Giving Thanks to the Turkey

We got turkeys in early June, and I cannot remember at the moment what part of this story I've included on the blog. So, when the post office called to tell us we had poultry waiting, we hustled right on into town to pick them up. Our kindly postmaster said, as she handed me the shipping box, "This is the quietest bunch of chicks I've seen."  Uh oh...

Of the fifteen turkeys that left Ohio, four were alive in the box. The good news is those lived on. And to start with, they were not all that pretty. They were big, all the same, and they were pretty smart for poultry; by smart, I mean less skittish and pretty observant. Also, their eyes were all black instead of the reptilian yellow of chicken eyes. They made different noises, too; I would compare their noise to the sound of water slipping down a metal tube.

I will admit that we got the overbred white variety. The first reason was that a friend had experience with the gooney birds and heritage breeds, and she warned us that the heritage breeds were a pain to tend and fence. The next reason is that a friend I help with slaughtering gets the gooney variety of chickens, and boy! do those birds get fat. They are also much easier to pluck. I expected these turkeys to be particularly dumb- you know, like drowning because they looked up in a rain storm- but as I already mentioned, they seemed smarter than the average chicken.

Turkey in late August

Well, before we left for our trip about a month back, one of the turkeys was looking pretty doggone big already. I suggested that we might kill him as soon as we got home. With one thing and another, we just did not have time to kill him. For at least a week, I have had mixed feelings about this turkey. I actually LIKE the turkeys and find them interesting. I could sense that killing one might make me sad; killing chickens does not even faze me. On the other hand, every time I looked at this turkey, I felt like Mrs. Hoggett or a starving cartoon character, imagining this living bird dressed for dinner. I have spent a surprising amount of time trying to figure out how to kill a turkey. If such things bother you, skip the next paragraph.

When we kill a chicken, we use a killing cone, which is like a metal snow cone with a hole in the tip for the chicken's head to poke through. This allows for the slaughterer to slit the chicken's throat instead of cutting off the head and makes for a better bleed out. It also keeps the wings from getting broken during death throes. We do not own a killing cone sized for these turkeys, nor do we know anyone with one of that caliber, so I kept pondering what exactly we were going to do. Imagine even catching a bird that big; when we catch chickens for whatever reason they thrash around- wisely- in a way that makes you want to let go. These turkeys are HUGE and if one thrashed around like that, I doubted I would emerge from the battle feeling like a winner. Also, I couldn't imagine exactly how the bird would be secured for the death throes, which is the point in the process that the phrase "like a chicken with her head cut off" comes from. Poultry is very active as it's dying; if the bird's body isn't moving around like mad, you probably haven't successfully killed it. I pondered this question and began asking all sorts of people if they had any idea how to kill a big turkey.

The friend who I trade slaughtering help with had a couple of ideas, and yesterday, he suggested we go ahead a give it a whirl. First, I got a pillow case and cut a hole in the corner. We also got water heating and a piece of baling twine to hang the carcass to pluck it. I also gathered the requisite knives and cleaver. Once the water seemed hot enough, Ezra went to catch the turkey. To be clear, Ezra LIKES catching fowl even if it is for the purpose of killing them. My friend and I followed- my thought being, "how is this kid going to hold onto this thrashing bird?" But that is not what happened.

Ezra knelt beside the bird and put his arms around it and the bird just sat there. Then my friend tried to slip the case over the bird's head. The turkey fought just long enough to tear the pillow case and show how foolish THAT notion was. So, he picked the bird up and walked over to our stump. Still the turkey isn't struggling. It was weirdly peaceful. We had the briefest of confabulations on what exactly we would do now that the wings weren't pinned, but we were on the way to an execution and it just did not feel like there was time left for reflection. I held the bird and he used the cleaver on the neck; the turkey went into death throes and proceeded to beat my shins all to hell with his wings, but I waited out the convulsions and we dipped the bird.

