about it for me girls, how was your week?

Posted in Food Storage | Tagged Canning, Frugal, Garden, Veggies | 4 Comments

Thank you DH for my present..

Posted on October 20, 2011 by Just another day on the farm

You know how some ladies swear their man just does not get them? I love that my man gets me… some ladies want jewlery or new outfits or fancy dinners out for their b-days.. Mine got me a brand-new Excalibur Dehydrator! with their cookbook Perserve it Naturally, the Complete Guide to Food Dehydration, Third Edition.

With our very humid summers its proven to be quite hard to be able to count of drying or perserving the harvest naturally, so moving over to the electic Dehydration is a good choice in many cases, while still using the drying screens in the summer when weather allows. With the cost of power where it is, using the most effective means of drying becomes important, we had gotten to the point of running two of the smaller round ones, plus the oven at times and still not having enough space and of equal importance, we were having trouble getting the temps right on some of the more fragile things I was drying, which meant reduced qaulity in the end product, I have a big old learning curve ahead of me with my new machine and I will certianly share along the way on how it goes..

If you own a Excalibur and have any advice for me, I would love to hear it?

Posted in Family, Food Production and Recipes, Food Storage | Tagged drying food, Food Production and Recipes, Garden, Greens, Herbs, Soft Fruits, Veggies, Wild Foods | 10 Comments

Can you believe it, still getting fresh Rasberries out of the garden..

Posted on October 19, 2011 by Just another day on the farm

As you know its eat out of your pantry but you got to love still getting fresh fruit from the garden in oct.. they are so sweet but they are winding down now so it makes this even more special.

Want a tip, did you know that one pint of fruit in a light syrup makes a perfect fruit jello, one package of knox, following the directions for 1/4 cup cold water, sprinckled over, mix and then add 1/4 cup boiling water stir well to disolve then stir into a dish that will hold a pint of fruit and juice, then chill in the fridge till set.. so quick, so easy, and you are limited only by the home fruits you canned, you can also make any of your canned fruit juices into wonderful flavoured jello’s, Elderberry is one of my favorites.

But what about if you are in a Chocolate mood, I like this recipe from the more with less cookbook.

2 cups milk
2 tbsp of Coco
If calls for 1/2 cup of sugar but I have cut it down to 1/4 with no issues, I have also replaced the sugar with honey and that works well.
2 tbsp of cornstarch

Cook over a low slow heat until thickened, stirring it the whole time with a whisk if possable, if you want it to be more rich like a store bought pudding, add a tbsp of butter at the end and mix it in, if you want to add a little twist, stir in 1/4 a cup of smooth peanut butter if you add the peanut butter, please omit the butter.

What little treasure are you still getting from your garden? Do you have a favorite homemade pudding recipe to share?