Here was another problem that we did foresee, but couldn't find another way around it. They turkey was too big for a real baptism even in my biggest canning pot. We dip poultry (though not waterfowl) in very hot (though not boiling) water to facilitate plucking. This guy would not really fit all the way in the pot, but we did our best. Around this time, I notice my friend is straining when he has to heft the bird; most likely I was, too, but the adrenaline made me oblivious to my own state. Anyway, I tried to help my friend get this bird hefted up so we could pluck the turkey from a hanging position; it really is much easier than any other way I've tried. And we come to a nice part about these over bred birds. That turkey was so darn easy to pluck, even the parts of him that had only a dousing in the hot water.

Then, I laid the bird in the garden cart and eviscerated him. His liver filled the palm of my hand; his heart was big enough to look at the different valves and ventricles. He was so heavy that I wasn't sure I could carry him into the house. I kept looking at him and trying to figure out how I was going to cool him down. The meat is more tender if you don't put them straight into the freezer. If they can sit in cold water overnight, it's a little like hanging beef. And this guy was not bound for the freezer anyway. Thanks to my sister's wife, he ended up in our cooler under water on the back deck overnight. I did weigh him before I got him under water, and he weighed roughly 30 pounds.

This morning, he looked like this.

The quart jar is to give a little perspective. He is sitting in a 12 quart bowl.  I really was not sure how to cook a bird this big; I just knew it was worth my while to do whatever it took from letting the meat get dry.

The first thing I did was cut the neck off and throw it in a pot with the heart, gizzard, and liver to make stock for the dressing. Then, I split the skin on his back and used the cleaver to cut him in half up the back. I had thought I would break his breast bone and then cut him in half there, too, but his breast bone was too much for me. I just split the breast and cut the bone the same way I did the back. Then I put each half into a roasting pan with some salt, pepper, parsley onion, lard and a little water. I covered them and cooked them at 200 for about 8.5 hours. That is one delicious turkey; we had a little dressing, some potatoes, some green beans, so cranberry sauce, and friends to share the dinner with. We have a lot to be thankful for.

Rendering

We bought part of a pig, and we happily take any lard anyone else passes on. So, today, the children and I have put 5 gallons of lard in the freezer. Donuts anyone?

I Used to Be Vegan

Back when I knew better, when I knew I was right, I did not eat any meat or eggs or milk or honey. I ate vegetables, soy, beans, and grains. I carefully chose food that made a complete diet. And Jason and I spent a lot of time working out animal-free analogs for many holiday favorites. We used whipped tofu for cranberry salad, for example.

Why do this? For one thing, we knew that the meat available at the grocery store was not produced humanely. We knew all about the battery hens that gave us eggs. We knew about the tie ups where dairy cows pretty much spent their lives.

For another thing, we really like experimenting. How can we get swiss corn bake without any swiss cheese?

Pregnancy completely changed my priorities. After subsisting for twelve weeks on cashew butter and soy milk, I began stealing meat from my friends' plates. And that was the end of our four-year vegetarian experiment.

It helped that Jason had already been rethinking the whole thing. We suddenly knew a different set of "right" things. We knew our soy wasn't free of animal products, or if the soy beans were, they were loaded with petro-chemical fertilizers. We knew that many of the analog food-type things we were eating were actually very far removed from "food". We knew that soy is actually pretty indigestible in most of the forms we were using it. We knew there were meat and dairy options out there that were kinder to animals- if we could find them in the burbs in Texas.

Thirteen years later, we are no longer right (much to everyone's relief). We do feel pretty good about our choices, just less self- righteous. We eat LOTS of meat and eggs and milk, but it all spent most of it's life on grass. I know the chickens who give us eggs, and we do our best to give them a good life. Our cow is probably lonely, but otherwise, she has a pretty nice life, as well. We still eat vegetables, but we also know who grew the majority of them. Legumes don't figure too highly, and soy not at all. Grains come and go; our feelings about them waver.

And still, having given up on being right, we are far from any sort of purity. Our cranberry sauce is made with local cranberries, but I haven't found a reliable source for Vermont oranges. Sabra and Cedar's hummus is really better than any other hummus I've had, with the exceptions of Byblos and Filiz Ozkan's. We really like Cabot cheese, which is at least local.

What is definitely true is that we enjoy our food. I believe our food choices are political acts, but what hits the table needs to be free from rancor and self-righteousness. Julia Child emphasized that food is not just so many vitamins and calories, but an entire experience.

Another Chicken Harvest

We bagged the chickens today, sending most to others' freezers, and tucking twenty into our own. The birds came in at a good weight, averaging 6.5 pounds. The first year, they averaged 6 and last year they were only 4.5.

The first year, we did not kill them until 13 weeks. They did not seem to gain much that last week, so we decided to kill them earlier the following year. Part of the deal is that once they get a certain size, they really eat a lot, so you have to compare what they might gain to the cost of feed.

Last year, we tried a different food that was not specifically formulated for maximizing growth. We also killed them at about 11 weeks. That was one depressing harvest, as we killed chicken after chicken that were so obviously smaller than the year before.

This year, we fed them "grower" food, and we supplemented with all of our waste milk. The past two years, we really didn't have much milk to spare for chickens. Since most of our milk is going into butter this year, and we're not sharing with a calf, that left gallons of skimmed milk for the chickens.

About a month ago, I helped a friend kill his chickens. His were a different variety, one that is more manipulated to grow big and fast, and I knew they would be bigger than ours. Still, I looked at them one week, and we both thought they looked a little small; the next week when we killed them, they averaged 8 pounds. I had a bit of chicken envy, and I upped the amount of milk our birds were getting.

A couple of weeks after that, a friend killed her chickens, which were a breed similar to ours, and hers all came in around 5.5 pounds. Now, maybe that sounds plenty big, but there is another meal on a six pound chicken; that half pound of meat really does make difference. Also, when you're putting 6 pound chickens in the freezer, none of the grain costs seem to matter; whereas when we sold 4.5 pound chickens at a price per pound that had counted on them being 6 pounds, it was painful. My friend's experience made me worry about whether ours would be big enough on execution day.

We picked up the chicken rig the evening before, and we felt pretty good about getting everything going, as we had used this setup the past two years. Well, harvest morning, we could not get this scalder to light. Jason worked and worked with it; he took the propane tank and had it topped off just in case that was the problem. Our friend showed up to help, and he worked on it. We got a huge pot of water heating on a propane burner, and still Jason and our friend tried to figure out the problem with the scalder. They actually had a good idea of the problem, but we were already two hours into our harvest and not a single chicken had been killed.

That's when Sylvie let all sixty chickens out of the fence.

Finally, chickens were rounded up, water was at temperature, and we were off. The rest of the day was uneventful. We realized that the scalder was nowhere near as important as the plucker and killing cones. We spent roughly 4 hours doing in 60 chickens; our friend, as well as Ezra and Phaedra learned how to eviscerate, Sylvie learned how to clean gizzards. It was quite a team operation.

Unfortunately, there were no free hands for a camera, so I'll try to describe the one thing I wished I had a picture of. At about 3:00, I looked at Jason, and he had chicken blood all down his neck, splattered across his face, and all over his clothes as he grimly set about killing the next chicken.

Cottage Cheese

This story starts many long years ago when we made yogurt in Texas. We used raw milk, we used prepared (store bought) yogurt as a culture, we tiptoed around the house while it was making and we had yogurt. At least, we had one batch of yogurt; we could never get a good result from using our homemade yogurt as a start for the next batch.

Also, Jason kept wondering why something so common in cultures with much more limited technology was so darn difficult to make.

We tried again in Vermont, and here things got even shakier. We figured it had to do with being able to keep the temperature steady for the entire time the yogurt was making. We gave up; it was too much waste for too little return.

Then, one day last spring, we decided to just leave the milk in a pan on the counter, because we only wanted the cream off of it to make butter. Well, things got away from us, and we did not get around to skimming the cream until a day and a half later.

Voila! Yogurt was hiding under our cream. That's it; that's all we did. We took a couple of gallons of milk still cow warm and left it on the counter for about 36 hours. Now this was a believable way to make yogurt. (You might also call it clabber.)

Now, cottage cheese presents a similar problem to yogurt. The recipes for it are extremely complicated and rely on a control of temperature that's hard to believe a "cottager" might have been able to maintain. After our experience with yogurt, we felt certain there must be a similarly lost way to make it.

And here it is-

Take your clabbered milk and put it on the stove over a moderate heat. Stir gently and occasionally. As soon as the whey separates from the curds, drain your cheese and rinse it with cold water. You are trying to stop the cooking.

Salt your curds and mix them with some sweet or soured cream or just some milk. It is not the same as what comes out of the container from the grocery, but the ingredient list is much shorter and the product is quite satisfying.

Another Good Use of Electricity

Back when we weaned Gusto, we suddenly were overwhelmed with milk. It seemed a fine time to learn to make butter. The children and I have made butter in a jar, shaking and shaking and shaking the jar until finally some globs separate. It was tedious and long, and I really do not think my children learned much from it. My friend has made butter in her daisy churn; she was unimpressed with the "convenience", but she believes it's a good alternative if she ever has to make butter without electricity. I have also made butter using a food processor, but the results were less than thrilling. Faced with all this milk, I needed to choose a method of butter making.

I did what many homesteaders do these days, at least the ones lacking knowledgeable elders, I turned to the internet. These first method I found different from those already listed was to use an upright mixer. Some of you may be wiser or more farsighted or more experienced than I am and you may already know what happened. For those of you lacking these traits that I lack, I will tell you- it was an unholy mess. There was cream on the cupboard doors and cream in the drawers and cream on the stove and cream on the floor and cream on me and really just cream everywhere. To top it off, it took FOREVER to whip into butter, maybe as long as 45 minutes. I went back to the drawing board and pondered the lovely convenience of the tidy sticks of butter one buys at the grocery store.

I decided to try the food processor again with a little phone support from a friend who makes all the butter they use. It is perhaps the very best reason for owning one of these noisy machines. After ten minutes, I had butter floating in butter milk.

I think the reason the food processor did not work when I tried it before had to do with the temperature of the cream. It was in Texas and I did have a toddler and preschooler "helping", and I am not sure the butter did not go too long or that the ten minutes it takes seemed more like 45 with two children under foot.

So, this information is already widely available on the internet, but to keep you from looking further, here's what you do. Allow the cream to separate from the milk; this only works with raw, unhomogenized  milk. If your milk has traveled much, it may not separate very well. When you can clearly see the line between the milk and the cream, skim the cream off the top of the jar (this is a bad time to have milk in a jug) and put it into another jar or straight into the food processor. The cream is much easier to skim and make into butter if it is chilled.

 Now, put the cream into the food processor with the spinning blade thing that sits in the bottom and turn it on. Sometimes the butter will make in under five minutes and sometimes it might take fifteen. The trick is to pay some attention because if it goes too long and gets too warm, you have to chill it and start again.

 The sound will change, and you might open it to see something like whipped cream. Let it keep going. You might open it again and see something like whipped butter; let it go just a little longer.

What you should see when you open it should look clearly like butter floating in milk.

So, gently pour off the milk- ideally not down the pipes as it will some day cause you untold sorrow. Run a little cold water into the food processor and pulse the butter. Drain it again. Add the cold water and pulse again. Drain.

Now is a good time for a wooden bowl. I do not work the butter much in this bowl, but I do give it a couple of turns to get a bit more of the buttermilk out of it. The butter will keep longer the more free of buttermilk it is. We freeze our butter, so this is less of an issue.

Put it into jars that do not have shoulders, seal them up (not canned), and put them into the freezer.

Eating with Gusto

Last November, Violet had a little bull calf. He was much prettier than Chappy, aka Clover, ever was. He was also less shy of people. Still, the fate of male calves in a setup like ours is pretty much the same- he was table bound.

Gusto was quite different from Chappy. He would nurse when I was milking, for example, which seemed pretty great at first. Violet would let down her milk much more vigorously than when I was just milking. Also, he wasn't taking even half the milk, so we had plenty. As he got bigger, he took more of the milk, and we did begin separating him the same way we had done Chappy. He was also harder on Violet than Chappy had been; her teats kept getting little scrapes and cuts from his nursing. Finally, we decided to wean him.

What we learned at that point is that Violet is a much easier milk cow when she does not have a nursing calf. She relaxes more, and milking is a pleasanter task. We got a surprising amount of milk once we weaned the calf and more cream. There are definite advantages to weaning a calf instead of waiting for Violet to do it.

Another thing I learned from Gusto is that banding a calf requires a little more focus on the task at hand. It seems that even though I banded him, I still had a little bull calf. This was not much of a problem until he got to be about ten months old and wanted very much for Jason to stay clear of the pasture. The braggadocio of a bull calf is comical until you remember that he outweighs you by a few hundred pounds.

That means we now have beef in the freezer and this on the stove. Because we now own a pressure canner, it makes sense to get the bones all turned into broth and out of the freezer. I'm giddy! Even my canning book calls broth a convenience food.

I'll simmer these for a couple of days, then can them in pint jars, and I'll have a beautiful ingredient for pretty much any sauce or soup.

This also all means Violet is alone again. I really want her to have another cow all the time, but at the moment, we cannot make that happen. The good news is that she did not exhibit as much stress as she did when we killed Chappy. Her next calf is due in April, and if that one is a heifer, we'll keep her to train into a milk cow.

Eggs

What are people thinking when they get eggs from one or two companies who send eggs to SEVENTEEN states? Do you think that those chickens are happy? Do you think there is any chance at all that the chickens are genuinely healthy? Do you think unhealthy chickens are going to lay healthy eggs all the time?

Chickens are easy to keep. Eggs are clean and sterile unless poorly handled. There is no reason for us to set ourselves up to fear our food. What do you need to do to secure your food?

I will continue to raise chickens and I will continue to pay a hefty sum for eggs when my chickens are not laying enough to meet our egg demands. Because I'm willing to do that, I can eat homemade mayonnaise and eggs over medium. I can stick my figure in cookie dough and cake batter and let the children lick the bowl. I will not blanch over any recipe that calls for a raw egg in the final product because I know the eggs I'm eating are not from some huge factory with hens stacked on top of each other so that the factory can then send eggs to seventeen states.

Do not let yourself be so far removed from your food source that you cannot know whether or not to trust it.

Berry Picking time

We went today for a first round of berry picking. After calling around, I found out about an organic pick-your-own in Plainfield called Littlewood Farm. In the past, we picked organic berries at Adam's Berry Farm; we really like Adam's, but it is so far away now that it feels too onerous.

Littlewood Farm was a very nice place to pick berries. The field was well-maintained (as in, we did not have to sort through the weeds to find the berries). The people were friendly, and the spot is lovely. It was also not too busy and was bursting with ripe strawberries. We picked 2.5 flats of berries in about 1.5 hours.

The children were very helpful. Ezra picked 3 quarts to every six I picked, Phaedra picked two to my six, and Sylvie picked 1 quart total. The thing I used to dream about is finally true. I was able to pick berries without stopping every 20 seconds to ride herd on one child or another, and I did not have to pick all the berries myself. Sylvie picked slowly, sampling as she went, and talked to all the other pickers. I kept thinking about Dudley Pippin, and I wondered what all she was telling about our family. Phaedra announced,"Sylvie is making friends again!", and then Phaedra jumped Sylvie's train. Sylvie would start talking, and then Phaedra would chime in. I worried that they were bothering people, but they seemed to share the wealth of their conversation evenly, and no one seemed bothered. Most even seemed a little charmed. Ezra focused on picking in a very bird-like way. He would pick three berries on one row, then wander two rows over and pick five, then move down twenty feet and pick one more. It was very aggravating to watch, so I quit looking, and he was obviously picking plenty fast.

Toward the end, Ezra regaled us with poetry. It started when Phaedra and I were trying to remember "Custard the Dragon", and Ezra began to help us. We did pretty well. Then, Ezra launched into "One Winter Night in August" and "Isabel". It was a delight to have poetry recited as we picked.

Then, Jason and I capped berries tonight. We'll do one more round of picking, because I owe a few jars of jam. So, once we've all the berries, we'll make jam. Then we can sing, "If you want the best Jam, you got to make your own."

One Thing Is Working

When we moved here, there was no obvious place for a refrigerator. I thought this made an excellent time to try a cold box.

We have a defunct freezer in the entryway. It's pushed into the northern corner of the room in what used to be a closet.

We have two deep freezers that we would run with or without a refrigerator because of meat storage and other frozen foods, like berries and bone broth. We keep bottles of water in the deep freezer. In the summer, we take some of these frozen waters and put them in the cold box swapping them for the ones that were in there before. We do this two to three times a day.

In the winter, we had to be aware of whether certain foods were actually freezing out there. And now, in this in between time, I put bottles in there yesterday, and they are still quite frozen today.

We are careful to not let anything sit in there long and there has been some discussion of whether we should vent it somehow. So far, there is no odor except when something is missed.

It has also caused us to think carefully about what actually NEEDS refrigeration. Our eggs are only days from the hen that laid them, so we do not keep them in the cool box. Ketchup and mustard are full of vinegar, and we have had no spoilage with keeping them in a cupboard. Butter also just stays in a cupboard for the most part; we do pay close attention to be sure it isn't rancid.

We consider these things, because it is easier to keep track of more fragile food when there is not a lot of clutter in the cold box. I think this particular experiment is a success. Now, we want to figure out ways of keeping food that skip the freezer entirely; Jason is casting an eye at the spring for that.

A bit of Excitement

On Saturday, we had chicken broth simmering on the woodstove. I often leave it there for hours at a time once I've brought it to boiling on the regular stovetop.

The children were in bed and Jason and I were playing a game with some friends who were spending the night when there was a sudden exploding sound and clang from the living room. We jumped up to see just what it was and in our mad dash, Jason slipped in the chicken broth that now covered the wall, hearth, stove, and floor. The pot for some reason had developed a seal and pressure built leading to a chicken broth volcano of sorts.

Jason was fine. The stove was cleaned and fine. The wall looks none the worse for wear. But we did laugh ourselves silly.

The other news is our newest addition- Nicodemus! Pictures to come...

The Miracle Worked Again

I put seeds into soil and less than a week later, little, tiny plants are poking out their wee heads.
These are peppers that I planted last Saturday. They are sitting on a warming mat close to the woodstove. I put plastic over them, too, to help keep them warm. Peppers like that.

This is the setup in the front window. There are starts for celeriac, leeks, broccoli, daisies, parsley, feverfew, lavender, and some other flowers.

And these are the little broccolis and there are little leeks, too.

Outside, when we got home last week, these were poking out of the snow. Phaedra took this picture yesterday. These are snowdrops, the first flowers of spring, as far as I know. They are very exciting.

Food

As I have been preparing for our upcoming trip to Texas I've been pondering the best way to deal with the trip and the food around a trip. I have driven to Cincinnati a couple of times by myself with the children, and one of those times, we did pretty well for food and the other time, not so good.

So, this morning, I said to the children "We are not stopping for any fast food on our way to Texas." They all said, "YEA! No junky food!" (This is proof that my brainwashing is working.) Then I said, "Let's think of things we might like to have that would make the trip more bearable and maybe feel more like a treat."

Ezra said "May we have oranges?" Affirmative.

Phaedra said, "May we have O's?" Affirmative. (O's are the Heritage O's you can sometimes find in bulk.)

Sylvie asked if we could eat at Cracker Barrel. Maybe for breakfast, but no junk from the "gift" shop.

After I mentioned having individual yogurts instead of our standard milkshake-for-the-road and one IZZE per day, they got giddy. They have all picked which flavor of which they'll have, and everyone agreed that hummus and chips and bread and cheese would be fine as long as we have the oranges. There was a request for trailmix and another for nuts.

I might get a strong yearning for a coke around Buffalo and Little Rock, but I have the children to keep me on this path, I guess.

The "go to" cake

I like to bake, but I really do not like the children's help in the kitchen. I sometimes think it's because I'm not much of a baker, so I get easily overwhelmed by all the little hands. It could be that when we're baking, I hear "Mama!" an extra 300 times in that day. Perhaps it's the fact that not one of the children notices when someone else is talking, so they all feel completely comfortable talking over one another. Whatever the reason, I find it most pleasant to bake when the children are all already in bed, when I've already been working for 13 hours, when I really ought to be getting ready for bed, when the kitchen is already clean, and when I'm already dog tired.

Naturally, I do not do much adventurous baking at that point in the day. That's when it's time to bake Grandmother Barclay's lemon pound cake with the slight modification implemented by Jason. It turns out great every time, even if my eyes are crossing as I mix it up. Add a little blueberry syrup, and you've got a fancy dessert. Toss it on a saucer beside some coffee, and you have a treat for a friend who drops by. You can substitute 1 cup of cocoa powder for one of the cups of flour, add a little cinnamon and leave out the lemon, and you have an awesome chocolate pound cake. You can make two loaves or a large bundt cake. It freezes well, so you can have a loaf on hand for a sudden potluck invitation. It really is quite a versatile little cake. Enjoy!

3 C flour
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp baking soda
3 C sugar (plus some to sugar the pan)
1 C butter (plus some to butter the pan)
1 T lemon juice
6 eggs, separated
1 C buttermilk (or soured milk)

Preheat oven to 325. Mix flour, salt, and soda. In another bowl, cream together butter and sugar. Add egg yolks and lemon juice to butter mixture. Add milk and flour, alternating, to butter mixture. Beat egg whites to stiff peaks and fold into mixture. Pour into prepared pan and bake for 60 to 80 minutes, or until done.

The half pig

We cut up half of a pig last Wednesday, and I finished dealing with the 4.5 gallons of lard today.  At this point, we were removing the leaf lard and shaving some of the fat off the back.  To give some perspective, the counter we worked at is six feet long.


Here's a picture of me cutting the fat off the back.  This pig was pastured and had lots of milk and soaked corn.  Our friends raised six this year; they say they do not want to raise that many again.

This is the hind quarter.  We cut this into two roasts and some steaks.


We haven't cut up enough pigs to know quite what to do with chops this thick.  Maybe we made the wrong choice, but we just cut them and packaged them in pairs for us to treat as a meal for all five of us.  We also made a rib roast from one end of the ribs.

It's pretty amazing to do this work and fill your freezer.  We ground the bits and pieces into roughly 30 pounds of ground pork to use in lasagna, tacos, gravy, and for sausage.

Burning...

I made hot cocoa for snack today.  I served it to Sylvie first, and she complained that it was hot.  I do serve hot things to my children, and I have since they were about 18 months to 2 years old.  They blow, they sip, they wait.

When she burned her tongue, I asked if she would like a little cream to cool down the cocoa, and Ezra went to get it.  Then, I turned to serve another cup of cocoa.

And suddenly, Sylvie was screaming bloody murder.  I turned and she was covered in hot cocoa.

I yanked her up and ripped off her shirt then her pants then her undershirt.  And she screamed and screamed.  I threw her in the tub and poured really cold water over her tummy and thighs.  She screamed and screamed.

Somewhere in there, Phaedra began screaming; I asked if she was burned.  No, she wasn't, but she had cocoa on her favorite tshirt, and she proceeded to wail.  I used a phrase I have used exactly one other time in 9.5 years; I told her to shut up.  I continued to lathe Sylvie with cold water, and Phaedra kept wailing behind me.  At that point, I did something I don't think I've done in all my parenting life; I said, "G** da*****, Phaedra, shut up!"  And Sylvie was still screaming.

I yanked Sylvie out of the tub and tried to asses her injury.  It looked faintly pink, and I was confused.  I said, "Sylvie, are you hurt?"

"SHRIEK! SHRIEK! SHRIEK!"

"Sylvie!  Listen to Mama!  Are you hurt?"

"SHRIEK! SHRIEK! SHRIEK!"

That's the point at which I slapped her.  It was a cold blooded decision, because I had to know what was going on.  Miraculously, she stopped screaming.  I asked again, "Sylvie, are you hurt?"

"No, Mama, but I spilled cocoa on my new pants."

The next few minutes were not my finest, but we made it through.  I reminded them of the boy who cried wolf.  I talked about helping the injured before we worry about clothes.  I talked about how if I think they are injured, I WILL act, and I will get a big boost from my body to do whatever I have to do to help them.  And, that this extra energy can make Mama especially crabby if it was actually unneeded.

Then, we all had cocoa.

People Kibble and thoughts on food as I raked the leaves

I bagged groceries at a coop in Burlington twice a month for awhile.  One day, as I was putting groceries into the bags, I noticed how much of the food purchased was very similar to packaged pet food.  It made me laugh.  Since then, I have tried to be even more aware of how much people kibble I allow into our lives.  The recent long car trip with it's accompanying "snacks" highlighted again how messed up the stereo-typical American relationship with food is.

For example, we have always made jokes that goldfish crackers actually have opium in them.  Then this bit of info comes along Junk food as heroin .  Suddenly our little joke isn't that funny.  Sure, we switched to organic cheddar crackers, but I guess even organic heroin should be questioned, especially for children.

I wished, as we were driving, that I could easily present a "homemade" meal for us, but even so-called-"homecooking" restaurants are pretty nasty.  Why is salad the only vegetable that even vaguely resembles something I serve at my house?  It's not even that I'm a veggie- fanatic; I'm perfectly willing to serve apple pie for dinner once a week, or twice if it's a bad week.  Heck, if we're having vegetable soup for dinner, I might not bother with any fruit/vegetable option besides applesauce at lunch.

I think it's that extra something in industrial food that I have learned to dislike, that strange chemical tang that is supposed to make the soup or salad dressing "new and improved" or "zesty!"  Why can't people be satisfied with the genuine flavor of cornmeal or buttermilk or apples?  Why does everything need to be flavor- enhanced?

On the car trip, I did take along yogurt and granola (not homemade, because I thought of it too late) and some fresh bread and that peanut butter you grind fresh when you buy it, but that was all gone when we were ready to come home.  I made a foray to Whole Foods in Cincinnati, but this tired mama got lost in all the people kibble.  And I'm honest with myself- I do not actually believe organic sesame sticks are that much better (if any) than a bag of chips.

By the time we got home, I was ready to wash that chemical tang out of my system with some roasted beets and potatoes and some apple pie.

Chocolate Cake Success

I made a chocolate cake that is definitely a keeper.  It's extremely moist and flavorful, and the recipe lends itself to cupcakes, a layer cake, or even a bundt or loaf shape.  Jason made it again with a bit of coffee and it enhanced the chocolate flavor to nice effect.  The icing recipe that was suggested was also quite good.  Now, we've found the chocolate cake, so I can focus more fully on the yellow cake.

The recipe is from The Pastry Queen by Rebecca Rather.

1 C unsalted butter
1/2 C dutch process cocoa powder (Yes, the dutch process part matters.)
3/4 C cool coffee
2 C sugar
2 eggs
1 C buttermilk
2 T (yes, tablespoons) Vanilla extract
2 C flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 tsp salt

• Melt the butter in a saucepan, gently
• Whisk in the cocoa, stir until smooth.
• Whisk in the coffee til smooth
• DO NOT BOIL!
• Off the heat, mix in the sugar, eggs, and buttermilk and whisk smooth.
• Whisk in the flour, baking soda, and salt until incorporated, a few lumps are okay.
• Pour into pans and bake.

Icing

1/2 C butter (unsalted)
1/4 C WHOLE milk
1/2 C cocoa powder
2 C sifted confectioners sugar
1 T vanilla
1/4 tsp Salt

• Over low heat, melt the butter, then whisk in the milk, cocoa, and powdered sugar.
• Off heat, whisk in the vanilla and salt.
• Pour over cooled cake, allow to set
  

Cake 2 results

The cake is moist with a finer, less crumbly, texture.  I like it, but Jason says it is not chocolate-y enough.  The thing is, we put a fudge icing on it, so it seems like the cake does not need to be so very chocolate- y.  I am debating this one.